An anti-migration, leftist renegade is shaking up German politics

Erfurt: Sahra Wagenknecht, who has never met a political party she could tolerate, has founded her own, and she is shaking up German politics with a combination of right-wing nationalism and left-wing socialism, articulated with seriousness and fluency.

After a career in communist and left-wing politics, Wagenknecht, 55, started the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW by its German initials, only in January. It has taken off like a rocket, running third in three states in elections starting Sunday, all in the former East Germany, where she grew up.

“The incarnation of anti-Americanism”: Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.Credit: Getty Images

There, her party is polling between 15 per cent and 20 per cent, well ahead of any of the three parties in government in Berlin but behind the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the front-runner in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. Nationally, her party is polling as high as 9%, forcing her way into the conversation before federal elections in September 2025.

Germany’s mainstream parties are losing their dominance. Wagenknecht has benefited from the crumbling of the old order. In Germany’s new political universe, she is something of a loose electron, difficult to characterise, adding volatility and further precipitating the breakdown of a political spectrum where left and right were once neatly and predictably arrayed.

Though coming from the left, her strength derives in part from sharing many of the same positions as the AfD, including calling for a sharp reduction in migration and the end to aid for Ukraine, but without any neo-Nazi tinge.

She supports Germany’s constitutional democracy and rejects leaving the European Union and NATO, unlike the AfD. So she is considered a safer vote for Germans angry with their current government, upset by migration, worried about war with Russia and American influence over Germany, but unwilling to support a proto-fascist party.

Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) political party, poses with a supporter during campaigning in Thuringia state elections in Eisenach, Germany.Credit: Getty Images

In an interview, Wagenknecht rejects ideological labelling.

“We don’t use those blinders,” she said. “If you consider the struggle for social justice, for less inequality, as something left-wing, the, of course we are left-wing in that sense. At the same time, we are in favour of limiting migration, which is supposedly not so left-wing.”

“So for many people,” she added, “the categories of left and right are no longer comprehensible”.

Wagenknecht is particularly acerbic attacking the mainstream left for its desire to cure the world before dealing with the problems of Germans. The Green party, a member of the federal coalition, “is considered left-wing but has become a warmonger” over supporting Ukraine, she said.

She believes that President Vladimir Putin of Russia has a point in rejecting NATO’s expansion, which, she says, “has obviously not ensured peace but, on the contrary, increased the confrontation”.

While she condemns Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, she wants a quick negotiated end to the war and an end to German support for Kyiv. “There is no other way than negotiation to stop people dying,” she said. “I don’t trust Putin at all,” she added. “But we have to try to find a compromise.”

She is considered, even by her opponents, to be a superb communicator and masterful at touching raw nerves in the population. One can argue with her, and she appears to have no discernible sense of humour, but she seems to say what she means.

The Left ended up “alienating itself from its voters, and important social issues — good wages, good pensions — were no longer their focus — instead, woke identity politics,” she said.

Sahra Wagenknecht

The arc of her life and her politics is remarkable. She was born in 1969 in East Germany to a German art-dealer mother and an Iranian who had come to West Berlin to study. When she was 3, her father returned to Iran; she was raised by her grandparents in a small village in Thuringia, where, she has said, she was regularly insulted for her mixed race and darker colouring.

After 1989, she went to university, eventually getting a doctorate, but remained true to the party of the former leadership, rejecting capitalism and capitulation to the West. She was elected to the European Parliament in 2004.

Later, she served on the executive committee of the party Die Linke (The Left), which resulted from a merger with Western leftists in 2007. After an early divorce, she later married Oskar Lafontaine, a founder of the party, whom she had once dismissed as a “social democrat”.

In the Bundestag, she became a prominent spokesperson for the party but had conflicts with its leaders, a pattern of hers, and she finally left the party last October before founding her own.

Asked if she considers herself, as the German news media do, “a disrupter” who is uncomfortable in any party she has ever joined, Wagenknecht said no. The Left ended up “alienating itself from its voters, and important social issues — good wages, good pensions — were no longer their focus — instead, woke identity politics,” she said.

As for the traditional centrist parties, she said, they embraced privatisation, deregulation and “neoliberalism, a political agenda that has made the majority of society worse off and their lives less stable.” She added, “This is something many people reject, which is why these parties no longer have much support.”

“The support we are getting, that confirms us,” she said. Before her party, she said, “inconvenient people who want to express their protest” had no alternative other than the AfD. “Now we offer them a respectable way to express their discontent.”

The rise of her party is indicative of a larger shift in Germany, argued Jan Techau, director for Europe at the Eurasia Group. “The party landscape is in massive and rapid transition, even if it doesn’t feel that way in Berlin,” he said. “These elections this fall will make this massive change visible for the first time, and it will have an impact on the national elections next year.”

The AfD and Wagenknecht are pressing on “a mix of unattended issues that the main parties are too lazy or too afraid or ideologically too ashamed to address,” he said, citing rising crime, migration, the failure to integrate migrants and the pressure they put on previously homogenous communities.

Carsten Schneider, a Thuringian who is the federal government’s representative to eastern Germany, prefers to emphasise the volatility of party loyalty in the east after the fall of the wall. Wagenknecht skilfully plays on “very simple anti-Americanism, Germany as a big Switzerland” between the superpowers, anti-migration backlash and anti-elitism, he said. “Let’s just say she’s playing the piano,” he said, with a smidgen of reluctant admiration.

Bodo Ramelow, the current head of Thuringia from The Left, said, “She becomes the incarnation of anti-Americanism; she hits the nerve of the people.” He added that she was excellent at playing “the politics of emotion.”

In a recent interview with the Die Zeit newspaper, Wolf Biermann, 87, a German singer-songwriter and former East German dissident, was typically more blunt. “Sahra Wagenknecht is the anachronistic head of a personality-cult party, the typical structure of totalitarian party apparatuses,” he said.

When I asked if her party, which keeps its membership small and secret, was built on Leninist lines, Wagenknecht bristled. “This has nothing to do with Leninism,” she said, but only with trying to build a party that does not “attract a lot of adventurers or radicals.” The AfD, she noted, began as a party of conservative economists.

Wagenknecht is open that her focus is on next year’s federal election. But if the parties of the federal coalition do badly in these state votes, coupled with their internal squabbling and fatigue, she would welcome early elections — presumably before her own party is tainted by real politics.

“Many people wish for early elections,” she said. “They wish that this coalition, which has nothing in common anymore, has no plan, no concept, does not cling to power for another year.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.