column
Fried – view from Berlin
Sahra Wagenknecht wants to keep ‘disturbed people’ away from her party. Will there be attitude tests now?
Sarah Wagenknecht founds her own party, but she wants to keep “disturbed people” away and writes about it star-Columnist Nico Fried
© Illustration: Sebastian König/Stern; Photo: Henning Kretschmer/Stern
According to her own statement, Sahra Wagenknecht does not want to accept any ‘disturbed people’ into her new party. starColumnist Nico Fried wonders how their selection process should work. And: Would the BSW accept the young Wagenknecht?
In order to build a party, Sahra Wagenknecht recently said, one has to differentiate: “What are honest, constructive comrades-in-arms, and how do we keep out those who are disturbed or extremists?” Funny choice of words, don’t you think? “Disturbed”? In any case, this remarkable distinction also contains an admission that the new Sahra Wagenknecht alliance (BSW) could be attractive to a considerable range of politically interested people, to put it cautiously.
It will be exciting to see how the presumed party leader organizes the selection process. Will there be a PÜV, i.e. a political monitoring association? Do you have to represent at least three of the BSW’s four important positions? So we say: If you are for cheap gas from Russia, for less immigration and against gender, then you shouldn’t also be in favor of higher pensions?
The requirement to keep disturbed people away also requires a certain knowledge of human nature. One shouldn’t be as wrong as Wagenknecht was when, in February 2022, a few days before the start of the war, she ruled out a Russian invasion of Ukraine with the words: “We can be very happy that Putin is not as he is portrayed: a crazy nationalist, who gets drunk on pushing boundaries.” Back then, the BSW would probably have accepted Vladimir Putin. Today we don’t know for sure, although he is certainly in favor of natural gas deliveries and against gender.
How would Sahra Wagenknecht deal with Sahra Wagenknecht?
By the way, parties have the right to choose their members. Paragraph 10, paragraph 1, of the Political Parties Act stipulates that an application for membership can be rejected even without giving reasons. This also happens in existing parties. Practitioners, for example, cite one reason for this is that an applicant has already taken part in a striking number of parties. If the BSW also adhered to this, one would have to examine the application for membership from Wagenknecht confidant Klaus Ernst a little more closely, who was already a member of the SPD, the WASG and the Left.
On the other hand, current cases show that problems can arise even with people who have only belonged to one party for decades. The SPD, for example, has been trying for months to throw Gerhard Schröder out of the party, who even in his bad times still achieved election results that Olaf Scholz and Sahra Wagenknecht, even together, can currently only dream of. After the exclusion failed, the SPD leadership recently had to honor the “equal among equals” (Schröder about Schröder) for 60 years of membership.
The question remains how Sahra Wagenknecht would deal with a Sahra Wagenknecht. As a young woman after reunification, she recently admitted that she said a lot of nonsense about the GDR and the Wall. But such errors can also be found in Olaf Scholz.
And you can just let that sink in: The Chancellor, whose government Wagenknecht described as “the stupidest government in Europe” and whose Russia policy she called “stupid”, can then serve as a key witness when it comes to his own biography Relief is possible. I have no idea how Wagenknecht defines “disturbed” in people. But her relationship with Scholz certainly is.