Enlarge image
Left-wing top candidates Janine Wissler and Dietmar Bartsch
Photo: MICHELE TANTUSSI / REUTERS
After their joint appearance, Dietmar Bartsch and Janine Wissler quickly went their separate ways.
Bartsch left the stage to the left, Wissler to the right.
The two didn't turn around again.
The fact that the staging of the two new top candidates ended up as if the selected candidates wanted to go in different directions was a minor blemish at the press conference on Monday afternoon in the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district.
One who fits into the picture.
Because in fact it is a rather unequal couple that the left is now supposed to lead into the federal election campaign.
It is an attempt to represent the entire breadth of the party.
On the one hand, there is the 63-year-old pragmatist Bartsch, who stands for a clear government perspective and also addresses the older PDS voters in the east.
On the other hand Janine Wissler, the 39-year-old left-wing West, who has pondered revolutions in the past and can be sure of the support of anti-racism and climate activists at universities.
For the mobilization of the party and its clientele, the duo is first and foremost cleverly chosen.
Whether the two can harmonize in the election campaign and convince new voters together will have to be seen in the coming months.
Wissler and Bartsch have known each other for a long time, but they haven't had too much to do with each other in the past.
Accordingly, the first photos of the two now looked a little strange, as if the party was reinventing itself.
The left urgently needed such a departure. Most recently, the party began to plummet in the polls, in some surveys it is only six percent.
Now the top duo has to save the comrades from falling towards the five percent hurdle.
On Monday they were self-confident: they are aiming for a “double-digit” result, assured Bartsch, referring to the “volatile” survey situation.
However, the party was in two digits for the time being: In the 2009 Bundestag election, it won 11.9 percent.
Four years ago it was 9.2 percent.
Bartsch announced that he wanted to go into the election campaign with two core messages: First, as an advocate for workers, pensioners, job seekers, all those who need a fairer country.
"We need a new sense of togetherness," warned the left-wing group leader.
Second, the state needs modernization.
"We need a new sense of we."
Dietmar Bartsch
Wissler spoke out in favor of a "courageous, radical and realistic" policy of the left.
She named the abolition of retirement at 67 and Hartz IV, a rent freeze, the upgrading of the “ailing infrastructure”, disarmament instead of upgrading, as central concerns.
The “super-rich and crisis winners like Amazon” should pay for the consequences of the corona crisis.
"We want to fundamentally change the premises of politics," said Wissler.
There was no sense of optimism at the first appearance of the two.
Overall, the freestyle went smoothly, at least within the party.
Apparently, the party leadership agreed early on that Bartsch and Wissler should lead the election campaign, the constellation had been under discussion for weeks.
The other two potential candidates, parliamentary group leader Amira Mohamed Ali and co-party chairwoman Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, must now primarily influence their own ranks.
Hennig-Wellsow is supposed to prepare the left for a possible red-red-green government responsibility in the federal government.
Most recently, Green Party leader Robert Habeck had demanded a commitment to NATO from the left, which their leaders coolly rejected.
As a real rejection of a left alliance, the Greens' demand does not want to be understood there anyway: The Greens wanted to go to the Union voters, so they needed distance to the left.
However, one knows in the party how difficult it would be to take one's own comrades with you in difficult negotiations with the SPD and the Greens after the federal election.
Hennig-Wellsow should now do preparatory work.
Bartsch's co-partner at the top of the parliamentary group, Mohamed Ali, in turn represents the recently weakened camp around Sahra Wagenknecht.
The group had suffered numerous, severe defeats in the party.
Mohamed Ali will now have to succeed in keeping the Wagenknecht camp with the party during the election campaign.
Only on Sunday evening did comrades speak again on the ZDF program "Berlin direkt" who warned that the left was neglecting the working class.
Wagenknecht himself was there once more.
So far, the attacks have not been directed against the new party leadership, as was the case with their predecessors Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger.
But how long?
If Hennig-Wellsow and Wissler are also targeted, the left could fall back into the old power struggles.
Despite the smoldering conflicts - in the party executive, participants report, the free choice of the top candidates on Monday morning ran relatively smoothly and quickly.
An application to completely forego the top candidates in the election campaign did not find a majority with five votes.
After all, around 86 percent voted for the duo of Wissler and Bartsch - that's a good result for the left.
At the performance on Monday, Wissler and Bartsch went back on stage to pose for the photographers.
In the end, they even left the podium together, in the same direction: to the left.