""We can do it," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2015 of her country's ability to absorb the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants streaming into Europe from the Middle East. Oh no we can't, comes the reply from Sahra Wagenknecht, the most interesting European politician you've probably never heard of.
Ms. Wagenknecht leads a new party -- BSW, the German acronym for Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance -- that's expected to be a star of three state elections in September. Saxony and Thuringia head to the polls on Sunday and Brandenburg on Sept. 22. Ms. Wagenknecht's group won't win any of those outright, but it's polling consistently at 15% or better in all of them. It's impressive for a party she created only earlier this year.
All three of these soon-to-vote states are in the former East Germany, and before Ms. Wagenknecht came along the main story there was the success of the far right. These are the heartlands of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which started its life in 2013 as an academic protest party against the euro currency but has morphed into a vessel for working-class discontent about, well, everything. AfD leads in most opinion polls in all three states, with around 25% to 33% support, which has triggered a mass freak-out in Germany and beyond.
Ms. Wagenknecht channels many of the same frustrations, in the same parts of the country -- but from the left. Born in 1969, she started her political career by joining the East's ruling communist party (the Socialist Unity Party, or SED) at almost the last moment one could do so, in 1989. She's spent the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall in leadership roles in the SED's various successor parties, most recently Die Linke (The Left).
If you think that background makes it possible to guess what she stands for, you're only partially right. On some issues she's all too predictable. This includes her sympathy for Vladimir Putin's Russia and antipathy to Ukraine and to Western support for the country following 2022 events.
Her party manifesto promises war on big corporations and more generous social welfare.
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.
Ms. Wagenknecht focuses on the problems of integrating so many migrants from such different cultures so quickly, and for a left-wing reason. "The stronger the welfare state, the more of a sense of belonging there must be," she recently told Politico. "Because if people have no connection to those who receive social benefits, then at some point they will refuse to pay for those benefits." It's an obvious but taboo reality about European welfare states and the politics of migration.
This makes the results of those state elections worth watching. Ms. Wagenknecht's success comes at the expense of AfD, whose support crested in opinion polling around the time her party got going and has been in decline since. This complicates warnings from mainstream politicians and commentators that AfD's rise signaled a neo-Nazi renaissance.
Ms. Wagenknecht's popularity suggests what's going on here is a wish to return to East Germany, not Nazi Germany. A well-known phenomenon, Ostalgie (a portmanteau of "East" and "nostalgia") is less a craving for authoritarianism than a yearning for social stability. Especially with the passage of time, some East Germans seem to play down the human depredations and material deprivations of the communist era and exaggerate the quietude of a relatively homogenous society in which everyone technically had a job and theoretically enjoyed equal opportunities. Emphasis on "homogenous."
Ms. Wagenknecht promises a return to what East Germany pretended it was, while eliding its grim reality. Commentators surprised by how conservative this sounds in practice should remember how conservative communism can be -- how hostile to social change or to any ideals such as religion or human rights not rooted in its own idiosyncratic materialism. Die Linke's embrace of the heady abstractions of campus-style leftism prompted Ms. Wagenknecht's break with that party, and the urban idealists of Germany's Green Party are a frequent object of her derision.
Ms. Wagenknecht demonstrates that it's possible to formulate left-wing arguments that align with voters' intuitions on immigration, which increasingly feels like the only issue that matters. But to do so, she's jettisoning the lofty principles beloved of so much of the university-educated urban left. It's working a treat in the oddly nostalgic former East Germany. It would be a tougher sell on American college campuses or MSNBC." [1]
1. Political Economics: A Conservative Leftist Surges in Eastern Germany. Sternberg, Joseph C. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Aug 2024: A.15.
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