Against the odds: the improbable journey of Die Linke through unified Germany

Opinion polls suggest that as many as six independent parties could cross the electoral threshold and enter the Bundestag in Germany’s federal elections in September. In advance of the elections, we will be running a series profiling each of these parties. In the first article of the series, Ross Campbell writes on the German Left Party (Die Linke), which has confounded initial expectations after the unification of Germany to become a stable feature of the German party system. However, with the rise of new challengers, the 2017 elections could pose formidable challenges for the party as it seeks to build on the third place it achieved in the last federal elections in 2013.