When I covered the election to the German Democratic Republic's People's Chamber for an academic journal back in March 1990, everyone was expecting the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), as the party that had just emerged out of the old ruling Communist party, to be swept into the dustbin of history. In the event, it obtained 16% of the vote, only 6% behind the Social Democratic party (SPD), whom everyone had expected to win. And it has been like that at every election since. A combination of wishful thinking and dodgy psephology has meant that the mainstream parties and their media outlets have done what they can to marginalise what has now become Die Linke or Left party.

This Left party is the product not only of parties of the old GDR, but also a merger with forces on and to the left of social democracy in West Germany, predominantly around Oskar Lafontaine. This means that it has built a basis not only as a sort of Christian Social Union (CSU) of the east but also as the only party represented in the Bundestag that does not go along with the general austerity consensus on social and economic policy. In a society and polity so geared towards consensus this puts it beyond the pale for a predominantly western-dominated political culture.

If we look at the national election results since 1990 we can see that the PDS/Left has managed to hold on with representatives in parliament on the basis of constituency votes during the 90s and into the 2000s, but since 2005 its representation has gone from vulnerable to stable, gaining 8.7% in 2005 and 11.9% in 2009. It is no coincidence that this last election took place in the teeth of the great recession, not because Germany was particularly badly hit in terms of headline figures, but because its ability to weather the crash has been based on keeping wages as low as possible (there is no minimum wage in Germany, something the Left wants to introduce) and productivity high without sharing the resulting benefits.

If we look at its results in the eastern states then we can see that it has also established itself as the representative of east German interests, regularly taking 25-30% of the votes there. Its support in East Berlin (48% in 2001) led to it forming a coalition government with the SPD. This combination of east German interests married with a strongly working-class flavour in the west – enabling it to pick up disaffected social democratic votes in the Saarland and North Rhine Westphalia – means that it is an important political player in federal politics, far more so than the flash-in-the-pans of the Alternative für Deutschland and Pirates. In the run-up to this election it is consistently at 8-10% in the opinion polls.

Gregor Gysi, the Left leader, is an important factor in the popularity of the party. He is a feisty political campaigner and knows how to play an audience. During this election campaign he has come up time and again as the best media performer and as a politician who is seen as authentic. In the 1980s, he was a lawyer in the GDR who represented many of the main dissidents in their struggle against the bureaucracy. This meant that he had contact with the Stasi – as a result, allegations that he was a Stasi informer himself have followed him around since 1990. This is one of the major reasons why a coalition of leftist parties (the SPD, the Greens and the Left) has never been possible, despite the electoral arithmetic which often gives them a combined theoretical majority. The fact that the east German Greens in particular emerged from the dissident movement means that they are not prepared to go into coalition with what they still see as the successor to the old ruling Communist party.

However, given that some of the latest polls indicate that the Liberals (currently in coalition with Angela Merkel's CDU) may not get the 5% needed for representation, some in the Greens are still considering a coalition with the CDU, and that the most likely outcome at the moment is a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD, one thing is for sure: no matter how much the others may hope for its demise, the Left party will continue to stick around as one of the few true oppositional parties in German politics.