BSW misses entry into the Bundestag: Wagenknecht wants to continue
"Anyone who is not in the Bundestag is no longer a relevant factor in German politics," Wagenknecht said at the time. The day after a dramatic election night, she no longer wants to hear anything about it. The BSW narrowly missed out on a place in the Bundestag. Her party's committees will now "discuss how we proceed," said Wagenknecht. She does not want to give up. "They want the headline, but I will not provide it."
Wagenknecht looks strained when she appears before the capital's press in Berlin on Monday morning with her co-party leader Amira Mohamed Ali. But she has also had a real election thriller behind her. Her coalition Sahra Wagenknecht narrowly failed to clear the five percent hurdle. It was only at two in the morning that it became clear that she was 0.03 percent short, just 13,400 votes. The Federal Election Commission put the official final result for the party at 4.97 percent.
This was significantly higher than the forecasts of the previous days, emphasises Wagenknecht. It was "a good result", although with a "bitter aftertaste". Overall, more people voted for the BSW than in the European elections last June , where the party came in at 6.2 percent from scratch, she emphasises. At that time, voter turnout was significantly lower at around 51 percent than in this federal election, where it reached almost 83 percent.
BSW chairmen Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali announced that they would have the election results legally examined. The reason: many Germans living abroad were unable to vote. They had received their postal voting documents too late due to the short deadlines. Lawyer Sophie Schönberger believes that a lawsuit is futile, as she told Die Zeit . There is no constitutional right to postal voting, according to the co-director of the University Institute for Party Law in Düsseldorf.
Mohamed Ali also pointed out that the BSW may have been confused with the “Alliance Germany” party in some polling stations, such as in Aachen. This too will now be “legally examined”.
Wagenknecht repeated the accusation made during the election campaign that the BSW had been excluded and "written down" by the media. And she accused individual polling institutes of deliberately misleading potential voters of her party with values that were too low.
The Forsa Institute of the pollster Manfred Güllner, for example, "set" the BSW at 3 percent shortly before the election: this was "not an election forecast, but a targeted action to manipulate voting behavior," Wagenknecht fumed. Wagenknecht also wants to file a criminal complaint: an account on the X platform is said to have published false poll results in which the BSW was given as only 3 percent.
"We are honored that our opponents have made so much effort to defeat us and push us out of the Bundestag. The fact that they have been successful for the time being is a setback," explained the 55-year-old. The BSW is not finished yet, the party has achieved unprecedented success in a short space of time.
However, Wagenknecht admitted that the BSW's participation in the governments of Thuringia and Brandenburg had presented it with a dilemma. Some expectations had been disappointed. Free school meals, as called for in Brandenburg, failed to materialize due to tight budgets.
Sahra Wagenknecht before the election
Other reasons for the difficulties in the federal election were a lack of money and personnel. It was also a disadvantage that the election campaign had revolved so heavily around the issue of migration. Demanding less migration was "not a unique selling point" of the BSW. Even in retrospect, she did not want to see the approval of the Union's "Influx Limitation Act", which almost received a majority with the votes of the AfD, FDP and BSW, as a mistake . Wagenknecht said that they had remained true to their stance.
Wagenknecht regretted that some supporters had felt rejected. The party has only accepted 1,200 members so far, and that was according to admission criteria that were partly opaque . It would not have been possible otherwise, she defended herself and promised: "We will definitely do things differently in the future." Then she again praised "the best result that a new party has ever achieved in a federal election."
The BSW has approached a significant number of people who no longer voted or would otherwise have voted for the AfD and who no longer felt represented by left-wing parties. Her co-leader Mohamed Ali derived from this the "mandate" to lead the party back into the Bundestag by 2029 at the latest. The day after the election, she did not want to commit to a withdrawal from the party leadership. This will be discussed in the committees, said Wagenknecht in Berlin. If there is a result, this will be announced.
taz
