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Belong to a divided party: Dietmar Bartsch, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow and Janine Wissler
Photo: Britta Pedersen / dpa
Jan Korte is a man of clear words.
The parliamentary manager, who has already described the situation of the left as “crappy”, is in quarantine these days because of a corona case in his area.
At home in Saxony-Anhalt he pulled out the ax at the weekend.
On Twitter he shared a photo of himself chopping wood.
'Enough of the division.
Group retreat can come next week,” he wrote.
It is doubtful whether there is actually enough of a split for all of Korte's party friends.
More than three months after the left's devastating electoral defeat, which ended up at 4.9 percent, the party is unmistakably divided.
Harsh criticism of Hennig-Wellsow
The ex-chairman Klaus Ernst had demanded on Sunday that the party leadership be re-elected by members.
He attacked the chairwoman Susanne Hennig-Wellsow head-on.
She would have to "stop only looking for faults in others" and should "remove petrol cans from the fire that she put up herself".
Several left-wing politicians did not want to let that go unchallenged.
Member of the Bundestag Caren Lay advised Ernst to delete his tweet.
"Well, are you lighting the fire again?" asked the Berlin left-wing politician Elke Breitenbach.
According to SPIEGEL information, some MPs had already taken Hennig-Wellsow to court in the parliamentary group meeting a few days earlier.
They said they talked about her for almost an hour.
There, too, some Hennig-Wellsow would have defended.
In the party executive, on the other hand, there was criticism again at the weekend of the parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch, who had made contemptuous comments about a decision by the party committee on compulsory vaccination.
Here, too, there would have been counter-speech for Bartsch.
The background to the personal attacks is the eternal conflict in the left over the direction of content, over which the party and parliamentary group leadership are struggling.
The parliamentary group leadership sees the party on the wrong track and thinks it cares too much about climate or minority politics.
A few weeks ago, Bartsch and Mohamed Ali had presented a corresponding strategy paper at a retreat, which sounded more like a kind of reflection.
The party leadership, on the other hand, wants to further modernize the positions of the left and focus more on the issue of climate policy.
The party leadership only published a paper at the weekend, which conveys a departure rather than a strategy.
The dispute manifests itself in the personnel of Klaus Ernst, who is probably the reason why he is so against the party leadership.
When Bartsch finally got his former opponent to chair the climate committee in the Bundestag, many left-wing climate politicians saw it as a deliberate provocation - Ernst had repeatedly criticized his own party's climate policy positions in the past.
Hundreds of party members launched a campaign against Ernst.
In the end, however, he prevailed in the group.
Hennig-Wellsow then said in an interview with the "taz" that the leadership of the parliamentary group would be "very likely" replaced at a party conference in the coming year.
Some MPs feel that this is cheeky, because the parliamentary group had just confirmed the chairmen in office.
In the meantime, Chairwoman Janine Wissler has made a similar statement, albeit more cautiously.
In the press conference on Monday, she spoke of reorganizing the leadership of the parliamentary group at a party conference next year.
But she didn't want to "anticipate" that.
The parliamentary group says that party leaders Wissler and Hennig-Wellsow tried to work with Bartsch and Mohamed Ali in the first few months after the election in spring 2021.
But the faction leaders had not kept to agreements, which is why the relationship of trust was already damaged after such a short time.
Wissler emphasized on Monday that if there was a desire within the party, the party leadership could be re-elected at a party conference this year.
Knowing full well that a majority in the party is more likely to be on the side of the party chairmen and that there is a lot of resentment in the state associations against the parliamentary group.
Meanwhile, the special problem of Sahra Wagenknecht is providing further fuel for the left.
"In Germany there is a party Die Linke, next to it - so it seems - a left-wing fraction that is independent of it and then there is Sahra Wagenknecht," Benjamin Hoff, head of the Thuringian Left State Chancellery, recently tweeted.
Wagenknecht recently fueled further displeasure with further negative statements on the subject of vaccination.
In the parliamentary group and in the party executive, it is said that they want to hold back publicly because they have to reckon with internal attacks by the group leaders if they object to Wagenknecht.
Those grassroots members of the left who applied for Wagenknecht's exclusion are now going to the federal arbitration court after the state arbitration commission in North Rhine-Westphalia rejected it.
Some fear, others hope Wagenknecht could leave the party himself.
The party "Die Basis" recently shared tweets from Wagenknecht.
The party is considered the political arm of lateral thinkers - some could imagine that they will switch there.
Others consider this unrealistic.
"Anyone who wants to get rid of me has to throw me out," said Wagenknecht back in 1995.
And that's how it stayed in the 26-year dispute over her.