In January 2024 a new party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) emerged from a split from Die Linke (the Left Party) in Germany, and initially achieved a political success unprecedented in German post-war history.
A few months after it was founded, it won seats in the European parliament elections in the summer of 2024 and in three East German state parliaments in the autumn. In opinion polls it was ahead of Die Linke for months. But in the German general election on 23 February this year, it failed by a wafer-thin margin to cross the 5% hurdle to enter the national parliament. In contrast, Die Linke achieved almost 9% of the vote, with 64 seats.
How can this be explained? First of all, these developments reflect the increase in political instability in Germany – the loosening of party ties. But there are also specific reasons. Although several of the BSW leaders had once belonged to the left wing of Die Linke, others did not. Their new party was clearly a right-wing split. Before leaving Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht had sometimes criticised Die Linke for neglecting social and class issues in favour of ‘woke’ issues. But even then, she had criticised identity politics from the right and failed to show any perspective on how to combat the oppression and discrimination people face from a class standpoint. In recent months, Die Linke took up social and class issues much more strongly than the BSW.
The BSW did have social reform demands in its general election programme. But these were formulated in a language of ‘justice’, ‘reason’ and ‘performance’, not in class terms, not in a language of ‘us down here against them up there’.
Above all, the election campaign was characterised by the fact that almost all parties and the media tried to distract attention from economic and social issues by pushing the topic of migration. The BSW was involved in this shameful manoeuvre, which contributed to making the right-wing AfD the second strongest party. Social demands are of little use if you help to ensure that economic and social issues are not discussed!
And last but not least, how can you enforce economic and social demands if you have no prospect of an extra-parliamentary mobilisation of the working population, but instead promote racist division, thus weakening its fighting power? Through coalitions with neo-liberal parties or appeals to their reason or sense of justice?
The BSW has already damaged its image as a new political force by participating in governments in East Germany after its election successes there. Sevim Dağdalen, one of the former BSW MPs, who once belonged to the left wing in Die Linke, wrote on Facebook after the election that “we lost voters because we formed coalitions with the CDU and SPD at state level. Our participation in governments has cost us trust…”.
Did the BSW manage to take voters away from the right-wing AfD through its stance on migration? According to the post-election survey, 440,000 BSW voters came from the social democratic SPD, 350,000 from Die Linke, 260,000 from the liberal FDP, 220,000 from the CDU/CSU, 150,000 from the Greens, but only 60,000 from the AfD. Four hundred thousand were former non-voters.
The war issue is the only issue on which the BSW has visibly taken an oppositional stance, in particular against arms deliveries to Ukraine and against anti-Russian sanctions. This has enabled it to distinguish itself to a certain extent, even vis-à-vis Die Linke. In fact, the BSW and Die Linke do not differ greatly in their formal programmes on this issue. But Die Linke is allowing prominent representatives of the party to constantly trample on its programme on peace.
On 21 March, the two federal states where the BSW participates in a coalition abstained in the Bundesrat in the vote on the lifting of the debt brake for military spending. The Bundesrat is the Federal Council, in which the federal German states are represented; their representatives traditionally abstain when one party in a coalition government at state level rejects a particular measure. Significantly the two states where Die Linke participates in a coalition shamefully voted in favour. However, thousands of members of Die Linke had protested in advance against the impending violation of party positions.
And the BSW is not really more radical on the issue of war. Die Linke’s election programme stated: “We demand the transfer of armament companies into public ownership and conversion to social production. Jobs and collective labour agreements must be preserved”. The BSW only vaguely calls for a “long-term restructuring” of the armament industry and “that the profits of arms companies must not be distributed to shareholders”.
Ultimately, the BSW’s peace policy is merely an extension of its utopian demand for a reconciliation of antagonistic class interests in Germany on the basis of justice and reason onto the international arena, with an equally utopian call for a reconciliation of imperialist great power antagonisms on the same basis. In contrast, in Die Linke there is an open battle around these questions between those who try to adopt a class point of view and a principled anti-militaristic position and those who have given up any anti-capitalist perspective and want to change the still existing programmatical position of the party against NATO and against arms deliveries. This at least is a starting point to put forward a Marxist point of view, which does not exist inside BSW.
The BSW missed entering the Bundestag by a few thousand votes. If the party had been represented, the envisaged government of the conservative CDU/CSU and the SPD would not have a majority. They would have been forced to bring the Greens on board and any government would have been even more unstable. It is therefore not surprising that attempts by the BSW to take legal action against the election result (because there is evidence that votes for them were mistakenly counted for another party called Alliance Germany) were shot down.
It remains to be seen whether the BSW will recover from its election failure. The political situation is so unstable that nothing can be ruled out. Above all, the BSW brings confusion and distraction from the important issues in the debate in society. Its disappearance therefore would not be unwelcome.
On the other hand, the combination of social demands with anti-migration demands is not a unique feature of the BSW. A wing around Hans Peter Doskozil in the Austrian Social Democracy have been pursuing a similar line for years, while George Galloway in Britain echoes the BSW approach. In the multiple crisis of capitalism, in which the masses are suffering from neo-liberal government policies while decades of racist agitation have left their mark on consciousness, there will be more attempts at such combinations, regardless of the fate of the BSW.
This can only be prevented in the long term by a combative class-struggle based policy of the trade unions and the building of a fighting socialist mass workers’ party. The upswing in membership and support for Die Linke means that the party is an important battle field to put forward such ideas and it could make an important contribution to both. But the Bundesrat vote on March 21 has shown that the party has not changed yet and is in danger of repeating the same mistakes of the past.
Wolfram Klein
Sol (CWI in Germany)