The Wagenknecht Problem

For many both in and outside Die Linke, it all boils down to one name: Sahra Wagenknecht. Doubtless, Die Linke’s decline has been evident since Wagenknecht, in the 2010s its most prominent representative, began publicly flouting the party line. This began with dubious anti-immigration talking points around 2018 and her abortive attempt to launch a “Gilets Jaunes”–style movement under her (not Die Linke’s) auspices in 2019. For the last five years, Die Linke’s fate seemed closely bound up with the rarely accountable choices of its most famous public figure. For younger, more educated, and urban activists, the question was how to tame her — or get her to quit. Wagenknecht’s will-she-won’t-she approach to starting a rival outfit kept her name in the headlines.

Die Linke had long relied on an amorphous governance structure based on a tactful collaboration among diverse internal groupings. There were more government-oriented “reformists” in the former East, post-Trotskyists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, not a few supporters of Israel, and “movementist” autonomists. When the issue was labor rights or rents, they could usually get along; even some more “revolutionary” activists supported single-issue campaigns or took up jobs for Die Linke MPs. This nonaggression pact was not, however, well prepared to deal with a high-profile leader going rogue on divisive culture-war issues. Even the sizeable faction that was bluntly critical of Wagenknecht was essentially powerless to force her to leave. While they criticized her as “red-brown,” she derided them as “the lifestyle left,” hopelessly out of touch with regular voters and obsessed with issues like pronouns.

The irony is that this situation mirrors her husband’s role in the late-1990s SPD, leading to the creation of Die Linke. A former minister, Oskar Lafontaine long insisted he would not quit the SPD while building up his media presence as a public dissident and eventually choosing the right moment to found something else. He eventually helped create Die Linke; now Wagenknecht has gone even further in the personal branding exercise, in January 2024 creating a new party called Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).

Days Gone By

Comparing Germany to countries with different voting systems like Britain, it might seem obvious that its more proportional model of representation would help the Left. Given a system in which (almost) every vote counts, challengers to neoliberal social democracy would have a far easier time of building an electoral base voting for the policies they want. For the first years of Die Linke’s existence, it seemed to prove this point, as it routinely elected dozens of MPs to the Bundestag. Still, the volatile party landscape also created other challenges.

The decade after Die Linke’s formation was its golden era, as it seemed to represent all that the SPD had abandoned. It first gained momentum in the mid-2000s from the mobilization against the SPD’s so-called Hartz IV welfare reforms, which slashed unemployment benefits. From this period up through the 2008 financial crisis, issues like welfare and the labor market were central to the national political agenda, including under Christian Democratic (CDU) chancellor Angela Merkel.

Not only did Die Linke “resist” anti-worker reforms, but in its early years it also had a certain credibility owing to the prominence of Lafontaine, a former finance minister who split from SPD over these issues. From opposition, Die Linke constantly raised the issue of a federal minimum wage until it was begrudgingly introduced by the CDU-SPD “grand coalition” government in 2015. Die Linke was the strongest critic of Germany’s role in the Eurozone crisis and the austerity regime forced on Greece. In its first decade, Die Linke was often able to set the political agenda in parliament and win media attention.

But things began to change with the introduction of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) into the electoral landscape. Founded in 2013, the AfD had managed to enter all but two state legislatures by 2017, the same year it entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent support. AfD surely faces major opposition, with its advances routinely prompting huge street protests across the country. Die Linke’s milieu (particularly in Berlin and eastern cities like Leipzig and Dresden) was always an active force in these demonstrations, seeing anti-fascist opposition to the AfD as core to its identity. It prided itself on being in touch with social movements and — in a now clichéd phrase — saw itself as a party with “one foot in parliament” and “one foot in the streets.”

Yet while in major cities Die Linke built a socially liberal and anti-racist profile, it also contained elements who dabbled in an “economic” anti-migration rhetoric that obsessed over the competition for Germans’ jobs. Right from the start, some of the party’s highest-profile spokespeople clearly held conservative views on this count, and it turned out to be a ticking time bomb. Even long before Wagenknecht became a pariah in Die Linke for such views around 2018, Lafontaine had in 2005 courted controversy for saying something rather similar. He apologized for his use of a Nazi-era term for foreign workers (Fremdarbeiter), but less public controversy was raised over remarks in his books from the same year, where he said that only the “upper ten thousand” of German society supported immigration, since they were shielded from its “consequences” in the form of competition for housing and jobs, or primary schools overburdened with foreign children. But over the years that followed, the issue was de-emphasized for the sake of party unity, in a national political context where it was not the central topic.

For a while, this balance could hold. Yet the shift in government and media attention to immigration after the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 soon meant that these contradictions could no longer be ignored. The problem wasn’t just the variety of positions. Die Linke had essentially no structures to resolve differences and maintain an appearance of party unity when faced with high-profile members making headstrong moves.

Decline

This problem has gotten worse over time, as other crises have tested to destruction Die Linke’s tendency to adopt noncommittal positions. The party was not seen to have a clear line on COVID-19 lockdowns or vaccination controversies, nor on the war in Ukraine. Previously, the moral basis behind Die Linke’s opposition to arms sales went largely unchallenged in its ranks, but this thin consensus masked a great range of inner-party disagreements. After February 24, 2022, when the German public strongly backed aid to Ukraine, Die Linke’s neutralism was easily cast as “pro-Russian.” With no real influence over the mainstream narrative — still today, as the mood is changing and the bigger parties are discussing peace talks — even Die Linke’s relative consistency has earned it little favor. Yet more confused is Die Linke’s dismal position on Palestine: while some leading members are vocal about the need to end weapons exports to Israel, the party harbors a considerable number of staunchly pro-Israel activists, and its manifesto for this June’s EU elections made no mention of the war. Voters who wanted to voice support for Gaza had to look elsewhere.

But perhaps the deeper problem was the idea of filling a “vacant” political space. When a party aims to occupy a gap in the electoral market — in this case, a broad party to the left of social democracy — there is surely a temptation to straddle this space, with all its different hues, rather than to provide a clear political leadership based on a program for government. Built on activists from many and varied forces in this leftist space, from former SPDers to those who call themselves “revolutionaries,” Die Linke opted for structures that allowed for maximum internal diversity. What this didn’t quite prepare it for was setting out an agenda for power. Where it was in office, for instance over the last eight years at the head of the Thuringia state government, its sluggish practice often jarred bizarrely with the outward radicalism expressed by its branches in the main cities.

Yet in this context, the fighting over Wagenknecht’s lack of accountability — a TV star who spoke her mind — also became a misleading cover for other ills. Over the last five years of internal strife, many party commentators seemed to count on the idea that Wagenknecht’s eventual departure would give the party a new image, purified in the eyes of voters. In this view, the creation of Wagenknecht’s rival party would leave Die Linke as a real left-wing voice for disgruntled Greens and Social Democrats. This was the tone of a congress meant to reinvigorate the party in November 2023, which also adopted a stronger “anti-capitalist” hue. This was comfort food for activists, but it has not helped Die Linke rebuild its base. Nor did the various street protests optimistically called “social movements” provide the magic solution. The largest in Germany this year — the hundreds-of-thousands-strong rallies against the AfD, following revelations about its plans to deport ethnic-minority Germans — have, if anything, helped shepherd progressive voters back into the government camp, for fear of a turn for the worse.

Who Steers the Ship?

Die Linke has often relied on a lowest-common-denominator set of commitments: social justice, the feeling that the SPD was increasingly neoliberal, and the assumption that a solid constituency of voters would want some sort of left-wing alternative. Germans surely are still voting based on economic concerns as well as questions of war and peace. But it is less clear that Die Linke has projected a convincing alternative economic model, or that it ever did. Instead, Wagenknecht’s BSW is now thriving by voicing a kind of redux of the old West German social compact — an agenda whose plausibility owes to its claim to return to “normality” — and offloading of the blame for Germans’ worsening conditions onto pesky environmentalists, migrants, and the current war in Ukraine.

In fact, while Die Linke activists believed that they were the core of the party and would improve their votes once the dissident Wagenknecht had gone, it seems that much of the voter base, especially in the regions where it did strongest, believed that she was the core and the activists were the dissident fringe. Her BSW surmounted 10 percent in all three eastern German state elections in September, easily outclassing Die Linke even where it governed previously.

If Die Linke is today galvanized by the idea of party unity, it isn’t entirely clear what mechanism could solidify this. Even after the split, the idea of party discipline hardly figures. In this sense, Die Linke also faces a cultural problem visible in the Corbyn-era Labour Party, and not shared by its Starmerite successors: a lack of ruthlessness, out of constant fear of being labelled authoritarian. In part a successor to the old East German ruling party (whose former top cadres were heavily purged after the fall of the Berlin Wall), Die Linke faces the routine accusation of using Stalinist methods, yet continually responds through a constitutive wishy-washiness.

Some hope comes from Die Linke’s new leadership, with cochairs Ines Schwerdtner (formerly of Jacobin) and Jan van Aken elected at the party congress in October. Schwerdtner has called for Die Linke to more specifically address working-class interests, listening to voter concerns via mass canvassing exercises. These are surely positive steps in overcoming the cultural distance with many voter groups and perhaps leaving behind the cult of party members’ own preferred focuses. This is, however, an uphill slog, and with snap national elections planned for February 23 — with the post-split Die Linke at risk of falling out of parliament — results can’t come soon enough.

Thirty-four years after West swallowed East, swathes of the Federal Republic’s “new states” are today colored in AfD blue. In September, the far-right party won its first state election, in Thuringia — an eastern state hitherto headed by Die Linke. To be sure, AfD’s voters are more likely to come from the mainstream right, or from former abstainers, than directly switch from the Left. But when the AfD is called a response to the failures of reunification, we could easily forget that in the 2000s the Left continually piled up votes in these same areas, including rural ones. It could claim to be the antiestablishment voice not just of many currents of activism but of working-class youth who’d lost out from the transition to capitalism. Regaining that insurgent spirit is vital, not just to stem the AfD tide but to preserve a Left worthy of the name.