Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) party will not form a new alternative left-wing European Parliament bloc.
This is after “it became clear that we would not reach the criteria” of 23 MEPs from seven countries needed for a group to be recognised, its lead MEP candidate Fabio de Masi told Brussels Signal.
“Our Plan A was to form a new group with the Five Star Movement” from Italy, said de Masi, who was elected as an MEP in the June 6-9 EP ballot along with five other BSW candidates.
“We had around 20 MEPS from six countries secured at some point,” falling just short of the 23 required, he said.
The Five Star Movement’s eight MEPs will now attempt to join the Left bloc instead, he said, where they will sit with Germany’s Die Linke, Ireland’s Sinn Féin and the French La France Insoumise.
The BSW, which has ruled out joining the Left, will sit with the so-called Non-Inscrits who do not belong to a political group in the EP.
De Masi said he still hoped the BSW would secure the necessary members to form a group in the future as, according to him, MEPs grow more disillusioned with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
“We see chances that members of The Left and S&D [Socialists & Democrats] will not be happy with their groups in the future,” he added.
“Not every party in these groups is in line with either the backroom deals around Ms von der Leyen and some feel that diplomatic initiatives in the Ukraine war should be given a greater role,” de Masi said.
The BSW members will not sit with the Left, he said, because his party “had split with the German Die Linke which we don’t see as a relevant political force anymore”.
Since then, the “meagre results of Die Linke in the European election with 2.7 per cent prove our hypothesis”, he said.
Die Linke, whose leader Martin Schirdewan remained group co-chair of The Left bloc for another term on July 3, lacked “realistic and attractive concepts or profile on issues such as peace, economic prosperity, social justice or well-managed migration”, said de Masi.
If in the future BSW was able to form a bloc, de Masi said they “would not call it an alternative Left but a broader political alliance from leftist and social democratic and other democratic forces”, with a common focus on “diplomacy and peace, public investment and labour issues”, he concluded.
A longtime political associate of the BSW party’s eponymous founder Sahra Wagenknecht, de Masi was in the European Parliament from 2014-2017 as a member of Die Linke, before becoming a member of Germany’s Bundestag from 2017-2021.
In September 2022, he left Die Linke and appeared alongside Wagenknecht when she launched BSW in January 2024.
