The Party That Could Shake Up German Politics

STUTTGART, Germany—At a rally organized around Germany’s newest political party on May 25, those in the crowd seemed most eager to talk about what was wrong with the country’s other parties. They were disappointed with the current coalition government, led by the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) alongside the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats. They were nervous about the crises Germany faced under its watch: the struggling economy, Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Others were passing through Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz and simply wanted to hear what this new party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), had to say. Once a prominent politician in Germany’s Left Party, or Die Linke, Wagenknecht is a media fixture who has built a public following and a reputation for bucking the political mainstream. She officially broke with the Left Party in January and founded her own.

Now, Wagenknecht is betting that voters who feel abandoned or disillusioned by Germany’s establishment will see a political project created in her image as one that’s created in theirs, too. The European Parliament elections, which run from June 6 to June 9, will be an early test case for the BSW’s influence and its ability to disrupt—and further fragment—Germany’s politics.

Wagenknecht’s party doesn’t fit neatly on Germany’s political spectrum. It embraces an unconventional combination of leftist economics and cultural conservatism, such as more restrictive immigration policies and a distrust of identity politics. “It’s a ‘best of’ of protest—almost populist—narratives that they have taken up,” said Mechthild Roos, a lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Augsburg.

The BSW’s foreign-policy platform breaks with Western consensus, especially when it comes to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Wagenknecht herself has called for an end to military aid to Kyiv and criticized Western sanctions against Moscow, including on energy exports. She has also scrutinized some pro-climate policies and argued that the progressive left is enamored with so-called woke cultural issues.

It makes people angry, Wagenknecht said at the Stuttgart rally, “when they have the feeling that the politicians in Berlin don’t even know how they are doing. … They don’t even know what’s going on in the country.”

Some BSW members don’t want to locate themselves on the spectrum, either. “We don’t label ourselves as a left-wing or right-wing force,” said Fabio de Masi, a former Left Party politician who is the BSW’s leading candidate for the European Parliament, in an interview with Foreign Policy. He identifies with the left-wing economic tradition, but he said that “you could say Main Street doesn’t associate with the left anymore,” referring to cultural debates.

This ideological flexibility is partly strategic. Wagenknecht “must get as much support as she can reach, but she is trying to get it out of every corner of the electorate,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin. “She’s not only listening to the public mood, what the public is talking about—she talks about it, too.” He joked that the BSW was “tutti frutti,” all the political flavors rolled into one.

However, that may seem at odds with the party’s other identity: that of a one-woman show. Although her face features on many of the BSW’s election posters, Wagenknecht is not running for the European Parliament, instead recruiting seasoned former Left Party members (such as de Masi), other defectors—including former center-left Dusseldorf Mayor Thomas Geisel, and some political outsiders. Still, it’s impossible to separate Wagenknecht’s brand from the support that the party has seen so far.

All of this lends some fuzziness to the picture of how BSW members might actually govern, allowing the party to sidestep some questions on its more radical policies. So far, it has used the campaign largely to address voters’ grievances about the current system.

“What we’re seeing, especially in Germany, is a lot of voters unhappy with the current progressive government and coalition,” said Sarah Wagner, an assistant professor at Queen’s University Belfast who studies the European left. “That is something that is being mobilized a lot by the radical right. But it’s not everybody’s darling anymore—people don’t want to be associated with voting for the radical right. … There’s this really open gap there to mobilize.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who leads the three-member “traffic light” coalition, has grown deeply unpopular. Meanwhile, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has surged. The AfD has used anti-immigrant populism to channel support from those also disillusioned with the political establishment, particularly in former East Germany. Although it has dipped from its polling peak of around 22 percent amid scandals, the far-right party is still hovering near second place in polls at about 17 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union.

However, the BSW is now polling at around 6 percent, putting it above the threshold to secure a share of Germany’s European parliamentary seats. Last month, the party won its first electoral victory, a mayoral election in Thuringia, a state where the AfD has strong support.

“Everybody’s happy if the AfD gets weaker, but we’re the only ones doing the job effectively,” de Masi said. He added that a slight weakening of the AfD coincided with the BSW’s rise, and that they are mobilizing nonvoters who might have once drifted to the far-right party.

The BSW argues that this shift is about broad disaffection with Germany’s political leadership, not about any convergence between Wagenknecht’s party and the AfD’s policies. But even if the BSW peels away support from the AfD, it will take votes from other parties, too—including from the Left Party, Wagenknecht’s former home. The new presence thus adds some unpredictability to Germany’s party system.

“It makes it more fragile than before and makes the competition more interesting,” said Neugebauer, the Free University political scientist.

One attendee at the Stuttgart rally, a retiree from the Black Forest region who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns, said that he used to support the SPD but abandoned the party years ago. Attracting such votes is part of the BSW’s aim: to provide people with an alternative. “BSW grab votes—but it turns out they grab votes from the middle, from the center,” said Roos, of the University of Augsburg. “The center gets emptied out, and the fringes get more powerful.”

The European Parliament elections will provide some hint at just how much chaos Wagenknecht’s party will bring to German politics. European campaigns are often vessels for national frustrations, but average turnout tends to be lower than in national elections, and voters generally care less about who they send to the European Parliament. However, that means that people might cast a protest vote they would not risk in a national contest.

The BSW is betting on that breakthrough—and the prospect that it could shake up Europe’s politics, too. Power in the European Parliament comes from coalitions, and the new party’s unconventional ideology makes it a bit of an outcast among the current groupings. But the BSW says it has partners willing to work with it and has even suggested that it could form its own group. If that is true, the BSW’s so-called left-conservative model could be a more potent political force in Germany and beyond.

That might have a “massive effect on the party landscape that we see all over the European Union,” said Wagner, the Queens’ University professor. “If there is a parliamentary group established for left-conservative parties, that might be something that is seen as a more relevant ideology within other European party systems.”

First, the BSW must face its first major vote. “It is not just an election and a decision on a different Europe,” Wagenknecht said to the spectators who stayed at the Stuttgart rally after a thunderstorm interrupted her speech. “It really is also a vote for a different Germany.”

Manuel Kinzl, 28-year-old from Aalen who was at the rally, said he was still undecided. He is worried about the war in Ukraine; Kinzl doesn’t oppose aid, but he thinks that the government needs to make a decision on what it wants to achieve in Ukraine. He is also frustrated about migration, saying that Germany needs to do more to support the skilled workers it says it needs.

However, Kinzl doesn’t know if Wagenknecht and the BSW can solve these issues. “I think she’s a very experienced politician. She knows how to talk and knows how to impress people with her speech,” he said as the Schlossplatz crowd cleared. “But I’m not exactly sure she has the solutions that we need.”