Germany’s National-Populist Star
Sahra Wagenknecht Wins With the Press
By Ari Paul
In bellwether polls ahead of next year’s federal election, Sunday, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) came first in Thuringia and second in Saxony (Deutsche Welle, 9/1/24).
Even the right-wing New York Post (8/31/24) admits that the party resembles the Nazis of yesteryear, saying the party “includes leaders who have spoken well of Nazis”.
“Exactly 85 years after the start of World War II, Germany is in danger of becoming a different country again: more unstable, colder and poorer, less secure, less worth living in,’ said [Charlotte] Knobloch, a former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who herself survived the Holocaust in hiding,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (9/3/24) reported.
The ruling Social Democrats were humiliated, but outperforming expectations was a breakaway coalition from Die Linke, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW).
Wagenknecht is a federal lawmaker and a former Die Linke leader who has since embraced many of the same socially conservative causes that have propelled the AFD into the mainstream. And she has also become somewhat of a consensus candidate for the corporate press, which finds the AFD too much like the Nazis and Die Linke as too left.
The New York Times‘ Steven Erlanger (8/29/24), in an overall positive assessment that featured many quotes from Wagenknecht, said that “her strength derives in part from sharing many of the same positions as the AfD”, just “without any neo-Nazi tinge”.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (9/1/24) said almost the same thing, that Wagenknecht’s party “offered voters the chance to vote for an anti-immigration, anti-Ukraine War party without AfD’s far-right tinge, and many seized it”.
She “rejects ideological labeling,” the Times said. It went on to allow her to paint herself as an impossible-to-pigeonhole independent, someone listening to all sides and striving to transcend the left/right paradigm. No political could ask for better public relations than this:
“’We don’t use those blinders,’” she said. “If you consider the struggle for social justice, for less inequality, as something left-wing, then of course we are left-wing in that sense. At the same time, we are in favor of limiting migration, which is supposedly not so left-wing.’”
“’So for many people,’” she added, “‘the categories of left and right are no longer comprehensible.'”
Curiously, in reporting on the results, in a piece co-authored by Erlanger, the Times (9/1/24) dispensed with framing Wagenknecht as heterodox, and instead called her party “rooted in the extreme left”.
Only later on does Erlanger admit that “though on the far left,” her coalition “holds many of the same positions as the AfD”. Erlanger himself can’t decide if she’s leftist, or someone who left the cause to compete against the far right.
The Economist (8/30/24) called Sahra Wagenknecht “Germany’s rising political star” and an “anti-immigration leftist with a populist appeal”, adding that she is the country’s “most glamorous and enigmatic contemporary politician”.
The Wall Street Journal (8/29/24) gave her a back-handed compliment, arguing that she pines more for Communist East Germany’s homogeneity than for the fascist era of Europe but that “she’s jettisoning the lofty principles beloved of so much of the university-educated urban left” and offering a “treat in the oddly nostalgic former East Germany”. The Murdoch paper added, “It would be a tougher sell on American college campuses or MSNBC.”
The Journal did offer her some solid conservative praise, especially when it comes to climate denial, transphobia and xenophobia:
“In other ways, however, she sounds conservative. From the BSW manifesto’s section on climate policy: ‘Serious climate and environmental policy requires honesty: Germany’s energy supply cannot be secured through renewable energies alone within the framework of today’s technologies.’ She opposed a gender-self-ID proposal advocated by transgender activists on the grounds that it was misogynistic and a sop to pharmaceutical companies.”
“Then there’s immigration. Ms. Wagenknecht for years has opposed the all-but-open-doors policy Ms. Merkel implemented in 2015.”
All of this is framed as her attempt to keep her leftism in the economic sphere, making inroads into the herrenvolk with cultural conservatism that aligns with the working class. She told the Times that her old party was “alienating itself from its voters, and important social issues — good wages, good pensions — were no longer their focus — instead, woke identity politics”.
Yet the coverage doesn’t challenge this narrative. Climate denialism is incompatible with any kind of left economic politics, especially in Germany. The coverage of her stance misses, for example, that one of Germany’s most important unions, IG Metall, represents workers in the renewable energy field. Ditto for the immigration issue, as German unions have been a vital part of integrating foreign-born workers into the economy (Economic and Industrial Democracy, 11/12/18).
As Deutsche Welle (6/10/23) put it plainly, she was pushed out of Die Linke for straying too far from democratically agreed-upon principles. (That kind of party discipline is pretty standard for anticapitalist parties.) Specifically, “Wagenknecht has taken positions against allowing migration, even criticizing Germany’s previous policies of allowing in refugees.” And she expressed “scepticism toward the coronavirus vaccines”, taking her further from the socialist materialism of Cuba and China’s vaccination developments (NPR, 2/1/22; South China Morning Post, 6/16/24) and more into the looney world of RFK Jr. and Alex Jones.
It also can’t be overlooked the degree to which her new coalition isn’t built around unions or a social movement, but rather her specifically. It is buried low in the Times piece before the election. Still, it eventually admits that in the “Die Zeit newspaper, Wolf Biermann, 87, the German singer/songwriter and former East German dissident,” said that Wagenknecht “‘is the anachronistic head of a personality-cult party, the typical structure of totalitarian party apparatuses.’”
Paul Simon, a journalist with the German left-wing publication Jungle World, describes her status as the head of the party in a more nuanced way:
“It is true that there is a cult of personality around her, but this is something that predates her own party by many years, and it is to a large extent the result of how the mass media, including public broadcast TV, promoted her as a populist left-wing opposition figure. She has been one of the most popular politicians in the country, and nobody around her approximates that.”
“Her party is organised in the way it is organised—very few members, tight central control—for good reasons: She needs to have control over messaging and avoid “crazies” flooding in.”
“This happened with the first, aborted attempt to found a new left-wing party: the failed Aufstehen movement, which was supposed to be a more classical grass roots movement. And when Wagenknecht does hold huge rallies, as in Berlin, together with Alice Schwarzer and others, for “peace in Ukraine”, this tends to attract right-wingers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists, etc.”
“I think this shows that she is not building a left-wing party in the old sense. She is very popular in many milieus, but her party is not connected to social movements, unions, an organised mass organisation….”
Simon rejects the way the US and other media have described her as a part of the radical left, just with a few socially conservative values, saying she “could be better described as national-populism”.
He said:
“Germany’s radical left has long had a very negative view of Wagenknecht, because she used to be part of it, but then abandoned her anticapitalism and later even class politics. For many years now, she writes very favorably of the well-regulated capitalism in West Germany of the postwar era.”
Simon added:
“When it comes to her views on “social issues”, the form of her politics is also more important than her concrete views. On paper, many of her demands seem moderate, and would also be at home in centrist parties like SPD or CDU. But she formulates them in a national-populist way…”
The mainstream media analysis of Sahra Wagenknecht’s views and her position has been superficial at best, which of course results in flawed reporting on a major political event in an important European country.
As a result, the mainstream coverage of Wagenknecht and her rise has left out a lot of nuance and context that would give readers the erroneous idea that she represents Germany’s left opposition to rising fascism when she is very much a part of the right-wing nationalist fervour.
Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.