Left-wing top candidate Eva von Angern: Defeat for the “nerd”

Eva von Angern spoke of a “black day for Saxony-Anhalt” given the success of the AfD in the state elections on Sunday evening. The left-wing top candidate has always clearly rejected the right-wing extremists.

Before the election, she even refused to shake hands with her AfD competitor in a television duel. "Torment Siegmund? Vote from Angern!" posted the top candidate of the Left in Saxony-Anhalt shortly before.

But she might not just be “disappointed” about the blue bar. Her own party also performed poorly compared to the forecasts of the last few months, which had predicted up to 13 percent: it only got around 9 percent.

One explanation for this, according to some leftists, was the campaign for tactical voting. This had asked people to vote for small parties such as the Greens or SPD so that they could enter the state parliament - and thus make an absolute majority for the AfD less likely.

Compared to the last election, however, only a few left-wing voters migrated to these small parties; in fact, the party lost to the BSW and AfD. Another reason for the Left's relatively poor performance could have been the high voter turnout, while the AfD was able to mobilize many non-voters.

In its analysis of the AfD's success, the Left shares the same assessment that the head of the right-wing extremists had given in a ZDF interview a few minutes earlier: "The CDU made the AfD so strong in the debate about pensions or health insurance. Those weren't reforms, they were social cuts," says von Angern.

Despite all the criticism, the Left candidate had always emphasized in advance that she was ready to work with the CDU to prevent an AfD government. “But we will not support any AfD policy in the guise of the CDU.” In order to form a coalition, von Angern demanded in the taz in June that the conservatives had to distance themselves from their current course.

Saxony-Anhalt is already working with the conservatives in many places. That is “good and sensible,” says von Angern. For example, she runs a network against child poverty with CDU MP Tobias Krull. She finds it all the more absurd when CDU politicians compare their party with the AfD. But even on election evening, CDU general secretary Franziska Hoppermann ruled out a coalition with “left-wing extremists”.

Von Angern is the exact opposite. Their habitus seems rather bourgeois-conservative. The 49-year-old is married and the mother of three sons; she has kept her birth name “von Angern”. He comes from an old Magdeburg noble family, as she says, not without pride. Their campaign posters said “homeland” – a term that conservatives might like, but not everyone likes. She named her cat “Mr. Böhmer” – after Wolfgang Böhmer, the CDU Prime Minister who ruled Saxony-Anhalt in 2002 when von Angern first entered the state parliament.

She was born in Magdeburg, was 13 years old when the Berlin Wall fell and was still going to school. Her mother was a teacher, her father worked at the Ministry for State Security, and at the time of reunification she turned away from her parents, she says.

They politicized the right-wing extremist attacks in the 1990s. That's why she joined the PDS, the predecessor party of the Left, in the mid-1990s. After graduating from high school, she studied law at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. For the Left, the woman with the large round glasses, who describes herself as a “nerd,” entered the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament in 2002 as the youngest member of the state parliament at the time. Hard-working and well-connected as she is, she managed to become parliamentary group leader of the Left in 2020. In 2006 she became self-employed as a lawyer in Magdeburg.

At that time, the PDS was still the second strongest force in Saxony-Anhalt, after the CDU. Four years ago, the Left had fallen to 11 percent, and von Angern was also the top candidate then. The fact that it is now even below 10 percent should hurt her. “We will defend this democracy,” she promised on Sunday evening despite everything.