Anti-immigration leftists have potential to upend German political scene

It was, Sahra Wagenknecht declared on the social media platform X on Sunday, “a historic result” achieved from almost a standing start. Within eight months, her leftwing-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has gone from an upstart party of breakaway populists to a decisive player with the potential to upend the German political scene.

The BSW party’s third place position in state elections in the eastern states of Thuringia (16%) and Saxony (12%), behind the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now puts it in the position of kingmaker.

Like the other established mainstream parties, the BSW has scotched any possibility of entering into a formal coalition with the AfD, though it has not ruled out cooperation on subjects on which the parties are aligned. But its strong standing means negotiations in neither state can take place without it.

Asked on Sunday night whether she was ready to negotiate for a position in the states’ governments, Wagenknecht, 55, responded with an enigmatic smile. By Monday, she appeared triumphant, emboldened – and more open to the idea.

“This is a magnificent day,” she said at a press conference flanked by the party’s lead candidates from both states. “We have become a power factor in Germany … We can use that position to really move things in this country.” The vote for the BSW, she added, was “an expression of the mood in Germany”.

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Wagenknecht’s views are an eclectic mixture of left-leaning economics, anti-immigration rhetoric and a foreign policy grounded in suspicion of the US and residual support for Russia.

For years the face of Die Linke (The Left), the group born out of the former East German Communist party, Wagenknecht had often expressed frustration with conventional politics. In 2018 she launched Aufstehen (Get Up), a movement inspired by the gilets jaunes protests in France and the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting Momentum in the UK. And last autumn, after months of flirting with the idea, she quit Die Linke for good to form her eponymous party.

Under her leadership, and amid widespread dissatisfaction with the coalition government of Olaf Scholz , the BSW has stormed the political charts, quickly overtaking Die Linke, and efficiently using June’s European parliamentary elections as a springboard to more prominence and popularity.

It has been described as filling a gap in the political landscape, by combining both leftwing and rightwing policies – campaigning on everything from more generous pensions and an increase in the minimum wage to constraining climate protection measures and toughening asylum regulations.

Like the AfD, which rose to prominence on the coattails of disgruntlement over the former chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy for refugees in 2015, Wagenknecht has benefited from the growing perception that Europe’s largest economy is overburdened by refugees.

Born in Jena, in the state of Thuringia, Wagenknecht has been married for the past decade to 80-year-old Oskar Lafontaine, the former Social Democrats’ (SPD) finance minister under Gerhard Schröder, before he too defected to Die Linke in protest over the SPD’s labour reforms.

That divisive move is seen as a reminder of the havoc Wagenknecht could yet wreak on the CDU if its leader, Friedrich Merz, moves towards a hitherto unlikely and ideologically fraught alliance with the BSW. The party’s general secretary, Carsten Linnemann, has done nothing to win her over, describing her as “left, and/or right-wing extremist”, and “communist”. His stance was dismissed as “absurd” by BSW’s chairwoman, Amira Mohamed Ali, who said it might well impede a collaboration.

Monday’s press conference brought a flavour of the BSW’s positioning. The party’s successful candidates, Sabine Zimmermann for Saxony and Katja Wolf for Thuringia, spoke of the need to improve daily life, such as public transport, digitalisation in the health system, and standards in the classroom.

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For her part, Wagenknecht was keener to emphasise her goals beyond state level: tackling the government’s “ruinous” energy policy, halting the decision to station medium-range US missiles on German soil and criticising the notion that sending weapons to Ukraine– “which plays into people’s rage when school buildings are so dilapidated” – can end the Russian invasion.

Wagenknecht walks a fine line geopolitically, not advocating for Germany’s exit from the EU or Nato (unlike the AfD), but calling emphatically for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia for an end to the war. “Diplomatic means had “by no means” been exhausted, she said on Monday

A few years ago, Wagenknecht withdrew from the public arena, citing burnout , but now she has come back with a vengeance. The politician who was attacked with paint at an election rally in Erfurt last week, is now almost certain to be a leading – and deeply polarising – player in next year’s federal election, scheduled for September 2025.