Full of envy, German leftists look to France.

There, the radical populist left around its charismatic leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has formed a powerful, albeit fragile, alliance with the Greens, Communists and the meager rest of the Socialists, which has become the third major political force alongside Macron's center movement and Marine Le Pen's right-wing extremists has ascended.

In Germany, on the other hand, the left, once praised as a role model by Mélenchon, did not get beyond the status of a splinter party in three state elections.

Previously, she had already failed at the five percent hurdle in the federal election.

Only thanks to a third direct mandate won in Leipzig was she able to return to the Bundestag.

The electoral defeat(s) and a MeToo scandal about sexual assaults by comrades in the Hessian home association of party leader Janine Wissler led to the resignation of her co-chair Susanne Hennig-Wellsow.

Their reckoning with parts of the party made the left look into the abyss where it is standing 15 years after its founding.

With the election of a new leadership team, the smallest opposition force wants to solve its life-threatening crisis at a party conference this weekend.

Voter potential of 18 percent?

The downward slide that has been going on for years will not end with a replacement of top personnel.

Wissler and other leading leftists flatter the party's dire situation by pointing to what appears to be "good foundations" to build on.

From this rosy perspective, this includes participation in four out of 16 state governments, in Thuringia even as the strongest force.

Thousands of local politicians are added.

The Karl-Liebknecht-Haus also likes to refer to a study according to which the left has a potential voter base of 18 percent.

But in Erfurt, the left only shines thanks to its popular prime minister, Bodo Ramelow.

In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, SPD election winner Manuela Schwesig has brought a plucked leftist to her side as a majority procurer for silent co-government.

In the city-states of Berlin and Bremen, the party owes its senators alone to a dominant SPD-Left Party, which pushed through Red-Red-Green.

In any case, Berlin's governing mayor Franziska Giffey would have preferred to form a traffic light coalition with the Greens and FDP, as in the federal government.

Voters migrate from the left to the AfD

In East Germany, with the exception of Thuringia, the Left Party, which operated as the “Party of Democratic Socialism” until 2007, has long since lost its rank as a regional people's party.

Protest voters from the former GDR, but also many younger people in Saxony and Brandenburg voted for the right-wing extremist AfD instead of the left.

The western expansion has largely failed.

In addition to its urban strongholds of Bremen and Hamburg, the party is only represented in a West German state parliament in Hesse, which is the only non-city state.

When Die Linke was founded in 2007 after the merger of the WASG and PDS led by former SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine, it hoped to be elected in the West because of anger at Schröder's agenda reforms.

Why should the Left be elected?

As with the AfD, the gruff tone and the desire to intrigue have become negative trademarks on the left.

The best example was the mud fight in Saarland.

There two factions fought bitterly against each other.

Right in the middle is her former star Lafontaine, who has now left the left in anger after his revenge campaign against the SPD.

In the federal government, it is his wife Sahra Wagenknecht who is polarizing in the argument about the position towards the aggressor Russia.

Her party enemy Gregor Gysi accused her of "lack of emotion" after Putin's attack on Ukraine, and she and other friends of Russia backed down.

Wagenknecht also stands for the directional dispute within the left.

She complains that the party is neglecting its core constituency in favor of identity-political issues.

As if they wanted to copy Mélenchon's recipe for success, Wagenknecht and her supporters called for a "popular left" striving for a "new, democratic and ecological socialism" before the party congress.

Why should the left be elected because of such phrases?

In France, the former popular parties, socialists and conservatives, are only a shadow of themselves. There, the extreme forces on the right and left are stronger than ever.

Luckily that's different in Germany, even if the SPD and Union have also shrunk.

But with the bourgeois Greens, a left-wing party has moved into the middle.

The left and increasingly also the AfD are relegated to narrow margins.

That's where they belong.