Aims and Ambitions: Policy, Office, Votes and the Left Party

Abstract

As Chapters 1 and 2 have illustrated, the Left Party went through a challenging and decidedly unpredictable first 15 years in existence. By 2005 it appeared, in spite of its inglorious past in the GDR, to have found a place in contemporary German politics, and it is undoubtedly becoming an ever more ‘normal’ part of the German party system. Thus far we have mapped out the roller coaster ride that the Left Party has experienced in everyday practical politics. We have also illustrated that the Left Party’s successes and failures have been analysed by political scientists in different ways; some have persisted in seeing it as a dangerous, populist, extremist party on the fringes of democratic acceptability, others as a milieu-based protest party articulating fuzzily defined eastern German interests, while yet more have, as we have seen, concentrated on analysing the party’s progress through the prism of left-wing politics. While all have had some merit, the results of the 2005 federal election, the merger of the PDS and the WASG into Die Linke and the establishment of the new party as a serious actor with genuine long-term prospects indicate that an approach based on the latter may now have the most mileage. Finally, thus far we have also concentrated primarily on the past rather than the future, avoiding any analysis of what problems, predicaments and dilemmas the ‘new’ Left Party is likely to be faced with. This chapter makes a start in rectifying this.