Battle for Thuringia: This is how Wagenknecht wants to come to power

The chairwoman of the party that bears her name arrived late and will leave early. But for the short time that Sahra Wagenknecht is visiting Erfurt this Saturday, all eyes and cameras will be on her as she routinely formulates her sentences with populist precision.

“It really scares me the debates we’re having,” she shouts. “Whoever takes the war to Russia with German weapons is taking the war to Germany!” Then she raises her voice even more. “There hasn’t been a victory in this war for a long time! People are just dying!”

Now, here in a conference room next to the Erfurt football stadium, the issue is not the federal government’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to use German weapons on Russian soil. It is about the candidates of the BSW, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, for the election of the state parliament, which has little jurisdiction over foreign policy.

But this distinction is purely academic for the party. Of course, Wagenknecht later said when asked, the issue of war and peace would be at the centre of the state election campaign, just as it was in the campaign for the European Parliament. The issue affects many people.

In Thuringia, the poll ratings are highest

And it is driving up the poll ratings of her party – especially in eastern Germany, where state parliaments will be elected in September not only in Thuringia, but also in Saxony and Brandenburg. While the BSW is fluctuating between 5 and 7 percent nationwide before the European elections on June 9, in state election polls she is at 11 percent in Saxony, 13 percent in Brandenburg – and 16 percent in Thuringia.

Of all places, the state in which Bodo Ramelow, the only left-wing prime minister, governs is where the former Left parliamentary group leader Wagenknecht has the best chance of her new party participating in the government. This is due to the precarious political situation in which the shattered red-red-green minority coalition is facing a particularly extreme AfD association under Björn Höcke, while the CDU is meandering tactically. But it is also due to the fact that the local BSW was founded quickly and has a pragmatic ex-left-wing politician at its head in the form of Katja Wolf, the current mayor of Eisenach.

Incidentally, and this is more than just folklore, it is the birthplace of Wagenknecht, who spent her early childhood in Jena. “As a Thuringian, I feel connected to Thuringia,” she exclaims in Erfurt, before going on to conjure up the perfect home world of her BSW. Her favorite words are “great,” “awesome,” and “wonderful.”

Okay, there is one thing that is causing unrest in the party: the practice of accepting members. In Thuringia, the BSW only has 47 members, although, as the party says, there are about 1,000 interested parties.

The official reason given for the hesitant acceptance is that troublemakers and extremists should be kept out. Unofficially, however, the aim is clearly to keep the competition for mandates and possible government posts to a minimum.

And so, in Saxony, which is twice the size of the state, 64 members recently elected a 30-person list for the state election. The party plans to run direct candidates in 44 constituencies. In Brandenburg, where the process of finding candidates has only just begun, the BSW has only accepted 36 people so far.

It was the left-winger Ramelow who recently expressed his outrage. “Here, an organisation that claims party privilege is deliberately not opening itself up to its supporters,” he told the star. “Is this an oligarchy or even a caliphate?”

When asked about her former party colleague’s accusations, Wagenknecht first tries to be ironic. So far, “Mr. Ramelow” has not applied for membership, she says, “so the question shouldn’t really be that relevant for him yet.” But of course, there is “also discontent” that the party is growing so slowly. Nevertheless, she appeals for understanding: “If you start with 500 and then open the doors and quickly take in 5,000, then you no longer have any control over whether this is really still the party we started out as.”

That’s exactly it: This time, Wagenknecht wants to keep control – in contrast to the “Stand Up” movement she initiated in 2018, which grew incredibly quickly and then imploded just as quickly. This time, she says, she wants to give voters “the guarantee that they will vote for what I stand for.”

Breeding a party under laboratory conditions

And so the party is being cultivated strictly according to the instructions of its chairperson, as if under laboratory conditions. In Erfurt it looks like this: In the middle of the conference hall, which easily fits 500 people, a small group of around 40 party members sit in front of a large stage and raise their voting cards almost every minute to elect the conference presidium and commissions. The originally planned live stream is not available for safety reasons.

After just under half an hour, the election manifesto was also sufficiently self-congratulatory and passed with only one abstention. It promises, among other things, free lunches for schoolchildren, an Eastern quota for hiring in the administration, a state parliament commission to deal with the corona pandemic and a citizens’ veto on new regulations.

The list is then chosen according to the proposal of the state executive committee, with contested candidates only being allowed from position 15 onwards. At the top is the current mayor Wolf, followed by her co-state leader Steffen Schütz. In third place is Steffen Quasebarth, who until a week ago presented the news program on Thuringian MDR television – for an average of 180,000 viewers, as he proudly announces. This rating was probably also the decisive criterion for hiring him. “I know that Steffen is a really famous man here in Thuringia,” says Wagenknecht.

A former Left Party member of the Bundestag from Eichsfeld, a former Left Party mayor and a former Green Party state chairman who recently tried in vain to get a parliamentary seat with his old party also have good chances of getting a seat in the state parliament. Otherwise, only one non-member will end up in the halfway promising seats.

Maximum flexibility in forming a government

This has begun the state election campaign in Wagenknecht’s country. The federal chairwoman sums up the strategy as follows: “With the BSW, there is now a party whose election will finally allow people to protest against this completely unspeakable, wrong policy in Berlin and elsewhere – and they will not be faced with the embarrassing situation of having to vote for parties that are teeming with right-wing extremists and Nazis.”

Against the traffic light coalition and the AfD: This is also how leading candidate Wolf positions herself, although she draws a much clearer line against Höcke. Thuringia, she says, needs an alternative to an alternative that “wants to lead Thuringia back into the darkest chapter of German history with its contemptuous worldview and ideological embellishment.”

When it comes to forming a future government, the BSW is being as flexible as possible. With the exception of the AfD, “we will of course hold talks with all democratic parties,” says Wagenknecht – and, who knows, this may even come from the position of the stronger. In Thuringia, her party is currently on a par with the Left in polls and only four percentage points behind the CDU. “And that can still change.”