Sahra Wagenknecht Loses Her Civil War on the German Left
Germany turned to the right in Sunday’s election, with the Christian Democrats (CDU) in first place at 29 per cent and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on just over 20 per cent. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Liberals lost millions of votes. Yet, one party on the left won a surprising reprieve.
The Left Party’s campaign stickers ahead of this election boasted, “Others want to govern. We want to change things.” Its 9 per cent of support (a four-point rise over 2021) and its projected 64 seats in the Bundestag may not be enough to revolutionise German politics. But its members reacted ecstatically to exit polls. Having scored under 3 per cent in last June’s European elections, the party seemed headed towards extinction; now, it seems it can rebuild.
In some regions, the party’s results were even impressive. In Berlin, the Left Party was the single most-voted party. There is much talk of young Germans turning to the AfD, but the Left Party was first-placed among under-25s, especially women. Part of the Left Party consists of post-communists in eastern Germany. But its main surge was in the former west, doubling its scores in states from Bremen to Bavaria.
So, was rallying young progressives the path to success? Germany’s left recently split over just this question. The former Left Party spokeswoman Sahra Wagenknecht has in recent years sharply denounced the “lifestyle left” for speaking to the “woke” and highly educated alone. In late 2023 she quit in order to create a rival, “left-conservative” party, named the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Claiming to represent ignored lower-income Germans, especially in the east, it fused social-democratic economics with calls to halt migration.
The BSW leaned into an anti-establishment image, staunchly opposing arms shipments to Ukraine and Israel. In last June’s European elections, it easily defeated its Left Party ex-comrades, before peaking in September’s regional elections in three eastern states. While the BSW’s subsequent decision to join coalitions headed by the SPD in Brandenburg and CDU in Thuringia may have confused its populist posture, it clearly distanced itself from regular left-wing positions. Its posters showed Wagenknecht’s face emblazoned with the words “Our country wants LESS MIGRATION”.
Yet while Wagenknecht sought to capture working-class voters from the AfD, rather than just rally left-wingers, this doesn’t seem to have happened in practice. Exit polls showed that the BSW’s main sources of support were in fact ex-Social Democrats (440,000 voters), former non-voters (400,000) and ex-Left Party voters (350,000). It seems that only 60,000 people who voted for AfD in 2021 voted for BSW in 2025. While Wagenknecht’s party did well among previous non-voters, far more of them – 1.8 million – went for the AfD. In eastern states, where the AfD was easily in first place, the BSW struggled even to match the Left Party.
Just three weeks ago, most observers expected that the Left Party would miss the 5 per cent threshold to enter parliament. Yet it was the BSW that fell short, with 4.97 per cent in preliminary results. The leading BSW figure Fabio De Masi blamed fake polling for having discouraged voters, and the party is threatening to launch a legal challenge over missing overseas votes. Yet it is hardly clear that the BSW has carved out a viable political niche.
Since the BSW split, the Left Party has itself reoriented. Last October, it elected new co-chairs Ines Schwerdtner, a housing campaigner and former Jacobin editor, and former UN weapons inspector Jan van Aken. In November, I interviewed Schwerdtner about the party’s strategy. As I headed to its offices at Berlin’s Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the same day the election date was set, I wondered if this storied wing of the German left was going to fall.
It didn’t look promising. Schwertdner told me about a pivot to concrete, economic issues, accompanied by a mass canvassing exercise to hear out working-class concerns. But the near-immediate collapse of Scholz’s coalition and the snap election cut short plans for on-the-ground rebuilding. Many accounts of this campaign have instead focused on the Left Party’s social media appeal – and especially the reels of Bundestag speeches by lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek, damning the mainstream parties for echoing AfD talking points on migration.
Has this socialist party broadened its appeal on economic grounds? Or did it just become a rallying point for progressive opinion, faced with the AfD threat? It seems like the two aren’t entirely separate: given a lame-duck centre-left government and a political climate dominated by calls to tighten migration, the Left Party’s messaging on rents and jobs offered something different. It did best among the young and in cities, but it rose across almost all age groups and regions.
I spoke to Schwerdtner again the morning after the election. She told me that her party had enjoyed a “snowball effect” of attention and activism, as its social media impact encouraged “more and more people to join our party” and turn up for its “door-to-door campaign”. Such canvassing is less common in Germany than in the UK. But for Schwerdtner, building up this “ground game” is vital for “listening to people’s worries at their doors”, even after the election is over.
The party claims to have piled on over 20,000 new members, and more may join on this wave of enthusiasm. Some local officials who defected to the BSW may consider their future. Yet this momentum could be hard to maintain. The unity built when faced with the fear of electoral wipeout may come less readily over issues like the war in Ukraine or Israel-Palestine, which party communications often skate over.
There are wider problems in defining a “progressive” or more “class-based” image. Since its creation, the Left Party has repeatedly made state-level alliances with the SPD and Greens, known as “red-red-green” pacts. Such broadly progressive coalitions have often sapped enthusiasm, including after a flagship 2021 referendum on nationalising Berlin’s big corporate landlords: Berliners voted for the measure, which the Left Party and Greens supported, but the SPD stopped it from ever being implemented.
This may not seem an easy climate to promote broad social solidarity. The AfD’s rise has prompted large, cross-party protest marches, yet other parties have also hardened their positions on migration. The Left Party’s anti-fascist rhetoric surely galvanises some voters, but seems insufficient to erode the AfD’s own considerable support.
Schwerdtner insisted that other dividing lines do exist: there are “majorities on crucial topics like rent policies, on prices, and on taxing the rich”. Creating “maximum pressure for change to the better on these points” can help make the “right-wing majority a thing of the past” next time Germans vote.
In this election, the Left Party secured its survival, and left the BSW on the sidelines. It was a reprieve. Schwerdtner knows better than most that this is not yet a victory.
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