Recently, a young left-winger from western Germany told me that he couldn’t remember a time before Die Linke. He’d been in primary school when Germany’s only socialist party was founded fifteen years ago, and it had been a constant presence throughout his life — often, he said, a rather “embarrassing” one. Despite voting for Die Linke, he’d never even considered becoming a member.

As someone who joined the party in 2007, soon after its creation, I couldn’t help but wince a little. I remember the hopeful atmosphere of Die Linke’s early days, when it was demonized in the media and denounced by the political establishment as a cabal of dangerous extremists. The more pushback the party got, it seemed, the more people loved it: campaign rallies were energetic and well-attended, and it marched from one electoral success to another. It was a good time to be a socialist.

As an intern during the 2009 general election campaign, I traveled up and down the country and saw how Die Linke brought together the disparate strands of Germany’s fragmented left, united by the desire to — as Oskar Lafontaine put it at the party’s founding congress — “contribute to the construction of twenty-first century socialism.” The party was far from perfect, and many problems remained unresolved, but things were broadly moving in the right direction. For the first time since the 1950s, Germany had a united socialist opposition, in Parliament and on the streets.