a new radical left party calls for negotiations with Moscow

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BWS), resulting from a split from the Die Linke party, defends a rapprochement with Russia. The group, moreover, wants to defend the working classes and calls for reducing the number of migrants.

In Germany, a fanfare start for the new populist radical left party. Its co-president Sahra Wagenknecht called on her country to negotiate with Moscow to end the war in Ukraine, Saturday January 27 in Berlin (Germany), during the party’s first congress.

She also pleaded for Germany to stop its arms deliveries to kyiv, in front of some 450 founding members of this party, gathered at Kosmos, a former GDR cinema, located on Karl-Marx Avenue in Berlin. “We are delivering weapons to Ukraine for a victory in which unfortunately even the Ukrainian generals no longer believe (…) this war must be ended and very quickly through negotiations”she said to applause.

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This party, whose full name is “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BWS) – for reason and justice” was launched on January 8 around this charismatic 54-year-old personality, born in Jena, in what was still the Communist Germany. Sahra Wagenknecht left the Radical Left party (Die Linke) last October with nine other colleagues, sealing the split in this formation, heir to the Communist Party of East Germany.

Especially popular in eastern Germany

Sahra Wagenknecht’s movement borrows ideas dear to the far-right, such as reducing the number of migrants or ending arms deliveries to Ukraine. He also defends a rapprochement with Moscow, to offer Germany a cheap energy supply.

Two electoral opportunities are available to the new party this year: the European vote on June 9 and those of three eastern regions in September. A breakthrough for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is expected during these two elections. Sahra Wagenknecht, who remained a communist after the fall of the Berlin Wall, shares with many East Germans their distrust of the West.

Sahra Wagenknecht is especially popular in the former GDR. In her speech, she clearly addressed voters who might be sensitive to certain ideas defended by the AfD, which is particularly popular in the East. And to outline: “When we advocate peace, we are labeled extreme right, when we defend farms and farmers, we are extreme right, (…) when we call for the limitation of immigration and when we is worried about parallel Islamist societies, we are far right”.