How Germany’s Die Linke defied expectations

Sunday’s general election feels both shocking while at the same time like a slow march towards the inevitable: for the first time since the war, a far-right – in parts openly fascist – party received more than a fifth of the vote share in Germany.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was particularly successful in in eastern states, fuelled by resentment about decades of social neglect, destruction of communities and institutions and failures to build a strong civil society after the fall of the socialist dictatorship – resentment weaponised into a war on immigrants and wind farms – cementing their position as the strongest party in all of east Germany except Berlin.

Almost every party caved in on the demands to be harsher on migrants, promising ever faster deportations and emergency legislation to stop arrivals at the border.

Conservative leader Friedrich Merz (CDU), who copied large parts of the AfD’s demands on migration, for the first time in the republic’s history breached the “Brandmauer”, the firewall against the far-right, by putting forward anti-immigrant legislation that would only pass with the help of AfD MPs.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) promised “deportations in grand style”, while even the Green party caved into demands for more deportations and forced through an asylum agreement against many party members’ wishes. Horrific attacks by Islamic fundamentalists just before the election just underscored the inevitable march to the right.

The result was predictable: the conservative CDU/CSU won, but with its second-lowest result in history (28.5%); the Greens barely managed to hold on to their vote share (11.6%); and the SPD free-fell to their worst result since their founding (16.4%). The AfD managed to double their vote-share from 10.4% to 20.8%, which is even more shocking given the record turnout of 82.5% – the highest turnout since reunification.

While Germany’s far-right still lags behind their colleagues in France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, it still looks like the lesson of “never again” is close to being buried.

Defying the inevitable

Amidst all this, there were some silver linings.

The German FDP, a liberal party now fully consumed by market radicalism and disgust for the poor, who broke the traffic-light coalition by insisting so much on austerity cuts that even a hollowed out SPD and Greens would rather face electoral annihilation than continue to govern with them a few more weeks, finally found out what the free marketplace of ideas meant for them.

Scoring even lower than predicted at 4.3%, widely missing the 5% hurdle to enter the Bundestag, Germany is now blessed with four years without the FDP; their leader, cake-enthusiast and pretend-entrepreneur Christian Lindner, faces the overdue end of his short but lucrative career.

But the real silver lining of the election was the surprising return of Die Linke, who polled at just 3% a few weeks ago in December.

If Die Linke were to exit the Bundestag, it would not only mean that Europe’s largest nation would have potentially end up without any left opposition to a conservative-led government and a strong far right – it would have had further ramifications due to Die Linke’s political foundation, the Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung, which finances large sections of the European left, including Scotland’s Living Rent. State money for party political foundations are tied to electoral results, and the death of Die Linke would have also meant depriving the European left of a source of funding at a vital time.

“The death of Die Linke would have meant depriving the European left of a source of funding at a vital time.”

A recent split from Die Linke by political celebrity Sahra Wagenknecht formed the BSW (slightly narcissistically named Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht), who achieved remarkable successes in eastern state elections at the cost of their former comrades.

The BSW decided that the way to win back working class voters from the far right was to (1) embrace a harsh anti-immigration stance; (2) be Russia apologists at every opportunity, refusing solidarity to Ukrainians; and (3) ridicule queer politics as out of touch.

These are not uncommon opinions on the western left, and electoral successes in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia seemed to validate the path taken by Wagenknecht – while their former “woke” colleagues in Die Linke looked doomed to inevitably disappear in the dustbin of failed left-wing projects.

But liberated from their former colleagues who followed Wagenknecht, Die Linke reinvented themselves in a few months, with fresh faces like Heidi Reichinnek, Clara Bünger and Ines Schwerdtner alongside socialist veterans like Gregor Gysi and Bodo Ramelow, and seized a shocking 8.8% of the vote with a focused campaign that pulled no punches: “We challenge the rich. No one else does it.”

By far defying expectations, Die Linke performed spectacularly well with young people, with 26% of the vote among 18-24-year-olds – outpacing the AfD at 21% – and positioned itself as an unapologetic anti-fascist voice that is now in a much stronger position than before, with their second-best result in history.

Meanwhile, the BSW landed on 4.97% of the vote, just about missing the 5% hurdle to enter the German parliament. Sahra Wagenknecht looks towards political retirement together with the similarly anti-immigrant FDP leader Christian Lindner.

How did Die Linke do it? And what can other left-wing parties, movements and campaigns learn from it?

While some of Die Linke’s success is owed to their remarkable candidates, their ability to clearly and concisely communicate key points, and their social media presence, especially around Heidi Reichinnek, there are many factors below the surface that enabled Die Linke to turn around, mobilise and almost double their vote share.

Winning the ‘war on woke’

Die Linke stood out for absolutely refusing to budge when it came to far-right talking points. Regardless of whether it was immigration, anti-queer sentiments, benefit fraud, climate scepticism or anything else – Die Linke refused to embrace any of these.

Instead, Die Linke called out those who caved to far-right rhetoric, whether it was the SPD, the Greens or their former colleagues in the BSW, demanding that they hold the line against the far right and not engage in any pre-emptive obedience to their politics.

As a result, the split with Wagenknecht and her fans soon felt like liberation, and a clear dividing line was visible between the regressive “leftists” like the BSW who kept describing western sanctions as “economic warfare” on Russia while blaming Ukraine for the war, or embracing anti-immigration politics just like the SPD did.

It also served as a distinct reminder to the electorate that a shift to the right on basically every topic was not inevitable – and soon attracted not only disappointed SPD and Greens voters, and even some of their former officials, but impressed many disillusioned non-voters and first-time voters to give the party a chance.

This refusal to give in to far-right talking points laid the grounds for the party positioning itself as the main anti-fascist alternative, and Heidi Reichinnek’s viral speech against Merz’s collaboration with the AfD showed every voter that they could be sure that they would not compromise with the AfD or their politics in any way – a unique selling point that no other party had after explicitly co-operating with the far-right like Merz and the CDU, or implicitly taking on many of their politics like SPD and BSW.

But the party was also cheeky about their “wokeness”: after the split, being behind in the polls, and having a new female frontline leadership, they launched the “Silver Curls” campaign, with three old white men taking centre stage in their bid to stay in parliament through direct constituency votes – thereby reassuring voters that their votes wouldn’t be wasted even if Die Linke fell below 5%.

But the three old white men kept talking about woke stuff, with Gregor Gysi’s speech on why men should shut up about abortion going viral. Old white men becoming flag-bearers of the new woke left, while at the same time empowering a new leadership team of young radical women like Heidi Reichinnek, Ines Schwerdtner and Clara Bünger, meant that, suddenly, wokeness didn’t look out of touch: Die Linke looked like steadfast anti-fascists who you would love to have a pint with.

How to forge compromise

Even after Wagenknecht and her entourage left, Die Linke was still a deeply divided party. Division can sometimes turn the best organisation into a toxic cesspit of scheming and shouting, not only putting off voters and new members interested in joining, but also risking wasting precious airtime to slagging other leftists and not attacking those on the right.

But Die Linke managed to deal with it – forging compromises that were not uninspired buzzword collections, but pointing towards new directions. There are two important examples.

Even with the explicit Putin apologists leaving the party, Die Linke remained divided on Ukraine and the Russian invasion. On the one hand, Die Linke faced the pacifist left, who abhorred militarisation and did not want weapons produced in Germany to be delivered into a conflict zone, instead calling for diplomacy against all odds. On the other side, Die Linke faced increased calls for military solidarity with Ukrainians, with many left organisations having direct ties to, and sometimes fundraising for, fighting left-wing groups on the frontline in Ukraine.

The new Linke leadership, under seasoned Greenpeace campaigner Jan van Aken, knew they could not resolve this divide in a few weeks, and instead approached the topic differently. Suddenly the left called for harsher sanctions against Russia, pointing out all the loopholes that western sanctions left for Putin’s regime to funnel money into their war effort, and especially focusing on the Russian ability to still sell oil and gas to fund their war against Ukrainians.

The German left is most toxically divided on Israel and Palestine since 7 October 2023. Die Linke sits between pro-Israeli leftists (famously called the “anti-Germans” or Antideutsch) who point out a historic responsibility of Germany to Israel and call out the reactionary stances of Palestinian groups, and a pro-Palestinian left who abhor Israeli war crimes and demand more solidarity with Palestine – all this against the background of an increasingly repressive German state that is quick to use any allegation of antisemitism or anti-Zionism to repress left-wing activity.

Van Aken, knowing this minefield well, invited the Israeli socialist party Hadash (חד״ש‎) to Berlin, asking for their main demands and building a joint statement refusing weapons delivery to Israel – thereby not only managing to contain an explosive disagreement to forge a careful compromise, but also centring the Jewish and Arab Israelis struggling to rebuild the peace movement against Netanyahu and his regime in a way no one else has done.

Amidst all these divisions and more, Die Linke not only managed to contain the conflicts in the party, but achieved something other parties lacked: they looked genuinely interesting. This soon resulted in attacks by the Greens and the SPD, fearing for their vote share. But Die Linke ignored the attacks from both the centre-left and Twitter haters, and even signalled support for tactical voting for SPD and Greens where it made sense, signalling an open door to all on the left looking for a new political home, while engaging all activists in practical tasks.

It’s still the economy, stupid

There is another easy lesson that leftists love to forget: simple campaigning on material issues that affect people’s lives. What tied together Heidi Reichinnek’s viral TikTok, Jan van Aken’s TV performances, and Gregor Gysi’s parliament speeches was a relentless focus on the economic issues affecting 90% of voters. Regardless of what they were asked, they always steered the conversation back to what actually affected voters in their personal life: healthcare, wages, rent.

As van Aken said: “If you try to push the wall in, you will fail. If you take a nail you can create a crack.” That nail for Die Linke was rent.

Die Linke talked non-stop about rent caps, making sure that every interview at least once mentioned “Mietendeckel”. They not only pushed the conversation back to material issues, but also offered practical ways to help voters on them, including online tools to report slum landlords, employers cheating on minimum wage rules, and collaborating with grassroots organisations to report violations of local rent caps. Soon, voters from across Germany supported the demands, if not the party – small businesses suffering from high rents began inviting left candidates for chats, and national conversation shifted.

This provided a model for other issues, where Die Linke was not afraid of simple, effective messaging that always re-centred social economic issues from climate change to immigration, which many called populist; calling for the abolition of billionaires, antagonising landlords, calling out big polluters became a brand recognition for Die Linke, and lent credibility to their slogan of them being the only ones challenging the rich.

This is simple, practical advice to leftists across Europe looking to organise: pick one major economic issue that affects people’s lives, and relentlessly push for change.

But the most important lesson maybe lies in the main slogan of the party: “Everyone wants to govern. We want change.” Do not aim for governance, do not see yourself as a government-in-waiting – your goal is to shift the discourse, educate the electorate and make them recognise their own interests, and mobilise for social change.

Across Europe, there are not a lot of grounds for hope right now. We should not over-estimate what this small success means, given that Germany faces another coalition between conservatives and social democrats, the prospects of austerity, and a far right that has never been stronger since the fall of the Nazis.

But the reactionary turn only looks inevitable if we do not engage in the struggle. Die Linke laid the groundwork on how we can fight back, and leftists across Europe can learn from it. We don’t need hope if we learn how to defy the inevitable.