06.04.2023

Mixing left and right

Pollsters suggest that a new party set up by Sahra Wagenknecht would gain considerable support. But, asks Carla Roberts, where are the principled politics that are so desperately needed?

Sahra Wagenknecht, a long-time member of the Bundestag, is today by far the most prominent leftwinger in Germany. She has undertaken a quite extraordinary political journey. Born in Jena, in the German Democratic Republic, she joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1989, as just about everybody else was leaving. Intelligent, personable and an articulate speaker, she quickly became leader of the GDR-nostalgic Kommunistische Plattform - first within the SED’s successor party, the PDS, then its further reincarnations as the Linkspartei and, finally, Die Linke (The Left). She eventually quit the Kommunistische Plattform after being elected to the European parliament in 2004.

Wagenknecht has often clashed with the party’s leadership - not least over its soft, pro-Zionist stance. She famously refused to stand up and applaud when Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, visited the Bundestag in 2010 - a symbolic gesture unheard of in Germany, which typically kowtows before Israel for obvious historical reasons.

Wagenknecht is a regular on popular TV talk shows, where she excoriates bourgeois politicians and snotty mainstream journalists alike. And, although she served as joint leader of Die Linke in the Bundestag between 2015 and 2019, Wagenknecht takes obvious delight in railing against the liberal bourgeois consensus, a consensus increasingly embraced by Die Linke.

Of course, Russia’s invasion and Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine has exposed the true nature of every political group, trend and party, including in Germany. The Green Party - still seen by many as some kind of opposition to the austerity course pursued by both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) - has come out all guns blazing in favour of supplying as many weapons to Ukraine as possible. Having resisted sending Leopard 2 tanks for many months, Olaf Scholz (an uncharismatic, caretaker-type chancellor) was eventually pushed into line by his junior coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP) (making up the so-called ‘traffic light coalition’).

For its own part, Die Linke’s leadership has been extremely mealy-mouthed on the war. Its agreed (social-pacifist) statement lays the blame firmly - and exclusively - at the feet of the Russian government, which must “stop fighting, agree to a ceasefire and start negotiations”. There is no mention, let alone criticism, of the role or plans of Nato and the attempt to reboot US global hegemony.¹ It simply echoes the German government’s initial ‘diplomacy first’ policy from a slightly left perspective, hoping that this will help change the party’s image as Putinversteher (those who understand where Putin is coming from).

Rather worryingly, it is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is the clearest anti-war voice in the Bundestag. Its representatives have no problem publicly blaming the US and Nato for recklessly pursuing the war and causing huge economic damage to Germany: falling real wages, rising prices and energy insecurity. Despite a number of scandals and bitter infighting, the AfD currently stands at about 15% in the polls² (up from 10.3% in the general election of 2021, which secured it 78 MPs). Compare that to Die Linke’s meagre 4%-5%. In 2021, it even missed the 5% hurdle required to enter parliament and only has its 39 MPs today thanks to a quirk in the rules that allows a party to be represented if at least three of its parliamentary candidates are directly elected by a majority in their constituency (in which case all votes for that party are counted).

Clearly unhappy with the poor performance of Die Linke, Wagenknecht has spoken out against Nato and the US and, together with Green feminist veteran, Alice Schwarzer, issued the Manifest für den Frieden (Peace manifesto). It has been signed by almost 800,000 people since it was launched in February.³ Sad to say, the Manifest is almost indistinguishable from Die Linke’s position on Ukraine - it too wants “diplomatic solutions”, blames chiefly Russia and makes no mention of Nato. Nevertheless, Die Linke’s leadership refused to mobilise or sponsor the anti-war demonstration called by Wagenknecht and Schwarzer for February 25.

Die Linke co-chair Janine Wissler - formerly of Marx 21, the German sister organisation of the Socialist Workers Party (more on this below) - even gave a number of interviews beforehand, where she voiced her disapproval, including a blunt “I will not be attending”. Because the AfD quickly announced its support for the demonstration, former long-term Die Linke leader, Katja Kipping, accused Wagenknecht of displaying “an ease in dealing with Nazis and the radical right. We are usually on the other side.”⁴

In the end, over 50,000 people showed up on the anti-war demo - a surprising success, which has now given Wagenknecht a new swing in her step. Interestingly enough, it is Janine Wissler’s former comrade in Marx 21, Christine Buchholz, who best exposed the idea that the demo was “dominated by the right”. Quite rightly, Buchholz did not follow Wissler’s moralistic boycott, and attended. She reported:

In the run-up, a number of rightwing organisations had called on their supporters to attend, and there were some individuals and smaller groups visible, but they did not dominate the protest … There were hundreds of members of Die Linke present with their own local banners and placards … [prominent rightwinger] Jürgen Elsässer was kettled in by them and other leftwingers and it was explained why.⁵

That is no bad way for socialists to deal with the far right.

Incidentally, Wissler - a consistent advocate of a red-green popular frontism - parted company with Marx 21 in 2020, just before she threw her hat in the ring to become leader of Die Linke. At the time she said that was “the usual and correct thing to do, to end any memberships of tendencies within the party”.⁶ Yes, it is “usual” for a budding careerist - but certainly not for a principled Marxist. Her political trajectory was, though, quite predictable. Even when she was a Die Linke rep in the federal parliament of Hesse, she was known for her “pleasant and compromising manner” and was always keen to make deals with the other parties - never coming under any kind of scrutiny by Marx 21 or its mother ship, the SWP (at least not publicly). Today she spouts Die Linke’s pathetic plea that Nato should be replaced by a “collective security system”, within which “all important states should be incorporated”. How about calling it something snazzy like the League of Nations?

Like Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Olaf Scholz and other mainstream imperialist politicians, she now supports a “two-state solution” in Israel-Palestine. In a recent statement she included this decidedly middle-of-the-road comment:

Hamas’s continuing rocket attacks from the Gaza strip are terrorist acts against the Israeli population. They cannot be justified by anything - they are inhuman and criminal. The Israeli response in the shape of continuous bombardment of the Gaza strip has on some occasions hit entirely unprotected Palestinian civilians. All sides have to end the violence.⁷

We wonder what Alex Callinicos might think about his former protégée?

Not left

It is no surprise that an ambitious politician like Wagenknecht is frustrated by the failure of Die Linke to make any political headway. Instead of being a strong party of opposition, Die Linke is keen to compromise and, whenever it comes to office in any of the 16 federal states, it is eager to show how responsible it is by slashing budgets, closing public libraries and generally being a reliable manager of capitalism. But it is constantly being outmanoeuvred by the right in the shape of the AfD. Of course, that organisation has the ‘advantage’ of being so hated across the board by respectable politicians that it does not get asked to join coalition governments, where its true nature would quickly be exposed.

Wagenknecht has subsequently declared: “I will not be a parliamentary candidate for Die Linke again.” When the current parliamentary term has finished (in 2025), she wants to withdraw from politics and work as a publisher and book author - “unless something new happens politically”. She has since clarified that she will “decide by the end of the year if I will help to form a new party.”⁸ Despite a lack of detail, such a hypothetical new ‘left’ party could achieve a massive 20%-30%, according to a recent poll by Der Spiegel: up to 50% in the east and around 24% in the west “would consider voting for it”.⁹ Which is, of course, different from voting for an actual party with a programme and candidates. Still, that is an impressive figure and it will look very attractive to Wagenknecht.

There certainly is a considerable political space to the left of Die Linke, where a genuine Marxist party could find inception and grow to mass proportions. Sad to say, that is not where Wagenknecht is at. Instead she has been heading in a ‘populist’ direction and is probably working towards an organisation which could be viewed as like the AfD, but on the left. Ukraine is not the only issue where she has had much-reported Berührungspunkte (points of overlap) with the AfD. During the Covid pandemic, she announced to much publicity that she had refused to be vaccinated: “They are injecting us with a genetic code. That is different and a new method entirely”. She did, however, argue in favour of protecting and vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable “if they so wish” and criticised those who “argue that Covid is not serious. It is serious - millions are dying”. Still, her stance earned her high praise from the vocal anti-vax-brigade in Germany, but the entire establishment media tore into her and there were many calls for her to be thrown out of Die Linke.¹⁰

It is the issue of refugees, however, where her politics are most problematic - and most reminiscent of the national-chauvinist populism of George Galloway. Since 2016, when the government of Angela Merkel agreed to take in one million people from Syria, she has been arguing that “the acceptance and integration of a very large number of refugees and migrants is linked to considerable problems”.¹¹ Loadedly, she went on to lambast the “general morality of a borderless welcoming culture”.¹²

It was this issue that led to her launching the campaign, Aufstehen¹³ (‘Get Up’), in 2018: “Not a party, but a movement for a just and peaceful country”. Its founding statement, presumably (co‑)written by Wagenknecht, is almost entirely focused on the issue of refugees:

For the wealthy, the promises of ‘Europe’ have been fulfilled. Those who are highly skilled and mobile can take advantage of the new freedoms. By contrast, roughly half of the German population has a lower real income than they did at the end of the 1990s. Many of them see freedom of movement and immigration more than anything as more competition for poorly paid jobs … Although the main reason for anxiety about the future is the crisis of the welfare state and global instabilities and threats, the rise in refugees has led to increased insecurity. Attacks on people due to their appearance or religion are on the rise.¹⁴

And so it goes on and on. You get the drift. It is not quite ‘Throw them out’ - more ‘We can’t afford to let them in’. It does not take much to envisage her proposing an awful, nationalistic ‘points policy’, similar to the one advanced by George Galloway, in order to weed out those refugees who are not ‘useful’ from capitalism’s point of view. In an article in the Morning Star Galloway wrote that “we should publish an economic-social-demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs”.¹⁵ Our own needs? The needs of a classless Britain, presumably, united in its fear that the country could be ‘swamped’ by those who have no job, no skills and no visas - ie, those millions of people pushed to the bottom of the heap by imperialist superexploitation. Wagenknecht has not been quite so crass (yet), but the nationalist logic will probably get her there before long.

Aufstehen’s founding platform - the whole website, in fact - does not contain a single mention of the word ‘socialism’ or what precisely this ‘movement’ is fighting for. Wagenknecht had clearly hoped that Aufstehen, by being extremely vague in terms of its political perspectives, would hoover up the ‘discontented’. Unsurprisingly, it did not - chiefly because AfD is already doing exactly that (and a lot more convincingly).

Aufstehen relaunch

Just after Wagenknecht had announced her forthcoming departure from Die Linke, I received an email invitation from Aufstehen with the subject line, ‘Sahra kommt!’ (‘Sahra is coming’ - to a Zoom meeting on March 29). This was billed as a relaunch of some sort and certainly was the first invite to a public meeting I had ever received from Aufstehen (having signed up to be kept informed a few years ago). I presumed Sahra’s widely-advertised presence would indicate that she is thinking about transforming this ‘movement’ into a fully-fledged party after all. Her peace protest was similarly called ‘Aufstehen für den Frieden’ (‘Stand Up for Peace’).

Alas, that does not seem to be the case. It became obvious very rapidly that she was only there as a friendly visitor of sorts, who seems to have not been involved with the group for some time. Her 10-minute contribution was vague, surprisingly boring and finished with the chair asking her: “Do you think you will now again be coming more often to our events and meetings?” To which Wagenknecht replied in a very non-committal way: “Sure, close contact and communication are always good.”

And I can see why she is not too keen. Aufstehen is a very amateurish undertaking. The meeting launched, “as agreed”, the forthcoming work on the political manifesto of the organisation - “agreed” a mere five years ago! The turnout was not bad, just over 600, but the age of the average attendant was clearly north of 60. The admin was shambolic; the Facebook live-stream did not work; a number of jokers managed to disrupt the meeting and it took minutes before the organisers succeed in booting out a guy parading around in front of his camera giving the Hitler salute. The ‘diary’ section of the website shows that there is very little going on locally. This did not feel like an organisation that is going places and Wagenknecht would do well to steer clear of it.

She has not let slip what exactly she is planning on doing, on which political platform or with whom she is in discussions about forming a new party - it is all hush-hush and the German left will just have to wait “until the end of the year” to see if she will get something up and running, and on what political basis. Might there be a ‘left’ in the AfD that she and her supporters are negotiating with? There is speculation that she will test the waters in the forthcoming European elections in 2024.

She has four or five supporters in Die Linke’s Bundestag fraction, many dozens more in the various structures of the party and no doubt thousands among the membership. A Wagenknecht split would put the survival of Die Linke in serious jeopardy - and perhaps make it impossible for the party to re-enter parliament in 2025. For a long time, this has been the key reason why many on the left continue to support the party - it has been the only left organisation with any chance of making it into the Bundestag. After a half-hearted attempt to ban ‘platforms’ was defeated about 10 years ago, it also continues to allow political trends to organise openly within its structures, move motions at conference, etc. Short of a new, principled Marxist party being set up, Die Linke still offers Marxists in Germany an opportunity to engage with thousands of other socialists with their own political programme - a worthwhile undertaking, in our view, despite the obvious political shortcomings of the party.

In any case, even if Wagenknecht does decide to launch a new organisation, this is clearly entirely the wrong way to go about it - and reminiscent of the unprincipled backroom deals that George Galloway and the SWP struck to set up Respect in 2004. Remember how well that one went?.