In Germany, the parties of the political centre are losing their grip on power. They have been squeezed by the far right for some years now. What is new is that they are being squeezed on the left as well.
Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht is named after one of Germany’s best-known politicians. An East German communist at the time of the reunification in the 1990s, Wagenknecht was often compared to Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist resistance fighter murdered in 1919. Wagenknecht is married to Oskar Lafontaine, a former SPD leader and finance minister. She hails from the old Left Party but left last year in protest against its support for Ukraine. Early this year, she formed her own party and immediately went on to win seats in the European elections in June and in three state elections this month. In the Brandenburg elections on 22 September, she won 13.5 per cent of the vote, and ended up ahead of the CDU. But, more importantly, she is now increasingly the power broker in eastern German state parliaments. There can be no coalitions without her. Her influence vastly exceeds her share of the vote.
Her opposition to military and financial support for Ukraine is the reason her rise matters beyond German politics. Just as the anti-immigration rhetoric by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) infected political conservatives, Wagenknecht’s position on Ukraine has infiltrated the discourse of the left, including within the SPD itself.
She caricatures pro-Ukrainian Greens as metropolitan elites, language borrowed from the right. She is also unique among politicians of the left in opposing immigration. I see her as a representative of a new hybrid class, a politician of the left with themes of the right. For Olaf Scholz, she is a real problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he was met with no effective opposition when he broke with Russia and firmly positioned Germany on the Ukrainian side. He also increased defence spending to comply with Nato targets.
Wagenknecht has effectively filled a niche in German politics. I know East Germans with moderate views on most issues, who would never dream of voting for the AfD, and yet they believe in the restoration of the German/Russian relationship. Many of them had direct dealings with Russia during the time of communism. For them, Wagenknecht is a symbol of East German pride. Apart from her position on Ukraine, her other big themes are Germany’s deindustrialisation and immigration. The three issues are linked. Russia was the provider of cheap gas to German heavy industry. Immigration, she claims, depresses industrial wages. She is the ultimate rust-belt politician.
With her position on Ukraine, she also leads the resistance to the Westernisation of Germany – something Sholz famously described as “an epochal change” after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Russia. Scholz’s declaration reverberated through foreign policy salons in European capitals. It was what Germany’s allies always wanted to hear. But inside Germany, it is supported only by a relatively small majority.
East Germany’s voters like it least of all. Its political leaders, many of them Social Democrats, used to be at the centre of the bilateral relationship with Russia. Many invested their careers in this relationship – such as Matthias Platzeck, a former SPD chairman; Manuela Schwesig, state premier of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; and Rolf Mützenich, the current SPD leader in the Bundestag. But only Wagenknecht can express so openly what many Social Democrats also believe to be true: that Germany’s unconditional support for Ukraine has been a mistake. For as long as the war still rages in Ukraine, the spectre of Wagenknecht will haunt the left.
The SPD followed Scholz, reluctantly. The party almost baulked at his recent decision to station US medium-range missiles on German soil. Scholz’s new epoch is not one in which all SPD members want to live.
He has since changed his tone. His support for a peace conference for Ukraine that includes Russia is part of a charm offensive. But Scholz has little direct control of the war itself, and therefore ultimately little control of his own political fortune. He desperately needs this war to end. Wagenknecht is already a problem for him, and this will get worse as we approach election day.
The biggest threat to Scholz would be early elections. After a string of disastrous losses, the centre-right FDP may pull out of SPD-led coalition government early. A German comedian asked for an electron microscope so that he could analyse the party’s latest election results. If the FDP were to desert Scholz’s cabinet, it would further play into Wagenknecht’s hands.
I see her appeal as a nostalgic throwback to the supposed good old times of the Russian-German political axis. For me, she falls into the category of politically effective, but plainly wrong. Deindustrialisation is proceeding for reasons that have nothing to do with Russia: lack of investment, lack of strategic diversification and lack of digitalisation.
There is no way back to the bad old days when Gerhard, Schroder and Putin spent time together in a sauna; or when the St Petersburg International Forum took place – a Davos stylee junket where Germans and Russians struck business deals. The destroyed Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipelines won’t be rebuilt. When the war ends, sanctions may be gradually lifted but the German-Russia relationship will not reset. Until that reality sets in, Wagenknecht will exert a strange appeal to Germans, many in the east and many in the SPD. And, unlike Scholz, she is a natural campaigner and a great orator.
In one specific way she is typical of the entire political class. Everybody represents some version of the past they want to hang on to.
[See also: Sahra Wagenknecht’s new left conservatism]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war