Contents
Sahra Wagenknecht, icon of the German left, turns her back on her party. In doing so, you endanger their future.
“Lifestyle Left” is what Sahra Wagenknecht calls her party. “‘Die Linke’ has become a completely different party and now represents left-wing politics that I can’t relate to,” says the 53-year-old dryly. Too woke, too anti-industry, too green for the left-conservative Wagenknecht.
For years in a constant dispute with the party executive, the German member of the Bundestag not only announced that she would no longer run for “Die Linke” at the end of this legislative period. She also threatened to set up a rival party. After much hesitation and hesitation, the party executive now decided that it was too colorful and pulled the ripcord that the future of the left was a future without Sahra Wagenknecht.
From the icon to the split mushroom
Wagenknecht and the Left Party: It’s a love-hate relationship. In 2007, the party emerged from the merger of the PDS, the successor to the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany, and a split-off SPD in the West. Only two years later, “Die Linke” moved into the Bundestag – and with her Sahra Wagenknecht.
Legend:
Sahra Wagenknecht threatens a rival party – and thus endangers the future of the German “Die Linke”. Image from the peace demonstration on February 25, 2023 in Berlin.
REUTERS/Christian Mang
Young, beautiful, clever and suitable for TV, Karl Marx’s political great-granddaughter blossomed into an icon of the left in public. Within the party, however, the light figure quickly polarized and split with its left-conservative line.
No demarcation from the right
But last September, Wagenknecht’s Russia speech in the Bundestag was the final straw. In it, she accused the federal government of “starting an unprecedented economic war against our most important energy supplier”.
Then, in February, the peace demonstration inspired by naïve pacifism took place, and Wagenknecht was right in the middle of it. She is convinced: “If you want to end the war, you have to find a compromise.”
I refuse to make my political position dependent on what the AfD says.
Wagenknecht is completely in line with the AfD with the demand to stop delivering weapons to Ukraine or the criticism of “uncontrolled immigration”. She emphasizes that she doesn’t want anything to do with right-wing extremists like Björn Höcke. “But I refuse to make my political position dependent on what the AfD says.” The publicist and author always uses it to fish in murky waters.
New party would have potential
Wagenknecht’s theses, which can be connected, catch on with old communists as well as with the new right. Political scientist Gero Neugebauer is convinced that a Wagenknecht party would appeal to many: “With its ideas of how politics should be, how German politics should be towards Germans, it has the ability to say the need to arouse the desire – yes, why can’t that actually be enforced?”
Wagenknecht sees the potential of having your own party at “above 20 percent. Clearly above». But she is still reluctant to announce the founding of a party and is sticking to her seat in parliament, despite the party executive’s request that she resign.
If three or four other Left MPs disappear with her, the faction will no longer be there.
For the parliamentary group “Die Linke” Wagenknecht is the personified wrecking ball. Because “if three or four other Left MPs disappear with her, the parliamentary group will no longer be there,” predicts Neugebauer. The possibilities of the left in parliament would thus be considerably reduced. It’s about the right to speak, about financial resources, about access to information and the media. And about the future of the left.