A new leadership duo is leading the Hessian left into next year's state elections.

The delegates at a party conference in Dietzenbach elected the state parliamentarian Christiane Böhm from Trebur with 76.1 percent of the votes as the new chairwoman.

In addition to the 64-year-old, the Darmstadt political scientist Jakob Migenda is now at the head of the party.

Ewald Hetrodt

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung in Wiesbaden.

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The twenty-eight-year-old received 74.5 percent of the vote.

Both ran unopposed.

The duo succeeds MPs Jan Schalauske and Petra Heimer, who in future want to concentrate entirely on their mandate and work in the parliamentary group.

"We don't have a chance, so let's use it," was the militant appeal with which a party congress delegate addressed her fellow party members.

Janine Wissler, federal chairwoman and long-time leader of the parliamentary group in Wiesbaden, also looked at the polls in autumn next year on Saturday.

"We came to stay."

She recalled the motto with which the party entered the Hessian state parliament in 2008.

"We came to stay." Both speakers were aware of the result of a recent survey commissioned by Hessischer Rundfunk and commissioned by the Infratest dimap institute.

After that, the party can no longer count on staying in parliament with a share of three percent of the vote.

In the spring, she had poll ratings of five percent.

In the elections in autumn 2018, the left in Hesse still got 6.5 percent.

Wissler emphasized that the federal party has a duty to give the state association a tailwind before the next election.

"I warn against jeopardizing this party," she cried.

Without naming Sahra Wagenknecht, the federal chairwoman opposed flirting with the founding of a new party.

The Hessian state association has proven for years how to work successfully.

As an example, Wissler and other speakers cited the work of the state parliamentarians in the NSU investigative committee.

They were pleased about the current publication of classified NSU files from 2014 by the "ZDF Magazin Royale".

Members of parliament and employees of the left revealed that there were documents on how the Office for the Protection of the Constitution dealt with information on the National Socialist underground.

If more proof was needed that the left had to exist in the state parliament, then it had now been provided, said long-time member of parliament Hermann Schaus.

The verbal encouragement by the party's top people was preceded by the discussion of the topic that had shaken the state association in the first half of the year.

A guide against sexism, border crossing and sexualised violence is to be drawn up by autumn of next year.

"We have to get to the roots of the problem," says the motion of the state board, which was approved with a few changes.

Since the spring, confidants have served as contact points for victims of assaults.

"We need structures that contain sexual harassment and assault and make it impossible in the long term," the text says.