Fabio De Masi doesn’t actually have time for what’s happening to him. He has to write a book, the deadline is approaching, but now his phone won’t stop ringing, ringing, pling, pling, pling, it goes on like this without interruption. Everyone wants something, he just wants to finish the book, actually. Couldn’t we call him again in March?
Of course, De Masi could now write in peace if he hadn’t sat down at the federal press conference at the beginning of the week. Sahra Wagenknecht, who presented De Masi as the top candidate of her new party Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) for the European elections, sat with him on the podium. Since then he has had to answer many questions. Especially why he’s doing this to himself.
Fabio de Masi, 43, was born in southern Hesse to an Italian father and a German mother. His career is a series of fortunate coincidences, at least in his own narrative. In order to finance his life in Berlin after studying economics in Hamburg, he cleaned the party toilets in an electronic club on Sunday mornings. Then the Left came into the Bundestag and De Masi got a job as a research assistant – including for MP Sahra Wagenknecht, who soon became something like his political foster mother. He actually just wanted to attend a few lectures – and ended up with a master’s degree in international economics. He ran as a hopeless candidate in the 2014 European elections – and suddenly found himself sitting in the EU Parliament. He was elected to the Bundestag in 2017 – and immediately promoted to deputy parliamentary group leader of the Left. A lot of things somehow happened that way in his life.
But Da Masi is also a meticulous worker. As an EU parliamentarian, he began to specialize in financial and tax scandals such as the Panama Papers and Lux Leaks; after moving to the Bundestag, he continued with Cum-Ex and Wirecard. He earned a reputation as a chief reconnaissance officer and was once even hired by the New York Times quoted, of course he has a link to it on his homepage.
Together with Wagenknecht, De Masi also led the camp of the frustrated leftists. The two founded the collection movement “Stand Up” in 2018, but it collapsed miserably before it could become a competing party. De Masi no longer stood for the Bundestag in 2021 and left the Left Party in 2022. At that time he stated in writing: “I have no plans to get involved in any other political formation in the foreseeable future.”
Why did he change his mind? “The disastrous traffic light policy that is dragging Germany into recession,” he cites as the main reason. “The federal government is the AfD’s harvest helper.” In addition, after he left politics, financial affairs such as Cum-Ex and Wirecard continued to concern him – and kept him in the public eye. He wrote inquiries and looked through files. “Then those around me told me, then you can do the job again straight away!”
He is followed by 100,000 people on Twitter
In fact, De Masi was already recognized across parties during his time on the left, and after his withdrawal from politics he became something of a full-time financial detective – he is followed by almost 100,000 people on the short message service X, formerly Twitter. However, he says that the fact that a mandate in the European Parliament will bring him a regular income again, completely independent of delayed book submission deadlines, is not a reason for the BSW candidacy. “I would rather have a little more time for things in life.”
It is a political truth that the left could use someone like him in their ranks again – but the party, says De Masi, is now “an irrelevant political force.” The left has “narrowed itself down” and now only serves urban milieus. “But politics must involve the majority of the population in order to be successful.”
The European candidate De Masi will probably also have a say in how this will work at the BSW at the national level, especially in the area of economic and financial policy. And there, too, there are signs of a break with his former party in terms of content. De Masi, for example, doesn’t believe in an unconditional basic income: “This means that you have less money for those who really need the welfare state – and you give up the claim to create good jobs with a future.”
He is for the ecological restructuring of the economy, “but with sense and understanding”. De Masi cites increasing CO2 prices while at the same time reducing many thousands of railway kilometers as an example of a senseless approach. He also takes a critical view of e-mobility, pointing to the high energy consumption of an electric car when you look at the entire production cycle. “It would have made more sense to set strict savings targets for the auto industry that were open to technology.” The ban on combustion engines would mean that old cars would eventually be scrapped in this country and the sales of electric cars would be promoted. At the same time, combustion engines would continue to drive in other countries without charging infrastructure. “It’s not ecological, it’s stupid.”
With this rhetorical shirt-sleeves, De Masi also wants to have an impact on a European level. “The EU doesn’t have to regulate things that municipalities can do better. It should regulate things like the minimum taxation of corporations in order to protect medium-sized businesses from Amazon and Co..” Overall, Europe needs more investment-friendly regulations. “Expenditure that is a sensible investment in the future must not be prevented by European debt brakes. This slows down growth, not debt.” However, the EU budget should not grow; agricultural subsidies should benefit regional farmers more than large agricultural corporations.
De Masi also wants to push back the influence of large internet companies such as Google and Facebook. Their influence “threatens democracy. These companies and their algorithms are often poison for our brains and choose what we read and think from a sea of data.” De Masi wants to counteract this with stricter antitrust law and a public digital infrastructure.
Despite his passion for complex financial topics, De Masi also has his own public performance in mind. For example, there’s this nice story about how he was once mistaken for former national team player Sami Khedira on the soccer field. It also says a lot about him because he likes to tell it: firstly, De Masi is not vain, but secondly, he is also someone in whom people obviously have a lot of confidence.
He is sometimes confused with Sami Khedira
At that time he was still the financial policy spokesman for the left-wing faction and left-back at the FC Bundestag. The football-playing parliamentarians play their sport with the necessary seriousness and therefore always wear the official jerseys of the national team. When a young spectator came up to De Masi after one of the games and, believing it was Khedira, asked for an autograph, the amateur footballer De Masi felt flattered – he then scribbled his real name as illegibly as possible.
Giving people what they want is a motif that can also be found when De Masi talks about migration policy. “You have to openly identify problems, for example in the situation of municipalities that are at the limit of their ability to integrate,” he says. Resentments like those stirred up by the AfD are unacceptable and do not solve any problems. But politics like the ones the left wanted to pursue wouldn’t help either. “On the left there was no longer a culture of working on solutions; instead, politics was only made through quixotic attitudes.”
Isn’t it still a risk to join a party whose political orientation is as vague as that of the BSW? De Masi tries football again, a saying from Andy Möller: He says he has “a good feeling in terms of feeling”.