Electoral Growth, but Not Stopping the Far Right

There is no doubting the electoral advance itself. June’s European elections saw the BSW running for the first time, scoring 6.2 percent — better than both Die Linke and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), the smallest party in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s national government.

The BSW’s leader, Wagenknecht, was once one of the most visible figures in Die Linke, but she often criticized its leadership. She especially chided the party’s ecological turn, its support for Angela Merkel’s open immigration policy in 2015–16, and its stance on the pandemic, as Wagenknecht instead echoed skepticism about vaccines. After the failure of the short-lived Aufstehen “movement” promoted by Wagenknecht in 2018, the veteran politician eventually broke with Die Linke, taking with her a good part of its leaders and parliamentarians.

The birth of the BSW has been accompanied by considerable media attention, also motivated by the hope that it would help stop the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Unfortunately, these predictions have not come true. In fact, the AfD won the elections in Thuringia and came a close second in Saxony and Brandenburg, all in all achieving its best-ever results.

Yet the BSW’s voters appear to come from other camps. Post-election polls showed that the main source of BSW votes in Thuringia and Saxony was Die Linke, a party that was steeped in crisis long before Wagenknecht decided to break with it. Founded in 2007 in the wake of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) neoliberal turn and deeply rooted in social movements, Die Linke sank in the 2021 elections. During that campaign, the left-wing party had seemed more focused on forming a coalition with SPD and the Greens than in explaining its own platform. The Ukraine war worsened already existing infighting within Die Linke, with the leadership supporting the coalition government’s alignment with Kiev, while Wagenknecht’s wing voiced a growing opposition.

Criticism of sanctions against Russia and of Berlin’s military support to Ukraine has, in fact, been one of the most attractive elements of the BSW’s platform for voters: Wagenknecht has convinced a significant share of the electorate that the government’s pro-Ukraine stance is disastrous for the German economy, highly dependent on Russian gas. In this regard, Wagenknecht has successfully copied AfD, which used to be the only party that clearly criticized sanctions against Russia and military support for Kiev. This is also one of the reasons for the far right’s electoral growth, particularly in the former East.

But Wagenknecht failed in attracting many AfD voters in September’s regional elections. The BSW got more support from former voters of Die Linke, the Christian-Democrats, the SPD, and former abstentionists than it did from former far-right voters. This party has thus far represented a re-ordering of a broad-left electorate more than a rival to the AfD.

A Left-Wing Ordoliberalism

Most of the energy behind left-wing criticisms of BSW refers to its positions on migration. But there are more reasons to consider the new party a threat rather than an opportunity for the radical left.

The first is Wagenknecht’s economic positions. The party has inherited from Die Linke left-wing positions on taxation and on the control of strategic companies by the state and workers. In addition, Wagenknecht voices a necessary criticism of the neoliberal nature of the European Union: she has criticized the so-called Stability and Growth Pact — which hinders public investment — and advocates the elimination of tax havens, effectively tolerated by the EU even within its borders. Yet that is not all. For the former communist Wagenknecht has praised representatives of ordoliberal budget restraint such as the conservative Ludwig Erhard. Her admiration for the German version of neoliberalism translates into an economic discourse where the main subject is not the working class, but small and medium-sized companies (the Mittelstand).

“They have their own sort of business culture, focused on the longer term, the next generation, rather than quarterly returns. They’re embedded in their local communities, often doing business-to-business trading,” said Wagenknecht in a recent interview with New Left Review. For this former member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), “What matters in Germany is the Mittelstand, the strong block of smaller firms that can position themselves against the big corporations. That opposition is as important as the polarity between capital and labor.”

This view is surely different from Die Linke’s own brand of “social” rhetoric, premised on the interests of low earners. Still, the BSW line also resonates with a certain tradition in postwar West Germany, which placed the middle class as the pivot of democracy and the so-called social-market system. For want of a strong and combative workers’ movement, this idealized view of social consensus built around small firms is seemingly able to appeal to parts of the working class itself, and, notably, many former Social Democrat and Christian Democrat voters. But BSW is not challenging this cross-class ideology but actively promoting it.

The new political formation is also far from the Left on climate politics. The BSW program says it hopes to achieve climate neutrality through “the development of innovative key technologies,” while its platform for the European elections advocated the development of “climate neutral fuels.” Still, the weakness of Wagenknecht’s environmental commitment is confirmed by her party’s stand against the abandonment of internal combustion engines by 2035 (as the EU currently plans).

Her position is related to a strong dislike of the Greens, the main representatives for Wagenknecht of the progressive liberalism that she seeks to combat. The neoliberal and militarist drift of the German Greens surely long ago distanced them from the Left. But it can hardly thus be concluded that its individualistic, consumer-focused green agenda is indeed the limit of the call for climate justice. The BSW, however, shows no interest in developing a socialist environmentalism.

“Bizarre Minorities”?

One of the programmatic axes of the BSW is “freedom of speech,” a classic demand of the Left. However, in the BSW’s insistent rhetoric, the great threat is leftist “cancel culture.” The party’s electoral program denounces a “progressive narrowing of the authorized field of expression,” while in Wagenknecht’s book Die Selbstgerechten (The Right-Thinking), she denounces progressives concerned about “ever smaller and ever more bizarre minorities,” against whom she advocates “normality.”

The BSW program aims to fight against a “new political authoritarianism that arrogates to itself the power to educate people and regulate their way of life or their language,” while its leader takes up in her book the right-wing rhetoric about “left-wing liberal gender theory,” which despises feminist and queer struggles.

By opposing the defense of minorities to the defense of the people, Wagenknecht ignores that the Left has often combined both, throughout history. In fact, recent left-populist leaders such as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, or Pablo Iglesias have done so perfectly well. Wagenknecht’s comments instead present the threats to free speech in a manner barely distinguishable from the far right, rather than attack the actually censorious policies of states and digital monopolies.

Even more worrying is the BSW’s closeness to the AfD on migration. Wagenknecht agrees with the far right in pointing to the arrival of foreign workers as a major social problem. This framework has, admittedly, also been adopted by the federal government parties (SPD, the Greens, and FDP), who recently announced national border controls and the restriction of the right to asylum. Wagenknecht has tried to provide a social basis for her anti-immigration position, arguing in her book Die Selbstgerechten that immigrants “compete directly with German employees,” driving down salaries and increasing rents. This rhetoric assumes the liberal framework of supply and demand as inevitable, rather than advocating strong public policies to limit rent or raise wages. Perhaps Wagenknecht’s surrender to the invisible hand of the market has to do with her admiration for the founders of German ordoliberalism.

Following a diagnosis that blames the migrant population for the inequalities essential to neoliberal capitalism, the BSW’s European program defends “ending uncontrolled immigration to the EU,” a rhetoric indistinguishable from the far right, and translates into the proposal of moving asylum application procedures outside European borders, just as AfD advocates. Wagenknecht has defined “open borders” as “the hollowness of neoliberal immigration policies.” In reality, the neoliberal European Union has done exactly the opposite: fortify its external borders, causing the death of more than 30,000 people in the Mediterranean during the last decade. In the BSW program, there is no trace of policies to open legal and safe migration routes, a void shared both with the far right and the European mainstream parties.

Although Wagenknecht declares her opposition to racism, her rhetoric sometimes veers into xenophobia, as when she exclaimed: “Germany is overwhelmed, Germany has no more room.” The BSW’s EU election program claimed that in France and Germany there are “Islamist-influenced parallel societies” in which “children grow up hating Western culture” — an alarmist description that seems copied from Marine Le Pen’s playbook. The BSW leader has also resorted to what scholars call “femonationalism,” presenting patriarchy as a phenomenon that is merely imported to Germany from the outside: “The women in our group [BSW] in particular are happy to live in a country that has by and large overcome patriarchy and they don’t want to see it being reintroduced through the backdoor,” i.e., by immigration.

Wagenknecht’s intention to attract AfD voters translates into a more than cautious attitude toward the xenophobic party. The BSW leader refused to join the massive anti-fascist demonstrations that took place earlier this year and has refused to label the AfD as far-right, despite it being a commonly accepted label. The former communist’s softness toward the AfD earned her a cover of Compact, the conservative magazine open to some forms of social democracy, in 2022 and an invitation to join this party from Björn Höcke, its leader in Thuringia.

Far-Right Frames Benefit the Far Right

A look at Wagenknecht’s proposals and speeches shows that she has largely copied the far right’s political framework. The “left-wing conservatism” that Wagenknecht wants to represent hides the capital-labor contradiction under an interclass amalgam, presents social diversity as a threat, and divides the working class by casting the population of foreign origin primarily as migrants, not as workers. On this basis, the BSW will not challenge or rival the rise of far-right ideas in German politics but feed them.

The BSW makes a necessary criticism of the EU’s neoliberal architecture and is a powerful voice against NATO and growing European militarism. But the adoption of the far right’s chosen dividing lines prevents Wagenknecht’s party from being a valuable inspiration for the Left in other countries. It is far from the political example of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, which has led the Left to a historic success, while explicitly appealing to the electorate of foreign origin and openly challenging Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron’s xenophobic and anti-social policies. Its record tells us that surrendering to the far-right view of society is not necessary to win.