Every time Wagenknecht scandalously leaves another party, she raises her popularity, while the donor party loses. Her ideology is the perfect populist cocktail: methods of strict economic regulation and state control smack of Stalinism, while the fight against illegal migrants reeks of, if not neo-Nazi, then ultra-right ideology. This is no coincidence – such a program is designed to capture the attention of as many supporters as possible, both on the right and on the left. In reality, Sahra Wagenknecht’s only true ideology is the well-being of Sahra Wagenknecht herself.
Wagenknecht was born on 16 July 1969 in the East German city of Jena. Her father is Iranian and her mother, who worked for a state-run art distributor, is German. Her father disappeared in Iran when she was a child, probably this trauma shaped her anti-immigrant sentiments. She was cared for primarily by her grandparents until 1976, when she was 7 years old.
Young Sahra knew how to secure her good future – she quickly joined the only political force capable of properly building her life: she joined the ruling party of communist East Germany, SED, in 1989 when she was only 20. Don’t expect dissidence and struggle for freedom – Sahra is far above all this, only cold calculated pragmatism. Wagenknecht was elected to the Party of Democratic Socialism (successor of SED) National Committee in 1991. She also joined the PDS’s Communist Platform, a Marxist-Leninist faction. This is an outstanding result for a 22-year-old, which speaks of high patrons who were already present in young Sahra’s life at that time.
She then enrolled as a philosophy student at the University of Groningen, completing her studies and earning an MA in 1996 for a thesis on the young Karl Marx’s interpretation of Hegel.
Wagenknecht remained a supporter of communist ideas forever, at least when it helped her career. By 2010, she had grown to become the deputy of the largest left-wing force, Left Party with 75.3% of the vote.
However, in 2021, after information emerged that Sahra was planning to create her own party, more than 50 leading members of Die Linke wrote a letter demanding her expulsion from their ranks – for using party resources to build her own political force.
Eventually, in 2022, Wagenknecht’s own party project – BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) was officially launched. This project is in its own way a super-calculated political mixture, designed to take both left and right protest voters, a kind of right-left monster of Dr. Frankenstein of German politics.
On the one hand, it is more left-radical than Die Linke: “Left Party must pursue radical and anti-capitalist goals,” Wagenknecht constantly emphasized. On the other hand, it is against migration, against “green ideas” and other rotten “liberalism” – such an ideology is needed to get conservatives to vote.
Political analysts have been arguing that the unique position of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) — left-wing on economic issues but closer to the far-right on issues like immigration and gender diversity — may pose a threat to the AfD. The European election on June 9 was the first big test of that theory. And this test was very successful for the new party. The next exam will take place in two local elections – in eastern Germany — Thuringia and Saxony. It will be interesting to see how many percent BWS can bite off not only from Die Linke but also from AfD.
She also indirectly admitted that she is fishing in the same waters as the AfD. “We believe, and this is also shown in many surveys, that a large share of AfD voters are protest voters,” she said. “They’re not right-wingers, and they don’t support far-right positions … they feel like they’re not being listened to, and they aren’t being listened to — it’s not just a feeling, it’s actually true.”
In foreign policy, Sahra has always been consistent. Consistently pro-Russian. Of course, this has its roots in those times when communist curators taught young Sahra the rules of internationalism and introduced her to big brothers from the Soviet Russia. Little has changed now – Wagenknecht is just as anti-NATO, anti-American, and pro-Russian as in the years of her party youth. It’s no surprise that she, under any pretext, advocates for stopping aid to Ukraine and for friendship with Russia – even after more than two years of Russian war crimes against Ukraine.
Back in 1992, she published an essay praising Stalinist Russia. She remains – according to German experts – Stalinist in some of her views even now. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, she claimed that key positions in the Ukrainian government were controlled by “Nazis”. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Wagenknecht claimed that while the United States was trying to “provoke” an invasion of Ukraine, Russia was not actually interested in it. She also did not support sanctions against Russia. And in a speech in September 2022, she accused the German government of “starting an unprecedented economic war against our most important energy supplier.”
Wagenknecht is probably the most disgusting political animal in Germany, who doesn’t care about moral norms or ethical rules, especially when it comes to countries she considers not very important, like Eastern European ones. She doesn’t care how many civilians Russia kills in Ukraine, she will still help the Kremlin, as long as her career continues to grow, if not with money, then with the media support Russia provides for her.
