The German party that came out of the left and doubled its votes in five months

7 min read PASCUAL SERRANO 0 comments

PASCUAL SERRANO

At this point we all know the results of the elections to the European Parliament and we have drawn the main conclusions: victory for the right, leap for the extreme right, maintenance of social democracy and failure of the left and the greens. With slight variations, this panorama is the most generalized in the different European countries. However, there is a phenomenon in these elections that is being analyzed little and that deserves to be studied because it may be perfectly viable to be carried out in many countries. This is the German party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (BSW), a party that was founded five months ago as a split from the left (Die Linke) and has surpassed them by more than double the votes.

But let's go to its beginning. The BSW party was born last January from an association created in September by deputy Sahra Wagenknecht, after leaving the board of Die Linke (The Left). Doctor in Economic Sciences, Wagenknecht was a member of the European Parliament from July 2004 to July 2009, and since 2009 he has been a member of the German Bundestag.

Well, this new party denies and distances itself from the dominant evolution in European left-wing parties. According to them, the current European left has adopted what they call positions that are distant from the popular and working sectors, it has begun to demand identity struggles that fragment the population instead of uniting it towards universal social demands. Their criticism is also directed against the majority environmental discourses that punish the most humble sectors with ecological fees and taxes, while not affecting people with greater purchasing power who can assume all these expenses or even enjoy ecological public aid.

His speech was becoming more and more popular among the most humble sectors of Germany and the predictions of success have been fulfilled, at least compared to the hitherto existing left. While Die Linke obtained 2,7% of the votes and was satisfied with 3 seats of the five it had, Wagenknecht's reached 6,2% and six seats, even more than the left had in the last legislature. And all this with a party created five months ago.

Sahra Wagenknecht explained in a book, recently translated in Spain, “The conceited ones. My counterprogram in favor of civility and social cohesion” (Lolabooks), his ideology, in which we see that it is quite an amendment adrift through which the current European left and also part of the Latin American left has gone.

Unlike the usual revisions of the left, which are almost always to abandon historical and traditional elements of their doctrine for the sake of a supposed modernity, what Wagenknecht does is confront the modernity of the left to recover, even with that so stigmatized nostalgia , the principles of struggle, solidarity and social cohesion that characterized the industrial workers of the seventies.

The German author denounces what she calls “left-wing liberalism”, a story of the university middle class, which, although it considers itself left-wing, is individualistic and in favor of a globalized economy. For them, talking about rights is defending identity groups to achieve representation quotas based on ethnic, religious, gender or sexual orientation diversity. That is, an unequal treatment of different groups, which, from the perspective of Wagenknecht and his supporters, represents a clear contradiction with the defense of the majorities that should be the DNA of the left.

The dominant line of the left, called postmodern or woke by some sectors, despises the working class or rural sectors, whom it observes with arrogance because they use diesel cars instead of electric ones, buy industrial meat at Aldi and prefer to have a family and stay in his town, instead of traveling the world.

That is why, according to the thesis of the BSW party, large popular sectors are joining the ranks of the extreme right given the orphanhood they feel in left-wing organizations. The BSW alliance has been particularly well received in eastern Germany. There, the new party won more than 13 percent of the vote, putting it in third place in that part of the country. Many find the explanation in elements that are missed from the Soviet era, such as the defense of the Nation State and the refusal to confront Russia through sanctions and the delivery of weapons to Ukraine that the EU is doing.

Although experts had predicted that the BSW would receive votes from the far-right AfD, the analysis by the Infratest Dimap institute They deny it. Of the former AfD voters, only 160.000 voted for Wagenknecht's party. Instead, around 520.000 votes from the social democratic SPD went to the BSW. And 410.000 votes also came from The Left, to which Wagenknecht previously belonged. That is to say, a broad spectrum of German society has found harmony with BSW's discourse.

Of course there has been no shortage of attacks from the left. She has been called an extreme rightist disguised as a leftist, a xenophobe and even a Covid and climate change denier. That is to say, her perfect cocktail to be able to present her as a kind of Trump, Bolsonaro or Le Pen, but with leftist skin to seduce. I have searched the more than four hundred pages of her book for that xenophobia and denialism and I have not found it. On the contrary, I have discovered important reasoning and harsh criticism of the dominant postmodern and urban left, I understand well the attacks it receives.

Wagenknecht and his BSW claim to be conservative, it is true, but it is not about political conservatism, but about conservatism of values in the face of what they consider an aggression of globalized capitalism. They are simply people who do not want to be mobile and flexible professionals, but prefer to stay in their homeland; that the family (of course, not necessarily that of a man and a woman) is a desirable situation that they cannot reach due to their economic precariousness. People who want to live in a stable social environment, cohesive with less inequality, and with their values and traditions.

Wagenknecht thinks that if we continue to despise all these people and, from our arrogance and moral superiority, calling them fascists because they believe that these values are only offered by the extreme right, we will only achieve more confrontation with neighbors to whom we have not been able to present proposals. suggestive from the left. Because perhaps it has been the supremacism with which the university and cosmopolitan left is looking at them that is throwing them into the arms of the extreme right. An extreme right that is already the majority in France, Italy and Belgium.

The reality is that in the previous European elections the Spanish vote on the left beyond the PSOE was 18% and now it has remained at 8%. Perhaps it is time to look at those working-class neighborhoods and rural regions that previously voted left and are now moving to the extreme right.

Reading the analysis of the book “The Uppity Ones” one perceives that one is not seeing the political debate in Germany, but rather the dilemma that the left across Europe must face, as we have seen in these elections. A left that must think about something more than applauding felt identities and airing the scarecrow from which the extreme right comes, as if it were by magic and there was no explanation.