The Albany Gazette - Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany's combative 'left-wing conservative'

On Sunday, the 55-year-old launches the campaign of her one-year-old BSW party in the hope it will enter parliament after a snap general election slated for February 23, replicating its success in regional and European polls last year.

Known as a polarising TV talk show guest and best-selling author, Wagenknecht has long given voice to popular discontent at what she calls heartless capitalism, arrogant political elites and dangerous Western militarism.

Hailing from the former communist East Germany, she has spoken with nostalgia about the state that vanished a year after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Unlike traditional leftists who encourage solidarity with refugees, she has demanded strict limits on migrants and those seeking asylum, also a key theme for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Her favourite targets are progressive Green party voters and "lifestyle leftists" who, Wagenknecht charges, preach sustainable living and multiculturalism but look down on the poor and less educated.

A year ago, she broke with her long-time comrades-in-arms at Die Linke, the successor to East Germany's socialist SED ruling party, to form a party named after herself, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW).

What she has dubbed a "left-wing conservative" agenda blends demands for higher wages, pensions and benefits with calls for stricter border controls, more police and a defence of family, homeland and state.

"She appeals to left-wing authoritarians, voters who hold economically left-wing positions but are culturally conservative," said political scientist Jan Philipp Thomeczek of Potsdam University.

- 'System detonator' -

Wagenknecht got a taste of power when the BSW obtained scores ranging from 12 to 16 percent in elections in three eastern states last year, allowing the party to enter coalition governments in two of them, Thuringia and Brandenburg.

For many years Germany's mainstream parties were able to dismiss parties on the left and right fringes -- but this has changed as ever more parties have emerged and eaten away at their support.

All parties have pledged a "firewall" of non-cooperation with the AfD, which has forced them to instead reach out to the BSW to build majorities despite the ideological chasm between them.

Wagenknecht has tried to leverage this new power to win symbolic concessions, including on her demand that the West stop arms supplies to Kyiv and seek peace talks with Moscow.

In the eastern states, parties spent weeks haggling over formulations they could all live with, settling in the end on a watered-down commitment to seek "peace in Europe".

News magazine Der Spiegel last year dubbed Wagenknecht the "system detonator", depicting her in a cover illustration holding aloft a red dynamite stick with a lit fuse.

- Strict hierarchy -

Wagenknecht grew up during the Cold War in what was then East Berlin, where the philosophy and economics graduate was known early on for her headstrong and rebellious nature.

But in the final months of the German Democratic Republic, she demonstratively joined the SED. Years later she declared that she "would have preferred to spend my life in the GDR a thousand times rather than in the Germany in which I have to live now".

She is married to former Social Democratic Party heavyweight Oskar Lafontaine, decades her senior at 81, with whom she lives in the southwestern region of Saarland.

Her BSW has attracted a mix of personalities from the arts and sports as well as the millionaire businessman Ralph Suikat, who has said he wants to "pay more tax".

But, as the name suggests, the BSW is heavily centred on its founder and chief, with a strict hierarchy and tight vetting of new members by Wagenknecht's inner circle.

So far the party has just 1,100 full members and around 25,000 registered supporters. In many regions it still lacks established party structures and volunteers.

The BSW currently polls at around five percent nationwide, the minimum for entry into parliament, but Wagenknecht is determined to anchor her party in German politics.

Der Spiegel said Wagenknecht long "had her own speaker's corner in the political marketplace, from where she drowned out most of the others, but now that's no longer enough for her, now she wants to join in".

(P.Clark--TAG)