Former Bundestag member Stefan Liebich is leaving the Left. He wants to focus on his new home USA.
Stefan Liebich was one of the heads of the realpolitik wing of the Left Party for 25 years. He was in the Berlin House of Representatives for ten years and for 15 years Member of the Bundestag. Now, after 35 years of membership, he has announced his departure from the Left Party.
It’s a no-drum roll exit – more of a pragmatic move, as you’d expect from a Realo. Liebich has been heading the North American office of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (RLS) in New York for almost two years and has had a green card, i.e. a permanent residence permit in the USA, since May 2025. He wants to concentrate on the USA. “I am planning my future here with my American family,” said Liebich. The RLS is the foundation associated with the Left Party.
The farewell letter to the Left Party says: “From January 2026, in my new home, I will try to make the world a better place and support the Democrats. With our new mayor in New York City, Zohran Mamdanithis is easy, but a little more difficult with other party members. (You know that).” He doesn’t want to “dance at two parties” and is leaving the party “at a time when it is doing well. Germany needs a party of democratic socialism.”
Looking back, Liebich praises the historic adaptation achievement of the PDS, which emerged from the GDR state party SED and which merged with the WASG in 2005 to form the Left Party. “No other party had to break with Stalinism as a system and has therefore painfully learned that it neither has a monopoly on the truth nor is it a vanguard party.”
As he leaves, he has some advice for his former party. She should “work on center-left majorities so that there is an alternative to black and blue when the firewall comes down.”
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