By Thomas Escritt
SUHL, Germany (Reuters) - Trains laden with battle tanks passing her window awakened dark fears for Kathrin Ruck, who on Sunday will vote for a party which promises to bring an end to the war in Ukraine by halting Germany's weapons shipments to Kyiv.
"I'm scared that one day this war will be directed against Germany," said the legal secretary, 50, from Sonneberg in Thuringia, a region which until 1990 was occupied by the Soviet army as part of communist East Germany.
"That's no problem for Russia."
Though there is no indication the tanks she saw were heading to Ukraine, such fears have helped push the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance from a standing start a few months ago to second or third place in polls ahead of state parliament elections this Sunday in the eastern German states of Thuringia and Saxony.
But even if it won it would be in no position to deliver on its promise.
State governments run schools, law enforcement and social services. And few believe ending Germany's supply of arms would stop Ukraine fighting to repel the Russian forces who invaded in February 2022.
Yet the BSW, created in January by an exodus from the far-left Left party, has cast the state elections - three are being held this autumn, all in the east - as a referendum on Germany's support for Ukraine.
Blending social conservatism and left-wing economics, it promises higher pensions, better schools, less immigration without excluding refugees, better jobs but fewer onerous regulations for employers, and above all a sense of certainty.
BREAKING THE IMPASSE
Supporters say it is honesty that they prize in Wagenknecht, leader of the party that bears her name.
"She believes in what she says and in what she advocates," said Milo Schroeder, a 17-year-old fan who cast his first vote for her at the European Parliament elections and gazed with adoration as Wagenknecht made her speech.
Wagenknecht presents her party as the answer to the impasse in the country's politics created by the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany.
"It can't go on like this. There has to be something new," Wagenknecht told an audience on the main square of Suhl, dominated by a Stalinist-style House of Culture built by the Communists in the 1950s.
Every party, including hers, refuses to govern with the AfD, complicating coalition arithmetic when its legislators take as many as a third of seats in Germany's parliaments. In Thuringia, an unwieldy minority government under Left politician Bodo Ramelow keeps it from power.
Party rules prevent the conservatives, running second in Thuringia, from working with the first-placed AfD or the Left - successor to East Germany's communist party. The BSW, despite being every bit as much of a communist successor party as the Left, is a possible partner.
No mainstream party is likely to drop its support for Ukraine because of an upstart's regional success, but a local win could shape public discourse. Nationwide, the party is polling 9% - enough to make for tricky coalition negotiations.
RUTHLESS DISCIPLINE
The daughter of an absent Iranian immigrant father and a German mother, Wagenknecht grew up an impassioned Communist in East Germany, writing fan letters to that country's prominent intellectuals in a looping handwriting that she fashioned into an imitation of Persian script.
In the early 1990s she drew up stridently Marxist policy documents for the communist Socialist Unity Party's (SED) democratic successor.
"Politicians aren't paid to make people's lives harder," she told the crowd in Suhl, where the party had its best European election performance. "They're paid to make things easier.
Katja Wolf, BSW's leader in Thuringia, a former mayor of Eisenach, where Martin Luther first translated the Bible into German, joined because she saw in the BSW a party that could at last take the fight to the AfD.
The two parties share an anti-immigration, anti-NATO stance that pro-Kremlin social media hails.
Ruthless discipline is one of the party's secrets. It has only a few dozen hand-picked members nationwide, mainly ex-Left and Social Democrat politicians and some local businesspeople.
Public filings show that the party has received around 4 million euros in donations from a wealthy couple with no public profile who in the one media interview they gave said they wanted to support a party that stood up for peace.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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