The left-wing loner
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Standing up to Elon!
Long a laggard, Spätzünder Germany has gone electric vehicle crazy! Sales in March increased by 200 percent on last year and, as we’ve reported, Volkswagen’s stock is up 60 percent since January on hopes that the Wolfsburgians will overtake Tesla.
The icing on the electric cake will be Elon Musk’s Gigafactory in Grünheide just outside of Berlin. The first factory of its kind in Europe is set to open before the summer. If only Brandenburg’s Landesumweltamt would provide the necessary approval…
Tesla had expected Brandenburg’s prime minister Dietmar Woidke (SPD) to give them the green light last summer.
But summer turned to autumn and no approval came…
Autumn turned to winter and, while Elon Musk overtook Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man, he was still waiting for that certificate.
A new deadline - the end of March - came and went. Still no approval.
Tesla has built the €5.8 billion factory on temporary approvals handed out on the premise that the whole thing has to be ripped back down should final approval not come.
“The German approval framework for industrial projects stands in conflict to the battle against climate change and the necessary urgency of such projects,” wrote Tesla in a complaint this week, making the utilitarian argument that the authorities should give in for the greater good instead of processing every single complaint that is sent to the Landesumweltamt.
Given the general torture of the past few months, it’s hard not to sympathize with the Californians’ eye rolling at German red-tape.
But my sympathy lies with Dirk Ilgenstein, the fluffy haired man who presides over the Landesumweltamt. He is standing up for the rule of law against the richest man in the world and listening to complaints about deforestation, excessive water consumption, and the relocation of a colony of local bats!
The airports, football stadiums and gigafactories that Turkey, Qatar or China build in no time come at a cost, and I’m sure that the citizens of West Virginia would have liked to have a man like Mr Ilgenstein on their side.
Mr Musk needn’t worry. The factory will obviously be approved. Even if iz takes a couple more weeks, it will have been built in record time. And hopefully no bats will have come to harm during production…
A.B.B.
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What to do about Sahra?
The unhappy marriage between pop star politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the Linke Partei says a lot about the deep fissures in left-wing politics today.
Ms Wagenknecht is perhaps the most naturally gifted politician of her generation.
An aloof and ethereal presence in the Bundestag since 2009, she was raised by a single mother in East Berlin, studied philosophy and literature at Jena University, and is a devotee of Goethe. With her pristine hair, porcelain skin and pearl earrings, she is hardly the archetypal populist.
But her uncanny knack for speaking a language that resonates with ordinary voters means that the epithet of volksnah (having the common touch) fits her even better than her tailor-made suits.
Back in 2019 she performed the German equivalent of the moon landing by unseating Angela Merkel as the most popular politician in the country. That’s quite a feat for a woman on the left flank of the successor party to the East German SED.
Even now, polling shows that she is more popular than CDU leader Armin Laschet. This enduring bond with the German voter comes despite the fact that she left frontline politics two years ago and has been largely out of the limelight ever since.
The key to Ms Wagenknecht’s appeal lies in a blend of unshakeable self-confidence, unabashed use of polemic, and genuinely impressive insights on a wide range of issues. It also helps that she is not shy about sitting on sofas on political talk shows.
Recently, she has built up a large following on her YouTube channel, where she picks apart what she describes as the government’s erbärmliche und absurde pandemic response. Adoring fans in the comment section ask if she is the only politician left in Germany with a shred of common sense.
At a time when the Social Democrats have been dying a slow death in Ms Merkel’s cold centrist embrace, a Wagenknecht-led Linke should be hoovering up working class votes.
Instead though, the party is polling at a miserable seven percent and their star politician is stewing in self-imposed exile on the backbenches. Working class voters have instead turned to the far-right AfD, or stopped voting all together.
Ms Wagenknecht's problem is that, for all her popularity with the wider public, she is despised by many in her own party. She retired as Bundestag faction head in 2019, saying that years of bitter power struggles with party moderates had left her exhausted.
For her enemies, she is “a politician of yesteryear” and someone who “uses calculated taboos breaches” to attack her own inner-party opponents.
Which brings us to the truly interesting thing about Ms Wagenknecht’s popularity. A large part of her appeal appears to be derived from the fact that she refuses to lift the 20th century lens of left-wing analysis from her eye and replace it with that of the 21st century.
While the new Linke leadership have decided to mimic the Greens, putting environmentalism front and centre of their manifesto, Ms Wagenknecht dismisses environmentalism as a cause of “lifestyle lefties.” As she sees it, the central issues of the day are still exploitative conditions for the working classes, the American war machine, and industry lobbyism. Everything else is just noise.
She sympathizes with France’s gilets jaunes demonstrators over Fridays for Future, and warns that mass immigration is helping big industry to exploit the labour force.
Last October, after months of seclusion spent writing her latest book, she gave an incendiary interview to the Süddeutsche Zeitung in which she lamented that left-wing parties are led by clueless and privileged urban elite who talk down to working class voters rather than trying to understand them. While she didn’t specifically name her own party, the intended target was clear.
Poorer Germans “react allergically when climate change is just an alibi for making their heating oil, electricity and gas even more expensive,” she said. “And they also don't want to be picked on for buying their schnitzel at the discount store.”
If excerpts from her new book “The Self-Righteous”, which goes on sale on Wednesday, are anything to go by, her attacks on the modern left aren’t about to end any time soon.
Her re-nomination this weekend as the party’s first list candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia for September’s election underlined the rift. Against a background of accusations that she had “fallen in love with the political right” and was now “a stranger in her own party”, she won an uneasy victory with 60 percent of the vote.
But despite all the bad blood, the party hierarchy knows that it can’t do without her in the upcoming election. No one else in Die Linke even comes close to her star power. Meanwhile, the obvious echo that her “archaic” talking points have found among voters must have her rivals secretly admitting that she has a point.
There will be pressure inside the party to woo her back into the fold in the coming months, but such a concession means ceding ideological ground to her. Otherwise, she has hinted that she may take more radical action.
Asked recently by der Spiegel what would happen if she fell further out of favour in Die Linke, she replied mysteriously that: “history shows: If a considerable part of the population has no political representation for too long, something new will eventually emerge.”
J.L.
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Who we are:
Jörg Luyken: Journalist based in Berlin since 2014. His work has been published by German and English outlets including der Spiegel, die Welt, the Daily Telegraph. Formerly in the Middle East. Classicist; Masters in International Politics & Arabic from St Andrews.
Axel Bard Bringéus: Started his career as a journalist for the leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet and has spent the last decade in senior roles at Spotify and as a venture capital investor. In Berlin since 2011.
Elon Musk is from South Africa, not California.