Sarah Wagenknecht’s new party will take part in next June’s European elections and September 2024 local elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony, which are all AfD strongholds.
Her goal, she says, is to “give a voice to her compatriots who have been disenchanted with traditional parties and the extreme nationalism of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)”. For now, what the head of the left-wing Die Linke parliamentary group, Sarah Wagenknecht, has managed to do is further fragment Germany’s already fractured political landscape.
Last Monday, in front of journalists in Berlin, the 54-year-old politician announced the establishment of the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice, threatening to break up Die Linke as many of its MPs are already rallying to her side, further eroding the mainstream political parties but, above all, to mediate the far-right AfD.
Her ideology is a controversial mix of left-wing rhetoric – her program includes proposals for “economic rationalization”, anti-monopolies, shifting the tax burden to the wealthy, raising wages and pensions – and simultaneously skepticism about immigration, anti-Americanism and espousing conspiracy theories, most notably her anti-vaccine stance, while blaming the West for the economic sanctions it imposed on Moscow over the war in Ukraine.
The founding of her party comes at a time when the cost-of-living crisis caused by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has soared, with popular discontent directed against the motley centre-left coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals and Olaf Solz personally. This was seen in the recent regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, where the three parties performed abysmally, in contrast to the far-right AfD which made a spectacular rise.
She says that “we live in a time of global political crises and Germany has probably the worst government in its history… Many no longer know who to vote for, or they vote out of anger and despair.” Her views seem to be finding receptive ears. At the pan-German level, the AfD gets 22%, while a poll for Bild found that 27% of voters would consider voting for Wagenknecht’s party, even if there is little concrete information about its actual platform.
The daughter of an Iranian and a German, Wagenknecht was born in the former East Germany. Months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he joined the Communist Party, while since 2009 he has passed through almost all positions in the Left party. By all accounts, this is a charismatic politician, with a talent for rhetoric, a frequent presence on television sets and a strong activity on YouTube.
In 2019, Wagenknecht for the first time succeeded in “displacing” the then chancellor Angela Merkel from the top of the ranking of the most popular politician in the country, after taking first place according to a survey by the Insa Institute.
The new party will take part in next June’s European elections and September 2024 local elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony, which are all AfD strongholds.
