Around 800 Hamburg residents came together at the fish market this week to kick off the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” for the European elections. MOPO introduces the heads of the BSW.

In addition to Wagenknecht himself, the former left-wing Bundestag members Fabio De Masi and Zaklin Nastic also railed against the traffic light coalition on the podium. The audience liked it. There is currently no regional association in Hamburg – the party only has 16 members here – but that is about to change.

Fabio De Masi’s return to the political arena may have surprised many. “My decision is not part of a wing dispute and I do not plan to get involved in another political formation in the foreseeable future,” he said in 2022 after leaving the Left Party. The 44-year-old Hamburg resident previously sat in the European Parliament from 2014 to 2017 and then in the Bundestag.

De Masi made a name for himself as a financial expert, for example in clearing up the Wirecard and Cum-Ex scandals. In 2021 he first quit the Bundestag, and a year later he resigned from the Left. De Masi spoke of a “blatant failure” on the part of the key players and, in the style of Wagenknecht, criticized the left-wing social policy and the way the comrades dealt with the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine.

Why return now? “The traffic light is driving the German economy into the basement with its economic and energy policy and has strengthened the AfD in surveys. I have been asked by numerous people, including Sahra Wagenknecht, to get involved again,” he tells MOPO. He has also continued to be involved in financial issues in recent years. “As a member of parliament, however, you have better instruments for this, and unfortunately there are not many in politics who do this work.” According to De Masi, the left is no longer a politically relevant force due to its own mistakes and is hardly in the reality of work and life anchored by numerous people.

In the European Parliament, the self-proclaimed “financial detective” wants, for example, to ensure fairer taxation of large US corporations and “increase pressure on diplomatic initiatives in the Ukraine war and the Gaza war”.

The Bundestag member Zaklin Nastic is supposed to set up the regional association of the BSW in Hamburg. When that will happen, however, is anyone’s guess. When MOPO asked, neither the 44-year-old nor the party provided any current information.

Nastic was elected to the Bundestag in 2017 for the Left – as the only member of the comrades from Hamburg. She had previously been a state spokesperson.

But as Nastic increasingly advocated for Sahra Wagenknecht’s positions, the rifts between her and the regional association became deeper and deeper. Two examples: In February 2023, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer started a “peace demonstration” in Berlin, with which Hamburg’s Left Party wanted nothing to do because there was no demarcation to the right. Nastic went along anyway.

Recently, Nastic and the regional association no longer spoke to each other. After announcing her resignation, the 44-year-old retained her mandate and went to BSW. At the end of last year, Nastic was the one who introduced Wagenknecht’s movement to potential voters in Hamburg. In doing so, she presented the alliance as a political home for all those who, as she says, would be “defamed”: regardless of whether they were gender opponents, opponents of vaccination, opponents of climate activists or concerned citizens.

If the BSW founds a regional association in time before the 2025 general election and competes here, it is likely that Nastic will play an important role.

Metin Kaya was a member of the Left for 18 years, most recently serving as a migration expert for the parliamentary group in the Hamburg parliament. Shortly after the BSW was founded, he changed parties. The 62-year-old has retained his mandate.

The political direction of the Left has changed to such an extent that it no longer corresponds to his idea of ​​socialism, he wrote in a statement. In his view, any criticism or dissenting opinion within the party is labelled as “openness to the right”.

At the presentation of the BSW in Hamburg, Kaya showed his attitude to the topic of migration: “Anyone who is politically persecuted in their home country is entitled to asylum.” Other reasons would not apply to him. He doesn’t find this attitude open to the law.

Like many who switch to BSW, he is also bothered by the left’s peace and migration policies. He describes the NATO defense alliance as a “war alliance” and criticizes arms deliveries to Ukraine. He recently even spread a false report for BSW on “X” that said NATO partner France had sent troops to Ukraine.

Angelika Traversin was previously known as the controversial leader of the Left in Hamburg-Nord. In 2023 she was warned in the district assembly because she went to the desk without permission and started talking. This was preceded by a request from the left for a minute of silence “to commemorate the Palestinian children and all those who died in the Middle East conflict”.

The other factions rejected it: not all people were included and Hamas was not named as the starting point of the war. “If you want to, you can interpret it that way, but it wasn’t meant that way,” Traversin told MOPO at the time.

At the beginning of this year she left the Left and joined the BSW. When it comes to housing policy issues, the Left would “ingratiate itself more and more to the Greens” and adopt outdated social policy, Traversin told MOPO about the reasons. “During the Corona period, people didn’t dare to defend themselves against encroachments on fundamental rights,” is their opinion. That’s why a new form of politics is needed in order to have more freedom of expression again.

By Ann-Christin Busch

The original for this article “Sahra Wagenknecht’s Quartet of Apostates from Hamburg” comes from Mopo.