Berlin Left Party: Problems in the third row

When the old and new factions of the Left Party met in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, the originally planned space was not enough given the 47 new MPs. Instead, they had to go to the ballroom of the former Prussian state parliament, the room where the German Communist Party was once founded.

Elif Eralp was unanimously elected as group leader, replacing Anne Helm, who left parliament. In addition to her, the previous parliamentary group executive including co-chairman Tobias Schulze remained in office on an acting basis until the new House of Representatives was constituted in October. Participants describe the meeting as harmonious: there were neither debates about government participation nor allegations of anti-Semitism.

But this harmony could be over as early as Friday when a state party conference meets to give a mandate to an exploratory group for talks with the SPD and the Greens about a joint government. The state executive board has proposed a five-member group, which includes Elif Eralp and Tobias Schulze, the two state party leaders Kerstin Wolter and Maximilian Schirmer and the former state secretary Wenke Christoph.

However, a motion from circles of the movement left, especially from Neukölln and Tempelhof-Schöneberg, suggests that the exploratory group be elected by the party congress. The reason: The proposed staff does not reflect the diversity of the party and would be biased in favor of the old government left. Instead, “those parts of the party that are critical of government participation should also sit at the table,” says the application available to taz. But because an election with many candidates at the party conference, which is scheduled to last only 3 hours, is unlikely to be possible, it could also result in a compromise.

On the other hand, the issue of anti-Semitism could become more difficult for the party, not only in view of a heated public debate, but also because of the announcement of a request for expulsion from the party against the spokesperson for the State Working Group on Palestine Solidarity, Hannah Bruns. The application from several unnamed party members was received by the party's state arbitration commission on Saturday.

Bruns does not hold any party office, but is a vocal representative of AG Palisoli and repeatedly speaks out unforgivingly about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The statement, for example, is attributed to her: “The liberation of Palestine ends when Tel Aviv is again in the hands of Palestine.” She also reiterated her stance in her reaction to the exclusion request: “I also said at demonstrations that Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves armed against expulsion, apartheid and genocide.” Bruns is convinced that she “will lead the fight against this exclusion request” and win. However, it will probably be months before a verdict is reached.

Last November, Bruns was involved in a short-term occupation of the Left party headquarters in response to the expulsion of Ramsis Kilani, who was expelled from the party due to anti-Israel incitement and a lack of distancing himself from Hamas. At least among some new MPs, expulsions of pro-Palestinian activists, for whom the boundaries to Israel-related anti-Semitism are blurred, are unlikely to be met with goodwill.

One of them is Vanessa Emde from Neukölln, part of the Trotskyist network Marx 21. Before the election, she published the call “Better to be right in the opposition than wrong in the government” on the Pali-AG Instagram account and promised that she would not be available for “abandoning positions of solidarity with Palestine”.

The youth association candidate Asya Șenyüz from Tempelhof-Schöneberg is also uncompromising. She is explicitly against government participation and recently declared that she would never take a back seat when it comes to “the genocide in Gaza”.

The two directly elected representatives in Mitte, Deike Janssen and Martha Kleedörfer, also operate in the Pali-AG environment. The latter caused a stir when she described the mayor of an Israeli twin city in the center, a party friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “fascist”.