A
Faustian moment for the German Left
Die
Linke leader pushes to ‘Corbynize’ Social Democrats.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
1/22/16, 5:30 AM CET
BERLIN — When
Sahra Wagenknecht graduated from an East German high school in 1988,
she could recite Goethe’s play Faust by heart, and it was Thomas
Mann’s novel based on the same legend that later convinced her to
go into politics.
The parliamentary
leader of Die Linke (The Left) — the far-left party that, by
electoral accident, leads the opposition to Angela Merkel in the
Bundestag — seems to have struck a Faustian bargain of her own,
riding a populist wave of discontent with mainstream political
parties into territory where Europe’s far-left and far-right meet.
Wagenknecht is
trying to turn a party of pariahs into potential kingmakers and fend
off rival offerings from the right by co-opting their stances on
hot-button issues.
“I went into
politics because I want to change existing conditions,” she said in
an interview. “Of course, I could do that better as part of the
government than in the opposition, where I only have very limited
influence.”
Limited indeed: The
‘grand coalition’ of Merkel’s conservatives and the Social
Democrats (SPD) dominates the 630-seat lower house with 503 seats.
The Left and the Greens have a combined 127.
As parliamentary
leader of the largest opposition party, Wagenknecht answers the
chancellor first in plenary debates. Merkel makes a show of ignoring
her, texting and chatting with her ministers so loudly that the front
bench got a reprimand in October.
“If
the SPD put a personality like Jeremy Corbyn at its head … things
could get serious for Merkel” — Sahra Wagenknecht.
At the next election
in 2017, however, the Left could in theory be instrumental in a bid
to topple Merkel after the SPD, which has previously governed with
the Greens, widened its coalition options by dropping a ban on
federal coalitions with the Left.
One obstacle is that
the SPD under Sigmar Gabriel and Wagenknecht’s party are so
incompatible on the major geopolitical issues: While the Social
Democrats are passionate about Europe and firm supporters of the
transatlantic alliance, the Left opposes membership of NATO and
Wagenknecht advocates an end to the euro.
The obvious answer
from Wagenknecht’s point of view is not to make her own party more
moderate — but to urge the SPD to move in their direction by taking
its ideological cue from today’s British Labour Party.
“The politics of
today’s SPD, and particularly the politics of Mr. Gabriel, follow a
line that is not compatible with ours,” she said. “If the SPD put
a personality like [current Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn at its head
… things could get serious for Merkel.”
The spirit of
Lafontaine
Some Berlin insiders
say that when Wagenknecht, who is 46, launches on one of her rants
against Gabriel (who is German vice chancellor and economy minister)
and the SPD, they hear her husband Oskar Lafontaine talking.
Lafontaine spent
four decades in the SPD, where he was chairman, finance minister and
a longtime powerbroker. He fell out with then-Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder and left in 2005. Lafontaine joined a party that merged
with the remnants of the East German communists in 2007 to form the
Left, ensuring him the lasting enmity of his erstwhile SPD comrades.
The SPD still blames Lafontaine for undermining the party, which has
since been stuck at around 25 percent support, humiliatingly low for
the oldest party in the Bundestag.
Wagenknecht and
Lafontaine are “an integrated whole,” said her predecessor as the
Left’s parliamentary leader, Gregor Gysi.
Wagenknecht was a
radical long before meeting Oskar, however.
Born in 1969 in the
East German city of Jena, she was raised by her single mother in East
Berlin. In 1990, a year after German reunification that she and
others perceived as annexation by the West, she began to study
philosophy and literature at university.
Her ambitions for a
career in academia changed upon reading Doctor Faustus. Mann’s 1947
novel tells the story of Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who had an
artistic breakthrough after striking a deal with the devil — and
his death in isolation and madness.
“Initially, I just
wanted to work in the humanities, in academia,” Wagenknecht said,
“But then I felt that if I did that type of work in isolation —
detached from what’s happening in the world around me — I could
end up like Leverkühn.”
Critics accuse her
of ideological isolation and striking her own Faustian deal with
extremism. As one of the leaders of the ultra-left Communist
Platform, the young Wagenknecht defended the GDR as “the most
peaceful and most philanthropic polity that the Germans created in
all of their previous history” and was dubbed “Stalin’s
daughter.”
“I’m constantly
blamed for having had a different position in my early 20s,” she
told POLITICO. “Yes, it’s true, I advocated certain views back
then — but today, I don’t hold many of those views anymore.
People change over time.”
Elected to the
Bundestag in 1998 and the European Parliament in 2004, she has been
co-leader of the Left in the Bundestag since October, eclipsing the
more moderate Dietmar Bartsch with her striking looks and strident
tone.
Comparing the Paris
terrorist attacks and the anti-ISIL coalition’s air raids in Syria,
she told reporters last month: “One of them is terror by
individuals, the other one terror by states.”
Who’s afraid of
Sahra?
More recently, she
has angered her own parliamentary group. Her remarks on the refugee
crisis and the sexual assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s
Eve by gangs of men that included asylum-seekers echoed the rhetoric
of right-wing groups like Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party
and Pegida who oppose Merkel’s open-doors policy on migration.
“He who abuses his
right to hospitality, has forfeited this right to hospitality,” she
said, adding: “This is the clear position of the Left.”
It wasn’t the
party policy, in fact, and Left MPs protested. Wagenknecht vaguely
acknowledged her unfortunate choice of words about “hospitality”
for people fleeing war, but reiterated that “the large majority of
the population thinks that one can expect of those, who are being
offered protection, that they respect the rules of our country.”
The AfD’s deputy
leader Alexander Gauland congratulated Wagenknecht for her remarks on
Cologne, saying she had “nicely put the situation in a nutshell.”
Her words are as
likely to resonate with Left voters in eastern Germany nostalgic for
the certainties of life before reunification as well as welfare
beneficiaries in the West afraid that the refugees will compete with
them for state resources. According to one poll, one in four Left
supporters would consider joining a march of the anti-Islam movement
Pegida if it took place in their neighborhood.
The AfD, which
narrowly missed the 5 percent threshold to enter the Bundestag at the
last election in 2013, now scores 10 percent or higher in opinion
polls, putting it slightly ahead of Wagenknecht’s party. Its
growing support makes it a bigger concern for Merkel than the Left.
“She has no reason
to be afraid,” Wagenknecht said of the chancellor, adding that only
the SPD could pose a threat to Merkel. “We [the Left] are not large
enough. At this moment in time, why should she be afraid of us? She
might have to suffer through our speeches in the parliament, but
there’s not much else we can do to be a threat.”
.webp)
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