The Left – and formerly left – in German politics

Sahra Wagenknecht is one of the strangest characters in German politics.

In this image from her Facebook account, she declares that “Alaska was progress,” referring to the Trump-Putin summit on Friday. To which I find myself asking, progress on what? Giving Putin a chance to highlight Trump’s inability to do anything to bring the war in Ukraine to an end? Since apparently nothing of any diplomatic substance was accomplished – where the progress is, I don’t see.

The rest of the captioning says, “Now [German Chanellor] Merz and Zelenskyy have to deliver: Renunciation of NATO, recognize the front lines – otherwise the dying will not end!”

An article from Deutsche Welle from February gives a summary of Wagenknecht most recent career turn of leaving the Left Party and founding a party named after herself, the Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which failed to win seats in the German Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) in elections earlier this year. (1) She had previously been a major leader of the Left Party, which for some reason I’ve never seen explained is called in English by its German name, Die Linke (The Left).

She was a member of the SED at the time of German unification in 1990. She then headed a group called the Communist Platform, which stressed militant left positions in the post-unification environment within the PDS. Over the years, she started adopting positions that weren’t typical “left” ones. She started having nice things to say about ordoliberalism, a conservative form of economic theory that shaped German economic policies under Konrad Adenauer’s Chancellorship and still holds a lot of influence within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Ordoliberalism is a variant of the free-market, cater-to-billionaires view of “neoliberalism.” She also started supporting a version of anti-immigrant politics. And when the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, she took a kind of antiwar stand that was hard to distinguish form a pro-Russian position.

That combination in her current BSW incarnation starts to look uncomfortably like that of the far-right AfD, the German party that J.D. Vance, the US Vice President who is an also an Opus Dei enthusiast and Peter Thiel disciple, promoted at the Munich Security Conference in February.

But she has hedged her positioning on the Russo-Ukraine War, calling Putin a “criminal” over it in 2024. Although in the image above, she’s also seems to be putting the full responsibility on Zelenskyy and the German Chancellor for what happens. All this is interesting in the context of political positioning. But Russia doesn’t seem to see a lot of advantage in a ceasefire or peace settlement at the moment. And in the context of that war, a stable settlement would have to include agreements with the US President over anti-Russian sanctions, among other things. Despite the “progress” Wagenknecht seems to find in Friday’s Alaska show, anything like a diplomatic approach by Trump 2.0 that would provide hope for such an outcome in the immediate future is still sadly not in evidence.

Who/what is the Left Party (Die Linke)?

Wagenknecht’s BSW seems to be trying to appeal simultaneously to the left and the right, including what still seems to be a somewhat favorable view of Russia among many in the former East German states. But BSW’s ability to pull substantial support from either the AfD or the Left Party constituencies is not clear at this point.

To give a Biblical-style genealogy of The Left Party’a evolution, the former East German Communist Party, which was technically named the Socialist Unity Party (SED) begat the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS), which later paired with discontented supporters of the Social Democratic and Green parties to form the Left Party, which won 12% of the vote in its first national electoral outing in 2009. This year reshuffled the deck on the German left:

In January [2025] Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz had enlisted support from the [far-right] AfD in an attempt to pass a controversial immigration bill. The measure ultimately did not pass, but the effort was seen as a weakening of the post-World War II Brandmauer (“firewall”) that prohibited cooperation with parties deemed to be extremist. Heidi Reichinnek, the Left’s parliamentary coleader, delivered an impassioned speech to the Bundestag that condemned any attempt to convey such power to an extremist group. In the immediate wake of this address, which was viewed millions of times on TikTok, membership in the Left skyrocketed. Reichinnek’s social media fame combined with traditional grassroots electioneering efforts to lift the Left out of the political wasteland; the party captured nearly 9 percent of the vote and 64 seats in the Bundestag. Among voters aged 24 and younger, the Left won an impressive 25 percent, a total that equaled that of the CDU and the SPD combined. With 4.97 percent of the vote, BSW fell just short of the cutoff for representation in the Bundestag. (1)

Ines Schwerdtner was a journalist who ran the left-intellectual journal Das Argument (which is broadly speaking in the “critical theory” sphere of political thought) and in 2020 was a co-founder of the German version of the social-democratic journal Jacobin. In this interview from March, she addresses the German political situation: She became the co-chair of The Left Party in 2024.

This is an English-language interview with her from March of this year talking about the Left Party’s results in the national elections: (2)

The portraits on the wall behind her are Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, both icons of the old SED.

She warns against the possibility that Germany could “become like Austria” and “work together with the fascists on a daily basis.” She’s presumably referring here to the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), with whom the conservative Austrian Christian Democrats (ÖVP) formed coalitions twice in the last quarter century, both times with bad results.

The NATO states in Europe, without the United States, spend roughly twice as much on their military as Russia, even accounting for purchasing power. So, at least if you think that the Russian government is composed of rational actors, the story that Vladimir Putin’s about to attack isn’t credible. We have to take people’s anxieties seriously, but not fall into the liberal discourse that says we need more military spending all the time.

The problem with any sort of “peace coalition” with the BSW and AfD is that they’re pretending that if only we had Nord Stream up and running again, then everything would be fine. This is not true. You also can’t attribute Germany’s industrial decline purely to higher energy prices; it’s not that simple. We have a general problem with underinvestment and are falling behind on numerous technologies. So we are caught between two fake news camps who are pretending to solve the whole problem in one fell swoop: by either finally defeating Putin, or by just striking a deal with him. I don’t think that is how geopolitics or industrial policy works. The problems we see now have a lot to do with a wider economic interdependency. But it’s much, much harder to translate that into political communication in a media discourse that is split between those two camps.

As a socialist party, we say: we could get our energy from sources other than gas and oil. But as long as we cannot really translate that alternative to the people — and that’s our job — it’s much easier to imagine that all that’s missing is Nord Stream. That’s easier than saying that we should have €500 billion investment in infrastructure to have clean energy under popular control. So I think we need to work on a left-wing populism that provides that kind of positive alternative, but one that is based on sound policy and not just empty rhetoric for daydreamers. [my emphasis] (3)

I assume that in those comments she’s taking digs at both BSW and the dubious antiwar posture of the AfD. (Everything about the AfD is dubious.)

I’ll be curious to see how Schwerdtner and the Left Party handle the rearmament debates over the coming months. As always, comparing the amounts spent on defense between companies is not in itself a clear measure of their relative strengths in actual combat. But it’s at least more meaningful than comparing the percentages of GDP being spent on defense, which in itself is even a less meaningful comparison.

Notes:

(1) Editors (2025): Left Party. Encyclopedia Britannica 02/24/20252025, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Left-Party-political-party-Germany> (Accessed: 08/16/2025).

(2) How The Left Beat The Odds In Germany’s Elections-Ines Schwerdtner Interview. Novara Media YouTube channel 03/04/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Left-Party-political-party-Germany> (Accessed: 08/16/2025).

(3) Jacobin 11/17/2024. <https://jacobin.com/2024/11/die-linke-schwerdtner-wagenknecht-workers> (Accessed: 08/16/2025).