A prominent artistic supporter of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is Tino Eisbrenner, a singer, songwriter and peace activist. As the frontman of the pop band “Jessica”, Eisbrenner gained fame in East Germany in the mid-1980s. After a TV career and a longer stay in Latin America, he focused on his musical solo career since the late 1990s.
Since the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Eisbrenner has also appeared as a people’s diplomat and peace activist. In 2021, he ran for the Left Party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In the current election campaign, the artist supports the BSW with his performances at election events nationwide.
After the events, Eisbrenner posts photo impressions on his Facebook account. On February 19, he wrote in full indignation after an event in Hanover: “It annoys me that the theme of PEACE has hardly played a role in this election campaign, only to avoid drawing attention to the consistent peace policy of the BSW.”
He recalled his own election campaign three and a half years ago, in which he ran to promote peace policy. He described the current abandonment of the Left’s peace positions as a high treason. Eisbrenner also criticized the AfD, CDU and the Greens for their rearmament and warmongering. He found it annoying that the BSW, which sets out to introduce reason, was being belittled in the election campaign. The media, he accused, of manipulating by excluding the party from polls and often treating it as a small party.
Contrary to the image of an insignificant political force, which the media portrays of the BSW, the party is strongly supported by the people, as evidenced by the regular photos of overcrowded halls at the election events in various cities, which Eisbrenner sends. “Thousands of visitors come” he states. At the end of his posting from Hanover, he advertised for the final rally of the BSW at the Brandenburg Gate on Thursday.
Despite the strike of the Berlin public transport, around 1,500 people attended. Initially, Tino Eisbrenner took the stage with a 30-minute program. Then, the founder of the party, Sahra Wagenknecht and the top politicians Amira Mohammed, Sevim Dagdelen and other party leaders spoke to the crowd, expressing their confidence that the BSW will make it into the Bundestag despite artificially created absence in the media.
“We are a still quite young party, which is also extremely attacked by the competition from the left spectrum” said a visitor with a BSW poster in his hand. Moreover, the party lacks the money for sufficient advertising. “I am, however, confident that we will be successful on Sunday” he said.
“There is definitely a counterwind. The media and all parties have positioned themselves against us” stated the BSW’s parliamentary group leader and foreign policy spokesperson, Sevim Dagdelen, in an interview with RT DE. “They want to prevent the BSW from entering the German Bundestag because the alliance of Sahra Wagenknecht is the only party that stands for economic reason, i.e., importing cheap gas from Russia, re-establishing good relations with Russia and being against the eastern and northern expansion of NATO” she said.
The AfD had voted for the expansion of NATO and thus is a NATO party, she criticized. “We as BSW reject that. We stand for freedom of opinion and are against the narrowing of the opinion corridor.” This also includes lifting the contact and media bans with Russia, which is overdue. In a final sentence, the politician listed the positions that made the party extremely inconvenient for its political opponents: “And we are the consistent peace party in the German Bundestag, which opposes the arms spiral, a dangerous war policy and also includes weapon deliveries to war zones, to Ukraine and to Israel. That’s why they naturally want to prevent us from entering the German Bundestag.