Debate about gender: Left boss rejects Wagenknecht criticism


Debate about gender
Left boss rejects Wagenknecht criticism

There are still a little more than two months to the general election and the left is still behind its expectations. Co-party leader Wissler rejects the criticism of ex-parliamentary group leader Wagenknecht: The cautious poll numbers are not due to gender-sensitive language.

The top candidate of the left and co-party leader Janine Wissler sees no connection between the polls of her party and the question of whether the left advocates gender-sensitive language. In the surveys there is a lot of room for improvement, said Wissler in the ZDF “summer interview”.

“I don’t think it’s gender.” The left was in the polls most recently at seven or eight percent. Wissler and her co-top candidate Dietmar Bartsch had given a double-digit result as a target for the federal election. Wissler said you could do both: make social injustices clear, but of course it was also about sensitive language.

“But it is clear that you cannot change society through language alone; we have to change the underlying problems.” The background to this is a debate that was initiated by the former leader of the Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht, with her current bestseller “The Self-Righteous”. In the book, she accuses left-wing parties of alienating their core voters with gender, climate and organic food debates.

“Have to overcome polyphony”

Wissler also made it clear that she wanted to include Wagenknecht in the election campaign. Wagenknecht is very popular, filling the marketplaces and reaching a lot of people via social media. “We have to use that for the party.” Wagenknecht posed the right question of how the left could reach more people – and represented the party’s election manifesto.

The former parliamentary group leader recently criticized her party sharply. She accuses the left of being too aloof and caring too little about her traditional clientele. Wissler replied that her party was going where others would not and was involved in tenant initiatives, for example.

Wissler is also convinced that the left must find its way back to unity in order to successfully pass the federal elections. “I believe that the left always scored points in elections when we managed to put the content forward,” she said. “We also have to overcome polyphony to a certain extent.”

Wissler referred to the left’s demands for a wealth tax, a higher minimum wage and the end of the pension from 67. For all these positions there are broad social majorities, said the left chairwoman. At the same time, she defended the left’s no to foreign missions by the Bundeswehr. Afghanistan, where the deployment of the Bundeswehr had recently ended, has by no means become more peaceful. After this failure, why should the left of all people reconsider their position here? Asked the party leader.

“The Left is of the fundamental opinion that peace cannot be created by sending soldiers somewhere,” said Wissler. If Germany wants to make a contribution to peace in the world, it should stop supplying weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt.

The left has been struggling with election defeats and poor poll numbers for a long time. “That was not an easy year for us,” admitted Wissler. “We had to postpone the party congress twice, and with it the personnel realignment.” Since February, Wissler and co-chair Susanne Hennig-Wellsow have formed the party’s dual leadership. Both replaced the long-standing management duo of Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger.

.