And suddenly there was this unfamiliar beam. That was before the last state election, in mid-September 2018, when Prime Minister Markus Söder struggled to remain Prime Minister, sometimes lunging to the right towards the AfD. Or with the idea of making dialect compulsory in schools: “You all know that dialect makes you more intelligent, you can see that every day in the Bavarian state government.”
In any case, a “Bayerntrend” survey was published four weeks before the state elections. And in addition to the only 35 percent for the CSU, there was another small sensation: the left at five percent – if the Sunday question had already been election day, it would have meant entering the state parliament for the first time. Although quite a few people marveled at another piece of news: that there is a left in Bavaria at all.
Nothing came of it, the result was 3.2 percent. In the 2021 federal election, it was even less in the Free State, even if the party was on everyone’s lips. Because the CSU posted “Prevent a shift to the left” everywhere and warned that red-red-green would immediately grab every citizen’s wallet. Bavaria is simply not a good place for the left. And in general, if parties are not in the state parliament, they are hardly on the political public screen. The most prominent of the four Bavarian members of the Bundestag is party co-founder Klaus Ernst – who, with his Ukraine expertise on talk shows, shouldn’t be the very best advertising at the moment.
On Sunday and Monday, the left will elect a new leader at a party conference in Hirschaid – this is also the prelude to the 2023 state elections. The Bavarian chairman Ates Gürpinar, who is also the deputy head of the federal government, wants to release the post, not without first in the Evening News against the competition in the camp left of center: The SPD in Bavaria is “only a shadow of itself”, the Greens are “already begging for participation in government” so much that they no longer stand for any issues. The national association will probably be led by a female dual leadership in the future. In addition to Gürpinar’s co-boss, Nuremberg city councilor Kathrin Flach Gomez, Adelheid Rupp, formerly in the SPD and member of the state parliament, is running for office. A pointer to where the left finally wants to go.
Rupp, from 2003 to 2013 in the state parliament, is considered combative. As a lawyer, where she last sued for a citizens’ initiative in Ingolstadt or for the left at the Constitutional Court; it was about the emergency appointments to local councils during the pandemic. She was already offended in the SPD parliamentary group, because of her there was more gossip. The SZ once gave her the title “The rabid red ones”. There was also trouble in the 2008 election campaign: while SPD top candidate Franz Maget called an alliance with the Left Party “completely out of the question,” should it get into the state parliament, Rupp, a few days before the election, didn’t want to rule out anything at all.