On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German democracy’s longest-serving matron of honour.
For more than three decades, long before telemedicine was a thing, Dr Wagenknecht has diagnosed modern Germany’s ills from the safe distance of the Bundestag opposition bench and talk show studios. But now it seems that she wants more: actively pushing for political responsibility to enact change.
At least it sounded that way last October when she and nine allies departed the post-communist Die Linke (The Left) party to form the provisionally titled eponymous political ‘alliance’, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). From a standing start – just 800 members, no back office and minimal funding – the BSW scored impressive double-digit support in two eastern state elections on September 1st. In Germany’s smallest state of Thuringia, where Wagenknecht spent her first years, the BSW took 15.8 per cent or fifteen seats in the state parliament in Erfurt; in neighbouring Saxony, 11.8 per cent brought fifteen seats in Dresden. In a further eastern state election in Brandenburg on September 22nd the alliance won 13.5 per cent and took fourteen seats in the Potsdam parliament. In Thuringia and Saxony, local BSW leaders are already involved in exploratory talks with other parties, anxious to isolate the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Sahra Wagenknecht hopes that, by the time Germans choose a new Bundestag – scheduled for September 2025 – her popular policies, on war-and-peace, migration-security and the welfare state, will attract wider support. Currently polling at 8 to 10 per cent in national polls, she sees her progress in the east as a springboard to further success. ‘We have founded a party that has completely overturned the political landscape,’ she said on the night of the first two polls. But is Sahra Wagenknecht is ready for the big time in Germany – and is Germany ready for Sahra Wagenknecht?
My first close encounter with her was in 2011, at the height of the euro crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel was in full austerity mode and the Bild tabloid castigated the ‘Broke Greeks’ and other euro ne’er-do-wells on a daily basis. Ireland rarely featured in the bailout debate – until December 6th, when Wagenknecht made an interesting intervention in a bad-tempered Bundestag debate. Merkel allies had backed tough conditions for bailouts, while opposition politicians made generalised criticisms of austerity. Only Wagenknecht criticised Berlin’s one-size-fits-all crisis policies. Ireland’s crisis was a liquidity crisis, she said, triggered not by a lack of competitiveness but a burst property bubble. ‘This forced rescue policy is wrong,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t save countries, rather banks and private creditors.’
Turning to Chancellor Merkel, she asked the German leader to come clean with her voters about her motives. If not, this ongoing ‘deception’ would do ‘irreparable damage’ to European democracy. Intrigued, I invited her to lunch. She glided in late and I remember a heavily made-up, inert poker face where the only movement was in her dark, interested eyes. Her back never touched the chair and she barely touched her food, but she still had a lot to say. ‘Germany has dirty hands, big time. The German government are the last people who have a moral justification for dictating how things should proceed now,’ she said. ‘There’s this terrible propaganda that … the Irish all have three homes and they’re doing just fine.’
Wagenknecht’s interest in Ireland at the time was personal. She was a regular visitor because her then husband of fourteen years, Ralf Niemeyer, lived in Killaloe, Co Clare. The couple divorced in 2013 and he has since had a busy time: after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he formed a self-declared German government in exile, apparently held talks with officials in Moscow and was in close contact with the organisers of a planned putsch, exposed in 2022.
After their divorce, Wagenknecht found happiness in 2014 with Oskar Lafontaine. A leftist former Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader, he was Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s first finance minister and – infamously – walked out on the job after five months. Furious at Schröder’s welfare reforms, Lafontaine split his own party to help form Die Linke and served as a co-leader. Now retired at eighty-one, he is still active and has been Wagenknecht’s key adviser. Their recent departure from Die Linke is the latest rupture in a political biography of splits, gaps and leaps. This time, Wagenknecht insists, the BSW is for keeps. ‘We have filled a large representation gap in the party landscape to change politics,’ she told Der Spiegel. ‘Not just for years but for decades.’
Wagenknecht was born in the East German city of Jena to a German mother and an Iranian father she never knew. Her mother remembers her daughter as ‘intellectually insatiable’, with an individualistic streak that got her into trouble with authorities in the collectivist socialist state. Her fully-formed contrarian instincts were in evidence on November 9th, 1989. While the rest of Berlin was out partying, the twenty-year-old Wagenknecht sat at home in an East Berlin suburb reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Months later, with the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) on its last legs, Wagenknecht signed up. ‘The GDR lived from strong leadership and pressuring people to support the path it took. I didn’t do that and had my problems,’ she told me in 2011. ‘Just because of that I’m not going to have my socialist convictions taken from me.’
Staying true to these convictions has been easier without the compromises of power. The post-SED successor party, the PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus), and later Die Linke, has served in state parliaments but never held power in the Bundestag. As a representative of the party’s communist – critics say Stalinist – wing, Wagenknecht criticised consistently what she saw as pro-business politics and reforms carried out at the expense of the working class and the welfare state.
As well as many sharp and amusing contributions in the Bundestag and a permanent talk show presence, she has built a loyal following with a series of bestselling books: Wealth Without Greed; Coma Capitalism; Freedom not Capitalism. In the last decade, however, as a new generation of Left leaders embraced postcolonialist narratives, pronouns and culture wars, Wagenknecht found herself at war with her own party. Her most recent book, Die Selbstgerechten (loosely translatable as ‘The Holier-than-Thous’) takes aim at the latest iteration of fashionable socialism. Urban lefties are less interested in the concerns of the working class and deprived regions, she argues, and more into avocado toast, oatmilk lattes and child-transporting cargo bikes.
A former Left political ally acknowledges a ring of truth to some of the criticisms of among younger colleagues. This has cost the party focus – and votes – but, in the end, he says, the main issue is another: Sahra is all about Sahra. ‘She is not a party political animal and not a team player; she is an intellectual entrepreneur in politician drag,’ he complained last month.
Her former party colleagues joke that Wagenknecht has been too busy saving the world – from her new home in Saarbrücken, 700 km away on the border with Luxembourg – to appear in Berlin for Bundestag sittings. Asked about her frequent parliamentary absences – she missed around thirty votes in 2023 – Dr Wagenknecht blamed short-term scheduling of votes that caused calendar clashes with other commitments. A look into her calendar reveals many lucrative off-site appointments, such as a speech with a €10,000 fee to a Swiss asset management fund event in October 2022, titled: ‘Left-liberalism and the farewell to the liberal society’. Alongside her basic deputy’s salary of €132,000 – excluding allowances – Wagenknecht earned around €800,000 on the side in 2023 in book fees and speaking engagements.
Last November, days after Wagenknecht announced the BSW, I travelled to the Saxon town of Riesa. Famed for its egg noodles, what was billed in Riesa as a reading from her most recent book turned into the first BSW rally. After rough years of economic ups and downs, pandemic uncertainty and rocketing energy bills, Wagenknecht was premiering a new foreword to the book’s paperback edition. Listening from the balcony of the Stern event hall, it was clear she was launching something entirely new in German politics: left-wing conservatism. In a tone of warm, conspiratorial concern she presented her theory of everything. Within minutes she had calmed the chaos of the last years for her stressed easterner audience. Many here struggled with higher energy bills, others were still triggered by pandemic measures that reminded them of old Politburo moralising and top-down threats. All of this chaos is part of a larger, ordered narrative, Wagenknecht explains, with the little guy as the victim-stooge of modern life.
Her arguments and well-honed jokes fall into three main categories: resentment-derision (well-off oatmilk-latte-drinking urban liberals), what-aboutism (Russia’s warmongering is no worse than America’s) and pacifist populism (force Ukraine to negotiate with Putin, even on his terms). For eastern regional audiences – many with lower incomes, raised in East Germany with a pro-Russian and anti-American outlook – this cocktail hits the bloodstream quickly. The audience in Riesa nods happily as her soft voice relates how ‘PR agencies’ – no names are mentioned – are working to manipulate German public opinion and set the country against Russia, arm Ukraine and rebuild Germany’s military-industrial complex. With its pro-Ukraine line, she argues, the Scholz government has embraced a ‘fairy-tale moralisation of politics … that defines itself through morality and posturing; questions of benefit and harm are relegated to second place’.
She saves her greatest contempt, however, for Scholz’s Green coalition allies who, she says, in the Russia-Ukraine war, have traded their traditional leftist pacifism for ‘Prussian militarism’ and feel entitled to ‘excommunicate’ critics of the war as ‘pacifist rabble’ – people like her – and the good people of Riesa – who ask the ‘who benefits?’ question and, as thanks, are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’. ‘It’s scary, we are living in a world of more and more conflicts,’ she said to her permanently nodding audience. ‘We have to finally understand that you cannot fight terrorism and other conflicts with military means.’
By the time I see her speak again, months later on the Thuringian election campaign trail, Wagenknecht has honed her message still further. Russia is barely mentioned and her speech contains even more emotional suggestion in its criticisms of rivals’ ‘crazy’, ‘outrageous’, ‘insane’ politics. In the pretty eastern city of Rudolstadt, a sizeable crowd braved a glaring summer sun to catch a glimpse of Wagenknecht.
Even at a distance her star wattage is clear, the event less a traditional rally and more about paying homage. As well as her attacks on big city liberals she describes the latest migration wave – 300,000 asylum applications alone in 2023 – as a security risk and an unfair burden on the labour and housing markets. These are the arguments that set her apart most from Die Linke – and which appeal most to voters here. Afterwards, enraptured listeners praise her ‘complex arguments’ and ‘clear solutions’ to problems. Ask for a reminder of what they are, however, and none appear to have stuck. With Wagenknecht it’s not the content, it’s the emotion, stupid. ‘I just feel that she sees me,’ says an older woman.
After ending her forty-minute address in Rudolstadt, Wagenknecht leaves the stage and, with distinctly regal bearing, comes down for a meet-and-greet with the people that is mostly meet and little greet. When she poses for the now obligatory selfies, remarkably little is said. That seems to suit Wagenknecht just fine. After her energetic speech she seems shy and stilted, with none of the common touch of her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, moving two steps behind her.
Not everyone in the Rudolstadt audience was convinced by what they heard. When Wagenknecht said she ‘cannot remember a single conflict that was ended with military means’, a woman nearby mouths what looks like ‘1945’ into her partner’s ear and snorts. ‘Wagenknecht wants people to emote, to be outraged,’ the woman told me after the speech, ‘and it works.’
The September 1 results speak for themselves. Eastern Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leaders are queuing up for talks with the BSW, anxious to secure its support – and power. They see overlaps in law and order positions and in climate policies that ‘don’t overburden our country and its infrastructure’. Western CDU leaders are horrified by that prospect, seeing the BSW as anathema to their pro-EU, pro-Nato and Atlanticist principles.
Her former Linke colleagues – facing a total Bundestag wipeout next year – have accused Wagenknecht of drifting into far-right populism. The AfD, sensing danger, is clearly regretting that Wagenknecht declined their invitation to join their ranks earlier this year.
While Wagenknecht rules out alliances with the AfD, some German politicians say this new political era makes anything possible. Nearly one in two voters in the eastern state elections shunned traditional parties to vote either AfD or BSW. At national level, recent polls place such anti-establishment support closer to 30 per cent. United or divided, the surge in support for the AfD and BSW means the question of the 2025 federal election is this: will the centre hold?
Some analysts are calling for calm: even with huge frustration over the ruling Scholz coalition, the traditional centre still has over 60 per cent support in polls. But others say unprecedented change is ahead. Some wonder if German politics is experiencing the so-called horseshoe phenomenon, where two populist parties at opposite ends of the spectrum coalesce on hot button issues, in this case on migration, energy and war.
One in five BSW voters said it was the party’s Russia-Ukraine policy – push for talks and ban further German arms exports – that won their support. Post-election analyses this month show the party polled well too in two of the top three issues on voters’ minds: fears of a rise in crime and fears of being dragged into a larger war with Russia.
Identification with Russia may, however, be a mixed blessing for the BSW’s prospects beyond eastern Germany. A recent Stern magazine survey pointed out that, while two-thirds of eastern voters think Wagenknecht ‘knows what preoccupies people’, just 46 per cent in western states agree. Just 25 per cent view her as trustworthy, down to 21 per cent in western states, where her anti-American swipes are likely to be less popular.
At the same time her party is picking up the most votes among non-voters, former AfD supporters and traditional SPD voters – many of whom have an ambivalent-to-critical stance on the US.
A year is an eternity in politics but, in recent surveys at least, Germans are largely happy with their country’s role as Ukraine’s number two supplier of military and humanitarian aid after the US. A June survey by the Forsa agency for RTL/ntv found 41 per cent of Germans think the level and nature of aid is just right. Some 24 per cent think Berlin is doing too little while 31 per cent think it is doing too much.
Similarly, some of the BSW’s more strident claims on Ukraine and Russia have faced energetic pushback in recent weeks. In a recent social media post, the BSW claimed that the conflict was unpopular even among Ukrainians, with 72 per cent in favour of a diplomatic solution. The post drew on – and distorted – the results of a representative survey in Ukraine commissioned by a German sociological institute. In the survey, 72 per cent of respondents said they favoured diplomatic efforts in addition to – not instead of – ongoing military action.
After winning applause on the eastern election trail, Wagenknecht may face a cooler response to what she calls a new ‘arms race’ triggered by Germany’s decision to host US mid-range missiles from 2026. Military experts dismiss her framing as alarmist. They see the deal as a counter-reaction to how Russia broke previous nuclear treaties, stationed combat aircraft in its Kaliningrad exclave and is planning to deploy nuclear weapons to Belarus. ‘Nato has to respond and, as a citizen, I expect to be protected,’ Claudia Major argued in a recent talk show alongside Wagenknecht. A military analyst, Major became a social media sensation for her take-down of the BSW leader, saying: ‘I have a different relationship to facts than you.’
After years as a talk show regular, Wagenknecht’s television appearances have become more bumpy of late. Her new leadership role puts her in the firing line and the rise in the number of campaign speeches delivers more ammunition to critics. With the BSW’s honeymoon period ending, Wagenknecht and her allies are already facing many questions about their party’s financing.
With a tiny membership and negligible subscription base, the party still found enough money for a €300,000 poster campaign in Thuringia and Saxony. A BSW ‘friendship society’ has collected around €5 million – including a single, €4 million donation from one couple. Winning six per cent in the June European elections will bring in €2.75 million of public funding while many BSW parliamentarians in the Bundestag – including Wagenknecht – continue to collect their salaries.
In line with German political funding rules, however, the BSW won’t have to publish its accounts until the end of next year – three months after the next scheduled federal election.
As BSW builds up party structures, established parties in Berlin are deeply unsettled. How do you tackle an opaque, populist rival with generous – but unclear – sources of funding? A year ahead of federal elections, Berlin’s ruling SPD have called for an urgent change to German campaign finance rules. ‘If the despots of this world understand that you can build a papier-mâché party in the largest EU member state with a few million,’ warned Kevin Kühnert, the outgoing SPD general secretary, ‘then we are facing a development that could put our liberal democracy under great pressure.’
After putting other parties under pressure before the polls, it is now the other parties putting pressure on the BSW. In Thuringia and Saxony, local BSW leaders are anxious – and willing – to share power. They complain that Wagenknecht, from faraway Berlin, keeps adding conditions that are impossible to fulfil in coalition talks in Dresden and Erfurt. Their suspicion: she is worried that their compromises in power in Germany’s eastern regions could dilute the ideological purity of her BSW project ahead of next September’s scheduled federal elections.
Doing is like wanting, just crazier. And just how crazy Germany’s traditionally staid politics gets in the next twelve months depends largely on Sahra Wagenknecht.
1/10/2024
Derek Scally is the Germany correspondent of The Irish Times. This article was very slightly updated on October 23.
