The leader of Germany’s new left-wing populist party the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) criticised Olaf Scholz’s increasingly unpopular government and called for an immediate end to the Ukraine war at it its founding congress in Berlin on Saturday.
Sahra Wagenknecht, the party’s leader, told delegates that society was at a tipping point, with voters overcome with “insecurity, outrage and fury”.
“We are setting out to change politics in Germany,” she said.
The new party’s programme combines traditional left-wing policies, such as higher taxes on the rich, with a markedly anti-immigration message — a strategy it hopes will allow it to compete with and potentially peel support away from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
In a 30-minute speech that was frequently interrupted by rapturous applause, Wagenknecht said the new party stood for economic common sense, social justice, and “peace and detente, instead of arms races and ever more war”.
She said it advocated “freedom of opinion and respect for dissenters, instead of cancel culture and a fast-encroaching political authoritarianism, which we experienced in its crassest form during the pandemic”.
Wagenknecht said the party’s supporters included “trades unionists, businessmen, careworkers, policemen, theologians, city dwellers and villagers”.
But it clearly bears Wagenknecht’s unmistakable imprimatur. A fixture of TV talk shows, a firebrand orator and best-selling author, she is one of Germany’s best-known personalities, with a huge following among voters disillusioned with mainstream politics, and she dominates the new party.
She was long a senior figure in Die Linke, a hard-left party that has its roots in the East German Communist party. But her views — especially her opposition to irregular immigration, and her frequent broadsides against “woke” political culture — eventually diverged sharply with others in Die Linke, and last year she announced she was breaking away to form her own party.
BSW’s hope is that can shake up the upcoming European parliament elections, as well as elections in September in the three East German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia which the AfD is expected to win.
The far-right party has been steady in the polls despite recent revelations that AfD functionaries met right-wing radicals last November to discuss plans to deport millions of people with immigrant roots from Germany, even those with German passports. Reports of the meeting triggered mass demonstrations against the far-right in many of Germany’s largest cities.
Surveys of voting intentions show the BSW could steal some votes away from the AfD, especially in eastern Germany — though its potential to disrupt German politics is still relatively small.
A poll this week by Infratest dimap in Saxony put the BSW at 8 per cent, ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens at 7 per cent but well behind the AfD on 35 per cent and the main opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) on 30 per cent.
In her speech, Wagenknecht called Scholz’s SPD-Green-liberal coalition the “most stupid government in Europe”, lambasting a controversial law to replace oil and gas boilers with heat pumps and a recent decision to cut fuel subsidies for farmers which triggered nationwide protests.
She also mocked the CDU and its leader Friedrich Merz, a millionaire with a private plane who once claimed he belonged to the middle class.
While appealing to traditionally left-wing voters with her call for a higher minimum wage, better pensions and affordable energy, she also seeks to attract AfD voters who oppose economic sanctions against Russia and German support for the authorities in Kyiv.
“We supply them with weapons till a victory which Ukraine’s own generals no longer believe in,” she said. “No to war, no to weapons exports in combat zones.”
The party has a markedly Eurosceptic tone, which could also appeal to AfD voters. Its programme for the European elections says the EU in its current form “damages the European idea”, singling out the “regulatory frenzy of the EU technocracy”.
The BSW says EU guidelines shouldn’t be implemented on a national level if they “run counter to economic common sense, social justice, peace, democracy and freedom of opinion”.
Wagenknecht criticised the government parties for denouncing as rightwingers those who wanted to see peace in Ukraine, who defended the protesting farmers and who worried about uncontrolled immigration giving rise to “Islamic parallel societies” in German cities.
The best way for the government to weaken the AfD, she said, was for it to “change its miserable policies”.
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