Wagenknecht

For many both in and outside Die Linke, it all boils down to one name: Sahra Wagenknecht. It is surely true that 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 in 2018, and with 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 tactful collaboration among diverse internal groupings. There were more government- oriented ‘reformists’ in the former East, post-Trotskyists and movement-oriented autonomists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, and not a few supporters of Israel. When the issue was labour 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 non-aggression 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 never shied away from being straightforwardly anti-Wagenknecht was essentially powerless to force her to leave. While they criticised 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

Looking at germany from the British perspective, it might seem obvious that a more proportional voting system would be a boon for the Left. Challengers to neoliberal social democracy, unshackled from party discipline, would have a far easier time of building an electoral base actually 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. Yet the volatile party landscape created other challenges.

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

Not only did Die Linke ‘resist’ anti-worker reforms, in its early years it also had a certain credibility owing to the prominence of Lafontaine, the former finance minister who split from the SPD over these issues. In opposition, it 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 euro 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.

Yet things began to change with the introduction of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) into the electoral landscape around a decade ago. 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 protests, with anti-fascist opposition to the AfD being core to its identity. It prided itself on being in touch with social movements, and it 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 profile as socially liberal and anti-racist, it also contained elements who dabbled in an ‘economic’ anti-migration rhetoric which 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. In fact, long before Wagenknecht became a pariah in Die Linke for such views around 2018, Lafontaine had in 2005 courted controversy for saying things that were rather similar. He apologised 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-emphasised 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 rogue members.

Decline

This problem has got 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 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, but this thin consensus masked a great range of inner-party disagreements. Particularly after 24 February 2022, when the German public mood was staunchly in favour of aid to Ukraine, the party’s neutralism was easily cast as ‘pro- Russian’. With no real influence over the mainstream narrative — now that the mood is shifting and the bigger parties are discussing peace talks — even Die Linke’s relative consistency has earned it little favour. Even 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 harbours a large 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 sets out to fill 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 programme for government. Built on activists from many and varied forces in this leftist space, from former SPDers to self-styled 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 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. Indeed, over the last five years of internal strife, sections of party commentators had long hoped that Wagenknecht’s eventual departure would essentially purify the party, at least in the eyes of voters. In this view, the foundation of Wagenknecht’s party would leave Die Linke as the real left party for disappointed Greens and Social Democrats. This was the tone of a congress meant to reinvigorate the party last November, which adopted a stronger ‘anti-capitalist’ identity. This was comfort food for activists, but it has not helped Die Linke rebuild its base. Nor did ‘the movements’ provide the magic solution. The largest in Germany this year — the hundreds- of-thousands-strong protests 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 always been soft-edged and diffuse in its leadership and organisation. From its origins as a coalition of post-communists and SPD splitters, before becoming a unified party in 2007, it relied on a cooperative leadership model that allowed internal diversity. Die Linke activists and strategists have often looked aghast at Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, favourably counterposing their own pluralism to the French party’s alleged rigidness. While La France Insoumise is in reality strongly grounded in its collective programme, German debates have, instead, tended to arrogantly dismiss the French example as a case study in authoritarian command.

Some today seek lessons from other foreign examples, especially Germany’s smaller neighbours. One is the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), which has a denser activist structure and a stronger attention to being useful to local communities through welfare-type initiatives and surveys of popular concerns. In reality, this party also has a much more centralised leadership structure and a higher bar for joining, derived from its Marxist–Leninist origins. Die Linke probably couldn’t adopt such a wide-ranging remodelling, by this point at least.

But a modern party also needs media performers — and if it doesn’t have them, the media will easily pick them instead. This is particularly true of smaller parties who are not offered the same airtime as governing parties. In its origins, Die Linke had the relatively charismatic Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi, and in more recent years Wagenknecht. Once she was out of favour, the failure to present an alternative and falling back, instead, on a rotating cast of charisma-less speakers, ensured that she, rather than figures better representing Die Linke’s tens of thousands of members, would have her say on TV news panels.

Catch-All

Die Linke always relied on the 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 even that it ever did so. 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 to its 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 electoral performance 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 scored above 10 percent in all three eastern German state elections in September, easily outclassing Die Linke even where it governed previously.

The only point of agreement in Die Linke’s milieu currently is that it needs a strong unity message. Yet it isn’t entirely clear what mechanism could really solidify this, apart from a shared opposition to Wagenknecht’s new venture. 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 employing Stalinist methods, and it continually responds through a constitutive wishy-washiness.

Thirty-four years after West swallowed East, swathes of the Federal Republic’s ‘new states’ are today coloured in AfD blue. In September, the far-right party won its first state election, in Thuringia — an eastern state hitherto headed by Die Linke. For 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 anti-establishment 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.