FOR SEVIM DAGDELEN, the most important issue in next month’s German election is peace, and the only pro-peace party is the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).

Dagdelen may be the most familiar in Britain of the 10 MPs who broke with Die Linke (The Left) to form BSW over a year ago, having played a role in the campaign to free Julian Assange and holding the party’s foreign policy brief. I met her last month at her Bundestag office to get her take on Germany’s political crisis.

“Our focus is peace,” she begins simply. “Stop arming Ukraine. Stop arming Israel. Stop economic sanctions and proxy wars. Pursue diplomacy, detente.”

Conventional political wisdom in Britain holds that elections are not won or lost on foreign policy, but for Germany war and sanctions have had a huge domestic impact, soaring energy prices and a drive to replace cheaper Russian energy with pricier alternatives hitting German industry hard.

“We have factory closures, with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake at the moment at Volkswagen, Thyssen-Krupp, ZF, Bayer.

“And those are the big names. There are a lot more little companies closing.

“The energy policy is totally wrong. Russian energy is bad, but US energy, Saudi energy, energy from the UAE is good? It’s hypocrisy.

“And we want to end this artificial energy crisis because it is causing the deindustrialisation of Germany, the collapse of the economy. Millions of people are suffering from high energy prices which also lead to higher food prices.”

A lot of this applies in Britain, too, but Germany, as the premier manufacturing power in Europe, has seen its flagship automotive and chemicals industries hit still more severely. 

Dagdelen points out that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens has stated openly that money for schools, healthcare and pensions must be cut to spend more on rearmament. In Britain, too, we have a government that refuses to lift the two-child benefit cap (estimated to cost about £2.5 billion a year) on the grounds there isn’t the money, while pledging £3bn to Ukraine for “as long as it takes” — but ministers do not usually state their priorities so baldly.

And Dagdelen predicts that Germany’s economic crisis — it is the only major European economy which has not grown at all for three years — is going to get worse.

“The economic crisis is upon us. The social impact comes later.” When the job cuts begin to bite, when the redundancy payments run out, when unemployment benefit — initially set at 60 per cent of your last income in Germany — drops to the social minimum after one year.

The BSW argues that Germany’s war policy serves US interests, not its own, and Dagdelen is not the first to note that the big manufacturers relocating production abroad are often building new plants in the US. Washington stands accused of deliberately using the war to deindustrialise Europe to its own advantage.

Yet one bizarre aspect of European leaders’ responses to Donald Trump’s return to the presidency is a seeming determination to continue the war even if the US loses interest.

“They are insane!” she exclaims. “They pass resolutions saying even if the US won’t send weapons any more, we will do it, we can send Taurus missiles.” Like Britain’s Storm Shadows, these require active involvement from the supplying military to fire. “So that means Germans firing missiles into Russia,” she notes grimly.

Will Trump end the war? “If he does, good. By some counts more than a million people have been killed in it, and it is the working class who are being sent to the front lines.

“But he is no peace angel,” she observes, pointing to his demands that other Nato countries raise military spending to 5 per cent of GDP — which in Germany would equate to almost 50 per cent of the federal budget. There is a strong possibility Trump will simply make Europe pay more for the Ukraine war while he shifts US attention to the Middle East, China and Latin America.

It is the BSW’s consistent opposition to imperialism and war which sets it apart from all other parties, she says, rejecting the idea that the far-right Alternative for Germany is also a “peace party.”

“They are fans of the US tech billionaires,” she says, pointing to their support from the world’s richest man Elon Musk. “They are ready to give Trump higher military spending, and when Trump says he wants us to spend 5 per cent, he means we should be buying US weapons and supporting the US military-industrial complex.

“They support the enlargement of Nato, drone wars, arming Israel throughout its killings in Gaza despite the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, German involvement in bombing Yemen.

“The AfD is not a peace party. It has more in common with the others.”

The BSW is also accused of echoing AfD anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dagdelen disputes this.

“It’s ridiculous to say we’re right-wing because we don’t want to overstretch society through unmanageable illegal immigration.

“Germany is a social welfare state, and that cannot be afforded unless you have borders. And the pressure that puts on services, rents and so on is increasing and feeding the growth of the far right.”

Germany’s answer to the international refugee crisis, she argues, should be to tackle the root causes by prioritising diplomacy to bring the wars people are fleeing to an end. A left which sees nation states as more of a problem than transnational corporations, moving labour to cut costs, is one she feels has lost its way.

That view, that the left needs to return to first principles and has been distracted by fetishising individual autonomy, has informed the BSW’s opposition to gender self-identification, which along with many British feminists she says undermines women’s rights. In Germany, you may change your legal gender annually.

“That means you have to be given access to women’s refuges, or if jailed you go to a women’s prison. We say that means there is no protection for women any more.”

She also takes a strong line against the commodification of women’s bodies, which she sees both in the normalisation of prostitution and in the burgeoning international surrogacy industry.

“It’s gross! You cannot defend women’s rights and be in favour of prostitution. It reduces the woman to an object.”

Germany legalised prostitution in 2002, and its mega-brothels have become international hubs for sex tourism, but political pressure to change the law has been growing. Reports such as one in 2022 by Dr Melissa Farley have challenged claims legalisation makes it safer, with the industry still dominated by organised crime and an estimated 90 per cent of Germany’s prostitutes being victims of illegal trafficking.

Dagdelen stresses that any change in the law must avoid criminalising prostituted women. “We favour the Nordic Model,” she says, one which criminalises the buying rather than the selling of sex. And she believes the law will change.

As for surrogacy, we are now seeing “the industrialisation of pregnancies” through commercial exploitation of poor women, often from the global South, producing children for the rich. It’s big business, worth nearly $18 billion last year.

The BSW’s positions on such questions show a willingness to challenge received wisdom on the left, and Dagdelen points out that freedom of speech is another plank of their election campaign.

While the most obvious repression in Germany is directed at the peace movement — it is now a criminal offence to say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and marchers to Rosa Luxemburg’s tomb carrying Palestinian banners were attacked by police last month — she says the problem goes wider, with “cancel culture” seeing people lose their jobs, especially in academia, because they say the wrong thing about Israel, Russia or a host of subjects from the Covid lockdowns to sex-based rights.

Asserting the right to debate such topics is one reason she defends the decision to form the BSW, splitting from Die Linke, as a gift to German democracy, presenting voters with choices the other parties had taken off the table.

She is confident the polls, which sometimes place BSW under the 5 per cent threshold for entry to the Bundestag, underestimate its support as a new party and one which attracts an unusual number of former non-voters. 

As for accusations of splitting the left vote, she says the break with Die Linke — whose leadership had led repeated attacks on Wagenknecht for her peace campaigning — was unavoidable.

“Die Linke is in favour of stronger sanctions, a self-destructive economic war against Russia, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in Germany, or even a Baltic sea blockade. 

“Prominent MPs are in favour of weapons deliveries to Ukraine, Israel. When I collected together last year with Ilhan Omar signatures of MPs in Nato states for a ceasefire in Gaza, Die Linke refused to sign because, as they said to me, it was the wrong time. Even three Social Democrats in the Bundestag had signed.”

Meanwhile, the BSW has “made history” already by securing the first ever state-level coalition agreement criticising the stationing of US weapons on German soil in Brandenburg. Its conditions for joining a coalition in the state also included investment in local transport (including a commitment for a minimum of hourly train services to all towns) and an agreement not to close a single hospital, a significant concession in a Germany racked by healthcare cuts.

Now it hopes its manifesto — including proposals for nationalising electricity grids, raising pensions and the minimum wage (to €15 an hour) and forcing the tech giants to pay their share of tax — fleshes out its core peace message to present voters with a real alternative on February 23.

A few days before, I’d been told that the BSW programme was “more social democratic than socialist.”

“Well, we never said we were founding a communist party,” Dagdelen shrugs. “I think it’s good there’s a left social-democratic programme competing in this elections. No-one else is offering one. No-one else is fighting for peace and a strong social state.”