Markus Liske
The Left Party is still avoiding drawing the necessary conclusions from the Russian aggression against Ukraine. This is because parts of the party sympathise with the foreign policy positions of Donald Trump.
One would like to be pleased that the Left Party has unexpectedly made it into the next Bundestag after all. With almost nine per cent of the second votes, in fact, and six direct mandates. One would like to be happy about this because the right-wing trend has now spread to all major parties, the positions of the CDU/CSU can hardly be distinguished from those of the AFD in many respects and the SPD and Greens are also talking out of their asses when it comes to migration. This consensus concert of contempt for humanity conducted by the AFD ultimately needs left-wing objections in parliament to at least preserve the memory that other positions are conceivable. But there is no joy to be found.
Sure, Heidi Reichinnek gave a brilliant anti-fascist speech as the top candidate of the Left Party when Friedrich Merz whipped his so-called five-point plan “for secure borders and an end to illegal migration” through the Bundestag with the votes of the AfD. Reichinnek countered this motion with impressive vigour with her call for solidarity and “human rights for all”. It is just a shame that her party only makes such melodious claims in a domestic political context, where it continues to attempt to occupy the broad field of state services of general interest and social responsibility that was vacated decades ago by the Social Democrats, who were once responsible for this.
A key characteristic of this anti-imperialism is the idea that there is a perfidious secret geostrategic plan behind every development at international level, which is deliberately concealed by the local media with intellectual complicity.
In terms of foreign policy, on the other hand, people prefer to cling to ideological constructs from the Cold War. On the one hand, there is the helpless pacifism that party leader Jan van Aken is fond of displaying when he condemns Russian aggression in interviews but nevertheless rejects arms aid for Ukraine and glorifies Vladimir Putin’s ally Xi Jinping as the potential founder of a “just peace”. On the other hand, there is an anti-imperialism that has never been overcome and which stands so steadfastly in the way of even the most basic understanding of the currently rapidly changing world situation that interpretations of the events of the recent and most recent past are almost inevitably misleading.
A key characteristic of this anti-imperialism is the idea that there is a perfidious geostrategic secret plan behind every development on an international level, which is deliberately concealed by the local media with intellectual complicity. The originators and beneficiaries of all conflicts promoted in this way are never China or Russia, but always the USA, NATO, “the West”.
Left-wing anti-imperialism, right-wing conspiracy myths, flat-earth nonsense
If you are obviously and undeniably wrong with this distorted view, as in the case of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which you thought was a fantasy created by Western propaganda until the day of the invasion, you simply switch to the next level of conspiracy, according to which Putin was forced to take this step by NATO.
This ignores the fact that Germany and France in particular have always resisted the accession of post-Soviet states to NATO, with the result that Ukraine’s accession was no longer even up for discussion. And yes, conspiracy - the term was chosen deliberately. Because structurally, the phantoms of left-wing anti-imperialism hardly differ from right-wing conspiracy myths or flat-earth nonsense. There is always a “lying press” that manipulates “the people” on behalf of sinister globalist powers (which you can also imagine as an anti-Semitic Stürmer caricature). The enemy is always in the West.
What both the left and the right are reluctant to do, however, is to openly criticise certain authoritarian regimes. No matter how brutally they treat their own populations, those liberal democracies in which human rights, freedom of opinion and freedom of the press are at least postulated as fundamental values are always to blame for all global undesirable developments.
China and Russia are hardly ever criticised
Just like many right-wing extremists, the anti-imperialist left places the “right of peoples to self-determination” (and thus the claim to power of even the most bloodthirsty dictator) above general human rights, which “the West” has only made up anyway to justify its wars. The only essential difference between left and right is their relationship to capitalism. The modern right usually has no problem with it, but the left does, at least when it appears in a democratic form. The fact that China and Russia, for example, although themselves integral parts of the capitalist world order, are hardly criticised suggests that the German left has fewer difficulties with capitalism per se than with liberal democracy.
Heidi Reichinnek and her colleagues on the executive committee of the Left Party, who like to waffle on about “democratic socialism”, would certainly deny all this. And yet they are obviously unable (or unwilling?) to translate their demands for solidarity and human rights for all into a contemporary foreign policy. After all, it is a fact that is difficult to deny that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia if the arms deliveries do not materialise. And it is also difficult to overlook the fact that the USA is now governed by a group of right-wing libertarians and pro-Putin hasbardeurs who are trying to abolish everything that qualifies the country as a democratic republic at breakneck speed, while at the same time trying to promote the same development in Europe.
Nevertheless, the resolution passed by the party executive on 1 March, in which it announced its intention to approve the lifting of the absurd German debt brake in the Bundestag, only speaks of financial civilian support for Ukraine and an illusionary “diplomatic initiative with China and other Brics states”. Has the Left Party not even realised that the world situation is developing in a highly threatening way and that Europe is in a precarious situation? Were they simply too focussed on domestic politics during the election campaign, but will wake up soon? Unlikely.
The next volte face into the anti-imperialist wonderland of alternative facts
Just as the party leadership did everything it could to stop Sahra Wagenknecht from resigning and took part in playing off domestic social issues against foreign policy solidarity with the attacked Ukraine in 2022, it is still trying to avoid deciding on certain conflict issues. After all, not all the stubborn anti-imperialists and Putinists have left the Left Party for the BSW. And if they don’t want to sink into insignificance after all, it seems to the party leadership, they have to somehow hold the “fermenting pile” (as Alexander Gauland once said about his AFD) together.
Social media clearly shows that many members and sympathisers of the party have long since taken the next turn deep into the anti-imperialist wonderland of alternative facts: Here, the USA is suddenly no longer the eternal enemy, on the contrary. Only the liberal Democratic establishment was really evil, according to this view, having pushed Russia to war with its aggressive values-based nonsense under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and now quite rightly being sent packing by Donald Trump.
The social media hatred was correspondingly enthusiastic when Trump and his Vice President J. D. Vance recently publicly denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. The only difference between posts by authors from the Left Party and those by AFD or BSW supporters was often that the former liked to claim that they were speaking on behalf of the “forcibly recruited Ukrainian working class” (Ingar Solty, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung), who would certainly fare much better under a terror regime established by Putin in their country than under the democratically elected President Zelenskyi.
Ukrainians can probably only hope for solidarity from the Left Party again when they enter the country as refugees after Putin’s victory and thus become a domestic political issue.
As far as the solidarity of the Left Party and its demand for human rights for all is concerned, Ukrainians can probably only hope for this again when they enter the country as refugees after Putin’s victory and thus become a domestic political issue. Whether this solidarity will then help them, however, is another question. That depends on whether the EU succeeds in preserving its constitutional constitution after all, or whether its member states will lust after a right-wing libertarian fascist variant based solely on the law of the jungle, following the US model.
Putin, Trump and the AFD are united in this endeavour. What the Left Party or the German Left as a whole hope to achieve from imperial autocrats, right-wing libertarian power mongers and their entourage, however, remains their secret.
