In France, Mélenchon advisor hails Wagenknecht’s anti-immigrant Aufstehen group
By
Alex Lantier
17 September 2018
Djordje Kuzmanovic, an advisor of Unsubmissive France (LFI) leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has hailed his German ally Sahra Wagenknecht’s launching of the xenophobic Aufstehen (Rise up) movement. In a long interview with L’Obs on Wednesday, the former paratrooper and geopolitical analyst posed as a defender of French people against low-wage immigrant workers. He also tried to pass off his xenophobic line as a “Marxist” analysis.
Wagenknecht, a leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) and partner of Mélenchon’s political associate, Oskar Lafontaine, founded Aufstehen at the beginning of September. She declared that Aufstehen was a movement “from below,” though it advocates militarily reinforcing the European Union (EU) and hostility towards refugees. She condemned “free circulation and immigration as the main source of growing competition for low-paid work” and denounced refugees for creating “uncertainty.”
Wagenknecht’s appeal won her the applause of the German neo-fascists. The far-right newspaper Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) hailed Aufstehen’s role in “the debate on a return to the nation state” and declared that the only way to avoid social and political upheavals was to organise “a broad social debate on the massive problems caused by uncontrolled migration.”
And Kuzmanovic added his applause to that of the German far right, hailing in L’Obs Aufstehen’s chauvinist and anti-immigrant line as a strategy for LFI to win workers’ votes.
He said: “Some left-wing voters are turning to right-wing populism, but the main problem is that most of the lower classes abstain. If there is an electorate to be won over, that’s…