2023-12-10 17:21:47
Former left-wing politician Wagenknecht Alliance also receives numerous donations from abroad
Sahra Wagenknecht at an interview in Berlin
© Bernd von Jutrczenka / DPA
According to a report, Sahra Wagenknecht and her new BSW party have received numerous donations from abroad. The alliance initially did not want to reveal which states came from.
The BSW was founded at the end of September and is intended to prepare the founding of a party. According to “Spiegel”, the founding party conference will take place on January 27th in Berlin. According to “Bild am Sonntag”, the club collected around 1.1 million euros in just under seven weeks. According to information from the newspaper, there were also large donations of 20,000 and 50,000 euros. BSW treasurer Ralph Suikat told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” on Friday that “we will reach a seven-figure sum in the next few days.”
Almost 17,000 euros in donations came from countries outside the EU. That’s around 1.5 percent of the total donations, said treasurer Ralph Suikat of the German Press Agency. If you include the EU states, according to him, 3.4 percent of donations came from abroad. This includes 7,086 euros from the United States “and exactly 75 euros with a reference to Russia,” said Suikat. “We would like to credibly assure that the US donations do not make us Biden fans and the 75 euros do not make us Putin’s friends either.”
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The association told “BamS” that all donations from abroad did not exceed the value of one thousand euros each. In doing so, he voluntarily follows the rules of the party law. In principle, parties are not allowed to accept donations of more than one thousand euros from countries outside the EU. Suikat had assured the “Süddeutsche” that the BSW was already being run as if it were subject to party law. “We will therefore transfer back amounts over 1,000 euros that were transferred from abroad without prior agreement,” it says on the BSW website.
Legal experts are critical of fundraising because the association could circumvent the legal regulations on party financing. The legal scholar and party researcher Sophie Schönberger told the “SZ” on Friday that the rules for financing parties are much stricter than association law. The suspicion arises that the aim of the BSW association is to undermine party law.
Sahra Wagenknecht is aiming for the European elections
State associations of the future party are initially to be founded in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony, where state elections are due next year. Wagenknecht also wants to take part in the European elections. According to the “BamS” report, Wagenknecht selected an account at Volksbank Pirna in Saxony for the donations. When asked by the newspaper, the association stated that Wagenknecht did not want “a large bank with call centers” and was striving for “decentralization.” The association’s headquarters is in Karlsruhe.
Watch the video: Wagenknecht in an interview on migration issues and Russian gas.
According to information from “Tagesspiegel” and “Correctiv”, both the left-wing extremist Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany from Gelsenkirchen and the right-wing Pegida support association have their fundraising accounts at Volksbank Pirna, as does the video agency Ruptly, which belongs to the Russian media company TV-Novosti has been on the EU sanctions list since 2022. The bank’s CEO Hauke Haensel says he maintains close contacts with Russia.
mth DPA AFP
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