11 Aug 2018; DG: Only days after Left politician Sahra Wagenknecht announced her new movement, dubbed Aufstehen or Stand Up, tens of thousands have vowed support. The movement could present a leftist case for limiting migration.
After months of floating the idea of an overarching leftist movement in Germany, the Left party's parliamentary leader, Sahra Wagenknecht, has unveiled the first stage of her Aufstehen ("Stand Up") initiative by rolling out a website that offers visitors a chance to join the movement.
According to Wagenknecht, the movement is meant to rally left-wing voters and pressure politicians to create a majority that would result in a left-wing government. It also aims to win over the "protest voters" who currently support populist parties such as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
"This is about courage to overcome the neoliberal mainstream, about a social policy in the interest of the majority," Wagenknecht told the online portal Nachdenkenseiten.de. "The globalization steered by corporations, the disintegration of the welfare state, an endless string of new wars — this not a force of nature. There are alternatives to it and we want to give people back the hope that politics can be changed."
Aufstehen, however, is not a political party in itself, and it welcomes the members of other parties, including the Left, the SPD and the Greens, as well as people without party affiliation.
"Nobody needs to leave their organization to work with us, but we especially want to encourage those people who don't feel at home in any party to act," she told the Spiegel magazine.
Aufstehen is also not endorsed by Germany's Left party, and several senior officials have already spoken out against the movement and Wagenknecht. The 49-year-old parliamentary leader has a history of clashing with party heads.
A threat for the Left?
The Aufstehen website, which went online a week ago on Saturday, currently consists of a collage of video clips with people across Germany discussing leftist ideas. It notably does not give details on what the Aufstehen members should stand up for, and the group's manifesto is set to be published only in September.
Even so, over 50,000 had pledged their support to the movement by Thursday. Wagenknecht's husband and political ally in the Left party, Oskar Lafontaine, praised the early success of the initiative.
"We are very satisfied." he told the dpa news agency. "We didn't necessarily count on such overwhelming support."
By Friday, there was more good news for Wagenknecht's platform: A poll ordered by the Focus magazine showed that more than a third of German voters "could see themselves" voting for Aufstehen if the movement transformed into a political party. The response was overwhelmingly positive among the Left voters, where 87 percent were open to supporting her initiative at the polls.
