Slow Deceleration

A study by the Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) of the German trade union federation’s think tank found that the BSW is perceived as an antiestablishment alternative, particularly in eastern Germany and among those who have only recently turned to the AfD. Socio-structurally, these are regions and communities where the PDS (Party for Democratic Socialism, one of the precursors of Die Linke) used to be successful. The BSW is strong in regions with high unemployment and an ageing population and, according to the WSI, particularly appeals to low-income voters, and those with pessimistic expectations for the future and little trust in existing institutions.

Even if the BSW’s scores in Thuringia and Saxony primarily damaged Die Linke, it likely also stopped the AfD from doing even better. In both states, the AfD was polling up to 35–36 percent. According to Infratest Dimap, 26 percent of BSW voters surveyed in Thuringia said that they would have voted for the AfD in the state elections if they didn’t have the BSW as an option. In Saxony, this figure was 33 percent. If this percentage is offset against the AfD’s actual result, the party would have achieved around 37 percent in Thuringia and around 35 percent in Saxony. It is also unlikely that many former Die Linke voters who have now switched to the BSW would have voted for the left-wing party again, as its poll ratings were already declining before the rise of the BSW. The hope of some Die Linke strategists that Wagenknecht’s exit from the party would mean that a new or renewed section of voters could be reached has been dashed.

In purely numerical terms, the BSW was able to slow the rise of the AfD somewhat — but has by no means been a stopgap. But what can be said of the BSW’s impact on political debate and media rhetoric in Germany in general? Is the party’s relative success, as is claimed by large parts of the left-wing and left-liberal spectrum, part of a general rightward shift of the political horizon?

Loyalty to Top or Bottom?

In terms of economic and social policy, the BSW clearly made its presence felt. One of the first demands of its parliamentary group, made up of former Die Linke MPs, was to increase the minimum wage. The BSW also called for pension rises. At the same time, it constantly speaks about promoting the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) under the slogan of “economic rationality.”

This orientation is quite contradictory. The antagonism between capital and labor is particularly strong between SMEs and wage earners. Small companies with roots in less economically dynamic regions consider a staunch anti-union stance essential for withstanding wider national and international capitalist competition. Left-wing forces in the BSW emphasize an economic policy based on a short-term “anti-monopoly alliance.” According to their portrayal of the current economic situation, the federal government — made up of the SPD, Greens, and neoliberal-hawk Free Democrats (FDP) — is pursuing a pro–big business industrial policy that distorts genuine capitalist competition. In this critique, the BSW in fact shares a perspective with the FDP.

In the medium term, however, the contradiction between the promises the party wants to make to SMEs and its promises to wage earners are likely to lead to tensions. On one hand, the BSW opposes higher taxes on capital and supports greater sanctions on the unemployed to pressure them to accept subpar work, while at the same time it demands higher pensions and a stronger industrial and structural policy in the name of helping workers.

We are unlikely to see a return to the Russian-European energy partnership and its correspondingly low industrial electricity prices. Instead, we can likely expect to see industrial battles intensify in the coming years. It remains to be seen how the BSW will position itself on the increasingly loud demands of the capital side — for a forty-two-hour week, raising the retirement age to (at least) seventy, restrictions on the right to strike in the public sector, and a reduction of corporate taxes. This conflict contains the seed of a potential split.

In Die Linke, the economic policy orientation of the BSW and its social policy stances, particularly on asylum, are evidence that Wagenknecht’s departure from Die Linke’s ranks was a pure right-wing split. The BSW itself also emphasizes that it does not want to be a “Die Linke 2.0.” Many of its key figures have been remarkably quick to distance themselves from their former worldview — whether for reasons of electoral pragmatism or out of real conviction. The party’s lead candidate in Saxony is one of the most egregious examples. The ex–Die Linke politician Sabine Zimmermann located the BSW “to the right of the SPD and to the left of the CDU.” On election night, Zimmermann emphasized on Germany’s ARD public TV station that there were great political “overlaps” between the CDU and BSW particularly in “education and migration policy.”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Although the BSW is clearly to the right of Die Linke in terms of economic policy and asylum and migration policy, the image of a pure right-wing split is not so clear when it comes to one core issue for the BSW: peace and a foreign policy geared toward détente. The Bundestag deputies who left Die Linke together with Wagenknecht did so primarily out of dissatisfaction with a perceived softening of the party’s peace and foreign policy positions. A major reason for their departure was the party’s indecisiveness in its criticism of the West’s Ukraine policy.

It is no coincidence that many of the members of the Bundestag parliamentary group who left Die Linke specialize in these foreign policy issues. Die Linke’s perceived refusal to adopt a pro-NATO and conciliatory attitude to the Western alliance has long been a decisive factor preventing the party’s participation in a federal government. This is why Wagenknecht, along with Sevim Dağdelen MP and others, had always maintained an internal position in opposition to the “red-red-green” coalition strategy that failed during the 2021 federal election campaign.

Keeping this in mind, it is easier to see why many grassroots members and voters have switched from Die Linke to the BSW. Especially in the East, but not only there, the shift of traditional voters from Die Linke and the SPD to the BSW can be explained above all by the latter’s foreign policy positions. Precisely because the issue of peace is closely linked to criticism of Die Linke’s “opportunism,” the BSW can still be perceived as an antiestablishment force, despite being unambiguously to the right of Die Linke on socioeconomic issues as well as on asylum and migration. Die Linke is still programmatically the most antiestablishment force in the German Bundestag, yet it appears to be a harmless, only slightly more leftist appendage of the SPD/Green establishment.

Another issue that has increasingly emerged as a central concern of the BSW is migration. When the party was founded, it was downplayed. When Wagenknecht announced the founding of the BSW at a press conference in October last year, she only briefly touched on migration once. Then, at the founding party conference in Berlin at the end of January, only a handful of speakers mentioned it.

Over the last several months, however, the focus has changed: especially from Wagenknecht herself, migration has become one of the central talking points alongside the war in Ukraine and social issues (particularly pensions). Ten years ago, she cast Deutsche Bank as a “ticking time bomb,” but today she says the same of migrants. In mid-July, she wrote this on Twitter/X after an eighteen-year-old asylum seeker from Morocco allegedly pushed a man down the stairs of a train station in the northern German town of Uelzen: “Stop uncontrolled migration that is flooding such ticking time bombs into the country!”

Wagenknecht is not the only one to emphasize this issue: when Zimmermann officially commented on the result one day after the election in Saxony, she named limiting uncontrolled migration as the first goal of a policy change. Education and peace came second.

Overall, the BSW can thus be classified as on the Left when it comes to pensions, the labor market, and foreign policy, and on the Right when it comes to internal security and migration. However, if you look at the course of the debate in the election campaigns so far, it is difficult to argue that the BSW has shifted the discourse further to the Right. The party has tended to follow the general right-wing trend, not set it. As a result, even on issues where it is more to the Right, the BSW is, both programmatically and rhetorically, roughly where the Christian Democrats and large parts of the SPD are now: in the center of the Right — no more, but also no less. This also means that the party is not a “front organization of the AfD,” as Oliver Nachtwey recently claimed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Yet, the BSW is also not — as Wolfgang Streeck argued in an interview with Die Zeit — the only force that “asks the right questions.” In terms of asylum and migration policy, the BSW has followed the general right-wing trend without clear conviction. If this is motivated by electoral tactics, the BSW could at some point become aware of how much this rapprochement with the AfD ultimately only benefits the latter. After all, voters who consider limiting immigration their top priority are more likely to choose the “original.”

At the same time, it is to be welcomed that the BSW, for example, is calling for a referendum on the extremely escalatory stationing of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, against which four million German citizens signed the “Krefeld Appeal” in the 1980s. With his decision, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is driving many more SPD voters into the arms of the BSW. The rise of the Wagenknecht party — in addition to the poor situation in the proxy war, the creeping withdrawal of the Americans, and the rapidly growing war-weariness of the Ukrainian population — is probably the decisive reason why Scholz, as well as even Omid Nouripour from the Greens, are suddenly calling for negotiations involving Russia.

Uncertain Future

The BSW’s future trajectory will largely depend on the wider national and international political climate. Its eclecticism in particular puts the BSW largely at the whim of external economic cycles. Something similar has already been observed with the Five Star Movement in Italy. The coming decades will probably be characterized by a new cold war against China, which will be legitimized with the unconvincing narrative of “democracies versus autocracies.”

For the BSW, the priority of a peace policy geared toward détente is probably the issue that sets it apart from all other Germany parties and could remain the main reason for its existence. The growing importance of this new bloc confrontation will open up a permanent field of activity for the BSW on one of its core issues, on which it actually maintains relatively coherent positions. The party thus fills a gap in the political spectrum. In the future, it is likely that this gap will only get bigger as a result of developments in the AfD and Die Linke.

This is particularly true if the current within Die Linke that advocates a less critical stance toward the transatlantic alliance prevails at the party conference in October 2024.

On the other side of the spectrum, if the AfD wants to become a governing power in Germany and at the European level in the coming years, the pressure to adopt ever more conciliatory positions toward the EU, the euro, the transatlantic alliance, and NATO will only increase. As a right-wing and racist force, the AfD will nevertheless be able to form alliances with the other bourgeois parties in Germany based on its firm commitment to the Western alliance and the “defense of our values” in the struggle of “democracies against autocracies” and against internal enemies (Muslims as well as those opposed to policies of imperial confrontation). The modernizing far-right parties in Italy and France, which have so far excluded the AfD from their parliamentary group in Europe, have long since developed in this direction. Although the strategy is rejected by the leadership and parts of the base, a “Melonization” of the party is the only path to power in sight for the AfD.

Foreign policy developments will be decisive for the BSW’s future prospects — and could even secure its future as a permanent fixture in the political landscape. Yet while its unwavering policy of détente has solid appeal, it’s future is uncertain due to confusion in other policy areas, particularly its contradictory desire to serve the interests of wage earners on the one hand and capital on the other.