First of all, it is just an announcement of the date for a press conference that will take place at the beginning of next week. But this announcement from Thursday afternoon already contains the core of the message: The left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht has founded an association that will in turn prepare for the founding of her own party. She will publicly present her plans at the federal press conference on Monday morning. With the invitation it is now also documented in writing that this association is called “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – For Reason and Justice”, or BSW for short. The founding party conference is then expected to take place at the beginning of 2024.
It is also interesting to see who will sit next to Wagenknecht on the podium on Monday: including Amira Mohamed Ali, the outgoing parliamentary group leader of the Left, and Christian Leye, another MP from the Left. Both are considered Wagenknecht’s close confidants. If all three leave the parliamentary group, the left-wing faction in the Bundestag would be history. But it is unlikely that this will happen immediately. Wagenknecht and her people are more likely to try to stay in the left-wing faction until their own party is actually founded. The remaining leftists, in turn, could throw them out with a two-thirds majority, but that would also be the decision to end the group. It is also unclear when exactly Wagenknecht will announce her departure from the party, to which she has been a member for more than 30 years.
“There is no reason to bury your head in the sand now,” says Schirdewan
The leadership circles of the Left Party have been seeing that there is now movement in the matter for days, if not weeks. And it even sounds as if some people were eagerly awaiting the departure of the Wagenknecht wing. “It’s good for the left that this is over,” said deputy party leader Ates Gürpinar South German newspaper. Now his party can concentrate again on the real problems, such as high rents and the shift to the right in Germany. Party leader Martin Schirdewan also seems more relieved than frustrated. “For us, this is an opportunity to be seen again as a party of solidarity with a clearly recognizable left-wing profile. There is no reason to bury our heads in the sand now,” he told the SZ.
Nevertheless, the party leadership is of course defending itself against the breakaways from its own parliamentary group. Schirdewan’s co-chair Janine Wissler speaks of Wagenknecht’s “ego trip”. Both have called on all left-wing MPs who want to join Wagenknecht’s party to give back their Bundestag mandates. They argue that it is “indecent” to take mandates that were won for the Left with them to a possible rival party.
How much the BSW competes with the Left can only be seriously assessed once Wagenknecht presents its concrete political goals on Monday. However, it is already clear that their project will be significantly further to the right on key issues and, for example, with the demand for a strict asylum policy, it will also target the AfD’s potential voters. However, Gürpinar assumes that his previous colleague in the parliamentary group has completely different motives: “It is humanly unfathomable that Wagenknecht is simply riding the wave of the shift to the right just to find a new platform for selling her books and other sources of income,” he says.
Right from the start, Wagenknecht realized that as a real existing project you suddenly had to deal with very specific problems. For example with a fake website. Donations for the BSW were advertised under the domain www.bswpartei.de, and Wagenknecht’s Bundestag office is listed in the imprint. When asked by the SZ, they said that it was a fake and that legal action was being taken against it.