Volker Schmitz recently wrote a thought-provoking piece concerning the strategy currently pursued by Sahra Wagenknecht, Die Linke’s top candidate for the upcoming Bundestag elections and the most recognizable figure on the party’s left wing. His article essentially amounts to a defense — though a conditional one — of Wagenknecht’s attacks on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s handling of the refugee crisis. He reads these as a necessary tactical posture for winning over working-class voters, who might otherwise be tempted to vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The AfD is the country’s emerging “right-wing populist party,” although this description might be too sanitized for a party whose deputies in the state assembly of Saxony have recently submitted a formal inquiry on the costs of sterilizing refugee children.

Schmitz’s article is timely. Since Syriza’s capitulation in the summer of 2015, the weakened left, in Europe and also beyond, has been soul-searching. It is trying to reinvent itself in a world where its predictions about capitalism’s worst crisis since the 1930s are validated on a daily basis, but where the main beneficiaries of the political center’s unraveling are forces that fuse anti-establishment rhetoric with latent and not-so-latent racism. The situation poses a pressing challenge for the Left, not least because these racist forces appear to have made significant inroads among the “traditional” working class, historically the backbone of trade unionism and social democracy.