One of the most important figures of the German left, Sahra Wagenknecht, announced yesterday in Berlin that she is leaving the leftist formation Die Linke to found, formally in January, a new, as yet unnamed, political party. Wagenknecht, 54, said that “governance has been ignoring the wishes of the majority for years,” so “many people no longer feel represented by any party.” In recent times, the leader has distinguished herself for her pro-Russian stance.
The set of his postulates leads analysts to point out that Wagenknecht’s departure, which takes with him nine other leftist deputies, harms both Die Linke and the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), especially in the east of the country. . It is in this territory of the former communist GDR where the unrest has been most felt around aspects that the future party promises to address with a populist approach, in the opinion of the German press. The new party would be operational for the European elections in June 2024, as well as for the three regional elections in eastern Germany (Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony) in September of that same year.
“Of course we will not make common cause with the AfD,” Wagenknecht said in response to the reproach. “We are launching a new party so that all the people who are now thinking about voting for AfD or who have already done so, out of anger, out of desperation, but not because they are right-wing, now have a serious discourse at their disposal.”
Sahra Wagenknecht proposes a combination of leftist economic policy, with high wages and generous social benefits, with a restrictive approach to migration. The leader opposes the current economic sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine and the shipment of German weapons to Kyiv, and she regrets the resulting loss of Russian gas supplies to Germany. She also attacks the Greens’ plans to combat the climate crisis.
At the presentation on Monday, Wagenknecht said that with economic sanctions against Russia, “we have run out of cheap energy with no viable alternatives.” The leader accused the Social Democratic, Green and Liberal Government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz of abandoning “the important tradition of détente” and argued that “conflicts cannot be resolved militarily; “That applies to Ukraine, the Middle East and many other parts of the world.” Aware of the irritation of many Germans about the cost of heating and the Greens’ plan to decarbonize it, she said that we must “move away from a blind and disorderly eco-activism that makes people’s lives even more expensive, but that in reality does not benefit not at all to the climate.”
Among the nine Die Linke deputies in the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) who are leaving with Wagenknecht is the co-leader of the parliamentary group, Amira Mohamed Ali. Die Linke has 38 seats, which will now keep it to 28, although the ten dissidents declare themselves “willing to remain within the left-wing parliamentary group.”
In the last elections in 2021, Die Linke just entered the Bundestag despite not having reached the necessary minimum of 5% of votes (it stayed with 4.9%), thanks to a clause that grants representation if three deputies are achieved by direct election in their respective electoral districts. In Germany, each voter casts two votes: one for the party list and one for the district candidate. This electoral system is under review, and if it is modified by eliminating the three-district clause – as the current Government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals wants – the Wagenknecht split would practically condemn Die Linke to disappear from the Bundestag.
Die Linke was founded in 2007, but part of its origins lie in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the single communist party in East German Germany. After reunification in 1990, the heirs of the old SED founded the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which in 2007 merged with a group of social democratic dissidents led by Oskar Lafontaine, and thus Die Linke was born. Lafontaine, 80, Wagenknecht’s husband since December 2014, left Die Linke in March 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sahra Wagenknecht, a convinced Marxist, born and educated in the GDR and who joined the East German SED party in 1989, already made an attempt at the end of 2018 to launch a similar alternative movement to Die Linke, with a marked anti-immigration accent, but she gave up on the six months and then he took time away from politics due to ‘burn-out’. This time the path to a new party looks clear, with nine dissidents with seats. For now, they have created the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance association. For Reason and Justice, to prepare the new party.
