Has Sahra Wagenknecht already peaked? Her populist party is unlikely to win true power

To many, this is a stunning result; after all, in its first year, the AfD didn’t even cross the 5% threshold in the Bundestag elections. But the BSW has something unique: the media-savvy Wagenknecht, who is the party’s main draw and regularly polls among Germany’s most popular politicians. The BSW’s co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali said on Sunday that the party would eventually get “a more neutral name” — but not until after next year’s federal elections which will determine the national government. Indeed, why rush it?

Exit polls in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony showed that more than half of BSW voters cast their ballot for the party because of Wagenknecht personally. And her appeal is far from superficial. She shares with many Western populists a compelling rejection of the dying neoliberal order and all that it represents today: Nato expansion, censorship, open borders, transgenderism, and public health authoritarianism. And crucially, she has managed to maintain this platform while continuing to win voters from the Left.

Yet even so, the expectation when it launched last year was that the BSW’s ranks would swell far more than it has for now. Some polls suggested that enough voters found a Wagenknecht party appealing enough to catapult it into second place; instead, it now polls nationally in the low double digits. Has it reached its ceiling?

Interestingly, the BSW has not drawn as many voters away from the AfD as was once expected. Indeed, in the most recent state exit polls, only around a quarter to a third of BSW voters stated that the AfD may have been their alternative choice. This raises a question: could it be that populist voters, especially the deeply independent-minded ones of the former GDR, see through the move and just opt to vote for the original? After all, on immigration, Ukraine and identity politics, the AfD had taken similar stances — and years before the BSW came into existence. What, in the eyes of voters, does the BSW add there that’s new?

That BSW and AfD voters for the most part do not overlap is to some extent easily explained: Voting for the BSW permits that section of the German left, especially its urban intelligentsia, to publicly take anti-woke, anti-war, and anti-immigration stances without losing what the Germans call Salonfähigkeit, the ability to continue to move in socially acceptable circles.

Of course, it isn’t as if the BSW and AfD are identical in all matters. They are radically opposed on the question of welfare-spending, where the AfD represents a more classically free-market radicalism compared to the BSW’s old-school social-democratic stance. But the question of how to keep social insurance systems liquid has taken a backseat in recent years, as Covid lockdowns and the Ukraine war came to the fore.

Add to this the fact that the BSW explicitly rejects any collaboration with the AfD, at least for as long as it includes the likes of Right-wing firebrand Björn Höcke in its ranks, and voters might wonder whether the BSW really means what it says. Why not form a Left-Right coalition with the AfD if you are so aligned on the key issues of the day? Especially if the alternative is that the BSW could now find itself in the role of organising majorities for mainstream parties it has sworn to oppose. This is not to prematurely brand Wagenknecht’s alliance as “sell-outs”. It is yet to sign a single coalition agreement, and its defenders might argue it is successfully changing the parameters of Germany’s national debate on both Ukraine and immigration.

After all, there are certainly signs that the German establishment is becoming more receptive. Chancellor Scholz recently indicated that he was open towards finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, while agreeing at the same time with the moves by the Christian Democrats to halt the vast influx of migrants into Germany. And as the former SPD chair Franz Müntefering famously said in 2004: “Opposition is bullshit. Let others do that — we want to govern.” The adage has since become received wisdom in Germany: it’s better to shape the world from the seat of power than stand on principle and be outside of the room. But historically, this has also meant that the coalition partners usually give up on a whole lot of their key campaign demands during the secretive talks in which an agreement is brokered.

In a sign that the BSW really does aim to stand firm on principle, the Wagenknecht alliance hopes to force the SPD’s hand. Its Brandenburg party chief Robert Crumbach is now demanding that the Social Democrats come out in no unclear terms against the stationing of US long-range missiles on German soil if they want the BSW as partners. Is it a mere bargaining chip or truly a red line for the Left-populist upstarts? The answer must be the latter if it wants to remain credible with its voters and become more than just a vehicle for Wagenknecht’s personal brand.

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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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