Is Germany’s rising superstar so far left she’s far right?

BERLIN — Listening to Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s hard-left icon, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the greatest threat to democracy is “lifestyle leftists” nursing lattes in reusable cups while shopping for organic kale at a Berlin farmers’ market.
Such well-off, eco-friendly urban bohemians hold what they deem to be “morally impeccable” views about everything from Ukraine to climate change, she says, and then impose those beliefs over regular people with draconian zeal.
Wagenknecht — whose recently formed populist party is polling in the double digits ahead of critical state elections in eastern Germany on Sunday — also believes there are too many asylum seekers coming to the country, claiming there’s “no more room.” She reserves much of her ire for Germany’s Greens, blaming their clean-energy push for the country’s deindustrialization, and favors closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
One of Germany’s most well-liked politicians, Wagenknecht started out in politics as a member of East Germany’s communist party and has long been the face of the country’s hard left. Of late, however, she often sounds positively far right.
Her views and scathing attacks on the mainstream left have, in fact, won her many far-right admirers. Björn Höcke, one of the most extreme politicians in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the party’s leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia was so impressed with Wagenknecht — particularly over her position on Putin — that he once called upon her to enlist in the AfD’s ranks. “I implore you, come and join us!” he said last year during a speech in Dresden.
Instead, Wagenknecht has forged a new political force defined by a seemingly oxymoronic ideology she dubs “left conservatism.” In the process, she is upending German politics by chipping away at the crumbling dominance of the country’s mainstream parties and further scrambling the left-right divide that characterized Western politics for most of the 20th century.
As established parties lose sway across Europe, the fractured political landscape makes it easier for political entrepreneurs like Wagenknecht to stake out new territory. That’s increasingly true in Germany too, which has long served as Europe’s anchor of stability — where politics were long relatively staid and predictable.
Long gone are the days when the Volksparteien — big-tent parties — could virtually alone determine Germany’s political course. Upstarts like the AfD and Wagenknecht’s party — dubbed Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) — are fomenting a revolt against the political mainstream.
That rebellion is particularly strong in the region that makes up the former East Germany which — despite the more than three-decade effort to absorb and integrate the formerly communist state after the fall of the Berlin Wall — is increasingly following its own parallel political reality.
With three state elections to be held in eastern Germany — in Saxony and Thuringia on Sunday, and in Brandenburg on September 22 — the AfD is leading or close to leading all the contests. Wagenknecht’s new party is polling between around 13 and 18 percent, a striking result for a party that just formed several months ago.
I met Wagenknecht earlier this year backstage at a theater in Berlin, where she was scheduled to answer questions from a reporter from Germany’s left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung before a live audience. Wagenknecht sported her signature look — a jacket with padded shoulders, a knee-length skirt and pumps — a style so invariable she’s often asked about it by reporters. (“Ultimately you get the feeling that it’s a kind of uniform,” the Tageszeitung journalist, Ulrike Herrmann, told Wagenknecht on stage later that night.)
Wagenknecht is far from alone in blurring the traditional left-right spectrum. In the U.S., former President Donald Trump has embraced some traditionally left economic policies on trade and tariffs, partly explaining his appeal to working-class voters. France’s far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, has co-opted economic and welfare policies from the traditional left, attracting, in the process, many former French Communist Party voters.
When I asked Wagenknecht if she saw any similarities between herself and Le Pen or other radical-right parties, a hint of shock seemed to break through her cool, composed countenance. Such parties, she told me, do not truly represent the “so-called little people.” Rather, she said, her brand of politics does — a left that focuses on fighting economic inequality while, as she put it, also embracing social policies that foster “traditions, stability and security.”
That’s territory, she said, the left has mistakenly ceded to the right. “These are quite legitimate human needs, and at some point the left was no longer interested in them,” Wagenknecht told me. She then blamed the rise of the far right on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his left-leaning coalition’s “arrogant” approach to governing.
“This is the direct result of an incredible frustration and indignation about wrong policies,” she said. “And the indignation is justified.”
* * *
Wagenknecht is accustomed to standing apart. She was born in 1969 in East Germany to an Iranian father who had come to West Berlin to study and a German mother who worked as an art dealer and lived on the other side of the Berlin Wall, making it impossible for the couple to maintain regular contact. 
When Wagenknecht was just three, her father left for Iran and never came back. She was raised by her grandparents in a small village in Thuringia, where, she told me, other children teased her for her black hair and dark eyes. “It was actually not so nice for me as a child,” she told me. “I was relatively alone there. There were no children with foreign parents.” 
As she came of age, much of her character seemed to be defined by resistance to change. At the age of 19, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she joined the East German communist party out of a desire to help prevent the state’s collapse due to what she considered to be “counterrevolutionary forces.” After the wall fell, she joined the party’s successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism, and served as the youthful face of the old-guard “Communist Platform,” the wing of the party that represented the views of the former East German leadership.
Due to her youth and the calm, coolness with which she peddled radical ideas, she became a German media phenomenon. As her party tried to move away from its East German roots, she continued to defend the old regime, maintaining her opposition to the West, NATO and capitalism. “Better East Germany with the wall than the societal conditions we have today,” she said in a 1996 interview on public television.
Wagenknecht’s hardline views began to moderate after she met another leftist icon, Oskar Lafontaine, a man 26 years her senior. Lafontaine was the powerful leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the 1990s, but left after a bitter power struggle with then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, believing the SPD to have turned against the working class and welfare state.
In 2007, Lafontaine’s SPD splinter party merged with the PDS to form Die Linke, or the Left Party, with Wagenknecht joining the executive committee. He and Wagenknecht later married. After Lafontaine took a lower political profile in 2009 due to health reasons, Wagenknecht became one of the party’s leading voices.
Yet, in subsequent years, Wagenknecht became an increasingly controversial figure within the Left Party, including when, amid the refugee crisis of 2015, she became a critic of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, using the mantra “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”). In 2016, after a spate of terror attacks perpetrated by migrants, Wagenknecht released a statement that read: “The reception and integration of a large number of refugees and immigrants is associated with considerable problems and is more difficult than Merkel’s frivolous ‘We can do it.’”
Members of her own party sharply criticized her, arguing that no true leftist should attack Merkel from the right on migration. That year, at a Left Party gathering, a man from a self-described anti-fascist group threw what looked like a chocolate cake topped with whipped cream in Wagenknecht’s face. Relations with many members of her own party grew more strained after Wagenknecht became a sharp critic of the government’s “endless lockdowns” during the Covid-19 pandemic and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Wagenknecht frequently appearing on German television to offer takes that echoed Kremlin propaganda.
Finally, last year, she announced that she and a group of Left Party allies would leave to form their own party, with Lafontaine, her husband, also later joining. “We live in a time of global political crises,” she said in Berlin. “And in this of all times, Germany probably has the worst government in its history.” Many people, she added, “no longer know who to vote for, or they vote out of anger and despair.” The choice led to the unraveling of the Left Party, which was forced to dissolve its parliamentary faction, liquidate assets and fire staff.
Wagenknecht has since grown adept at finding a leftist angle for what are commonly rightist stances. Her skepticism of immigration is due, in great part, to her support of the welfare state, which, she says, requires a certain degree of homogeneity to function.
“The stronger the welfare state, the more of a sense of belonging there must be,” Wagenknecht told me in Berlin. “Because if people have no connection to those who receive social benefits, then at some point they will refuse to pay for those benefits.”
Another example was Wagenknecht’s vote against a bill passed by the German parliament earlier this year to make it easier to change one’s legal gender — a law, she said, that would “just be ridiculous if it weren’t so dangerous.” But she found a traditionally left line of attack for that view, targeting the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry as the main beneficiary of the bill. “Your law turns parents and children into guinea pigs for an ideology that only benefits the pharmaceutical lobby.”
She has also repeatedly called for an end to German military aid for Ukraine and negotiations with Putin — a view prevalent on the far right, but for her, an anti-war stance rooted in the leftist tradition.
That she sounds like the right on these issues brings to mind the “horseshoe theory” of politics, often attributed to the French author Jean-Pierre Faye and his 1996 book “Le Siècle des ideologies,” which holds that political extremes bend towards each other, in the shape of a horseshoe, so that the far left and far right ends are closer together than they are to the center. 
But a more concrete explanation for her policies is that Wagenknecht sees a representation gap — a space for people with socially conservative views who are uncomfortable with migration and progressive politics, but are also wary of the AfD’s extremism. Wagenknecht, in other words, seeks to provide a more palatable, anti-establishment alternative.
Wagenknecht, like leaders of other parties, has ruled out governing with the AfD in a coalition. At the same time, she has not, like others, ruled out cooperating with the AfD to pass what she deems to be sensible legislation.
“If the AfD says the sky is blue,” her party “will not claim that it is green,” she recently told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
* * *
There are numerous theories for why so many voters in the east of the country are prone to supporting populist and radical parties. One is that the wage gap between eastern and western Germany has driven resentments in the east, where employees on average earn about 15 percent less per hour.
Another is that loyalty to mainstream parties and trust in institutions runs less deep in the eastern states because they only became part of a reunified Germany 34 years ago. In that sense, the parties that dominated West Germany’s postwar history — the center-left SPD and center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — are a lot less entrenched.
When we spoke in Berlin, Wagenknecht had another explanation for why she’s doing so well in eastern Germany, saying it had to do with the legacy of resistance to authoritarianism. People in the east, she told me, just don’t like being told how to think. They were, in other words, less susceptible to the indoctrination that lifestyle leftists impose through their grip on mainstream politics and the media.
“East Germans are particularly sensitive today when they realize that you want to educate them, that you want to lecture them, that you want to restrict their freedom,” she said. “That’s also a bit of the legacy of East Germany, the legacy in the sense of a certain resistance and renitence that people acquired back then.”
Many eastern Germans — even those born long after the end of the Cold War — maintain a strong sense of identity as “Ossis” (Easterners). Voters in the east also tend to be more wary of immigration, more socially conservative and increasingly nostalgic toward Russia. That later trend has perplexed even some of the people who know the politics of the region best.
“Suddenly, over 30 years later, there’s this nostalgia, but it’s a strange nostalgia because it doesn’t differentiate between Russia and Putin,” Bodo Ramelow, the current premier of Thuringia and a member of the Left Party that Wagenknecht abandoned (and no fan of hers), told me earlier this month. “A collective forgetting seems to be playing a role.” People no longer realize what it means that Soviet forces crushed an East German uprising in 1953. Rather, he said, the West is increasingly seen as the oppressor. “So, it’s really a reversal, a reversal in terms of substance.”
Wagenknecht appears to be both fomenting and capitalizing on those pro-Russia sentiments. “The central issue in Ukraine is: Will Ukraine become a staging area for American military bases and American missiles?” she said at a press conference the day her party was founded. She has also condemned a plan to deploy U.S. long-range missiles on German territory, and when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to Berlin to speak in the Bundestag, her party — along with AfD parliamentarians — refused to show up. Russian media outlets, unsurprisingly, love to quote Wagenknecht.
It’s partly because Germany’s Greens — a party that emerged from the pacifist movement during the Cold War — have become so hawkish on military support for Ukraine that Wagenknecht holds them with particular contempt. “The Greens are the most hypocritical, most aloof, most mendacious, most incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, also the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag,” she once said in a video message.
That’s a message that is resonating with eastern German voters. The Greens have seen their support plummet so much in the three states going to the polls in September that they risk not winning seats in any of the state parliaments. The two other parties that make up Germany’s three-party ruling coalition — the SPD and the fiscally conservative Free Democrats — are also struggling.
With the AfD and Wagenknecht’s new party rising, forming viable coalition governments that exclude populist and radical parties across the east is becoming increasingly difficult — if not impossible. 
After the eastern elections, both parties hope to strengthen their influence in the rest of Germany. Should they be successful, ahead of a general election next year, what’s happening now in the former East Germany may only be a prelude.