On the surface, this might be taken as good news. Both in Germany and across Europe, the left is in need of renewal.
Unfortunately, what was on offer was simply a rehash of the same ideas that Wagenknecht has been pushing for several years now.
Some of these are good, some are bad, but they add up to considerably less than the sum of their parts.
Before delving into the particulars of the BSW party program, it is worth noting that Wagenknecht and her collaborators are doing something that very much needs to be done.
The left end of German politics has mostly been deserted by the Social Democratic Party as part of the Europe-wide disciplining of social democracy since the 1980s.
One must be cautious when using terms like “the left” or “social democracy” to discuss postwar European politics. European states had wide variations in history, composition, and political trajectory.
But there has been something of a convergence since the 1970s.
Social democratic parties tended to have roots in trade unions and adhered to ideas of government ownership and planning that were viewed with disfavour by the economic establishment.
In the 1970s, two processes began to converge, fundamentally shifting the political environment in which social democratic parties operated.
The receding of the postwar economic boom brought a greater degree of economic stress.
A related, although not identical, process was the decline of industrial workers (the traditional base on which social democratic power was built) as a proportion of the total workforce.
For the social democratic parties, the result was a twofold pressure.
On the one hand, as François Mitterand learned bitterly in 1983, reduced rates of growth and job creation created powerful incentives to manage the economy responsibly, i.e. according to the dictates of neoclassical economics.
On the other, doing so created turbulence in social democracy’s traditional relationship with its working-class base.
One consequence of the latter was the increasing impulse to find greener electoral pastures closer to the centre of the political spectrum. Blairism is a paradigmatic example of this.
Blairism was committed to offering nothing to UK Labour’s traditional working-class base other than the assurance that those at the lower end of the income distribution would do better under a Labour government than under the Tories.
This was probably true, as far as it went, but it was also part and parcel of Labour’s attempt to woo increasing numbers of political moderates in the middle classes.
The result was a technocratic government run along “responsible” lines. “Responsible” meant willing to rein in the welfare state.
Let’s pause to consider the peculiar ironies of welfare states in Europe.
American conservatives assume that European welfare states arose due to a social impulse. In fact, most of these arrangements were created by moderately conservative Christian Democrats in the postwar period.
These same conservatives generally fail to recall that these programs were put in place as much to fend off the attractiveness of communism as out of any solicitude for the populations that benefited from them.
In any case, this irony pairs with another. Since the end of the postwar boom, social democratic parties have increasingly been on the hook for cutting exactly these programs.
While party functionaries evince a certain degree of regret for the human costs of such policies, they always have to be done to discharge the obligation to responsible stewardship of the economy.
The rise of groups like Wagenknecht’s BSW is a direct consequence of this history. Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been undergoing a rightward shift for nearly three decades.
The SPD’s progress has been slowed by the fact that their centre-right competitors, the Christian Democrats (CDU), have resisted the temptation to rightward lurches, at least to a greater extent than has been the case elsewhere.
This is not to say that the CDU has not also shifted under pressure from Alternative für Deutschland.
However, the Christian Democrats have held to their ground, perhaps because AfD shows as much tendency to attract disaffected voters from the SPD as from the CDU.
In light of this, the political program offered by Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht makes a lot of sense. A lot of it is clearly grounded in ideas of the left.
The world today is in a “stranglehold of war and violence”. Europe needs a “strong, innovative, and socially responsible” economy in which the power of big tech, big pharma, and the megabanks is held in check.
The European idea has to be reborn as a defender of “democracy, justice, freedom of expression and the rule of law” rather than the “El Dorado of lobbyists” it has become.
BSW’s policies reflect Wagenknecht’s predilections, particularly her views about the role of the modern state.
In interviews over the last few years, Wagenknecht has sought to separate the role of and need for the state from its nationalist connections.
While rejecting national chauvinism, the Iranian-German politician has argued that states offer the prospect of a kind of regulatory power that is absent at the global level.
This defence of the state as an administrative tool to regulate unrestrained corporate action is well-taken and makes sense on pragmatic grounds.
That said, the party’s Program for the European Election 2024 contains some very problematic material.
Wagenknecht’s stance on migration policy is well-known and restated.
People fleeing persecution have the right to asylum, but Germany has been the victim of an unequal distribution of asylum-seeker burdens.
Much of the rhetoric presented here seems intended to misdirect.
There is talk of Europe’s responsibility to improve conditions in the countries refugees are fleeing and to improve educational facilities to counter brain drain.
Still, there is a grain of truth here. It would be an excellent idea if EU member states, the US and Canada, which have profited handily from misery elsewhere, would take meaningful steps to repair the damage.
But that would seem to be the kind of step taken along with allowing those in danger to flee, not instead.
This part of the program is couched, as one might expect, in generalities, and it is a world away from the brutal ethnic cleansing program mooted at the AfD’s notorious Potsdam meeting in November.
But it still comes across as pandering to a segment of the electorate now lost to the left.
The degree of this pandering can be seen in a later section on cancel culture, wherein we find the following:
In the attitude of a modern ministry of truth, many politicians and journalists or the so-called “fact checkers” today claim to determine what is right and what is wrong. Cancel culture is becoming more and more aggressive and is used ever more ruthlessly towards those who think differently. They no longer just have to expect public pillorying and undeserved defamation, but also de facto bans on appearances or job loss.
Little needs to be said here except to reiterate that apparent occurrences of ‘cancel culture’ all too often seem to dematerialise as soon as one digs into them.
This is in marked contrast to the professional, personal, and often physical consequences born by people who didn’t fit in in the decades before the current cancel culture hysteria.
A final point about the BSW platform concerns its view of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The program makes many appropriate points about finding diplomatic solutions and getting out of the arms trade.
Much of the force of these propositions is dissipated by the call for a negotiated solution to the Ukraine crisis, to be achieved by ceasing to support Ukraine.
Wagenknecht and her collaborators seem inclined to believe that Vladimir Putin would be inclined to negotiate on such a basis.
But, having squandered oceans of blood and mounds of treasure in the Russo-Ukrainian war, it is hard to imagine Moscow accepting the paltry prize of the two eastern oblasts of Ukraine as a consolation prize.
The problem with the BSW program is not so much that it is wrong. Much of it is, in fact, quite attractive. Its main issue is that it is neither fish nor fowl.
AfD has created a powerful discourse of cultural peril surrounding the issue of immigration.
It is so powerful that it has convinced many members of Germany’s lower classes to vote for AfD even though the latter’s neoliberal economic policies are not in their interests.
Trying to talk sense on immigration, if by that one means to try to offer a rational, non-barbaric grounding for anti-immigrant policies, runs aground on the fact that most AfD supporters would be opposed to immigration whether it was reasonable or not.
The struggle needs to be fought at a different level and with different goals.
People who support Alternative für Deutschland are looking for radical change. BSW seems to have forfeited its radicalism, pursuing voters who are out of reach.
Photograph courtesy of conceptphoto.info. Published under a Creative Commons license.
