The entry of a new German Left Party shakes up the Country

[D. Schlenk]

https://mronline.org/2024/01/26/the-entry-of-a-new-german-left-party-shakes-up-the-country/


The entry of a new German Left Party shakes up the Country


By Vijay Prashad

Posted Jan 26, 2024



This article was produced by Globetrotter.

In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament
(Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their
intention to form their own party. With their departure,
Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736
members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the
far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons
for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that
Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose
decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved
many of them into the arms of the AfD. The new formation is
led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most
dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a
former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is
called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice
(Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early
January 2024.

Wagenknecht’s former comrades in Die Linke accuse her of
“conservatism” because of her views on immigration in
particular. As we will see, though, Wagenknecht contests
this description of her approach. The description of
“left-wing conservatism” (articulated by Dutch professor
Cas Mudde) is frequently deployed, although not elaborated
upon by her critics. I spoke to Wagenknecht and her close
ally — Sevim Dağdelen — about their new party and their
hopes to move a progressive agenda in Germany.


Anti-War

The heart of our conversation rested on the deep divide in
Germany between a government — led by the Social Democrat
Olaf Scholz — eager to continue the war in Ukraine, and a
population that wants this war to end and for their
government to tackle the severe crisis of inflation. The
heart of the matter, said Wagenknecht and Dağdelen, is the
attitude to the war. Die Linke, they argue, simply did not
come out strongly against the Western backing of the war in
Ukraine and did not articulate the despair in the
population. “If you argue for the self-destructive economic
warfare against Russia that is pushing millions of people in
Germany into penury and causing an upward redistribution of
wealth, then you cannot credibly stand up for social justice
and social security,” Wagenknecht told me.

If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing
in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium,
while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia
for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe
that you would stand up for the millions of employees
whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of
whole industries brought about by the rise in energy
prices.

Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless
his government is able to solve the pressing problems
engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will
be able to reverse this image. Rather than try to push for
a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine, Scholz’s coalition
of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats,
say Dağdelen, “is trying to commit the people of Germany to
a global war alongside the United States on at least three
fronts: in Ukraine, in East Asia with Taiwan, and in the
Middle East at the side of Israel. It speaks volumes that
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock even prevented a
humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the Cairo summit in
October 2023.

Indeed, in 2022, Thuringia’s prime minister and a Die Linke
leader, Bodo Ramelow, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the
German federal government must send tanks to Ukraine. When
Wagenknecht called Gaza an “open-air prison” in October
2023, the Die Linke parliamentary group leader Dietmar
Bartsch said that he “strongly distanced” himself from her
(the phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza is used
widely, including by Francesca Albanese, UN Special
Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967). “We have to
point out what is happening here,” Dağdelen tells me,

It is our duty to organize resistance to this collapse
of Die Linke’s anti-war stance. We reject Germany’s
involvement in the U.S. and NATO proxy wars in Ukraine,
East Asia, and the Middle East.



Controversies

On February 25, 2023, Wagenknecht and her followers
organized an anti-war protest at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin
that drew 30,000 people. The protest followed the publica-
tion of a “peace manifesto,” written by Wagenknecht and the
feminist writer Alice Schwarzer, which has now attracted
over a million signatures. The Washington Post reported on
this rally with an article headlined, “Kremlin tries to
build antiwar coalition in Germany.” Dağdelen tells me that
the bulk of those who attended the rally and those who
signed the manifesto are from the “centrist, liberal, and
left-wing camps.” A well-known extreme right-wing
journalist, Jürgen Elsässer, tried to take part in the
demonstration, but Dağdelen — as video footage shows —
argued with him and told him to leave. Everyone but the
right-wing, she says, was welcome at the rally. However,
both Dağdelen and Wagenknecht say their former party — Die
Linke — tried to obstruct the rally and demonized them for
holding it. “The defamation is intended to construct an
enemy within,” Dağdelen told me.

Vilifying peace protests is intended to put people off
and simultaneously mobilize support for repugnant
government policies, such as arms supply to Ukraine.

Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her
views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports
the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing
war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the
problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration,
but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions
on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says,
must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for
an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD.
“Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me,

we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply
watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to
grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone
to that party out of frustration and in protest at the
lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.

The point of her politics, Wagenknecht said, is not anti-
immigration as much as it is to attack the AfD’s anti-
immigrant stand at the same time as her party will work
with the communities to understand why they are frustrated
and how their frustration against immigrants is often a
wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in
education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy
toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said,
“that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right
wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to
shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus
to pro-working-class politics.

Polls show that the new party could win 14 percent of the
vote, which would be three times the Die Linke share and
would make BSW the third-largest party in the Bundestag.


About Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and
journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent
at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the
director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute
for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has
written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and
The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us
Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam
Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power.