Enthusiasm for red-brown Wagenknecht

The German politician Sahra Wagenknecht has surprised no-one by announcing a new party. For the time being she has modestly given it the name “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht — for Reason and Justice”.

Wagenknecht has tried this before: in 2018 she formed Stand Up, an outfit based upon vague anti-globalism, denunciations of finance capital and nostalgia for both East German Stalinism and West Germany’s 1950s social market economy, with support for small and medium businesses.

Wagenknecht and her partner the former SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine were by then well known for their hostility to immigration, with Lafontaine calling for “illegal” immigrants to be deported and Wagenknecht blaming Angela Merkel’s “uncontrolled opening of borders” for low pay and terrorism.

“Stand Up” didn’t last long, but it gives us a pretty good idea of what the political basis of Wagenknecht’s new party (a split from Die Linke, the “Left Party”) will be. Not that Wagenknecht has made any secret of her views: in 2021 she published a book (The Self-Righteous ) which amounted to a diatribe against what she called “identity politics” and “left liberalism”, summed up in this quote:

“Left-liberals claim to stand for diversity, cosmopolitanism, modernity, climate action, liberalism, and tolerance. On the other hand, they declare war on everything that left-liberal thinking considers right-wing: nationalism, looking backwards, provincialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia. For left-liberals, faith, nation and homeland are signs of backwardness.”

Wagenknecht claims her aim is to win voters away from the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and of course, that’s an admirable objective. But she is going about it by aping the politics of the AfD. No wonder that last year the AfD-associated magazine Compact featured her on its cover and speculated about the possibility of a future coalition (or at least some kind of deal) between the AfD and a Wagenknecht party.

The other main point of agreement between Wagenknecht and the AfD is opposition to any form of support for Ukraine and thinly-disguised sympathy towards Putin’s invasion. This would also explain the enthusiasm that the Morning Star has been showing towards her and her faction within the Die Linke.

Ukraine

The paper’s editor, Ben Chacko interviewed Wagenknecht’s close ally Savim Dagdelen for the paper’s 20 January edition and followed this up by republishing a lengthy article by Dagdelen herself, translated from the Berliner Zeitung, calling for conciliation with Russia, blaming the US (alone) for the war and opposing arming Ukraine.

But the paper’s most enthusiastic Wagenknecht supporter has been prominent Communist Party of Britain member Nick Wright, who (unlike Chacko) has no qualms about mentioning (and defending) her stance on immigration.

On 18 November 2021, he wrote — with obvious approval — that she “has challenged liberal responses to the rise of the far right to make the point that in challenging racism it is necessary to name those responsible for the flight of refugees and migrant workers…”

Wright then went on to claim that “she had calumny heaped upon her for suggesting that in a factual and democratic debate about migration that there are many people who oppose racism and xenophobia and at the same time consider the regulation of migration to be essential.”

Now that the new Wagenknecht party has been announced, Wright can scarcely contain his delight, proclaiming: “It is true that it takes a detailed class position on the main economic and social questions and is highly critical of what it describes as Die Linke’s focus on identity over class, but its position on immigration is more nuanced than its opponents claim” (26 October).

The same edition of the paper publishes the statement released by Wagenknecht and her supporters announcing their departure from Die Linke and the intention to form a new party. It complains that by “focusing on young, urban activism-oriented milieus” Die Linke was “driving away our traditional voters” (presumably meaning older white people) and of “a lack of concentration on social justice and peace” (“peace” in this context presumably meaning appeasing Putin). The word “socialism” does not appear anywhere.