Sahra Wagenknecht is a well-known German politician and former leading member of Die Linke (The Left). In 2023, she founded her own party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), trying to combine left-wing social policies with more conservative positions on cultural issues and migration issues. Because of her strong media presence and controversial positions, Wagenknecht attracts significant attention on social media platforms.
Studying how her perception changed before and after the founding of the BSW is relevant for understanding how political figures shape online debates and how new parties can influence political discourse in Germany. This helps to highlight the role of social media in shaping public opinion during times of political transition.
We collected the top twenty most relevant comments from each of the top 100 most liked videos on Sarah Wagenknechts YouTube Channel both before and after the founding of the BSW. In total we collected ~2000 comments from each period from which we selected the 500 most liked comments to end up with a total of 1000 comments to analyse.
We generated a WordCloud using keybert based on keywords extracted from the comments.
Most common words in YouTube comments – Before/After
Combined from before/after comments on Sahra Wagenknecht.
| Rank | Word (Before) | Count (Before) | Word (After) | Count (After) |
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The comparison of comments before and after the founding of the BSW shows that the overall perception of Sahra Wagenknecht on social media has remained largely stable. In both periods, the most frequent keywords are strongly centered on her as a person with entries like “Wagenknecht” an “Frau Wagenknecht” as one of the most mentioned key words. Words like “frieden” and “deutschland” also appear as some of the to comments both before and after the founding of the BSW.
Although the relative frequencies of some words shifted—such as “krieg” being more present before than after, the dominant narrative remained consistent: Wagenknecht is discussed as a central political figure associated with peace, democracy, and strong rhetoric. Positive evaluative terms like “danke”, “hochachtung”, and “großartig” appear regularly in both timeframes.