analysis
Status: 07/22/2021 3:44 p.m.
In the Bundestag election campaign, the Left Party relies primarily on a signal word with an exclamation mark and on content. Little can be seen of the top duo.
The left is pushing. “Now!” – that’s the word with an exclamation mark that jumps out at one of almost all of the party’s election posters. A signal word for the policy change that the party absolutely wants. “The politics of lost time must be over,” demanded Janine Wissler, the left-wing top candidate at the presentation of the poster campaign in Berlin.
The Left Party is sticking to its goal: it wants to get ten percent in the federal election. And according to previous surveys – it is closer to seven percent – there will still be a lot of work for the party. She wants to “go to the front doors and into the squares”.
Themed pictures instead of top candidates
What is striking on the posters: Dietmar Bartsch and Janine Wissler, who are supposed to be the driving forces behind the election campaign as top candidates, do not appear – at least until now. Instead, unknown faces that stand for higher pensions, a minimum wage of 13 euros and for more salaries and more staff in the healthcare sector.
In addition, there are posters on the topics of rent caps, property tax, against arms exports and the slogan issued as a climate target that buses and trains should be free everywhere. The big issue of social justice hovers over everything.
Redistribution instead of looking east
The party wants to finance all these expensive goals with a major tax reform. For example, with a one-off property levy and a higher top tax rate. From the property levy alone, she expects an additional 140 billion euros in income.
“With us, the rule of thumb applies: up to an annual income of 80,000 euros, the people are relieved and everything above that we will burden the people. With a single, mind you,” said Wissler, specifying the tax concept of her party.
What you look for in vain on the election posters is the topic of the East. Although one now often hears in conversations with people from the party that the focus of the former “Caretaker Party of the East” must again focus more clearly on the people there, there is no separate poster for the Bundestag election campaign.
Lessons from Saxony-Anhalt
In the recent state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, the Left Party caused a sensation with the slogan “Take command of the Wessis”. The poster featured a large dog on a leash that was being tugged by a small child. There was a lot of criticism for the slogan, and not just from political opponents. Some even from their own party found that 30 years after reunification such a demand was outdated.
The Left in Saxony-Anhalt decided not to hang this poster anywhere, but still defended the demand. Saxony-Anhalt’s top candidate Eva von Angern still thinks that this poster was “a direct hit” and emphasizes: “The vehemence of the debate shows that we have hit a nerve. We have said something that many people in the East have said on the move. ”
“Special responsibility for the East”
There will be no such poster for the left-wing election campaign in all of Germany. In view of the top candidate, who comes from Hesse, the left-wing Prime Minister in Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, who comes from Lower Saxony, and the fact that now more party members of the left come from West Germany than from East Germany, this would probably also lead to irritation.
Top candidate Bartsch smiles when he says that such a slogan cannot of course be posted in the federal election campaign. He emphasizes, however, that the Left Party has a special responsibility for the East, this is undisputed and he criticizes the lack of presence of people of East German origin in management positions, the still incomplete pension adjustment and the different wages in East and West.
Styrofoam instead of class struggle: The Left Party relies on new beginnings and upheaval in its campaign.
A slogan with green associations
At the end of the presentation, Wissler and Bartsch stand by the photographers by large letters that the party has set up on a lawn next to the Berlin party headquarters. Again the “now!” made of purple styrofoam. This is intended to underline the urgency of the left-wing demands, said Federal Managing Director Jörg Schindler.
The left really wants to push through its issues, i.e. to be involved in a federal government with which that is possible. That this “now” (without the exclamation mark, but also in purple) is exactly the title of the recently published and much discussed book by Annalena Baerbock, the green top candidate, is a coincidence and has no political connection, according to the Left Party.