Political scientist: Sahra Wagenknecht has been relying on populism for a long time

Mr. Thomeczek, why are you so interested in the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) that you have even developed an election support tool for the new party?

I research populist parties and have already developed various election aid tools, for example the Election Compass. In the BSW-O mat I brought together my main interests. The data that users of the tool voluntarily submit – about their agreement with the BSW statements, about themselves, their previous voting behavior and their attitudes towards populism – will flow into a study on the super election year 2024. I am particularly interested in what potential the BSW has in the different groups of voters and their affinity to populist attitudes.

This potential is repeatedly considered to be great, especially with regard to AfD voters and sympathizers. How do you see that?

There is definitely a representation gap in the German party system that the BSW can fill with its combination of left-wing social and economic policy and more conservative migration, social and climate protection policy. This gap is not Sahra Wagenknecht's fantasy, but can be proven empirically and is not particularly small either. However, I see greater potential among non-voters or among people who are frustrated with the SPD or the Left Party. This is also shown by the first data from the BSW-O-Mat. There are of course overlaps in content between BSW and AfD. Whether the AfD's core electorate would be willing to vote for another party is a completely different question. I'm skeptical about that.

To what extent is the BSW a populist party?

From a scientific perspective, populism is a communication strategy in which a large, definable group – in the case of the AfD “the people”, in the case of the Left Party “the ordinary people” – is played off against certain elites, “the old parties” or “the large corporations”. However, the Left Party from which the BSW emerged is not as clear a case as left-wing populist parties in other European countries – Syriza, La France insoumise or Podemos, for example. But there was and is definitely a populist wing in the Left Party and Sahra Wagenknecht was by far its most populist politician. So far it looks as if she will remain true to herself in her new party.

How do you base your theory of Wagenknecht as the most populist politician?

With my students I am currently examining the press releases of the Left Party in the Bundestag over time. You can clearly see that Wagenknecht has long relied heavily on populist rhetoric, much more so than other left-wing politicians. During the financial crisis, for example, it pitted “the taxpayers” against “the financial sharks”.

How much populist rhetoric is there in the BSW's founding manifesto, on which the BSW-O-Mat is based?

A lot and it starts with the first sentences: “Our country is not in good shape. For years, governments have ignored the wishes of the majority. Instead of rewarding performance, the distribution was redistributed from the hard-working to the top ten thousand.” This type of polarization, the regulars’ table rhetoric, is very popular right now, and not just in Germany.

The sentences you just quoted are also individual positions in the BSW-O-Mat. How did you go about making the selection?

The BSW manifesto names four core themes – economic reason, social justice, peace and freedom – and I initially oriented myself on these. In a second step, I looked for statements that would be suitable for a voting aid tool. On the one hand, these are those that are as clear as possible, not cryptic, such as a sentence about NATO in which the USA is not clearly named, but is only described as the “leading power” of a military alliance. On the other hand, I looked at statements that offer a certain amount of room for interpretation. There can be a recipe for success in this: many people can agree with them because they can read into it what they want.

There are two versions of the BSW-O-Mat. You can leave after 20 statements or comment on six more. How many make it to the end?

Almost all users complete the entire questionnaire. This surprised me because during the testing phase we were worried that people would lose patience. But interest is very high, so far there have been more than 45,000 views.