Sahra Wagenknecht’s insider revolution Mainstream parties now do her bidding

When the BSW first exploded onto the political scene, some in Germany wondered whether they might partner with the AfD to revolutionise German politics. From Ukraine to migration, after all, both parties agree on much — even as their leaders seemed to get on personally. That was clear enough when Wagenknecht and Weidel met in a much-discussed TV debate, finding themselves speaking as one on the origins of the Ukraine war and jointly rebutting the moderator’s lazy assertions that they were mirroring “Putin narratives.”

Since the BSW threw its lot in with the CDU, however, things have changed. Quite aside from her infamous “footstool” comment, Weidel has speculated that the BSW will fail to achieve its core demands. But things aren’t quite that simple. Recent developments, after all, show that Wagenknecht is trying to drive a hard bargain on an issue that is also on the top of the AfD’s agenda: settling the war in Ukraine. It would certainly be a political masterstroke if Wagenknecht could press the CDU closer to her own position here. Next to the Greens, no other German party is as hawkish. But Wagenknecht insists on a “peace provision” in any formalised coalition agreement. She’s also demanded that the CDU reject the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil.

For a while, this strategy appeared to bear fruit. In early October, a trio of politicians from the CDU and SPD published an op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine where they called for a “ceasefire and negotiations” in Ukraine. All three authors want to lead eastern German states where elections were lately held. Equally relevant, all three need the BSW to get into office. Steffen Quasebarth, the BSW’s newly minted deputy speaker of the Thuringian state parliament, says the op-ed was lacking in parts, especially since the authors noticeably avoided an outright rejection of stationing the American missiles. Even so, he calls the article a “step in the right direction.” And as Wagenknecht herself pointed out in her debate with her AfD rival, you’re hardly a “footstool” if you push the establishment closer to your own politics.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU and the party’s candidate for chancellor, was quick to rebut such ideas. Pushing back against the op-ed, he demanded that German-made Taurus be sent to the embattled Kyiv government. Soon enough, Wagenknecht herself piled on the pressure too, suggesting in an interview with Der Spiegel that local CDU parties in Germany’s east should distance themselves from Merz’s sabre-rattling. In essence, Wagenknecht was asking them to disobey their party leader in exchange for her seal of approval, something they’re hardly willing to do. 

Wagenknecht may be her party’s namesake, but not every member seems willing to take things quite so far. Some Thuringian BSW leaders seemed fine with the op-ed, both as a sign of accommodation and because they pushed negotiations with the CDU along. Any peace provision would be probably symbolic anyway: German state governments don’t make foreign policy. Interestingly, those BSW politicians who appear more willing to appease the CDU include its Thuringian state chair Katja Wolf, like Wagenknecht formerly of Die Linke.

Nowhere was Wolf’s eagerness to cooperate with the CDU clearer than last month, when the newly elected Thuringian state parliament convened in Erfurt. The AfD politician Jürgen Treutler was supposed to preside as the eldest member. The most important order of business was to elect the parliamentary speaker and his deputies, and as the largest party, the AfD had the privilege to nominate one of their own. It was clear that the AfD’s nominee would never have been elected. But rather than being allowed to follow proper procedure, Treutler was repeatedly heckled by other parties, including BSW members, in a clearly staged disruption. One CDU politician shouted that Treutler was leading a Machtergreifung (“seizure of power”), an obvious reference to Hitler’s rise.

The meeting descended into chaos and a subsequent legal dispute over the proper order had to sort things out. The state constitutional court, which is stacked with CDU and Left appointed judges, quickly ruled against the AfD, who were ultimately barred from the deputy speakership and important committee chairs. A party with nearly 33% of the vote was left without influence over parliamentary rule-making while the SPD, which had won only 6%, was given one of the deputy speakerships.

Why the casual dismissal of a third of the voters’ will? What about democracy? Steffen Quasebarth insists that the AfD in Thuringia falls far outside the realm of acceptable democratic politics, noting the presence of its notorious state chair Björn Höcke. Quasebarth and others attack as a far-Right extremist, pointing especially to his probable past in the German neo-Nazi scene. For his part, Quasebarth concedes that the AfD was within the law when it ran the constituting session, but thought the protest was nonetheless necessary. “Excluding the AfD from the parliamentary speakership,” he says, “was not a decision against the voters, but a decision for democracy.”

Not everyone in the BSW agreed with the party’s apparent coordination with the CDU. Friedrich Pürner, one of the first BSW members in the EU Parliament, wrote a long post claiming that actions of the anti-AfD bloc looked worryingly like the “ominous behaviour of politicians” during lockdown years. That was a time when “power-hungry politicians wanted to achieve full control over the population and massively restricted fundamental rights to do so.” The scenes in Erfurt were no different. Instead, Pürner told Die Welt that the BSW should have held talks with the AfD, as well, given that it is a “democratically legitimated party”. Yet the Thuringian BSW swiftly dismissed Pürner’s protests, suggesting he should stick to politics in Brussels.

Nonetheless, Pürner’s outcry shows that there are indeed some in the BSW who oppose a strategy of simply demonising the AfD. Another example is Robert Crumbach, a union activist and former SPD member who today leads Wagenknecht’s party in Brandenburg. Before the election, Crumbach said that the BSW should treat AfD bills like those of any other party, considering them on their merits. But then a Syrian Islamist stabbed three people to death at a diversity festival in the town of Solingen. The AfD reacted by demanding a blanket ban on asylum seekers, refugees and certain other foreigners from public events. This went too far in Crumbach’s eyes, who said the idea reminded of the Nuremberg Law. All the same, he can see a future in which the BSW and AfD would join forces, he says today. “But that depends entirely on the AfD and its further development.”

AfD leaders disagree that the ball is in their court. Nationally, after all, the BSW polls at just 8%. Compare that to the AfD’s 18%. “If the AfD will one day closely work with the BSW, the BSW should remember that it will do so as the junior partner,” says René Springer, another Brandenburgian and an AfD member of the Bundestag. Springer is one of those outspoken easterners who occasionally gives the national party leaders massive headaches. When, in January, the state-aligned “fact-checking” website Correctiv led a sting operation claiming to have exposed a “secret plot” by AfD members and Right-wing activists to mass expel non-ethnic German citizens, the party leadership distanced itself from any such plans. Springer, however, Tweeted that “we want to lead back foreigners into their home country. By the millions. That’s not a secret plot but a promise.” It’s a promise Springer ultimately thinks the BSW — for all its criticisms of mass migration — wouldn’t make and certainly never keep. During her debate with Weidel, in fact, Wagenknecht categorically rejected mass-deportation schemes, instead committing to focus on criminal aliens.

At least Springer seems to have the zeitgeist on his side. A majority of young voters regularly report that the AfD is their favourite party, in keeping with Gen Z’s move Right generally. The Right-wing populists do equally among working-class voters, nominally Wagenknecht’s pro-welfare base. That’s possibly because they see the AfD as more credible on the number one issue in German politics: immigration. In fact, the BSW seems to be treading water for the moment. For a party founded in January, it’s certainly impressed, winning seats in state parliaments right off the bat. But its results so far have ultimately proved underwhelming, especially when compared to Wagenknecht’s fame and all the media attention she’s enjoyed.  

And whether that represents BSW’s electoral ceiling may be tested sooner than expected. The next major elections in Germany would normally occur next September, when polls for the Bundestag take place. But if the coalition negotiations in the eastern German states fall apart — due partly to Wagenknecht’s insistence on further concessions from the mainstream — snap elections would be necessary. It’s possible that those eastern Germans who felt betrayed by the BSW’s behaviour during the antics in Erfurt might gain new respect for Wagenknecht’s hard line on the Ukraine war. But there’s one thing Wagenknecht doesn’t seem willing to budge on: during her debate with Weidel, Wagenknecht insisted that there could be no common cause with a party that offered a political home to the likes of Björn Höcke. The AfD can’t purge the Höcke wing, of course, lest it loses populist appeal with voters. Whatever else you might want to say about it, anti-immigration policies sell.

In a sense, though, any future partnership between the AfD and BSW matters less than their embrace by the mainstream. While Wagenknecht’s outfit can only go so far on issues like immigration, both populists parties have put the establishment under such pressure that they’re now shifting Germany’s Overton Window. Merz’s protestations aside, the CDU’s rhetoric on Ukraine has become softer. The mainstream parties are showing a new toughness elsewhere too. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has demanded “deportations on a large scale” while Merz, too, has recently called for tougher border enforcement. Whether the AfD and BSW will or won’t, in short, is beside the point. The real question is how far the old establishment is willing to go to win over the hearts of the ever-growing share of voters who flirt with populism.

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Gregor Baszak is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The American Conservative, The Bellows, Cicero, Platypus Review, Return, Sublation, and elsewhere.

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