Sahra Wagenknecht is Germany’s rising political star
SAHRA WAGENKNECHT is Germany’s most glamorous and enigmatic contemporary politician—and its most polarising. A party she launched only in January, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), is shaking up politics in eastern Germany and is likely to join coalition governments in two states there, Thuringia and Saxony, that hold elections on September 1st. This alarms centrists: the BSW offers a hotch-potch of far-right policies (on immigration and culture) and far-left ones (on social spending) with an admixture of anti-Americanism and pro-Russia sympathies.
With her elegant, two-piece, brightly coloured suits, put-up hair and good looks, Ms Wagenknecht has a populist talent for seizing on voters’ grievances. She has been a star of television chat shows for years—criticising Angela Merkel’s “welcome culture” for migrants, the government’s measures to fight the covid pandemic and, these days, its support for Ukraine.
But the BSW has propelled her to political stardom. It is forecast to win 15-20% of votes on September 1st, compared with 6.2% nationally in European Parliament elections in June. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is forecast to come first in Thuringia, and a very close second in Saxony, but is shunned by every other party likely to cross the threshold of 5% of votes needed to enter parliament. The BSW will be an essential part of an anti-AfD coalition.
This is a remarkable achievement for a woman who joined the already failing SED (Socialist Unity Party), the old East German Communist Party, in 1989, at the age of 20. She was a long-serving member of the federal parliament for The Left (the SED’s descendant, and its co-leader in parliament from 2015 to 2019) when she quit, complaining of burnout.
She seemed destined for a life as a writer and public intellectual. An economics PhD, she is the author of a dozen books, including: “Prosperity Without Greed, How to Save Ourselves from Capitalism”; “Freedom Without Capitalism”; a book on Goethe, of whom she is a huge fan; and one on the young Karl Marx’s critique of Hegel. She is married to Oskar Lafontaine, an octogenarian who was once Germany’s finance minister and leader of the centre-left Social Democratic Party.
She has said that she stays in politics to make a difference, and to offer an alternative to “lifestyle leftists” who live in a cosmopolitan bubble far removed from most of the working class. In 2021 she published “The Self-Righteous”, a political manifesto that inspires the BSW. Ms Wagenknecht’s Communist roots can be seen in some of the epithets bestowed on her: “Madonna of neo-communism”, “Rosa Luxemburg of the Berlin Republic” and apologist for Stalin. She once dressed up as another Marxist, Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter whom she admires, for a spread in Gala, a glossy magazine, in which she tried to shed her chilly reputation for having, in one commentator’s words, “a freezer’s ability to empathise”. She described herself as “very emotional, someone who can also cry, who needs happiness, harmony and encouragement”.
She was born in Jena, in the former East Germany, to a German mother and Persian father who returned to Iran when she was three, and grew up in East Berlin with her mother. She stayed a Communist after the fall of the Berlin Wall and over the years has sometimes lavished praise on some of Stalin’s policies. She has sometimes expressed nostalgia for the old German Democratic Republic, and refuses to call it a dictatorship.
Ms Wagenknecht blames NATO more than Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for the war in Ukraine. This is a popular view in eastern Germany, especially among the older people. She wants immediate negotiations to end the war and opposes the federal government’s recent agreement to allow American missiles to be stationed in Germany from 2026. This weekend’s elections are “a vote on war and peace”, she says.
Such views are among the biggest stumbling-blocks to the BSW’s joining coalitions with the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). But to keep the AfD out of power, the CDU might well, with gritted teeth, pursue one. The conservative mainstream might otherwise sympathise with her views on immigration (she wants sharp curbs) and her criticism of “woke” and identity politics. For Jasper von Altenbockum, a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it is already clear that the BSW will be the real winner of this weekend’s election. Its leader in Thuringia, Katja Wolf, could even be the next state premier, if the BSW gets more votes than the CDU.
When Ms Wagenknecht was asked recently by journalists from Die Zeit whether she would like this job herself, she replied that her place was in Berlin. But she insisted that she would be part of the talks on a possible coalition in Thuringia. The BSW’s exclusive focus on its eponymous leader is likely to become its biggest problem. Ms Wagenknecht is known to see herself as an outsider and to revel in rebellion. As party leader and kingmaker she will need diplomacy and a talent for compromise—skills she has so far shown few signs of possessing.■