Simplistic Explanations

According to much of the mainstream press and indeed Die Linke’s political opponents, it ought to be thanking the most unlikely of figures for its revival. We are told that it was the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz, today Germany’s chancellor, who brought Die Linke back from the brink.

According to this narrative, what made the difference was Merz’s decision, in the middle of the campaign, to push a parliamentary resolution reliant on the votes of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Merz’s breaking of a taboo (it was the first time a Bundestag resolution was approved thanks to AfD votes, although the CDU’s overtures to the far right have a longer history) offered an opening to Die Linke’s joint lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek to shine in her speech denouncing the move, making her a popular icon among progressive voters. With her decisive intervention, she revived a party that otherwise would probably have fallen below 5 percent support.

That, at least, is the dominant account of how Die Linke turned around its fortunes. The 30 million views of Reichinnek’s speech in just one week provided a visibility such as Die Linke could otherwise only have dreamed of. But there are solid reasons to believe that Reichinnek’s speech simply accelerated and amplified an already existing trend. After all, the CDU’s vote together with the AfD came at the end of January 2025, when Die Linke had already been rising in polls throughout the month.

Absent from the mainstream narrative are the reasons why Reichinnek’s speech resonated so widely. First among these is the fact that the CDU’s joint vote with the AfD sought to impose an effective stop to asylum-seekers arriving in Germany. This also helps us understand why, when the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens also denounced Merz for reaching out to the AfD, their accusations rang somewhat hollow. Both these government parties had, during Scholz’s administration, presided over successive restrictions in provisions for asylum-seekers and imposed controls on some and then all German borders in September 2024. Meanwhile, in opposition Die Linke had  defended the right to asylum even as it became increasingly unpopular (a poll this January indicated that 68 percent of Germans wanted to accept fewer refugees). Wagenknecht’s BSW split from it to advocate, among other things, a more restrictive immigration policy.

Second, the leader of the SPD parliamentary fraction might have accused Merz of having opened “the gates of hell” by reaching out to the AfD, with the Greens’ rhetoric only a little less harsh. But both parties remained open to forming a government with the CDU after the elections in the name of “taking responsibility.” No voter might similarly fear that Die Linke would make the deeply unpopular Merz chancellor. In short, whereas the SPD and the Greens had a credibility problem, Reichinnek’s angry speech criticizing Merz was not only well articulated but also authentic, because it built on Die Linke’s prior trajectory.

Considering the policy concessions that the SPD and Greens had made in government to both their own neoliberal-hawk government partner (the Free Democrats, FDP) and the right-wing opposition, observers could only wonder what they’d be ready to do to become the CDU’s junior partner. Joining Merz’s Christian Democrats in government this spring, the SPD has in fact accepted policies such as pushing back asylum-seekers at the German borders and replacing the eight-hour-day regulation with a weekly maximum.

Die Linke’s election effort was helped by the SPD’s and Greens’ mistakes (these parties’ previous voters were the main contributors to Die Linke’s increased vote), as leading members in the leftist party’s campaign privately acknowledge. After years of mainly worrying about attacks from the right-wing opposition, the SPD and Greens were forced to counter an agile and social-media-savvy Die Linke campaign that focused on neglected issues such as the increasing price of supermarket goods and rents, and the lack of fair taxes on the rich. Die Linke’s campaign remained laser-focused on a few key messages that activists stuck to, such as the need for a rent cap and eliminating the taxes on basic groceries. Die Linke’s creation of an app to check abusive heating and renting prices in some of the main cities was also key to positively entering the media conversation and showing that the party could practically help working-class people.

The Challenges Ahead

One measure of Die Linke’s recent success is that unlike at the previous congress in Halle, at this month’s edition in Chemnitz there was only scant talk of the BSW. The party founded by Wagenknecht had enjoyed around 8 percent polling support last fall, but it eventually scored 4.98 percent in February’s federal election — missing the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament by just over 9,000 votes.

The elections did not only reward Die Linke’s programmatic proposals as compared to the BSW’s but also showed the value of its model of party organization. Whereas the highly centralized BSW has around one thousand members — each individually approved by its leadership — Die Linke entered 2025 with 58,532 members before experiencing a sudden surge to 100,000 ahead of the election (it currently has 112,000 members). Die Linke’s intensive street and door-knocking campaign contrasted with a BSW that was barely visible in the streets aside from election placards. After the campaign, one of the main challenges for Die Linke today is to integrate the wave of new sign-ups, which have made the party younger, more Western German, and more female.

The Chemnitz congress was also shaped by the perennial tension between Die Linke’s opposition course at the national level and its government participation in some federal states. February’s elections had given rival opposition parties AfD and Die Linke a combined one-third minority in parliament and, with it, the de facto power to block constitutional changes, notably to the “debt brake” which limits government deficit spending. However, after the election — but before the new parliament met — the Christian Democrats, Greens, and SPD cobbled together a two-thirds majority in the old parliament to exempt military spending from the debt brake and approve a special infrastructure fund.

In the Bundestag, Die Linke criticized the reforms because they maintain the debt brake for nonmilitary expenses while spending on the army is now theoretically unlimited. However, Die Linke members in the governments of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern voted in favor of the package in the Bundesrat, i.e., the institution representing the federal states, where constitutional changes also need to be approved. Die Linke members in both states argued that the funds for the regional and communal governments in the approved infrastructure package were essential in times of austerity. Yet their decision clearly went against the party line and frustrated the national leadership.

The constitutional changes would have been approved even without Die Linke votes, and its recent polling remains strong in both Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Still, Die Linke can be thankful that the controversial votes took place when the BSW, which has strongly criticized remilitarization, is still recovering from the disappointment of not having entered parliament. What the representatives of Die Linke in both regional governments could not prevent was significant criticism of them at the congress in Chemnitz. Party activists lamented that they had spent the election campaign putting up placards against more military expenditure only for the Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern governments to vote for more cash for the army.

Die Linke’s Relationship with the CDU

The congress also addressed the troubled question of Die Linke’s relationship with the CDU. On May 6, Merz became the first chancellor to need two voting rounds in the Bundestag before being elected. At least eighteen members of the government’s parliamentary majority did not express confidence in him. To organize a second voting attempt on the same day, Merz needed a two-thirds majority to change the procedural rules of the parliamentary session, thus requiring the help of either Die Linke or the AfD. While Merz’s CDU rules out “coalitions and other forms of content-related cooperation” with both these parties, the conservatives held conversations with Die Linke, and the leftist party decided to allow the second vote.

Whether voting together to change procedural rules qualifies as cooperation is debatable. But clearly, without Die Linke’s votes, Merz would have had to postpone his first international visits and wait at least three more days, until May 9, to be elected chancellor. There would have been mounting pressure to know whether Merz actually had a majority and which legislators had not supported him. The vote would also have collided with the first day of Die Linke’s congress.

Did it make the right decision by allowing his earlier election? A congress delegate from Frankfurt didn’t think so. She said it would have been nice “if Germany had lived three days without a king.” Die Linke’s parliamentary group was reportedly relatively divided on whether to allow the vote to proceed, but the “yes” side carried the day. Denying the early repeat vote would have reinforced Die Linke’s antiestablishment profile, a not-insignificant attribute in times of low popular support for the status quo. It is unclear, however, how it would have weathered three days being accused of bringing the country to a standstill (in fact, the situation was far less dramatic, as Scholz would have remained caretaker chancellor).

Equally important, there is no predicting what the CDU’s behavior during those three days could have been. Merz is famously impulsive and could even have prompted a move toward fresh elections, with the AfD poised to swell its ranks even further. These three days would also have opened a window of opportunity for those CDU members who had anyway preferred a minority government with, if needed, extragovernmental support from the AfD.

The conversation about the CDU’s relationship with Die Linke is expected to resurface soon, as the Bundestag needs to elect three new members for the Federal Constitutional Court and they need to be approved by a two-thirds majority. In Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD surpassed 30 percent support in last year’s regional elections and the CDU rules without a majority, the center-right party has long been in conversations with Die Linke to approve its budgets.

The polarization between CDU and Die Linke has the positive aspect of showing that very different options are available to voters without having to opt for the AfD. Still, the new parliamentary arithmetic at both the regional and national levels will likely force CDU and Die Linke to talk more often.

An Opposition Strategy

“Die Linke is back” was a common line in party coleader Ines Schwerdtner’s intervention at the Chemnitz congress, as well as in Reichinnek’s comments. At least at the national level, Die Linke’s immediate strategy seeks frontal opposition to the new CDU-SPD government. In Chemnitz, for instance, Die Linke coleader Jan van Aken accused the ruling parties of being detached from ordinary people’s realities, with inflation and high grocery prices not even mentioned in their coalition agreement.

Unlike the Greens, who wanted to stay in government and will have to justify their recent record in office still for some time to come, Die Linke benefits from having long been in opposition and is currently polling 10–11 percent. Moreover, the Greens and the SPD appear to have no interest in covering their left flanks and are instead in search of centrist voters. Green politicians such as Ricarda Lang and Social Democrats such as Saskia Esken who represented the left wing of their parties have been relegated to a secondary role. Instead, the Greens appear to be taking the course of their only regional president, the centrist Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Württemberg, whereas the SPD is firmly under the control of vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil, a member of the party’s conservative Seeheimer Kreis faction.

Considering this and Die Linke’s internal strength, the hopes expressed at the party congress for the 2026 elections are not unfounded. Next year, it will seek to enter the Western parliaments of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg for the first time and finish first in the Berlin elections, after winning most votes in the capital in February’s federal elections.

It will be in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, however, that Die Linke’s objective of recovering working-class voters from the AfD will be most important. In these two states, which also vote in 2026, the AfD doubled the second-place parties in votes in February. The case of Saxony-Anhalt is especially concerning. The AfD collected 37 percent of ballots there and enjoys an unusual strength even in the largest cities. In 2026, the flashy headlines for Die Linke could come from Western Germany and Berlin. Yet it is in the east of the country where any votes hard won from the AfD can prevent the first far-right regional president since 1945.