Panagiotis Xoplidis
The AfD’s first place in Thuringia and second place in Saxony were no surprise. The sad fact that for the first time since 1945, a far-right party wins a (state) election in Germany is based on the choices of the traditional political system. In front of a fragile landscape, Sarah Wagenknecht is trying to position herself as a decisive factor, talking about “left-wing conservatism” and supporting medium-sized businesses.
The result of the local elections in two states of the former East Germany was described as a “political earthquake”. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a clear victory in Thuringia with almost 33% of the vote. In the most populous state of Saxony, the AfD was a close second with 31% to 32% for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It is not, of course, a real… “earthquake”, as this result was something more than expected. The AfD has an established presence in all the eastern states, not as a “protest” party, but as a potential governing force. It is no different from the far-right parties that already participate in the governments of most Northern European countries, yet it is the weight of German history that currently forces other political forces to rule out any cooperation with it.
The “anti-fascist fight” is being led by the current coalition government, which is even promoting the banning of the AfD, while announcing tough measures against immigration and introducing militaristic education in schools as part of the “war economy”. The AfD appears as anti-systemic, as it has against it not only the governing parties, but a network of state institutions that are discredited by the people as a whole, in the midst of an unprecedented crisis throughout the country. The mainstream media’s presentation of the AfD as an “East German peculiarity” is also outdated, as the result of the recent European elections highlighted its strong influence at the national level, with the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals simultaneously sinking. What the citizens of East Germany experienced when it was effectively annexed to the West (collapse of social protection structures, deindustrialization, marginalization of the working class), are now becoming “everyday” throughout the country. The rhetoric of the AfD thus finds resonance, which increases even more in the conditions that have developed since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
Sarah Wagenknecht’s face-free party with anti-immigration and conservative rhetoric appears as government solution
The formation of governments in the local states acts as a harbinger of fermentation at the national level. After the previous 2019 elections in Thuringia, a politician of the (neo)-Liberals had initially formed a government with the support of the AfD, breaking the supposedly entrenched refusal of any cooperation. After an outcry at national level this alliance was overthrown with a minority government and prime minister from the party of the Left (Die Linke). Now in Thuringia the only realistic majority government that can be formed is an alliance between the Christian Democrats with Die Linke and the new party Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW). That is, the big winner of the elections, who finished third in both states and who already declares her willingness to work with the Christian Democrats, excluding the AfD.
Wagenknecht has created a new political force that breaks all ties not only with the communist past, but even from the left, declaring that at the moment in today’s Germany she identifies with Green Foreign Minister Analena Burbock, who completed the integration of the pacifist movement during the Cold War to a party that represents the most belligerent and aggressive part of the German political scene. According to her declaration, Wagenknecht’s personal party is based on an ideology she calls “left-wing conservatism”. For the first time, a current that is developing in many European countries from the “underwater” of the crisis of the historical Left is taking shape in a party of mass appeal.
Its positions, as much as they are demonized by the existing left parties, are not far from those represented by the modern reformist left. The abolition of the class struggle is commonplace and its place is taken by the “confrontation between financial and productive capital”. In an interview with New Left Review, Wagenknecht puts the focus not on the working class, but on the defense of the Mittelstand, the German medium-sized enterprises, which she considers the arm not only of the German economy, but of its social structure. The Mittelstand are in many cases companies in cutting-edge industries with global exports, which in modern capitalism are suffocated by the “bad financial sector”. This analysis also accommodates the interests of the German car industry and corporate giants of German capital, parts of which are not at all hostile to the strengthening of parties such as the AfD and the BSW. Wagenknecht’s position also acquires a geopolitical dimension as she defines China as an economic power that expresses “production” against the “finance capitalism” of the USA. In the same interview he goes so far as to miss the values of Christian democracy and Catholicism in Germany because they “preserved the welfare state” in the context of a righteous “domestic capitalism” that resisted neoliberalism! He thus ends up praising leaders like Adenauer, while referring positively to “EU democracies” in contrast to “Brussels bureaucracy”.
An analysis, that is, which is not far from analogs of many parties of the Left who accept this classless framework and shift the confrontation to “identity issues” deliberately pushing out of the discussion the issue of work, the class struggle, the capitalist crisis which leads to the aggravation of the imperialist rivalries. The degeneracy of adopting far-right positions such as “Germany cannot accommodate any more immigrants”, “taxpayer burdens for refugees” and “traditional family values” is the result of a line that claims to want to fill the representation gap in the existing political framework but ends up in an easy-to-digest alternative solution, even a governmental one.
Published in the newspaper Before (7.9.24)
2024-09-13 09:35:21