Going on the offensive

By Pascal SteinwachsLex Kleren Switch to German for original article

"déi jonk Lénk" wants to work for a fairer society. However, the youth group of the "déi Lénk" does not have a good word to say about government policy.

Tania Mousel is 31 years old, lives in Sassenheim, works at the National Library and has been with "déi Lénk" since 2017. She has been the spokesperson for "déi jonk Lénk" since November 2020, together with Smail Suljic, who was busy with his studies and therefore unable to attend at the time of the interview, which took place on Monday last week. Instead, Kevin Sousa, 24 years old, from Esch/Alzette, took part in the interview. He recently finished his university studies and then did an internship at "déi Lénk", which he joined in 2018.

Lëtzebuerger Journal: Sahra Wagenknecht, probably the best-known politician of the Left in Germany, accuses her own party in her book of worrying too much about gender symbols, LGBTQIA+ or cancel culture, and of not noticing the real problems that a normal worker has in his everyday life. As a representative of the Luxembourg left-wing politics, what do you say to this assessment, which caused quite a stir not only in Germany?

Tania Mousel: I agree and disagree with Ms Wagenknecht at the same time. I haven't read the book yet, but it looks as if, by using somewhat pejorative language, she is pretending that the examples you just mentioned are not important to the author. Of course, I absolutely cannot agree with Sahra Wagenknecht, especially since she is relatively well off financially and lives in a cisnormative relationship and for this reason cannot identify with the concerns of many people.

However, I agree with Wagenknecht when she points out that the centre parties do not want anything to change structurally at all. Raising a rainbow flag once a year does nothing to solve the problem and only serves to distract from the broken system.

Kevin Sousa: There are also queer people among the workers. With her statements, Sahra Wagenknecht has simply ignored a large part of the workers she is supposed to represent.

Two years ago, "déi jonk Lénk" renamed itself "ELO! Ekologesch Lénk Jugend-Organisation", but in May 2021 – or so I gather from its Facebook page – it changed its name back to "déi jonk Lénk". Why?

TM: The problem was that there was another movement, "déi jonk Lénk", that had distanced itself from "déi Lénk" and meanwhile changed its name to "Laïka", whereas we, "déi Lénk Jeunes", changed our name to "ELO! Ekologesch Lénk Jugend-Organisation" so as not to be confused with the other organisation. But since ELO! was not necessarily associated with "déi Lénk" and the other grouping is now called "Laïka", we changed our name again.

Sounds complicated …

TM: (laughs) Yes.

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