Sahra Wagenknecht has come closer to her goal of splitting the unruly Thuringian BSW around her opponent Katja Wolf. Three members of the Erfurt state parliament announced on Wednesday that they were leaving the parliamentary group and the party. The BSW group now has twelve instead of 15 members. The step came as a surprise; party leader Wolf was not informed. Stefan Wogawa, Roberto Kobelt and Dirk Hoffmeister cited the “destructive attacks” from the federal leadership around party founder Wagenknecht as the motive for leaving.
She had put political stability in Thuringia at risk for “transparent election campaign maneuvers” in Saxony-Anhalt, said Wogawa, previously the parliamentary director of the parliamentary group. At this point he could no longer take part. The work of the Thuringian BSW has long been discredited by the federal leadership. They had been thinking about leaving for six months.
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Wagenknecht's flirtation with the AfD when it comes to electing an AfD prime minister is something he cannot reconcile with his conscience, said Kobelt. Wagenknecht had announced that the BSW would abstain from a third round of voting in Saxony-Anhalt, which would allow AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund to be elected Prime Minister with a relative majority.
At the same time as they left, the three MPs in Thuringia founded a new party. It is called “Your vote counts” and Hoffmeister is its chairman. The three want to work as a parliamentary group in the state parliament in the future; five members are needed for a parliamentary group.
From a “de facto majority” to a true minority government
The stability of the Thuringian BSW is not only shaken by the trio. State parliament member Matthias Herzog had already announced his resignation from the party on Monday. The entrepreneur said he feels an increasing distance from the rude treatment of each other in the BSW. And he saw himself as a “counterpart to the AfD” from the start. If the BSW supports the AfD, that contradicts its basic attitude.
It is unclear whether Herzog will remain in the parliamentary group, as he initially announced, or whether he will now join the new parliamentary group. There are also two supporters of Wagenknecht in the group, Anke Wirsing and Sven Küntzel. They have announced that they will follow the decision of the BSW federal leadership and no longer support CDU Prime Minister Mario Voigt after Chemnitz University of Technology revoked his doctorate.
The BSW crisis is a blow for the blackberry coalition. Because so far the CDU, BSW and SPD had 44 of 88 votes in the state parliament; Prime Minister Voigt described the stalemate as a “de facto majority”. But now the coalition is missing three or four votes instead of one; the stalemate government has become a true minority government. Although the “Blackberry” had to come to an agreement with the opposition left before for a majority, this dependence has now grown. The trio of leavers said that they still had “the greatest agreement with the governing coalition”. But now they are freed from any party discipline and immediately criticized the accumulation of offices in the Thuringian BSW. This is aimed at Wolf, who is not only party leader but also finance minister and deputy prime minister.
Höcke is happy
Björn Höcke was particularly pleased about the further split in the BSW. The AfD is betting that the minority government under Voigt will fail and has identified the BSW as a wedge that can be driven into the blackberry coalition. Höcke, party and parliamentary group leader, now spoke of “days of chaos” in Erfurt. The AfD will submit a motion to dissolve the state parliament so that new elections can be held. It is currently unlikely that the AfD will get a majority in the state parliament: it is 27 votes short of this.
But next Sunday could contribute to the further crumbling of the blackberry alliance. On Saxony-Anhalt's election Sunday, the Thuringian BSW will meet at a special party conference from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. to vote on whether it should leave the government in Erfurt, as Wagenknecht demanded, or continue to govern. The Thuringian BSW has around 550 members, all of whom were accepted centrally by the federal leadership in Berlin. 400 of them only joined at the beginning of the year. The Thuringian party leadership does not know how many of them will come on Sunday or what their attitude will be.
