Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (), officially known as BSW—For Reason and Justice (), is a registered association created on 26 September 2023 by members of the German political party The Left for the purposes of founding a new political party. The plans for the new party were presented at a federal press conference on 23 October 2023 by Bundestag members Sahra Wagenknecht, Amira Mohamed Ali, and Christian Leye, The Left in North Rhine-Westphalia former managing director Lukas Schön, and the public administration specialist Ralph Suikat.
Amira Mohamed Ali announced that she, Wagenknecht, Leye, and seven other members of the Bundestag faction would leave The Left and form part of the newly-founded BSW; they remain part of The Left's parliamentary group (Fraktion) and maintain parliamentary privileges. The main goal of the association is to build a structure for a new party led by Wagenknecht. The association is sceptical of both green politics and support for Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War. According to various poll, between 12 and 20 percent (with as high as 32% in eastern Germany) of Germans said they would vote for BSW.
History
Background
Wagenknecht, who has been described as a prominent left-wing politician, was a member of The Left and its predecessors, such as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and the Party of Democratic Socialism; her political positions are generally identified as left-wing populist. Although she was co-leader of The Left from 2015 to 2019, conflict with other party members on topics, such as the German refugee policy, COVID-19 vaccination, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, had led to speculation since 2021 that she would leave The Left and found a new political party.
Speculation increased in the run-up to the 2023 Hessian state election and the 2023 Bavarian state election on 8 October, in which The Left failed to reach the 5% electoral threshold while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged in both. The success of the AfD led Wagenknecht to claim that a left-wing populist party could compete with the AfD while also respecting the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany.
Association registration
The association, based in Karlsruhe, was entered in the association register at the district court in Mannheim on 26 September 2023. In mid-October, over fifty members of The Left submitted an application for Wagenknecht's exclusion from the party in order to prevent her from building a new party with the resources of The Left.
Members of the party and political commentators blamed the ongoing speculation about the founding of a new party and the resulting breakup of the Left for its poor results in the state elections. Martin Schirdewan, federal chairman of The Left and co-chair of The Left in the European Parliament – GUE/NGL, declared that the party would expel members who committed to the founding of a rival party by BSW. The Federal Executive Board of The Left passed a resolution of incompatibility (Unvereinbarkeitsbeschluss) with BSW.
Shortly after the press conference was announced, a fake website was registered under www.bswpartei.de that presented itself as the official website of the party, using copyrighted imagery and Wagenknecht's office address in its imprint. Wangenknecht would file a criminal report against the website, which is now offline. It is still unclear who created it.
Political positions
The political positions of BSW include further restrictions on immigration, a plan for deglobalization, opposition to green politics, ending military aid to Ukraine, and a negotiated settlement to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Wagenknecht considers BSW to stand primarily in opposition to The Left and Alliance 90/The Greens, which she describes as representing "weird minorities" instead of "normal people". BSW has been variously described as populist, economically socialist, cultural conservative, and pro-Russia in foreign policy, the latter of which Wagenknecht has denied. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wagenknecht stated that her party is "obviously not right-wing", instead being left-wing in the sense of "striving for more social justice, good wages, decent pensions" and "a foreign policy that returns to the tradition of détente instead of relying more and more on the military card".