Sahra Wagenknecht has officially started founding her own party. The association “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – For Reason and Justice” was founded to prepare a new party, it said in a statement. The 54-year-old is thus making a break with her previous party, Die Linke.
Wagenknecht justifies her move by saying that there is a political void that needs to be filled. Many no longer felt represented by any party. In addition to Wagenknecht, several fellow campaigners have announced themselves for the presentation of the new alliance, including the previous co-chair of the Left faction, Amira Mohamed Ali, Wagenknecht’s confidant and parliamentary group colleague Christian Leye, the former managing director of the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lukas Schön, and the entrepreneur Ralph Suikat.
The left-wing faction in the Bundestag is on the verge of elimination
For Wagenknecht’s soon-to-be former party, the Left, the new project is a danger: not just as competition in future elections, but now. The club’s chairwoman, Amira Mohamed Ali, announced that eleven MPs from the Left, including Wagenknecht and herself, wanted to leave the Left faction. As soon as the breakaway left leaves the Bundestag faction, it loses its faction status and can only continue as a group. She gets fewer parliamentary rights and also less money.
Mohamed Ali and her colleagues expressed their willingness to “remain in the left-wing faction until the new party is actually founded.” They would also like to see an orderly transition in the interests of the employees. However, it does not seem very likely that the leadership of the Left will agree to this proposal. The party leadership has already announced that it will initiate party exclusion proceedings against those involved in founding the new association.
Left party leader Martin Schirdewan expects the Wagenknecht alliance to be positioned in the right-wing party spectrum. “If Sahra Wagenknecht wants to be successful with her project, she will have to position herself clearly to the right,” he told the Augsburg General.