As of: January 27, 2024, 6:49 p.m
By: Nail Akkoyun
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The alliance with her name held its founding party conference on Saturday.
Migration and climate are hardly an issue - but the peace agreement with Russia is.
The editorial.
Berlin – This party will never be called anything else.
This is one of the few certainties that one can have after the first party conference of the “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – for Reason and Justice” (BSW).
The new party is a one-woman show in every respect.
One might think that the formation of a new party would lead to discussions, perhaps even a controversy or two.
You have to agree on a program and a strategy.
But not at BSW.
This is outsourced to an expert council.
Until he starts work, the namesake takes care of everything related to the content and, above all, the performance.
In this way, you can create a founding party conference and a preparation meeting for the European elections on a single day.
This may be due not least to the fact that the current 450 or so party members appear to have been selected very carefully.
There are people from all kinds of professions and parts of the country, it was said in the various speeches by party leaders.
And in fact all federal states were represented.
The Berlin delegation was the second largest, directly after that of the most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
So much for the distinction from the “Berlin bubble.” Above all, however, it was people in the so-called prime who came to Berlin to the former East Berlin Kino Kosmos.
People who clearly had little interest in internal strife, but who had joined the party primarily “because of Sahra” and came to Berlin for the founding party conference.
Sahra Wagenknecht takes part in the founding party conference of the “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – for Reason and Justice”.
The party was officially founded in early January with around 450 members.
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
Founding party conference in East Berlin: Sahra Wagenknecht dominates the show
There was a lot of talk in advance about the fact that the BSW is based primarily on the personality cult surrounding Sahra Wagenknecht.
The founding party conference on Saturday in the former Kosmos cinema in East Berlin did little to dispel this impression.
Wagenknecht did not come alone, but accompanied by her husband Oskar Lafontaine.
However, this reinforced the impression that the new political project is a family company - tailored to Sahra Wagenknecht in every respect.
Because Oskar, as everyone here called him, has no plans to play a major public role at BSW.
On Saturday he explained this almost harshly to everyone who asked him.
The stage belongs to his wife.
She stepped into the spotlight as if she had been waiting for it for a long time.
In a bright red costume, very upright, very elegant.
The Rosa Luxemburg revenant of yore has reinvented herself as a political business woman.
But that doesn't mean that Wagenknecht can't do a good job.
In her acclaimed speech she cultivates a very special dialectic.
She advocates that people in the party should tolerate differences and treat each other with care.
Different opinions should be discussed fairly and respectfully.
Wagenknecht rails against the Greens and calls for an end to the Russia sanctions
But this does not apply to political competition.
Wagenknecht crosses the line into populism several times.
For them, the Greens are a symbol of aloofness and arrogance in politics.
The repeated mention of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock's values-based feminist foreign policy leads to deliberate malicious laughter in the audience.
So far, so known.
But things get really bad when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
Once again it calls for an end to the sanctions against Russia and the arms deliveries - and culminates in the outrageous sentence: "The Ukrainians should continue to suffer and die for our freedom." You couldn't bend the truth more cynically.
In the same breath, the FDP's top EU candidate, who Wagenknecht calls “Marie-Agnes Strack-Rheinmetall”, is also getting rid of her fat.
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Above all, however, you have the impression of a strange backwardness all day long.
This is not just because young people are almost completely missing.
The main reason is that important topics are missing.
Migration and refugee policy are not an issue; the climate is only mentioned in passing.
Because the BSW is the self-proclaimed peace party with a strong tendency towards Ostalgie in this area: war as an invention of capitalism to make the few rich on the backs of the many.
The question of how peace should work if a dictator has no interest in it does not fit into this hermetic worldview.
And because it isn't asked, it doesn't have to be answered.
This is what the magic of the beginning of the Sahra-Wagenknecht party looks like.
It won't last long.
(Christine Grateful)