parties
Left-wing faction in the Bundestag at the end – processing is underway
The left-wing faction in the Bundestag dissolves 18 years after it was founded. photo
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
They did politics together for years, but now the Left and the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” are parting ways in the Bundestag. Parliament now has an unusually large number of individual representatives at times.
Wagenknecht’s colleague Christian Leye told the German Press Agency that there was of course sadness when the faction was dissolved. “In the group, but also in the party, there are people who I respect very much and, above all, value. In the end, however, it was a political decision: the majority of the officials on the left no longer faced the crises of the time. ” Answers are needed to social division, economic decline, war and the rise of right-wing anti-democrats. “We are facing this, and that is good and right,” said Leye.
Liquidation proceedings could take a long time
The former parliamentary group members want to regroup in two different groups in the Bundestag: the remaining 28 MPs from the Left on the one hand and the ten MPs from the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” on the other. The Left has already applied for this to the Bundestag, and Wagenknecht’s group wants to do it next week.
Such groups generally have fewer rights in the Bundestag than parliamentary groups and also receive less financial support from the state. The details will be regulated in a Bundestag resolution. It is unclear when the plenary session will decide on this.
The left-wing faction was founded in 2005 from members of the Left Party.PDS and the WASG, two years before the two parties formally merged. Since the parliamentary group would miss the minimum size of 37 seats without the ten parliamentarians around Wagenknecht, it decided in November to liquidate itself from December 6th. The so-called liquidation process could take months or years because all contractual relationships have to be wound up. This includes the termination of around 100 employees.