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NRW top candidate Sahra Wagenknecht
Photo: Michael Kappeler / dpa
Several members of the Left Party want to expel former parliamentary group leader Sahra Wagenknecht from the party.
Now the party leadership has sharply criticized the project.
"We do not consider the application for exclusion against Sahra Wagenknecht to be correct or justified," wrote Federal Managing Director Jörg Schindler in a message.
He called on the left to unity: Political controversies are resolved through the exchange of arguments and not otherwise.
The criticism is aimed at a number of comrades who had applied for party expulsion proceedings against Wagenknecht.
The seven-page document was submitted to the State Arbitration Commission in North Rhine-Westphalia on Wednesday evening, and SPIEGEL first reported on it.
Wagenknecht is the top candidate of the NRW left for the Bundestag.
The reason for the request is that Wagenknecht had inflicted "serious damage" on the party.
The multi-page application deals primarily with Wagenknecht's new book "The Self-Righteous," the party said: "In its criticism, it deviates from elementary principles of the left." Various interview excerpts are also named, in which Wagenknecht leaves open whether or not they remain in the party after the federal election.
"To put back intra-party differences"
They also justify the exclusion with the fact that the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia has lost 30 percent of the votes in the polls since Wagenknecht's free choice to become the top candidate, and that more than a hundred comrades have resigned from the state association.
Wagenknecht has been criticized by the Left for weeks because of her interviews and the book.
Opponents see it as a settlement of Wagenknecht with their own party - proponents say they uphold the basic course of the left.
In election campaign times, the dispute with political opponents has priority, explains Linken managing director Schindler, the rejection of the party expulsion.
"We call on all members of the left to put aside differences within the party and to get actively involved in the federal election campaign."
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