Enlarge image
Left-wing politician Wagenknecht
Photo:
Britta Pedersen / dpa
Members of the Left Party Board of Directors are demanding that former parliamentary group leader Sahra Wagenknecht refrain from running for the next Bundestag.
The background is the recently published excerpts from Wagenknecht's new book.
The 51-year-old is running for first place on the North Rhine-Westphalian state list at a digital party congress on Saturday.
“While we are working on bringing anti-racism and ecology to the fore as social issues in alliances and with unions, Sahra denigrates movements such as Indivisible, Black Lives Matter or Fridays for Future as› self-righteous ‹.
Lateral thinking, on the other hand, defends them, «said board member Johannes König from Bavaria to SPIEGEL.
If you act so contrary to your own party, "you shouldn't be a top candidate for a large regional association."
Board member Maximilian Becker from Saxony complains that Wagenknecht "obviously no longer represents the basic values" of the party: to be voted for the left and to publish a book in which the party is settled is "perfidious".
Wagenknecht's book is "a declaration of war on hundreds of thousands of young people who vote for us and stand up for climate protection and anti-racism," says the Bundestag member Niema Movassat, who is also on the party executive.
“Wagenknecht obviously despises part of our electorate and thus endangers the party's election results.
It is incomprehensible to me how someone like that can become a top candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia, «said Movassat.
Maja Tegeler from Bremen made a similar statement: "Sahra Wagenknecht's theses on identity politics are based on false assumptions and ultimately serve a perpetrator-victim reversal that is otherwise only known from rights."
Wagenknecht defends himself against criticism
There was already considerable criticism of the widespread theses in Wagenknecht's book on social networks.
Wagenknecht, however, rejects the reservations.
In an answer to a question from a left-wing member in North Rhine-Westphalia, she responded to the criticism.
"My book is a plea for a strong left and an analysis of the reasons why most left and social democratic parties in Europe have lost the support of their former electorate in recent years," writes Wagenknecht.
It is every member's right to be against their candidacy.
"However, it does not meet the requirement of mutual solidarity if one tries to help this goal to be successful through falsehoods and assumptions."