BERLIN, November 10. /TASS/. Sahra Wagenknecht, a Bundestag lawmaker and leader of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance - Reason and Justice party (BSW), has announced that she will no longer serve as the party’s leader.
"We have agreed to distribute duties a little more efficiently, among a broader team going forward, so that I can continue my work in the BSW, especially in those areas where I can be of the most use. In my role as the party leader I was too busy with organizational and party management issues, which practically paralyzed me in terms of performing other duties, barring me from developing and promoting the party’s strategy. I liked this job because the first 18 months of a new party’s existence are a very important stage," she told a news conference in Berlin.
"We just couldn’t go on as things were" in the long-term, she explained. "In the future, I would like to focus on contributing something real to the BSW, drawing on my strengths," she said.
According to Wagenknecht, she plans to set up and head a BSW commission on fundamental values, which will address issues of the party’s ideology. Apart from that, she said that she plans to lead the party’s faction in the Bundestag if it ultimately manages to make it to the parliament.
The party’s co-leader Amira Mohamed Ali and European Parliament member Fabio de Masi are seen as Wagenknecht ‘s most probable successors.
Although Wagenknecht is the party’s leader and the most recognizable member, it was reported on November 5 that the BSW will remove her name from its title but will retain the acronym. The party’s board suggested it be renamed Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason. The final decision will be made at a party convention to be held in Magdeburg on December 6 and 7.
In late October 2023, Wagenknecht announced her decision to leave the Left party and establish her own political force. As step one, she founded the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which was the basis for the establishment of the BSW party in January 2024. Today, the party has approximately 7,000 members. It demonstrated good results at the elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony, or former East Germany states. Experts explained this success by her criticism of Berlin’s policy toward Russia among other things.