She is presented as a “populist” or as “Putin’s puppet”. For her fans, Sahra Wagenknecht brings hope. His lectures are sold out all over Germany. Since leaving the presidency of the parliamentary group of the radical left (Die Linke) in 2019, the MP has been applauded for her diatribes against Volodymyr Zelensky, NATO, real estate companies or the migration policy of Olaf’s government. Scholz.
“The elusive. From the left, from the right, extreme…”, qualified it, in mid-April, the magazine Der Spiegel in the front page dedicated to it. And polling institutes credit her with 19 to 24% of voting intentions – scores obtained by the major political parties in the 2019 federal elections. Gatherer, Sahra Wagenknecht attracts a very heterogeneous public which brings together the disappointed of the radical left and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the antivax and, above all, the far-right voters. More than 70% of voters of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), credited with 16% in the polls, consider it a “serious option” for the next election.
After the bitter failure of her Aufstehen movement (Stand up), stillborn in 2017, Sahra Wagenknecht announced the creation of a new party “by the end of the year”. “Before launching, it needs an observation phase to identify its supporters,” notes sociologist Dieter Rucht, professor emeritus at the Free University of Berlin and specialist in protest movements.
His schedule is precise. Banking on the growing unpopularity of the Scholz government, she intends to stand in the European elections with an “anti-establishment” program. Behind the scenes, her husband Oskar Lafontaine, known as “Oskar le Rouge”, defector from the SPD and founder of Die Linke. A phenomenon, Wagenknecht? Rather “a nice flash in the pan” for Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of his former political family, Die Linke. Behind the scenes of the party, on the other hand, it inspires fear. The radical left has normalized itself in the political landscape and left its role as a protest party to the far right. The emergence of a new “red” party could risk ejecting them definitively from the Bundestag in 2025.
“A border open to all is naive”
Cold, dark-eyed, black hair braided in a bun, Sahra Wagenknecht is often compared to Rosa Luxembourg, the revolutionary socialist assassinated during the Spartacist uprising of 1919. Born in East Germany in 1969 to a German mother and an Iranian father, this former orthodox Marxist has long maintained the tradition of revolutionary socialist struggles. In 1989, when the East German government gave in to the peaceful revolution, she became a member of the United Socialist Party. After reunification, she joined the heirs of East German communism (PDS), the political pariahs of the time, which became Die Linke in 2007.
Impressed by the success of Podemos (Spain) and La France insoumise, she dreams of creating a populist party in Germany. In 2018, she posed in front of the Chancellery with a yellow vest to mobilize “against the rich” – a flop. She also wants to put an end to the “good conscience of the left on the culture of reception”: “A border open to all is naive”, she insists. “She presents herself as the advocate of the ‘little people’, who understand her message on high prices, arms deliveries or refugees”, summarizes Dieter Rucht.
His main target? The ecologists, whom she presents as the “most dangerous party in Germany”, which wants to “ruin Russia”. “They would be ready to drive the Leopard panzers to Ukraine themselves!” she says. Her rapprochement with the icon of German feminism Alice Schwarzer also allowed her to seduce the survivors of German pacifism. During a rally on February 25, at the Brandenburg Gate, Sahra Wagenknecht violently attacked members of the government, who, according to her, “refuse any dialogue with Moscow”. “How can you be so thirsty for war?” she said in front of the crowd, assuring that Moscow was ready to talk about a ceasefire and peace. On his terms, of course.