Amira Mohamed Ali
Left faction leader resigns because of the dispute over Sahra Wagenknecht
Amira Mohamed Ali resigns as leader of the Left Group
© Michael Kappeler / DPA
Amira Mohamed Ali has led the Left Party parliamentary group together with Dietmar Bartsch since 2019. Now Sahra Wagenknecht’s confidant wants to retire. And thus sends a political signal.
Left faction leader Amira Mohamed Ali is pulling in because of the way her party is treated Sahra Wagenknecht resigned from her post. “I have decided not to run for the chairmanship of the Left Party in the Bundestag in the coming board elections,” said Mohamed Ali in a statement that was available to the German Press Agency. “This decision has political reasons.” The final tipping point was the distancing of the party leadership from Wagenknecht at the beginning of June.
This shows the crack in the left more and more clearly. Mohamed Ali, who has led the group together with Dietmar Bartsch since 2019, is considered to be Wagenknecht’s confidante. This has fallen out with the party leadership around the chairmen Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan and is considering founding their own party. Wagenknecht wants to make a decision before the end of the year. Polls suggest a Wagenknecht party’s chances of success.
Mohamed Ali finds it difficult to follow the course of the party leadership
In her statement, Mohamed Ali gives several reasons for the planned withdrawal from the group leadership, which will be re-elected at the beginning of September. The 43-year-old writes that she is finding it increasingly difficult to represent the course of the party leadership in public. This contradicts their political convictions in many places. Among other things, she criticized the fact that no “fundamental no to the wrong course of the traffic light government” was formulated, for example to climate policy, which puts a financial burden on people. There is also a lack of “a clear yes to a consistent peace policy”.
The party leadership wants to win over disappointed Green voters, she said. But you can’t reach those for whom left-wing politics should be made, not even AfD voters who can still be won back.
“The final tipping point for my decision was the unanimous decision of the party executive of June 10, 2023 and the fact that the large majority of the state executives adopted this decision,” the statement said. “It says that Sahra Wagenknecht has no future in the left and that she should resign her mandate together with other members of parliament. This shows in a hitherto unknown clarity the desire and the goal to force part of the membership out of the party.”
Splitting the left is a risk
For the parliamentary group, the internal division is a risk. It could lose its status and thus financial resources and influence if more than two MPs switch to a Wagenknecht party and leave the parliamentary group. She left it open how Mohamed Ali would behave. She only wrote: “I will continue to work in the Bundestag for the goals and convictions that have supported my political work so far.”
Wagenknecht had repeatedly criticized the party leadership and irritated with the possible founding of the party. Wissler and Schirdewan finally took the initiative and enforced the decision against Wagenknecht. In the meantime, they have made another decision that has met with criticism from Wagenknecht supporters: they proposed refugee and climate activist Carola Rackete as the top left candidate for the European elections (Here you can read more about it).
“The party executive’s proposal to proclaim the non-party Carola Rackete as the top candidate for the European elections, bypassing all party bodies, further proves the wrong-way journey of the political leadership of the left,” said Klaus Ernst, member of the Bundestag, also a supporter of Wagenknecht, the Berlin “Tagesspiegel”. Officially, the list for the European elections will only be drawn up at a left-wing party conference in Augsburg in mid-November.