Nobody needs a Rejuvenation of Leftism
The new Sahra Wagenknecht Party is a disaster for Germany
When the only Late Night talk host Germany has ever had, Harald Schmidt, invited enfant terrible of the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht, to his show in 2011, everyone held their breath: Will he be able to make her smile? Indeed he did – though barely.
Formerly of left-wing party Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht’s reputation as a socialist concrete lady is not entirely made up out of thin air. Especially the last years saw her increasingly impatient, if not outright indignant over the “Traffic Light”-coalition made up from the Social Democrats (red), the Green, and the Liberal Party (yellow), as she implored the government to “return to reason” and called the Greens “the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag” for its warmongering stance against Russia in the Ukraine conflict. Her words resonate with an electorate who feels not only betrayed by the Greens and their coalition partners whose political agenda is exhausted in hyper-woke moralizing, but not represented in the first place.
Over the past year, commentators and journalists have pointed out Wagenknecht’s potential alliances with the right-wing/conservative Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The commonalities between the AfD and Wagenknecht indeed covered the rejection of state encroachment onto private civil rights (i.e., vaccine mandates), a return to efficient energy production such as nuclear, the refusal to power up the Ukraine war machine by sending more German artillery, a halt to mass migration, a push-back against EU technocrats with their clearly anti-democratic and censorious inclinations, and indeed, the economic strengthening of the working and middle class. A party co-led by Wagenknecht and the AfD’s chair Alice Weidel would have catapulted the established parties out of the Bundestag and into political oblivion. But the hope of a majority of the electorate that the disastrous government would be replaced by a left-right Querfront opposition was quickly stifled, as Wagenknecht, the concrete lady, rejected any kind of cooperation with a “partly extremely right-wing” party. And, known for her rigidity, she kept her word.
Since September, Germany has the basis for a new political party, the “Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht”. A recent poll showed that the BSW would spontaneously get 12% in a federal election, chopping the current flight of fancy for the AfD from 22% to 18% and pushing Die Linke, at 4%, out of parliamentary representation. The BSW’s first press conference, held on Monday, was unsurprisingly met with huge media interest. Seven of Wagenknecht’s new allies announced their resignation from Die Linke to join the BSW and present their political vision in time for the elections to the European Parliament. But if the public expected a rejuvenation of politics, it was soon disappointed. The only thing that was rejuvenated was leftism – paying lip service to a sort of less woke, less war mongering and less authoritarian version of Die Linke, or indeed, the Green Party. Indeed, the first row of the BSW has the charm of a Social Democrat convention led by middle-aged women who meet at Sunday matinées for prosecco and Fassbinder movies at a EU-sponsored ArtHouse cinema.
Indeed, the political orientation of the BSW leadership is very much in line with the left mainstream. In parliamentary votes over the last years, the new party spokesperson Amira Mohamed Ali (pictured in the white blazer jacket) has voted for the extension of the Infection Protection Act that would allow the use of emergency powers to introduce human rights violations such as nationwide lockdowns. She voted pro vaccine mandates and explicitly against an investigation into civil rights breaches during Covid. She voted against the extension of the lifespan of nuclear power. She voted against the prohibition of “gendering” in official language, rejecting to put a damper on Germany’s explicitly woke state ideology. She voted against the protection of the German border enshrined in Federal Law to support mass immigration. In other words: Ali, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new No. 1, supports the same policy as Die Linke or the Green party. Rather than being baffled about Wagenknecht’s strategic pick, one should clearly see the continuity, rather than the discontinuity, of the new party with the progressive left establishment. This is nowhere as clear as in Wagenknecht’s complete misrecognition of Germany’s political climate: the German people are not, as she maintains, so “desperate that they would even vote right-wing”. The German people have really had enough of left-wing elitism, state control, and a slow but sure GDRization of public and intellectual life. Her own misinterpretation of the German citizens’ demands and detachment from their interests is only matched by her hubris to insist that none of the AfD voters really want to vote for a right-wing party. A classic case from bad inference from one’s personal preferences to everyone else’s, often found in socialist elitists.
Wagenknecht’s complete detachment from political reality is also testified in her nostalgia for a 20th century “good Leftism”, as incorporated in the ideas of Willy Brandt and Michail Gorbatchev whose ideas she openly endorses as foreign policy templates. But Germans do not want a rejuvenation of this kind of ideology or another: they want political representation. And neither Wagenknecht’s BSW nor Die Linke nor any of the current government parties are willing or able to take that demand seriously. Which only leaves the AfD. At a journalist’s question if Wagenknecht, if in charge of building a government, would think of a coalition with the AfD, she stressed again that a “common cause with the AfD” is out of the question. In effect, she would only be able to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens, in fact strengthening them. The BSW, against their promise to change Germany’s political landscape, will enforce the current order. This, and nothing else, follows from the building of the new party.
With the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht entirely estranged from the political realities and demands of the German electorate, striking a mid-size blow to the AfD, the question remains which function the Wagenknecht-led party could fulfil. One thing is clear: there will be no left-populist revolt. If anything, a politically pragmatic view suggests that the BSW will build on top of a “more of the same” program. It is almost tragicomical that everybody see this as clear as a white horse in daylight - except for Sahra Wagenknecht and her own little Social Democracy nostalgia club.
Cover: video still from Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” (1984).
Gentry liberals wouldn't break bread with conservatives even to save their own lives...the perceived moral pollution would make them outcasts with their own people, who imagine themselves as tolerant but can only tolerate others who think their exact same thoughts.
The main purpose of the initiative is to increase the number of subscribers to SW's YouTube channel.