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It has become quiet around the party Die Linke - apart from the headlines that the Thuringian Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow recently made when he admitted that he was playing "Candy Crush" on his mobile phone during the Corona negotiations.
The silence that surrounds the left is all the more remarkable as the red-red-green coalition in the federal government hoped for by many journalists would not be possible without it.
What is the reason for the disinterest in the party - and what does it mean for the federal elections in September?
First of all, what currently applies to other parties also applies to the left: In the corona pandemic, what counts above all is the action of the executive.
There is little demand for political programs, and certainly not radical ones.
The lack of interest in the left is mainly to blame: the party lacks convincing leadership and its program seems to have fallen out of time.
The left has been struggling with weak leadership for some time.
Since the departure of Oskar Lafontaine as party chairman (2010) and Gregor Gysi as parliamentary group leader (2015), there has been no one who radiates beyond his own clientele.
The only one who succeeded was Sarah Wagenknecht.
But it was fought within the party until it renounced the chairmanship of the parliamentary group.
Several district associations now even want to prevent her from becoming the top candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia in the federal elections.
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The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the party was suspended in the election of a new party leadership.
The chairmen Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger had already declared in August that they did not want to run again.
But because of the corona pandemic, the party conference was postponed from October to this weekend.
At least as important, however, is the programmatic weakness of the left.
It doesn't even know whether it wants to rule or not, and it only has old answers to new challenges.
Anyone who wants to know how the party will react to China's advance will look in vain for it in the new election manifesto.
Anyone who hopes for answers on how the impending mass bankruptcy after the lockdown can be averted will not find anything either.
The program does contain a lot of suggestions on how to spend money, but not a single one on how it could be made in the future.
Instead, the left is calling for entire industries to be transferred to public ownership, which would not only be priceless, but also not very convincing in view of the inefficient operation of the state in the Corona crisis.
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The party's foreign policy ideas also appear antiquated.
"We are calling for the dissolution of NATO and its replacement by a collective security system with Russia's participation," says her election manifesto - as if Boris Yeltsin were still in power in Moscow.
And although the party calls for the UN to be strengthened, it rejects the Bundeswehr's missions abroad, which means that the SPD and the Greens see it as a ruling party.
The party's weaknesses have not remained hidden from voters.
If she received 11.9 percent of the vote in the 2009 federal elections, she can only dream of similar results today.
Even in 2017, when the Union and the SPD suffered historic losses, it only came to 9.2 percent.
In current polls, it is even worse off, in the 2019 European elections it even reached just 5.5 percent.
The downward trend is particularly evident in eastern Germany.
In Brandenburg the party fell within ten years from 27.2 to 10.7 percent, in Saxony from 20.6 to 10.4 percent.
In Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, it is only slightly better at 16.3 and 13.2 respectively.
In Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, the left was even thrown out of the state parliaments entirely.
Only in the poorly populated Thuringia did the party achieve a record result in 2019, which had regional reasons.
No strategy against the decline in voters
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So far, the left has no strategy against the decline in the number of voters.
Instead, it operates according to the motto: Keep it up!
The demand in the election manifesto for “open borders for all people” should further strengthen the supremacy of the AfD in the east.
The Left has apparently said goodbye to its role as the (East German) People's Party, because programmatically it is focusing more and more on the alternative milieus in the cities.
The party is now increasingly emulating the Greens.
In the election manifesto, climate protection even made it into the title.
And when the Green Party leader Anton Hofreiter questioned the construction of new homes, Riexinger immediately adopted the criticism.
The red-red-green voter potential will not increase as a result, but will only be distributed differently, if at all.
The upcoming party congress will probably do little to change the state of the party.
The parliamentary group leader of the Left in the Hessian state parliament, Janine Wissler, and her counterpart in Thuringia, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, are to be elected as new chairmen.
Her nomination, which took place without the participation of the grassroots, corresponds to the same proportion that was decisive for her predecessors: Wissler belongs to the radical wing, Hennig-Wellsow to the moderate.
It is unlikely that the two will be more successful.
At Hennig-Wellsow, personal characteristics stand in the way.
In February 2020 she became known nationwide because she threw a bouquet of flowers at the feet of the FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich after his election as Thuringian Prime Minister.
All of Germany could see at the time that it couldn't handle defeat.
The radical left newspaper
Junge Welt
certified that as party leader in Thuringia she acted “authoritarian” and “did not place excessive emphasis on discussions”.
The cross-stream integration of the party wings - a must for every left-wing leader - has "not been their priority so far".
A former parliamentary group colleague accused her of having "systematically marginalized" the left wing in Thuringia under her.
Even at public appearances, Hennig-Wellsow does not appear confident.
In habit, she is reminiscent of the failed party leader Gabriele Zimmer.
The fact that the 43-year-old, whose father rose from a truck driver to a criminologist in the People's Police in the GDR, also has problems with written communication, was recently revealed in a guest post in Die Zeit, which was bursting with unsuccessful formulations.
"Will the radical change of course be successfully initiated," was one of her sentences, "or is society going back towards market belief and competitive thinking?"
The other candidate appears smoother, but her political positions are likely to deter many.
If it were up to Wissler, radical minorities would exercise power instead of parliaments.
The guiding principles of the group “marx21”, which it co-founded, say: “The left can hit capital if mass movements are ready and able to expropriate the ruling class and replace the existing, undemocratic state apparatus with organs of direct democracy . "
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The group is therefore - just like the "Socialist Left", to which Wissler belonged - classified as unconstitutional by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
At the end of 2019 she initiated the founding of another group called “Movement Left”, whose goal is “a socialist democracy in which not just a parliament, but the people through council structures have a say in all matters.”
Conflicts are inevitable
In connection with her candidacy, Wissler announced that she would end her membership in the extremist organizations.
But she also emphasized that she did not distance herself from their positions.
It can hardly be assumed that this attitude will attract new voters to the party.
Instead, conflicts with Hennig-Wellsow are inevitable, which the left wants to make capable of governing nationwide.
Although both are currently trying to cover up the conflict, if there is a red-red-green majority after the federal elections, it should break out in all sharpness.
Nobody knows yet what the political mood will be in September.
But it is already certain that the left will not have a good start to the election year 2021.
If Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate elections in mid-March, the party will again miss the five percent hurdle.
For June, further losses appear in Saxony-Anhalt.
And there is little to suggest that the left will experience a political awakening under its new chairman.
Therefore, the party will probably sit on the opposition bench again in the next Bundestag.