Berlin's way will lead to US-style capitalism, 'Red Sahra' warns

BERLIN LETTER:Germany's government are the last people who have a moral justification to dictate how things should go now, says a leading politician from the left

IN THE grey world of German politics, Sahra Wagenknecht is a rare splash of colour.

Dubbed “Red Sahra” by the German media, the 41-year-old Left Party MP has a reputation that precedes her: a hard-left socialist who joined the East German SED ruling party six months before the fall of the wall, a structure she later memorably described as a “necessary evil”.

The soft-spoken woman who shows up for lunch is a long way from all of that. With bright, alert eyes and fine-boned features, her dry wit is the first indication of the formidable intellect beneath the still surface. Wagenknecht is a regular visitor to Ireland – her husband of 14 years lives near Killaloe – giving her a particular interest in Ireland’s meltdown and its new dependency on her own homeland.

“Germany has dirty hands, big time,” she says, referring to the huge exposure of German banks to Irish debt. “The German government are the last people who have a moral justification for dictation how things should proceed now.” Yet this is exactly what is happening, she says. Chancellor Angela Merkel is using the dependency of its neighbours on German cash as a lever to force through German-style reforms – including low wages and pension cutbacks – a strategy she describes as “madness”.

“I think she could threaten in a brutal fashion that things have to happen along German lines,” she says of an upcoming summit to discuss a Berlin-Paris proposal for greater EU co-ordination of social and economic policy. “If this spreads, then what we once had resembling a European model is gone. The German way is the road to an American capitalism without protection.”

Wagenknecht was born in the East German city of Jena to a German mother and an Iranian father she never knew. Her intelligence – her mother describes her daughter as "intellectually insatiable" – was matched by an individualistic streak. Though that brought conflict with East Germany's collectivisation zeal, she remained a committed socialist to the end. When the Berlin Wall fell on the evening of November 9 1989, Wagenknecht sat at home in East Berlin reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

“The GDR lived from strong leadership and pressuring people to support the path it took. I didn’t do that and had my problems,” she says. “But because of that I’m not going to have my socialist convictions taken from me. Naturally the wall was not something we would wish as socialists but today we have different problems and it’s annoying to be constantly pigeon-holed with the wall, barbed wire and the Stasi.”

Wagenknecht has stayed true to her party through its permutations over the years: from the SED to the post-communist PDS which, in 2007, merged with Social Democrat (SPD) members disillusioned with the reform programme of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

That last merger saw the PDS move from an ageing, eastern regional party to a federal force with a solid 10 per cent core vote, to the left of the SPD. Yet it has failed to capitalise from the financial crisis as much as might have been expected.

“I think there is still an inhibition to voting left, particularly in western Germany and in a crisis Germans tend to be more conservative and fearful,” says Wagenknecht.

Germany’s much-praised economic upswing is “only taking place in company balance sheets”, she says, and a record low jobless rate masks an explosion in casual and temporary jobs.

“I’m hopeful that now, when they notice they’re not benefiting from the (economic) upswing that we’ll be able to reach people.”

After cutting her teeth in the party’s hard left Communist Platform, Wagenknecht has softened the rhetoric of late. She remains convinced, however, that a firm left stance is the best chance of long-term co-operation with the Social Democrats (SPD).

And what of the Left Party itself? Former SPD man Oskar Lafontaine returned from the political wilderness to see through the transformation from PDS to Left Party before standing down last year for health reasons.

When the time comes to replace the current leaders – two competent if not exciting figures – the person to watch will be Sahra Wagenknecht, a figure most commentators love to hate almost as much as Lafontaine.

So much for the future; back in the present, Wagenknecht picks pensively over her lunch. Eventually, she says, Germans will see the real villains of the financial crisis were not Greek pensioners or Irish mortgage-holders but closer to home.

“There’s this terrible propaganda (here) that all Greeks retire at 50 and the Irish all have three homes and they’re doing just fine,” said Ms Wagenknecht. “We have to work against that to show who are the real profiteers: neither the Greek nor Irish population but banks that speculated in grand fashion.”