Sahra won’t save us now

Why hopes for a Sahra Wagenknecht-led united front against the elites are illusory

Sahra Wagenknecht, the most popular female politician in Germany today, and the best-known in the West, is currently haunted by the curse of outrageous expectations: “It is incredibly difficult to form a party in Germany”, she recently responded to demands to form a new oppositional party. This kind of vague reply has become typical for the 53-year-old member of Die Linke, who has the hopes of the vast majority of the German population resting on her petite shoulders. In the past 3 years, Germany’s residents, both in the cities and more rural areas, have increasingly become fed up with the established parties and their media shills: their totalitarian course on Covid, their war mongering with Russia, barely concealed propaganda by the “public-service” media, and the continuing class war from above has been sensed as a disenfranchisement of individual civil rights, freedoms, and ownership, and a stark lowering in the standard of living for Germany’s close to 100 million inhabitants.

Wagenknecht has been adamant in addressing the issues, and also naming the responsible party in the current government coalition – the Greens – who, according to her, present “the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag”. Her words resonate with an electorate who feels not only betrayed by the Greens, whose political agenda is exhausted in hyper-woke moralizing, but not represented in the first place.

Many commentators on the right have pointed out that Wagenknecht’s agenda could very well be linked to the agenda of right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), represented by the no less telegenic Alice Weidel. The commonalities in fact cover issues of state encroachment onto private civil rights, the refusal to power up the Ukraine war machine by sending more German artillery, mass migration, and a push-back against the government technocrats with their clearly anti-democratic inclinations. But whereas Weidel sits comfortably in her oppositional party seat, Wagenknecht’s own party, Die Linke, is several steps removed from her outspoken pledge for re-democratization at home and diplomatic solutions to the war abroad. Precisely because Wagenknecht seems increasingly isolated in her own party, and is not known to give up easily, hopes for a rejuvenation of politics lie with her. Not only established intellectuals are calling for a united front against the protofascist realignment of the current elites. YouTube comments to “Sahra”’s innumerable public broadcast gigs are overflowing with demands that a new popular front or Querfront party shall be formed, in order to “save Germany”. A party in that vein, uniting demands of the radical democratic factions in both the Left and the Right, fronted by Wagenknecht, would indeed have a good chance of entering the Reichstag with the next elections: 10 per cent of voters would “definitely” vote for Sarah, 19 per cent would “consider” voting for a new Left-Right-crossover party, and last but not least, 74 per cent of AfD voters would vote for a hard Left candidate if her name is Sahra Wagenknecht. 12 per cent of votes would easily fall on a new Wagenknecht-fronted party, which would ultimately destroy Die Linke and split the AfD in half.

And yet. Confronted with the question of a new party aligning the (old) left and the (new) right, Wagenknecht reels off her usual programme, as recently made available to English speakers in Glenn Greenwald’s System Update interview. “Naja”, she dismissively begins the answer to every question: “Oh well”. It is true that forming a party in Germany is incredibly time- and energy-consuming, as she points out time and again, with money and manpower the biggest issues. But one gets the impression that this is not the only obstacle to a new party formation that would most definitely present the biggest blow to the current established party line-up. The truth is that the public requests to make a bond with traditional conservatives crosses an ideological line Wagenknecht is unwilling to cross. Because of its economically liberal affiliations, the AfD is anathematic as an ally, and potential co-founders like the ousted Christian Democrat Hans-Georg Maassen who opts for a more restrictive border policy, is viewed with a grain of salt, to say the least. Mostly however, Wagenknecht is unwilling to move an inch away from her own hard left dogmas. She insists on economic redistribution and restrictions to free market ideology. At the same time, she wants to strengthen the middle class and its purchasing power, and tackle inflation hikes, which finds resonance with potential right-wing allies. But as an old saying goes, you cannot eat your cake and have it, too. In that sense, she is not a great team player. Team playing, however, would be mandatory for a cooperation on this scale, with this size, and with the potential the alliance could bring.

But all of that is overshadowed by a greater, and politically more disastrous doubt, as a source close to her informs me: as an older generation Leftist, she is scarred with the “Nazi” blackmailing that took hold of the German political debate since Covid. She is simply too weak – or simply too scared – to confront such a reproach for its ludicrous, inverted reality. Easily blackmailed with the fear of being labelled “right-wing” – Wagenknecht principally rejects invites from dissident media in Germany – the question arises whether, as a politician, Wagenknecht really has the best interests of the German people in mind. It seems that the “aloofness” she charges the Greens with can also be applied to herself. At the end of the day, she is her own marketing brand and quite content with commenting the current political craze from the sidelines. But if even someone as bold, stupendously intelligent, and integer as Sahra Wagenknecht shies away from putting the ridiculous “Nazi”-claim to test and daring a political restart, which admittedly requires guts beyond appearing on public broadcast media, we must observe that this is time around, Sahra won’t save us. Knowing this now will spare us the disappointment later.

Instead of centering our hopes on careerist politicians, we should remember who, in a democracy, the real sovereign is.

Cover: Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane performing “White Rabbit” (1967).