Germany’s Die Linke: Another way of doing politics

By the weekend before the German federal election, it had become clear that something big was underway in Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. On Friday afternoon, hundreds of people — members and non-members alike, students and workers, ranging in age from 18 to 80 — assembled in the event hall of the VORWÄRTS housing cooperative in Friedrichsfelde for Die Linke’s final campaign rally with the district’s direct candidate, the newly appointed party chairwoman Ines Schwerdtner. The weekend that followed saw an influx of even more people. Dressed in red safety vests and armed with flyers, petitions, and pens, they set off in small groups into the surrounding neighbourhoods. Diligent as ants, they trekked for kilometres through the streets between the Plattenbauten, climbing tirelessly up and down the staircases of the enormous apartment blocks, knocking on doors in the hope of speaking with members of the local community about their issues and worries and urging them to vote for Die Linke.

“The door-to-door campaigning was a great experience for me”, explains Marcel, who put a great deal of time into the campaign and went on numerous expeditions canvassing for votes. “It was important for me to be able to take some form of concrete action to counter the swing to the right. The mood was surprisingly positive; only a couple of doors were slammed in our faces, and I was only verbally abused on one occasion”, explains the 33-year-old, who is himself a resident of Lichtenberg and works in a counselling centre. Marcel was previously already politically active in the tenants’ movement, but — like many others — only became a party member during the election campaign. In Lichtenberg alone, 500 people have signed on as party members since the beginning of the year. “It was a lot of fun being able to offer people support, like by showing them the heating bill calculator, or giving them information about social consultation services.”

According to Regina Brückner, a member of the campaign’s organizing team, over the three weekends of active campaigning that took place in January and February, as well as the numerous individual actions held in the afternoons, the “red vests” knocked on a total of 68,078 doors in Lichtenberg in the weeks leading up to the elections. She calculates that this amounts to “almost every other door out of 152,100 households”. Based on these figures, which come from the data collected by the campaigners using the Zetkin campaign app, 24,312 doors were answered, 11,891 friendly conversations were conducted, and, in response to the campaigners’ final question, 6,461 people pledged to go out and vote.

“In this way, we were ultimately able to reach approximately 35,000 people, because the conversations we had with people then spread to the respondents’ family members and friends”, Regina Brückner happily explains. And she corroborates Marcel’s observation: “A lot of people said they would vote for us.” But it wasn’t just the mood at people’s front doors that was surprisingly positive. As she recalls, nobody had anticipated that so many people would volunteer to go canvassing: “Back in December, we talked in the organizing team about our target of reaching 30,000 doors. We managed to exceed that target twice over.”

The party’s election results from 23 February are no less impressive: Die Linke achieved 23.5 percent of all second votes in Lichtenberg — 5.2 percent more than in 2021, making it the strongest party, narrowly ahead of the AfD, which came in at second place with 22.4 percent. The first vote results deserve particular attention, however. With a total of 34 percent, Ines Schwerdtner came in at ten percentage points above both her tally of second votes and the number of first votes received by her predecessor, Gesine Lötzsch, in the last parliamentary election. Meanwhile, the local candidate for the AfD, Beatrix von Storch, secured only 21.9 percent — less than the number of second votes for her party.

Evidently, the efforts of Die Linke’s campaign team in the final days leading up to the election paid off: By focussing voters’ attention on the stand-off between Schwerdtner and Storch, campaigners were able to convince a considerable number of SPD, BSW, and Greens voters to cast their first vote for Die Linke’s party leader, in order to prevent the rise of the right-wing extremist candidate von Storch. But the strategy also clearly paid off at the national level: with 8.8 percent of the second vote nationwide and an impressive six direct mandates to the Bundestag, the party returned an electoral triumph the likes of which it had not seen for many years.

Slow and steady wins the race

Die Linke’s resounding electoral success at the national level was due to the synergy between a number of different factors. Besides the party’s primary focus on social issues, these included a strong and successful social media campaign and collaborations with online influencers. The impassioned speech delivered on 29 January by party front-runner Heidi Reichinnek in reaction to the CDU/CSU’s decision to join forces with the AfD in order to push through a motion in the Bundestag to tighten Germany’s migration policy amassed some 25 million views online. At the same time, the party’s ability to successfully mobilize voters and its own rank and file can also be attributed in large part to its door-to-door campaigning, which had been a long time in the planning. Especially in the campaign to secure the direct mandates and the first votes for the constituency candidates, vote-canvassing appears to have been central.

Although the dynamism of the election campaign may have come as a surprise to many, nothing was left to chance, as Martin Neise from the party headquarters in Karl-Liebknecht-Haus points out. “As soon as the snap elections were announced in November, we started preparing a large-scale door-to-door campaign in a selection of constituencies”, explains Neise, who was responsible for organizing the Lichtenberg branch of the project. “Our first step was to assemble a local team of dedicated and enthusiastic individuals with varying degrees and different kinds of campaign experience.” The party headquarters provided additional support in the way of both personnel and funds. The dates were scheduled for three weekends of active campaigning. Regular induction events for new campaign recruits were held in the events hall of the VORWÄRTS housing cooperative. A centrally managed internal communications structure, complete with a Telegram channel and email list, was established in order to regularly inform and mobilize the ever-growing group of volunteers about any and all actions, events, and milestones during the course of the campaign period. By the time the campaign had drawn to a close, more than 1,000 people had signed up to Die Linke’s Telegram channel for the Lichtenberg constituency.

“Door-knocking was really at the heart of our election campaign; everything else centred around it”, explains Neise. “We began our door-to-door campaign by first targeting the apartment blocks where we had garnered considerable support in previous elections. So I guess you could say we started from within our own bastions.” It was not until later in the campaign that other neighbourhoods became targets for canvassing efforts — in particular when it came to campaigning for first votes. The first such areas to be included were those in which Die Linke had recently lost support in the wake of the BSW’s split from the party, or where the SPD had gained traction, and then the leafy middle-class areas with single-family dwellings. For Neise, it was also vital that all of the party’s other activities — like the Rote Tafeln (Red Tables), with complementary sausages and tea, the social consultation hours, and various public events — were planned in such a way that they could be promoted to members of the public in the context of the door-to-door interactions. “This meant that we were able to offer people a follow-up service at their own doorstep and show them that, when it came to the specific problems they were facing, we were open and responsive as a party, and could be of concrete assistance to them.”

The door-to-door conversations had a two-way effect. For one thing, these interactions provided campaigners with an opportunity to make a tangible, practical contribution, to participate, and to learn something from their conversations with members of the public; while at the same time, many of the people with whom they spoke felt that their hopes and concerns were being heard and taken seriously. These dialogues motivated outsiders to get involved and put their trust in the party, while simultaneously providing a sense of affirmation and motivation to those already active in the campaign. Martin Neise also highlights the impact had by the vast number of red-vested individuals: “Our campaigners could be seen all over the place. We were a talking point in many neighbourhoods.”