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In 2007, Lafontaine’s SPD splinter get together merged with the PDS to kind Die Linke, or the Left Party, with Wagenknecht becoming a member of the chief committee. He and Wagenknecht later married. After Lafontaine took a decrease political profile in 2009 as a consequence of well being causes, Wagenknecht turned one of many get together’s main voices.
Yet, in subsequent years, Wagenknecht turned an more and more controversial determine throughout the Left Party, together with when, amid the refugee disaster of 2015, she turned a critic of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s resolution to permit in lots of of 1000’s of asylum seekers, utilizing the mantra “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”). In 2016, after a spate of terror assaults perpetrated by migrants, Wagenknecht launched a press release that learn: “The reception and integration of a lot of refugees and immigrants is related to appreciable issues and is harder than Merkel’s frivolous ‘We can do it.’”
Members of her personal get together sharply criticized her, arguing that no true leftist ought to assault Merkel from the precise on migration. That yr, at a Left Party gathering, a person from a self-described anti-fascist group threw what regarded like a chocolate cake topped with whipped cream in Wagenknecht’s face. Relations with many members of her personal get together grew extra strained after Wagenknecht turned a pointy critic of the federal government’s “countless lockdowns” throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Wagenknecht incessantly showing on German tv to supply takes that echoed Kremlin propaganda.
Finally, final yr, she introduced that she and a bunch of Left Party allies would go away to kind their very own get together, with Lafontaine, her husband, additionally later becoming a member of. “We reside in a time of worldwide political crises,” she mentioned in Berlin. “And on this of all occasions, Germany most likely has the worst authorities in its historical past.” Many individuals, she added, “not know who to vote for, or they vote out of anger and despair.” The alternative led to the unraveling of the Left Party, which was compelled to dissolve its parliamentary faction, liquidate property and hearth workers.
Wagenknecht has since grown adept at discovering a leftist angle for what are generally rightist stances. Her skepticism of immigration is due, in nice half, to her assist of the welfare state, which, she says, requires a sure diploma of homogeneity to operate.
“The stronger the welfare state, the extra of a way of belonging there have to be,” Wagenknecht advised me in Berlin. “Because if individuals haven’t any connection to those that obtain social advantages, then sooner or later they are going to refuse to pay for these advantages.”
