November 16, 2023 - 1:05pm
There was a time when German politics had a reputation for being sensible, even boring. More recently, however, the country’s volatile rebalancing of the political spectrum has attracted a great deal of attention. This time, it’s the far-Left party Die Linke in the limelight. Following the resignation of its most prominent figure Sahra Wagenknecht, the party might be about to implode, creating a political vacuum that may well end up fanning the flames of the AfD.
Sahra Wagenknecht announced last month that she was leaving Die Linke to form her own party, which is expected to follow a more Left-nationalist course. Many German centrists are hoping Wagenknecht could draw votes from the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), acting as an “alternative to the Alternative for Germany”. But with her old party disintegrating, the opposite may be the case.
When Wagenknecht left, nine of her colleagues followed, leaving the party with only 28 MPs, not enough to form an official faction in the Bundestag. As a consequence, Die Linke announced earlier this week that it will dissolve the group, which means losing state funding and rights in the parliamentary process.
While faction leader Dietmar Bartsch was trying to put on a brave face, arguing that “the liquidation of the faction is definitely not the end of Die Linke,” it’s hard to see the party come back from this. It had already struggled with infighting, losing nearly half its electoral support between the general elections of 2017 and 2021 and leaving it with only 4.9% of the vote. Without national relevance and faced with direct competition from Wagenknecht, it might prove difficult to maintain the infrastructure for local and state-level elections.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the implosion of the far-Left party could benefit the far-Right. Die Linke has more support in eastern regions where it competes with the AfD for the anti-establishment vote. As the successor to East Germany’s ruling party, it was often able to pick up around a quarter of the votes in eastern states in the 1990s, when it was called the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), entering coalitions, including in Berlin, with the Social Democrats. While it lost some of its traction when it merged with a party from the former western areas to form Die Linke, it continues to receive support in the east. The current leader of the state of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, is from the party.
Losing a party that is seen by some to look after the concerns of eastern Germany leaves a void for the AfD, which has already been able to capitalise by targeting disgruntled voters in the region, using slogans such as “The East Rises Up”.
Local elections are scheduled in three eastern states next year: Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. In all three, the AfD is currently set to win but not outright, making it possible to form coalitions without it. The collapse of Die Linke, however, may change this.
Take Thuringia, where the polls currently predict 34% support for the AfD and 20% for Die Linke. If Die Linke evaporates, their voters might stay at home, vote for the Social Democrats or plump for the AfD, potentially making it mathematically impossible for the other parties to form a coalition without the hard Right.
If the AfD is included in Thuringia, it will, as the strongest party, demand to have its leader run the state as Minister President. That would be Björn Höcke, who has links to neo-Nazis and who was charged earlier this year for using a slogan of Hitler’s stormtroopers. He was previously leader of the Der Flügel faction of the AfD, which the German security service judged to be “Right-wing extremist”.
It was in Thuringia where the Nazi Party gained its first government positions in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power as chancellor. Germany’s mainstream parties must take the falling apart of Die Linke seriously, for the unintended consequences may be significant.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
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SubscribeThat time when German politics was regarded as “sensible, even boring” was when Merkel opened the immigration floodgates to millions from the most violent, corrupt, repressive and conflicted parts of the world
Not content with socially destabilising Germany and creating enormous national security risks, she followed through with the shutting down of Germany’s perfectly safe nuclear reactors and thereby making the German economy dependant on Russia for oil and gas.
That such predictably catastrophic policy choices were regarded as “sensible” is testament to just how far the naive, foolish ideas of “progressives” had infected mainstream thinking.
The silly, predictable scaremongering in these articles, insinuating some comparison with the rise of Hitler, is tiresome.
Anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews is dramatically increasing in Germany. But it’s not from the “far-right”. It’s from those millions that “sensible” politicians allowed to flood into the country.
I was going to write someting similar, but you have expressed it much better than I would have done.
Well said.
The problem with the left is that they are never wrong.
Because they “meant well”, a convenient excuse for lacking historical knowledge and a convenient evasion of the will to power.
‘The silly, predictable scaremongering in these articles, insinuating some comparison with the rise of Hitler, is tiresome.’
I agree with you on that much.
Good critique. When they’re losing the game, the so-called progressives flip over the table in fury and accuse their opponents of being racist, bigoted, neo-Nazis, and other such things. In America, it’s become so prevalent that the other side does it too, like a child taunting “I know you are but what am I”. Nobody pays much attention to accusations of Nazism anymore. It’s just part of the show, and we’re well on our way to the point where accusations of racism are similarly shrugged off. This is evidently something new for the Germans, who probably find it mightily disturbing.
Little has changed, if we may take Olaf Scholz’s smirking in that now famous press conference with Joe Biden in early 2022 that the US would put an end to Nord Stream; let them eat coal!
Well said, Marcus!
Dear Katja, this is a quote from your previous article. Are these troublemakers far-right or are they imported from other countries?
Darling, I understand that we are all obviously stupid here and our memory cannot accommodate more than one bit of information, but, alas, the Internet remembers everything.
We have antisemites marching in the streets throughout the west, and a shocking increase in hate crimes against Jews, but ya the real threat is from the right. At some point this worn-out trope will become silly to everyone.
Isn’t the party “Die Linke” the official and legal successor of the GDR’s “SED”? I say good riddance to a political group that not only grew out of the socialist East German regime ruled by the likes of Honecker, but proudly continued this rotten tradition. The old SED rebranded itself PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism!) after the GDR’s collapse, and became the political home for Stasi officers and die-hard comrades. The name changed, but the convictions of its followers and members did not. Another name change followed in 2007/2008 when the PDS merged with a West German left-wing party and adopted the moniker “Die Linke” or The Left. Some of the party’s leading figures had criminal convictions (e.g., Hans Modrow who died earlier this year), whilst others, such as Gregor Gysi, are accused of assisting in the disappearance of the SED’s fortune. I shan’t be shedding a single tear for The Left.
Like Merkel’s murky past in the GDR the media class rarely mention this. In the 1990s Eastern European anti-communist dissidents discovered to their dismay that Western leftists and liberals were happy to work with ‘former’ communists. One wonders how many serving Eurocrats were trained in Moscow and how that effects the workings of the EU.
Hoyer, perhaps out of naivety, has no feeling for this history at all.
As has frequently been observed, when reasonable politicians stop listening to voters’ concerns, they will vote for unreasonable ones. Very unpleasant to see anyone with those sort of alleged links being elected. But it would be difficult to vote for any of the German mainstream parties either.
The AfD was started by a couple of econi ics professors who,unlike Sunak,knew about the Laffer curve. Talk of Nazi gestures and slogans are often to be found in the DM, but no real historian
of the period would agree. They might consider someone who is a left wng nationalist rather more likely to be similar to the Nazi Party, the national socialist party, and I am surprised Hoyer djd not mention this. But she has to stick to her party ine.
How can a massive influx of Leftists be any good for a conservative party? It makes no sense now and it has never made any sense in any other contexts. The only think accomplished by such sudden, unvetted political migrations of disgruntled Leftists (disgruntled, as the Left is wont, by the perennial question of how many Jacobinical fallen angels can dance on the head of a pin) is to fill conservative movements with leftists and turn any conservative organization merely into yet another left-wing faction.
Let the Jacobins and Hébertists settle their differences amongst themselves, if they can and if they will. Don’t let such dubious conversos past the door unless there is positive proof of their soundness, sincerity, conviction, and trustworthiness.
‘Far right’, ‘Hard right’ description of the AfD are cheap lazy labels for a party that’s probably to the left of mainstream Toryism!
Hoyer obviously consumes far too much MSM.
This article illustrates that the (basically) 19thC model of politics built around left and right wings just can’t accommodate the changed reality of the 21st.
Goodhart’s ‘Anywheres and Somewheres’, and a spectrum constructed on that basis is a far better tool for analysing the way things are now.
The AFD are Somewheres (Germany), the Red Wall in the UK are as well, The Lib Dems are Anywheres, and similar elements inside Labour and Conservatives, and indeed Humza Yousaf’s SNP are Anywheres, and in all three parties this is the real reason they are experiencing huge strains that threaten the coherence of all three.
I think a fundamental restructuring of parties to reflect this century’s political realities is underway and it is happening across the West.
I would hope that the Wagenknecht party takes away a good slice of the AfD vote, as well as votes from the discredited SPD and Greens. If that happens, the AfD will have nothing to gain from the split in Die Linke.