In Thuringia, the BSW brought a stubborn state leader into line. It practices democratic centralism reminiscent of the GDR. Dubious methods have a system.
Sahra Wagenknecht giving a speech in the Bundestag in mid-October.
Liesa Johannssen / Reuters
You are reading an excerpt from the weekday newsletter “Der Andere Blick”, today by Susanne Gaschke, author in the Berlin office of the NZZ. Subscribe to the newsletter for free. Don’t live in Germany? Benefit here.
The name actually says what kind of party the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is: it is a women’s party. A type of company that is completely focused on its founder and chairwoman. Finally, Wagenknecht no longer has to be considerate, no longer have to make petty compromises, and finally no longer have to tolerate party friends around her who have different opinions than her.
You can currently see how brutally it enforces its will in the East German state of Thuringia. There, as in Saxony and Brandenburg, the BSW is needed to form a majority because no one is willing to form a coalition with the right-wing AfD party.
As a price for the BSW votes, Wagenknecht demands Russia-friendly peace commitments from the coalition partners, even though foreign and security policy play no role at the state level. In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats under Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke hastily fulfilled this demand.
The specific peace-friendliness of the BSW
In Thuringia, however, the BSW top candidate and former mayor of Eisenach, Katja Wolf, agreed with the CDU and SPD to record the different beliefs on the Ukraine issue in a preamble to the coalition agreement. In this way, the BSW’s specific peace-friendliness would have been documented without the political partners having to deny the Federal Republic’s ties to the West or the policies of the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Wagenknecht immediately declared this classic democratic compromise a “mistake” at the beginning of last week. Wolf said defiantly that “formally” the approval of the federal chairperson was not important at all. That was factually correct, but also an insult to majesty.
Wagenknecht loyalists immediately began to insult Wolf; BSW General Secretary Christian Leye, a longtime Wagenknecht henchman, traveled to Erfurt in the middle of last week to put pressure on her and “show her the tools,” as a Wolf confidant put it.
Also last week, the BSW federal executive board accepted 21 new Thuringian members into the party – this means a 25 percent increase in membership for the regional association. The new additions appear to be firmly on Wagenknecht’s line, which means the majority in Erfurt has tipped against Wolf.
In democratic parties it is usually common for local associations or local associations, i.e. lower, decentralized organizational units, to decide on the admission of new members. The BSW, on the other hand, practices democratic centralism in that the leadership nominates and accepts members.
This practice is somewhat reminiscent of a dictum by Walter Ulbricht. The former chairman of the Central Committee of the SED in the GDR said that everything had to look democratic, “but we have to have it in our hands”.
Last weekend, Leye stood next to Wolf and explained how things should work in the future: You go into government as a unit, that would be good – or you go into the opposition as a unit, that would also be good. Wolf made an embarrassed expression and now has to try somehow to incorporate declarations of peace into the coalition agreement with the CDU and SPD.
A split would be a risk for Wagenknecht
Of course, it is “formally” right: there is no imperative mandate in Germany. Theoretically, MPs can elect whoever they want to be prime minister. A split in the Erfurt BSW faction would also be a risk for Wagenknecht. But Wolf probably lacks the courage and, at the latest since the controlled entry maneuver, the majority in her regional association to assert herself.
Where Wolf is weak, others must be strong. One can assume that Sahra Wagenknecht’s entire political enterprise is aimed primarily at the federal election next year. The CDU and SPD in Thuringia have to consider whether they really want to become the masterminds of its marketing strategy.
The German media, which appreciates Wagenknecht as a high-rating player in the talk show theater or embarrassingly celebrates her as a political icon (as was recently the case in the opulent ZDF documentary “Inside Alliance Wagenknecht”), should rather address the question of how democratic the BSW actually is is.
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