GERMAN leftwing politicians on Tuesday launched a cross-party populist movement they pledged would address the concerns of the poor and win back working-class voters who have drifted to the xenophobic far-right. Sahra Wagenknecht of the far-left Die Linke party, and other co-founders presented the “Stand Up” alliance a week after extremist mobs in east Germany attacked foreigners and noisily protested against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies.

Wagenknecht deplored the neo-Nazis making Hitler salutes and the ugly outbursts of racist hatred, but argued that many citizens had followed the call of the far-right Pegida movement and anti-immigration AfD party out of frustration over their social conditions. “I am sick of abandoning the streets to Pegida and the far right,” she told a Berlin press conference, launching the cross-party populist movement which she said had won more than 100,000 followers since its online debut several weeks ago. “Many people joined not because they hate foreigners but because they feel left behind,” she said about the rallies in Chemnitz in the formerly communist East, a region which still lags the west economically almost 30 years after reunification.

The new leftist movement has been compared to the populist campaigns of US Senator Bernie Sanders and Britain’s Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but also to left-wing social movements in Spain and Italy. It is the brainchild of Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, 74, a firebrand socialist, ex-finance minister and defector from the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). Because “Stand up” (Aufstehen) is, at least initially, a movement rather than a registered political party, anyone can join — the main target groups being disenchanted followers of the SPD and Greens.

The movement’s declared goal is to counter the “neoliberal policies” of Merkel’s centrist coalition government and fight for secure jobs and pensions, environmental protection and “a true democracy not ruled by banks, corporations and lobbyists”.

Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2018