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Sahra Wagenknecht Is Shaking Up German Politics From the East
The AfD and Ms. Wagenknecht are pressing on “a mix of unattended issues that the main parties are too lazy or too afraid or ideologically too ashamed to address,” he said, citing rising crime, migration, the failure to integrate migrants and the pressure they put on previously homogenous communities.
Carsten Schneider, a Thuringian who is the federal government’s representative to eastern Germany, prefers to emphasize the volatility of party loyalty in the east after the fall of the wall. Ms. Wagenknecht skillfully plays on “very simple anti-Americanism, Germany as a big Switzerland” between the superpowers, anti-migration backlash and anti-elitism, he said. “Let’s just say she’s playing the piano,” he said, with a smidgen of reluctant admiration.
Bodo Ramelow, the current head of Thuringia from The Left, said, “She becomes the incarnation of anti-Americanism; she hits the nerve of the people.” He added that she was excellent at playing “the politics of emotion.”
In a recent interview with the Die Zeit newspaper, Wolf Biermann, 87, the German singer-songwriter and former East German dissident, was typically more blunt. “Sahra Wagenknecht is the anachronistic head of a personality-cult party, the typical structure of totalitarian party apparatuses,” he said.
When I asked if her party, which keeps its membership small and secret, was built on Leninist lines, Ms. Wagenknecht bristled. “This has nothing to do with Leninism,” she said, but only with trying to build a party that does not “attract a lot of adventurers or radicals.” The AfD, she noted, began as a party of conservative economists.
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