Germany’s favourite “firebrand politician”, Sahra Wagenknecht, has finally launched her long-awaited new party, the awkwardly named Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – Reason and Fairness. After years of speculation, the German and some of the international media went into overdrive, predicting that the “leftwing conservative” party (Wagenknecht talks about combining job security, higher wages and generous benefits with a restrictive immigration and asylum policy) would “shake up” the German party system and “could eat into the far right’s support”.
But is a party led by Wagenknecht, a former member of the far-left Die Linke (The Left) party, really the “miracle cure” for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? Based on what we have seen in neighbouring countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands, the chances seem slim that the so-called icon of the German left will rescue working-class voters from the claws of the AfD. In fact, it is more likely that she and her new party will strengthen the far-right agenda.
Sure, Wagenknecht has launched her new party at a perfect time. Germany is heading for its first two-year recession since the early 2000s its national statistics office warned this week. The current three-way governing coalition led by Olaf Scholz is deeply unpopular, with broad resistance building to an expected new round of austerity policies. Scholz’s party, the centre-left SPD, and the Greens are polling just 28% – combined!
The Left, Wagenknecht’s former party, consistently polls about 4%, (still) under the electoral threshold to enter parliament, while the AfD has recently won many new supporters, not least from The Left. Finally, the election calendar this year is extremely favourable, with three state elections in the east of the country in in autumn, and European elections in June – where Germany uses a proportional system without an electoral threshold and parties need only 1% of the national vote to gain a seat in the European parliament.
The German media are also desperate for a new “populist” party that they can cover more favourably than the still largely ostracised AfD. And, despite the fact that she was relevant for only a few years in German politics – as co-leader of the opposition from 2015 to 2017 – Wagenknecht has enjoyed an outsized media presence throughout her career. In fact, you could even say that she has become mainly a media phenomenon. Although distrusted and eventually marginalised by her own colleagues in The Left, and having later led a failed “collective movement” – Aufstehen (Stand Up), the (unsuccessful) predecessor of her new party – Wagenknecht has remained one of the most prominent and popular politicians in the German media.
Probably most importantly, there is significant electoral potential for this new party. In September 2023, a poll found that one in five Germans “could imagine” voting for the (not yet founded) party. In fact, as the German political scientist Sarah Wagner recently argued, a significant part of the German electorate combines leftwing economic views with rightwing cultural views, but no German party offers such a “leftwing authoritarian” (or “leftwing conservative”) programme. Unlike other far-right parties in western Europe, such as the French National Rally (RN) or the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the AfD has not (yet) made the switch from a pro-market to a welfare chauvinist agenda.
But, although Wagner and her colleagues found that Wagenknecht “has the ability to build bridges between left and right”, they were less sure “whether current AfD voters would be willing to turn their backs on the AfD and vote for a Wagenknecht party instead”. Leaving aside that leftwing authoritarians tend to be less likely to vote, they also tend to vote rightwing more often than leftwing, particularly when cultural issues such as immigration dominate the political agenda, as they have been doing for most of the 21st century so far.
And given that such issues continue to dominate, Wagenknecht’s “anti-immigrant” and “anti-woke” discourse will only strengthen the mainstreaming of far-right talking points. In most cases, this leads to more, not less, electoral support for the far right – as in the the most recent Dutch elections, in November 2023. The Dutch Socialist party (SP) campaigned on an “old left” platform combining traditional leftwing economic positions, for example on healthcare, with demands for a temporary stop on migrant workers and a popular leader, Lilian Marijnissen, attacking “identity politics”. But it lost yet again, while the (combined) far right won a postwar record number of votes. In some countries this “leftwing conservative” approach has led to a fall in far-right support: for example, it benefited the Danish Social Democrats. But even this was mostly because of internal problems in the far-right party, and eventually gave way to a successful new Danish anti-immigrant party.
So, while the Wagenknecht party will undoubtedly gain some good electoral results in 2024, it is very doubtful that it will transform the German political system. True, her split from The Left caused the disbanding of its parliamentary party. But rather than actually causing The Left’s demise, Wagenknecht simply hammered the final nail into its coffin. And rather than “saving democracy”, as she has vowed to do, she is more likely to help to weaken it, by further mainstreaming and normalising far-right narratives and policies.
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Cas Mudde is a Dutch political scientist, the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today