At the beginning of next year, the Sahra Wagenknecht alliance wants to change from an association to a party. According to the treasurer, almost one million euros in donations have been collected so far. But there are doubts as to whether it is even legal to transfer the collected funds to party assets.
This article first appeared at ntv.de.
Just over a month after it was founded, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) collected one million euros in donations. This is reported by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (SZ). “We will reach a seven-figure sum in these days,” BSW treasurer Ralph Suikat told the newspaper. They are satisfied, “but we still have a long way to go.” The major parties spend tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns, said Suikat. At the press conference in which she announced the split from the Left Party, Wagenknecht said that the planned party wanted to run in the European elections and the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg next year.
Before that, the party must first be founded. According to information from MDR, this will happen at the beginning of January, and the founding party conference is planned for the end of the month in Berlin. So far there is only one association called “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – for Reason and Justice eV”. This is also where the donations were received, which will later be transferred to the party’s assets. The BSW considers this approach to be legally unproblematic. But there are also experts who see it differently.
Sahra Wagenknecht is legally in a gray area
The legal scholar and party researcher Sophie Schönberger from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf points out the differences in association law and party law. Compared to the requirements for parties, far less strict rules apply to associations in Germany with regard to the transparency of financing. Clubs could, for example, receive donations from other EU countries, but parties are not allowed to do so, she emphasized in the SZ. From their point of view, Wagenknecht and her colleagues are at least entering a legal gray area if they transfer the donations collected by the association to the party.
“I would say there is a lot to suggest that it is illegal and should be sanctioned,” said the scientist, who speaks of a “straw man donation.” “With the club structure, they basically circumvent everything that makes a party in Germany.” The action is already “extremely lazy”. Suikat, however, assured that the BSW does not accept donations from other EU countries. The association is already being run as if it were subject to party law in order not to make itself legally vulnerable, he told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.
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Whether this approach is successful will ultimately be decided by the Bundestag administration, which must check whether the party was founded properly. “If the Bundestag administration really came to the conclusion that it was illegal, then the party would be financially exhausted before it even began,” says Schönberger, who was appointed by the Bundestag as an expert to assess the new electoral law. The party would then have to pay a fine that would be three times as high as the amount that the club transferred to the party.
Source: Stern
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