Sahra Wagenknecht Launches German left “law and order” Populist Party “tough on immigration”.

Sahra Wagenknecht: new Left “law and order” Populist Party “tough on immigration”.

“Leftwing politicians are singing the praises of border control while rightwingers call for expanding the welfare state. Old political certainties could be turned upside down in Germany this summer as the far ends of the country’s political spectrum both moot a “national social” turn.”

Says Philip Oltermann in the Guardian today from Berlin.

A new leftwing movement soft-launching in Germany in August aims to part ways with what one of its founders calls the “moralising” tendency of the left, in an attempt to win back working-class voters from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

The as-yet-unnamed new populist movement, partly inspired by the British Labour party’s Momentum and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, and spearheaded by the leftwing party Die Linke’s chairwoman, Sahra Wagenknecht, will include former and current members of the Social Democratic and Green parties, and prominent academics such as the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck.

Note: the latter is a frequent contributor to New Left Review, which tells you something about their political direction…

It seems that this is serious, although earlier this year an Aprilscherz (April Fool’s joke) suggested, Wagenknecht gründet links-nationale Partei (that is, a Nationalist Left party…)

If the opening paragraphs are bad news enough  the first thing to note is that the key figure in this new group is  Sahra Wagenknecht.

The Linke MP is notorious for her views on migrants – not favourable – which have created a serious row the German left, and praise from the racist AfD (Sahra Wagenknecht nach stern-Interview: Lob von der AfD, Rüffel von der Linken. ) Notoriously she claimed after the 2017 Lorry  terror attack on the Berlin Yule Market that Angela merkel bore a responsibility (‘Mitverantwortung”. “In addition to the uncontrolled border opening, there’s a police force that has been downsized to the point of inefficiency, that neither has the personnel nor the technical resources which would enable it to cope with the current threat situation.”

This is a summary of her stand,

““There have to be open borders for the persecuted,” she said, “but we certainly can’t say that anyone who wants to may come to Germany, claim social benefits, and look for work.” That point of view is “detached from reality”, she claimed.” 11th of June 2018. The Local. Open borders for all? The debate dividing Germany’s Die Linke.

Her background:

Wagenknecht’s East German past (Deutsche Welle DW)

Wagenknecht’s rebellious streak stretches back to her childhood growing up behind the Iron Curtain. Born in the former East Germany (GDR) in the city of Jena, her father was an Iranian student and her mother worked for a state-run art distributor.

Although she tends to be sparse with personal details in interviews, Wagenknecht has said several times that she doesn’t identify as having a “migrant background,” emphasizing that her father never fully immigrated to Germany. According to Wagenknecht, he returned to Iran when she was a small child and was never heard from again.

Today, she is considered part of the old-school wing of the party as one of the members who remains from the former East German Socialist Unity Party (SED).

For a time, she was under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency for her far-left views.

She’s campaigned hard for an end to German military involvement in foreign missions and wants Germany to stop all weapons exports.

“I consider it so dishonest to say we are fighting terrorism, while at the same time cooperating with and delivering weapons to those who openly support terrorism,” she told DW. “You can’t fight terror with terror.

Noting the rise of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) following the influx of refugees in 2015, Wagenknecht controversially adopted similar rhetoric in an attempt to make populist causes left-wing.

She’s heavily criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies and went so far as to say Merkel is partly responsible for the Berlin Christmas market terror attack which killed 12 people.

“In addition to the uncontrolled border opening, there’s a police force that has been downsized to the point of inefficiency,” said Wagenknecht in January. That comment led to condemnation across the political spectrum, but applause from the AfD.

She’s also called for a limit on refugees and made comments about asylum-seekers losing their right to asylum if they commit crimes. In its party platform, the Left party calls for all who are looking for protection in Germany to not be turned away.

The parallels with the right-wing populists have uneased many within the party, with top Left party members repeatedly distancing themselves from her remarks.

A more extreme example of left-wing disapproval with Wagenknecht’s refugee stance happened last May when an anti-fascist activist threw an entire chocolate cake in her face at a Left party conference.

Weeks earlier, the same group made a similar attack – but that time it was the AfD’s Beatrix von Storch with cream pie on her face.

Wagenknecht represents the radical side of the Left Party, fellow top-candidate Dietmar Bartsch appeals to the moderate wing

Instead, she wants to solidify the Left’s position as the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. She’s all but ruled out possibly entering into an alliance with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens in a so-called “Red-Red-Green” coalition.

“A good opposition policy is better than a bad government policy,” she said at a party conference in June to thunderous applause.

Other leading members of her party, including her co-candidate Dietmar Bartsch and Left party co-chairwoman Katja Kipping, are more open to cooperation with the SPD and Greens if it means the Left gets a chance to be in the driver’s seat.

But Wagenknecht has harshly criticized compromises made by the Left in “Red-Red-Green” governments on the state level, saying the SPD and the Greens advocate for neoliberal policies.

With her precise and uncompromising attitude, Wagenknecht is determined to fight for her vision of Germany. “I think you must be able to fight for what you believe in,” she told DW.

Echoing the AfD, Left party’s Wagenknecht says Merkel partly to blame for Berlin terror

Does Chancellor Angela Merkel bear some responsibility for the Berlin truck attack? Sahra Wagenknecht, the Left party’s parliamentary chairwoman, causes a stir once again. (06.01.2017)

The Guardian story announces:

Wagenknecht has practical concerns: she worries that the Left’s support for open borders, beyond the recognition of right to asylum, is driving voters away from the party. She also fears that uncontrolled migration increases the pressure on Germans looking for work.

According to one of the movement’s founders, its defining feature is likely to be its adherence to “the materialist left, not the moral left”.

“When people live in social conditions that make them feel secure, they are usually prepared to act generously and tolerantly,” said Bernd Stegemann, an author and dramatist at the prestigious Berliner Ensemble theatre who is working with Wagenknecht on the movement’s programme.

“When they live in increasingly precarious and atomised conditions, however, they are also likely to react to challenges in a tougher and colder manner. Brecht summarised it wonderfully. Grub comes first, then ethics.”

As well as rallying around traditional leftwing causes such as disarmament and a reversal of Germany’s Hartz IV labour market reforms, an unsigned position paper circulating around Berlin political circles in recent weeks suggests the movement will also advocate law and order policies and a tougher stance on immigration. “Open borders in Europe means more competition for badly paid jobs,” says the paper, which is headed “fairland”.

Stegemann, who is not a member of any political party, said he was frustrated with middle-class leftwing intellectuals lecturing working-class Germans for their sceptical reaction to Angela Merkel’s decisions at the height of the refugee crisis.

We are dealing with an absurd situation when the winners of neoliberalism tell the losers that they must be more humane. And it galls me when politicians think it is enough to pass down moral judgments. No, politics must act.”

The launch of the new movement, which will start as an online forum where supporters can upload and visualise policy proposals, comes as the AfD is trying to win over disappointed Die Linke supporters in the former states of East Germany. It is doing so by occupying positions on social welfare usually associated with the left.

Earlier this year, on the First of January, this story appeared, on the DW site,

Germany needs ‘new left-wing people’s party,’ says leftist veteran Oskar Lafontaine

The co-founder of the Left party has called for a new alliance to catapult the left wing into power. He believes German voters are more than ready for such an option.

Oskar Lafontaine, who co-founded Germany’s Left party (Die Linke) in 2007 after leaving the Social Democratic Party (SPD)in protest over business-friendly reforms by ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, told weekly news magazine Der Spiegel that German voters had shown there was a “potential for a leftist majority” and that people were “downright asking for such an option.”

“We need a collective left-wing movement, a kind of left-wing people’s party comprising the Left party, parts of the Greens and the SPD,” Lafontaine told Der Spiegel.

Lafontaine, who is married to one of the Left party’s parliamentary group leaders, Sahra Wagenknecht, even goes so far as to say that the “political party system we have today no longer works” and that a new order was necessary to give the left wing a chance to get into government at the federal level.

Comment: 

It will be interesting to see what the new Party’s position on the European Union is.

This, with migration and law and order, is one of the central concerns of the AfD, whose electorate  Wagenknecht’s ‘anti-moralist’ group aims to target.

If they adopt a ‘sovereigntist’ anti-EU position, above all opposing the Euro, they way lies open for ties up with a number of other rightward, or ‘national’  drifting groups, from the British Brexit left, to French ‘republican’ currents present in the thinking of La France Insoumise.

There is equally room for further cross-overs with the patriotic cultural  ‘identity’ movement across Europe, seen in the UK not just on the hard-right but within Blue Labour and the ‘communitarian’ left  (indebted, amongst others, to the writings of Roger Scruton) and anti-virtue signaling networks, spearheaded by Spiked-on-Line. Perhaps the pro-Brexit New Left Review will give Wolfgang Streeck plenty of space to expound the new party doctrine.

It is a measure of the political direction of this movement that instead of attacking the Islamist genociders from the standpoint of universal human rights, they chose to float their ideas behind the provisional  name which  Guardian cites as “fairland” – a cosy heimat.

Update from our correspondent in Germany:

 the Guardian article contains no actual news. The only thing that makes this news is this article a month ago in the right-wing tabloid, Die Welt: https://www.welt.de/…/Gastbeitrag-Warum-wir-eine-neue…