These days, three special speeches were given one after the other in the German Bundestag. A woman who stood there for the last time spoke between two SPD MPs, who both went to the microphone in the plenary hall for the very first time in their lives. Framed in two so-called maiden speeches, Katja Kipping, still 43 years old, gave her farewell speech.
The former party leader of the Left is leaving the Bundestag after 16 years because she hopes that it will help her career. She is switching from federal politics to state politics, but from the opposition to government. Kipping is the new Senator for Integration, Labor and Social Affairs in Berlin.
She has been preparing for her new job for half a lifetime. Even as a schoolboy in Dresden, Kipping was involved in social projects and citizens’ initiatives. Sometimes she fought for an unconditional basic income, sometimes for the environment, sometimes for better train connections in Saxony’s regional traffic. Since she was first elected to the Bundestag in 2005 – for a party that was then still called the PDS – she has been fighting a constant battle against Hartz IV. Both her first and her last speech as a member of the Bundestag dealt with the dignity of the underpaid. In parting, she accused the Ampel coalition of having merely renamed the Hartz IV problem with the introduction of citizens’ money: “New terms alone don’t fill a refrigerator,” Kipping called to colleagues from the SPD and the Greens, with whom she recently worked would have loved to rule.
She was well prepared for explorations with the SPD and the Greens
That failed not least because of the desolate result of the left in the federal elections. Kipping has been promoting an alliance with Red-Green at the federal level for years. It is no secret that she would have preferred to take over the Labor Ministry from Hubertus Heil. Just in case, she had prepared a 120-page exploratory paper on the field of labor and social affairs.
Now she’s doing what she dreamed of. Just one floor down, in red-green-red Berlin. The efforts of the state political level offer it the chance to distinguish itself in concrete politics. On her first evening as a sworn social senator, Kipping visited the city mission’s cold bus. While the new members of the Federal Cabinet are making their inaugural visits all over the world (or at least all over the Republic), Kipping went to say hello to the homeless in the capital.
For the troubled left, which is currently fighting nationwide to remain visible at all, this personality is also spectacular because Katja Kipping in Berlin can at least rudimentarily compete with the celebrities of the governing mayor Franziska Giffey. In the eight years that she was party leader, she couldn’t complain about the lack of public image.
On her way up, feminist Kipping also benefited from stumbling men. She reached the Bundestag in 2005 as the Saxon replacement top candidate for the “Tatort” actor Peter Sodann, who had withdrawn his application after two days. The way to the top of the left was clear for her in 2012 after the founding fathers Gregor Gysi and Oskar Lafontaine mutually neutralized each other. As party leader, she then got caught up in trench warfare with Sahra Wagenknecht, in a way that Gysi and Lafontaine couldn’t have done better together.
Even party colleagues who do not agree with her in every worldview describe Kipping as a meticulous worker with Prussian discipline. She will also need it for her plan to show in the rather undisciplined Berlin what would have been possible with her in the Bund.