The break between Sahra Wagenknecht and the Linke-Spitzer can no longer be repaired: The former parliamentary group leader considers the Left - quite rightly - to have failed. She no longer wants to take part and is considering founding a new party. This is a good idea for three reasons.
Sahra Wagenknecht and the party leadership of the Left are no longer friends. Wagenknecht sees her own comrades in the "sad decline of the former peace party". The differences between her and the party executive are "so great now that the idea of how it should come together again overwhelms my imagination". She almost officially ended her party career with the sentence: "I rule out running for the left again."
Left party leader Janine Wissler can only helplessly leave the gauntlet lying around and calls "flirting with new parties" unhelpful. Left Vice-Chairman Katina Schubert accuses Wagenknecht of working "for a long time on her own account" and against the party: "Travellers shouldn't be stopped." But many - including a number of members of the Bundestag - could follow Wagenknecht, the party is threatened with a historic split. Even the former party leader Klaus Ernst demonstratively shows up with Wagenknecht on Twitter and comments: "It's a shame that my party is disappearing into political insignificance."
Wagenknecht gets so much encouragement from the party base that the founding of a new party becomes more and more likely. The European elections next year could be their premiere, because there is no five percent hurdle in the European elections. In particular, the "Manifesto for Peace" in Ukraine, co-written and promoted by Wagenknecht, is enormously mobilizing.
Should Wagenknecht actually found a new party of his own, that would be a good idea for three reasons.
First, it would be a good service to Germany's political culture if the Left Party finally came to an end. After all, it is not just any left-wing party, but the SED, which has been renamed several times. This party was the state-supporting pillar of the GDR dictatorship. It is not a normal institution like others, it is a constant moral affront to democracy.
The peaceful revolution of 1989 is one of the best moments in German history. The people courageously and peacefully got rid of a brutal, socialist oppressor party - and even renounced revenge. The SED-PDS Left Party survived and became a network of Stasi rope teams, wall builders and neo-socialists. Their sheer existence seems like a bitter, last mini-triumph of the GDR. The founder and leader of the Social Democratic Party in the GDR (SDP), which later became the SPD, Stephan Hilsberg, describes the moral dilemma with this party as follows: "This left with its responsibility for Stalinism, the wall, barbed wire, political criminal law, dictatorship and Millions of refugees in Germany will become a normal party. Getting involved with it will always remain a hot topic." Should Wagenknecht finally split this left 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and found a new party unencumbered by the Stasi past, that would be a long-overdue liberation for the moral integrity of the Federal Republic.
Second, Sahra Wagenknecht is fascinated by the Berlin Republic. She is a permanent dissident and annoying left-wing extremist, but also someone who puts her fingers in all sorts of open wounds. She speaks plain language, has a crystalline intelligence and millions listen to her because she can captivate the audience with the classic virtues of inflexibility and poise like few politicians of this generation.
On the one hand, Wagenknecht looks like the governess of a red castle boarding school with a stern look and a straight back, on the other hand like a serious, instructive secondary school principal from the sixties with a raised index finger. There's something retro-fashion about her success with the audience. Their idea of socialism has long since fallen out of time, in fact a horrible political error of the 20th century. But the habit with which she presents her iron left positions seems familiar like an old melody. Wagenknecht is sheer politainment for the Berlin Republic, as entertaining as an oldie remix at red sunsets.
Thirdly, Wagenknecht's "Manifesto for Peace" shows that a democracy needs opposition and debate even in times of war. As in the pandemic debate, Wagenknecht renounces a general political correctness that in the long run undermines and undermines a living democracy. She may be wrong and make false arguments. But falsification in a democracy only works with open debate and wide corridors of opinion. In a republic that, after the refugee crisis, pandemic, euro inflation and the Ukraine war, has somewhat forgotten how to openly exchange different positions and arguments and not just collectively sing about the respective government position and defame every deviation, the Wagenknechts are - from the left as on the right - the necessary salt in the soup.
Wagenknecht rants as passionately as many politicians used to, when there was still courage to have an opinion and not just opportunism in opinion polls, when there was still open debate and not just patronizing wokeness, when there were still figures like Herbert Wehner and Franz-Josef Strauss that showed the edge and not all danced lithely in a square meter of politically correct center minuets of media self-affirmation. Creaky leftists, slobbering ecologists, and snarling rightists may be unsavory to us in the majority center, they may rarely share our opinions, they may upset us with their one-sided positions. But we shouldn't marginalize them and silence them. If everyone thinks the same way, too little is thought. The freedom of a republic is always the freedom of those who think differently - including that of Sahra Wagenknecht.
So Ms. Wagenknecht: found your party and rant about your mistakes about a good socialism, which is just as non-existent as there is a good Putin. I will never choose you, but I will listen to you.
