Following the German federal election on February 23, a new party could officially enter the Bundestag: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, named after its firebrand founder, who split from the Left Party in 2023.
Her eclectic mix of left-leaning economic policies, anti-migrant rhetoric, and a foreign policy that is pro-Russia, anti-Israel, and deeply distrustful of NATO has enabled the party to hoover up votes in recent elections. At the EU elections in June, it achieved six percent of the vote. And in regional elections in three eastern states in autumn it became the third-strongest party, earning it a spot in the ruling coalitions in Brandenburg and Thuringia.
The Alliance, called by its German acronym BSW, was officially formed in January 2024. Technically, it already has ten seats in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, after Wagenknecht – former co-leader of the Left Party and a sitting member since 2009 – took nine defectors with her.
Now, BSW will, for the first time, contest a national election, currently polling at between four and six percent (a five percent minimum is needed to enter the Bundestag). The Left Party, meanwhile, is trailing at just three to four percent.
The rise of BSW
The BSW’s rise has been meteoric, its speed unprecedented in German politics – and its politics hard to define. But who is the woman behind it? And will Wagenknecht succeed in remaking Germany’s political landscape?
Wagenknecht is perhaps best described as an old-school leftist. She was born in 1969 in Jena under the state-socialist regime of the German Democratic Republic, where she was a member of the youth organization FDJ as a teenager. She joined the ruling party, SED, in the final months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In 1991, she became a member of the party executive of PDS, the SED’s democratic-socialist successor, which fused with another party in 2007 to create the Left Party.
After the fall of the wall, Wagenknecht idolized East Germany’s past, fellow party members have said of her. In 2002, she voted against a PDS resolution that stated that “there is no justification for the dead at the [Berlin] Wall” – referring to the state’s policy of shooting those trying to flee to the West. Until 2010, she was a member of the Communist Platform within the PDS and later Left Party, a group of orthodox Marxists who saw Stalinism in favorable terms.
Already in the 1990s, her positions were strongly criticized within the PDS. However, she rose to become a leading member of the Left Party in the 2010s despite being seen as an increasingly polarizing, even unruly figure who repeatedly challenged party consensus.
However, among some voters, especially in Germany’s east, Wagenknecht became a political icon. Her sharp-tongued speeches, delivered in elegant attire, won her many fans. She once even donated one of her trademark colorful blouses to the Marxist newspaper Junge Welt for auction. When asked how many blouses she would give away to restore the old socialist regime in East Germany, she said, “All that I have, of course.”
Wagenknecht’s bestselling books have further fueled her popularity. In 2021, her book The Self-Righteous, which criticizes identity politics and “lifestyle leftists” as privileged positions that do little to alleviate economic injustice, topped Spiegel’s bestseller list. The book ignited a debate on the left and was also lauded by right-wingers critical of “woke” politics.
Her books and speaking gigs have netted her handsome side earnings, which amounted to 750,000 euros in 2023. Among them: 10,000 euros for a talk at Swiss Rocket Asset Management and a further 10,000 for one at the Swiss Institute for International Studies. Only four members of the Bundestag earned more in addition to their parliamentary salaries than Wagenknecht that year.
While still a member of the Left Party, she was criticized for often being absent from the Bundestag, with leading voices saying she should concentrate on her parliamentary work more. Many felt she put herself before her party.
In many respects, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance is the logical conclusion to her cult of personality. One member has referred to her as the “Kaiserin” of her new party. And with the help of some wealthy backers – the party received a donation of 5.1 million euros from a German high-tech investor, the largest single party donation in German history – she has put her polarizing persona on the ballot.
But even internally, many have criticized the authoritarian grip she has over her namesake party. Wagenknecht reportedly approves each member herself, keen to prevent “unwanted” activists from joining. Her anti-migrant rhetoric appeals to voters who might otherwise vote for the extreme-right AfD – and could be damaging to the party’s image (the extreme-right magazine Compact featured her on the cover with the headline “The Best Chancellor” in 2022).
However, Wagenknecht is also set on controlling the party’s line, seemingly unwilling to compromise with other leftists. “With such a young party, we naturally have to be careful that other issues aren’t suddenly able to gain majority support as the party grows,” she told the German newspaper TAZ in July.
As a result, BSW has surprisingly few members – just 1,000 across Germany. In some cities, it only has a single member, hindering an effective election campaign, as it relies on supporters whose membership applications are backlogged and are growing increasingly frustrated as a result of the party’s top-down approach.
Perhaps the strongest remnant of Wagenknecht’s communist days is her anti-Western stance on foreign policy, critical of the USA, NATO, and Israel. Wagenknecht herself markets BSW as a “peace party.”
Just days before Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she said in a talk show that Russia “does not have any interest in marching into Ukraine, of course not.” Since then, she has repeatedly doubled down, denying Russian war crimes, amplifying Kremlin-aligned disinformation and suggesting Ukraine should simply surrender.
When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a speech at the Bundestag in June, BSW left in protest – along with the AfD. Wagenknecht herself has never been to Ukraine, as she fears she would be murdered there, she claims.
Wagenknecht’s anti-Israel stance has also earned her much criticism. When Shimon Peres addressed the Bundestag in 2010 on the day of commemoration for the victims of National Socialism, she and her now fellow BSW politician Sevim Dağdelen refused to stand up after his speech to applaud with all other members of the Bundestag, as Wagenknecht “cannot show such respect to a statesman who himself is responsible for war,” she later said.
Since October 7, Wagenknecht has accused Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza of having the “traits of a campaign of annihilation,” using the German word Vernichtungsfeldzug, often used in connection with the crimes of the Nazis. Her party has filed motions to block German arms exports to Israel and accused the German government of “aiding and abetting war crimes.” But she has also repeatedly stressed she supports Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Hamas-led attack against Israel.
As a result, Germany’s Central Council of Jews has strongly criticized Wagenknecht, with president Josef Schuster saying in an interview in August that she “fuels Israel-hatred in Germany with rather populist positions” and has a “tendency towards conspiracy theories.”
BSW was the only party to vote against a resolution against antisemitism passed in the Bundestag in November. And after Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans were hunted through the streets of Amsterdam in the same month, a leading member of BSW, Klaus Ernst, claimed on X that Mossad was allegedly among them, as he sought to blame the Israeli fans for the violence against them.
On the eve of Germany’s next federal election, BSW’s prospects are still far from certain. Despite initial euphoria following a string of strong election results in East Germany and on EU level, support is waning. Until the current coalition crumbled, comprised of Social Democrats, Greens and the pro-business FDP, BSW was consistently polling at eight percent – a strong showing for a first-time party. But whether it will clear the five percent threshold needed to enter the Bundestag is now unclear, recent data shows.
One reason is that Wagenknecht has been conspicuously absent from the campaign trail, so far organizing few events. The surprise election caught BSW off guard, which had banked on more time to raise funds and consolidate its nascent structure. Another is the structure itself: media reports critical of the strictly hierarchical organization and its authoritarian style of management have done it few favors.
By founding a party named after herself, Wagenknecht has put her personal brand on the ballot on February 23.
But whether Germany will vote to extend the Sahra Wagenknecht Show for another season will be a close call. The Jerusalem Post approached Sahra Wagenknecht for comment but is yet to receive a response.
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
