Who’s afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht?

Her blend of old-school leftist economics, anti-NATO foreign policy and conservative cultural outlook is redefining populism — and upending German politics

I’ve written for UnHerd about Sahra Wagenknecht’s new left-conservative party and how her blend of old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-NATO foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is redefining populism — and upending German politics:

Though Wagenknecht tends to avoid framing her party in tired left-right terms, its platform can best be described as “left-conservative”.

In short, this means it mixes demands that would once have been associated with the socialist-labour left — interventionist and redistributive government policies to regulate capitalist market forces, higher pensions and minimum wages, generous welfare and social security policies, taxes on wealth — with positions that today would be characterised as culturally conservative: first and foremost, a recognition of the importance of preserving and fostering traditions, stability, security and a sense of community.

This inevitably entails more restrictive immigration policies and a rejection of the multiculturalist dogma, in which minorities refuse to recognise the superiority of common rules, threatening social cohesion.

For Wagenknecht, the promotion of social cohesion, including by restricting immigration flows, shouldn’t just be seen as a positive end in and of itself, such as for reasons of public safety, but also as a precondition for the pursuit of economically redistributive policies, and even of democracy itself. Only a political community defined by a collective identity — a demos — is capable of committing itself to a democratic discourse and to a related decision-making process, and of generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to legitimise and sustain redistributive policies between classes and/or regions. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no effective democracy, let alone a social democracy.

The inverse, of course, is true as well: the social cohesion necessary to sustain the demos can only flourish in a context where the state intervenes to restrain the socially destructive effects of unfettered capitalism (including the push towards the free flow of labour). There is, in other words, no contradiction between being economically left-wing and culturally conservative, says Wagenknecht; rather, the two things go hand in hand. Neither is the concept particularly new, she adds: this was basically the (winning) platform of most old-school European socialist and social-democratic parties.

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Thomas Fazi

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