By Gunnar Schupelius
Sahra Wagenknecht is popular and promises a lot. But it doesn’t explain how it wants to solve this country’s problems, says Gunnar Schupelius.
The left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht has founded an association (BSW – For Reason and Justice) from which a new party will emerge. It promptly received more than ten percent in the surveys, and approval was significantly higher in the eastern German states.
Where does the enthusiasm for a politician who has been working in the Bundestag for a long time, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully, come from?
Sahra Wagenknecht addresses the two biggest fears that people are currently gripped by: the fear of impoverishment and the worry about the ever-growing number of asylum seekers who can no longer be accommodated.
“The uncontrolled immigration, which is overwhelming our country and making integration increasingly difficult, must be stopped,” she says. The majority in the country will agree with her, but they won’t say how they want to end immigration.
And in all of them it remains as vague as in this topic. She says: “Instead of rewarding performance, the hard-working people redistribute it to the top 10,000.” That’s not entirely true, because the hard-working people also redistribute it dramatically downwards.
She wants to skim off the “top 10,000,” but that won’t be enough to finance all the social benefits she promises. She doesn’t talk about assets and inheritances in general; she probably doesn’t want to scare off the “hardworking” people.
She says in her new video (buendnis-sahra-wagenknecht.de): “Without a new political beginning, our industry and our small and medium-sized businesses are at stake. Germany needs a strong, innovative economy.” But she doesn’t show any concept for this either. On the contrary: Wagenknecht has previously advocated expropriation and a planned economy, which, as we all know, always lead to impoverishment.
Ten years ago she expressed her admiration for the socialist ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. He showed that “a different economic model is possible”. But nationalization drove Venezuela to ruin, led to mass misery and millions of refugees.
She also had a lot for the long-term Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. “He stood for a better world,” she said seven years ago. She led the communist platform in the PDS (today: “The Left”), which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution tended to classify as unconstitutional.
It may be that she has left all that behind her, but it is not obvious. Now she spews platitudes: “The people in our country deserve better politics,” she says in her video, dressed in black and showing her clenched fist.
That’s true, but do we deserve Sahra Wagenknecht’s politics? We don’t know because she doesn’t tell us much. She presents herself as a magician who solves problems with magic. That’s a bit cheap!
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