In both cases, it’s clear the political center lost because it had lost touch and didn’t see what was coming. Liberal media, in the United States and in Germany, completely failed to see why working-class voters would vote for Trump again and ended up completely blindsided. Nothing was learned from the last couple of years. I think Bernie Sanders put it well when he said, you shouldn’t wonder why you’re losing when you’re not working in the interests of working-class people.

I think the same has happened to Olaf Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition. But there’s the difference: that after the split in its ranks, ahead of fresh elections, the Social Democrats and Greens are now trying to lay all the blame on Christian Lindner [former finance minister, of the neoliberal-hawk Free Democrats]. He is set up as the bad guy who failed at responsible government. Lindner is a bad guy — but the whole coalition was neoliberal in its essence, not just him. The government in its entirety failed to look out for the interests of working people.

Trump’s election has escalated dynamics that were already ongoing. When Social Democrats and Greens talk about a “sovereign Europe,” they mean more military spending. This is already what Chancellor Scholz and Robert Habeck [vice chancellor, of the Greens] have said in the last few days. Having moved toward an early election, they said that we need exemptions from the debt brake [a constitutional limit on the Germany government’s budget deficit] in order to spend more on the military. The Greens are discussing an extra €500 billion for defense — an extraordinary sum. Not for infrastructure, not for schools and buildings and bridges, but only for military spending.

So, I think that this snap-election campaign, which will be short and hard-fought, will be all about defending Europe, defending Germany, and security policy, discussed in military terms. That’s frightening. When the political center invokes a “sovereign Europe,” they only mean it in Emmanuel Macron’s sense of building up a European army. This summer, during the EU election campaign, we said, yes, we need a sovereign Europe and European Union, but in a sense of social and economic policies, in the sense of not being dependent on either the United States or China.

The NATO states in Europe, without the United States, spend roughly twice as much on their military as Russia, even accounting for purchasing power. So, at least if you think that the Russian government is composed of rational actors, the story that Vladimir Putin’s about to attack isn’t credible. We have to take people’s anxieties seriously, but not fall into the liberal discourse that says we need more military spending all the time.

The problem with any sort of “peace coalition” with the BSW and AfD is that they’re pretending that if only we had Nord Stream up and running again, then everything would be fine. This is not true. You also can’t attribute Germany’s industrial decline purely to higher energy prices; it’s not that simple. We have a general problem with underinvestment and are falling behind on numerous technologies. So we are caught between two fake news camps who are pretending to solve the whole problem in one fell swoop: by either finally defeating Putin, or by just striking a deal with him. I don’t think that is how geopolitics or industrial policy works. The problems we see now have a lot to do with a wider economic interdependency. But it’s much, much harder to translate that into political communication in a media discourse that is split between those two camps.

As a socialist party, we say: we could get our energy from sources other than gas and oil. But as long as we cannot really translate that alternative to the people — and that’s our job — it’s much easier to imagine that all that’s missing is Nord Stream. That’s easier than saying that we should have €500 billion investment in infrastructure to have clean energy under popular control. So I think we need to work on a left-wing populism that provides that kind of positive alternative, but one that is based on sound policy and not just empty rhetoric for daydreamers.

We’re working on a strategy together with people from the IG Metall trade union and from the works council [employee-representation board]. The workers are paying for Volkswagen management’s failures over the last five to ten years, but the state has also failed. Last time when we had this kind of crisis, we had the state spending €5,000 a head for everyone to get a new car. In the deep phase of deindustrialization we’re facing right now — with the car industry obviously being one of the backbones of German industry — that kind of policy isn’t enough.

One thing that we insist on is that state aid should be provided only in exchange for equity in the company. When you have public investments, you also need public control. That doesn’t mean socializing Volkswagen in one fell swoop. But the state and the workers need to have more control over decisions. This has always been our line. But now we need to be more concrete and work together with IG Metall and the works council. You need an industrial policy with a plan — like Isabella Weber says — that looks ahead for five, ten years for the industry to have some kind of perspective.

Exactly. Still, in Germany, we do have this sentiment that the state should be part of the steel or car industry. There is some idea of a welfare state with some public control, and IG Metall’s statutes speak of socializing major industries if necessary. No one believes that this will happen tomorrow, but you still have these political sentiments among the workers, in their day-to-day discussions. I think we could mobilize around that, much more than in the recent past. But our voting base among industrial workers is 1 or 2 percent: very low. No socialist party should be satisfied with that.

I recently talked to Peter Mertens from the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), and we discussed how you can reach people in the factories. He said it takes ten times more work to rebuild that kind of connection to industrial workers than other types of community organizing. I think it’s worth investing in that anyway, because of the strategic leverage and social power that comes with it.

So I don’t think we can build all that just in the next three months. But we should definitely start talking about it more often and have a plan for reaching out to industrial workers. Without them, we can have the best policies on paper, but no one will care. And I think we should use the crisis in Volkswagen and the auto industry to gain a new confidence in saying that we also take industrial workers into our big picture of the working class, and consequently that our working-class party is a party for workers.

Especially in eastern Germany, Steffen Mau rightly says that there is a deep depression and estrangement, not just from Die Linke but from parties and politics in general. This process has been going on for two or three decades. So to build back strength in rural areas will take five to ten years, even if we’re doing well.

In the next three months, we need to talk about workers as workers. We’ve long been very sensitive about mentioning each and everyone and their problems, not forgetting about anyone’s feelings, being the “Left with all the adjectives,” anti-this and anti-that. But we need to change the way we communicate from day one in this campaign, and to make clear that we’re a different party.

We should talk about what people want and what they’re afraid of: that should be the material for what we talk about. So, when we talk about capping rents, about prices, about deindustrialization, we need to put the working class and its interests front and center, and change completely the way we talk about politics.

We had a “preelection campaign” planned, where we wanted to knock on 100,000 doors. Obviously [with the election now brought forward] we’ve now cut the “pre-“ bit, and we’re already in the campaign. But I think we are paradoxically one of the most prepared parties now, because we already have 150 Die Linke groups who started campaigning even before the election season officially began.

We wanted to knock on 100,000 doors so we could listen to people and get our main proposals for the election from them directly. What we heard — which is no surprise — after the first couple thousand talks, is that most people in the cities talk about rent. I think it gives us more legitimacy to say, OK, well, what we want in this election campaign is a federal rent cap, because it’s what people need most. The Social Democrats have completely failed on the cost-of-living crisis, on heating and building new homes. Rents have been rising for years now, not just in the main cities.

More than two thousand people have joined our party since the fall of the government last week. We have all these new members asking themselves, what can we do? I think it’s best to get them in contact with the people that we want to convince of left-wing politics, but also that we get the material that we talk about directly from the people we seek to represent. We’ll have to experiment with this type of dialogue. Now we have to get the campaign up and running even faster. So, after ten thousand talks, we’ll need to analyze them. And I hope that in two weeks we will have a program that takes into account what people have told us on the doorstep.

That’s one of the biggest tasks for the coming years. At our recent party convention, we had a lot of talk about capping the income of party representatives: fellow cochair Jan van Aken and I are both taking the median worker’s wage of €2,800 a month. I think that’s a role model. We can’t make a bylaw in the party overnight. But we can take this step toward being more of a socialist party that doesn’t allow a split between its members and its functionaries.

We had discussions about representation, and — for instance, for the coming state elections in Hamburg, we will be running a candidate who is a dockworker, recently on strike. We need more people like that, nurses and workers, on our lists. I’d prefer a quota for that, to put the issue on the political agenda. Die Linke is a 55,000 member “ship” that needs steering. But you can feel a lot of pressure for change, and not only from us. When we published that we were capping our own wages, I think that was the most popular thing we did in the last few weeks. We were in Bild for the first time in a long time with some positive news, and people said, I usually vote AfD but I really respect what you’re doing. I think it brings back many people who might say, I’m not interested in left-wing politics per se, but I like this different attitude. That can change how people look at us.

I’m running for election in Lichtenberg [a district of eastern Berlin currently represented by Die Linke in the Bundestag]. We had a meeting there packed with people — older people who’d been in the Party of Democratic Socialism [PDS, of the 1990s–2000s] and Die Linke forever, and who said they haven’t experienced such hope since [Die Linke was founded in] 2007. So you can really feel that something is changing. It was maybe two-thirds older people and one-third younger, newer, more activist people who’d just joined. I think this is a good example of how the party is now working.

Most of the young people are really keen to do something. We should use that potential. We also need to be more than a young activists’ party where people join the campaign trail then get frustrated and go off elsewhere because of bad election results. We need the experience of the older generations too.

To bridge that gap, you need them involved in common practice together. An election campaign can be a good moment for that. But we want to really build these connections, for instance with educational programs for new members who are not Marxists per se, but who came to the party because they’re afraid of the AfD or joined Die Linke in response to Trump coming back. I think it’s our task to make them socialists, through education and through practice.

There’s also the old PDS way of doing politics: I invite people to come to my advice-surgery and listen to them and try to help them with their problems. I think doing that gives people more sense of what this party could be.

Around ten thousand members left with the BSW split. Many of them had been frustrated with Die Linke for a long time, and I can’t get them back immediately. But a first step is to win back voters, especially in the East. People are also frustrated with BSW over this question of [its negotiations on] joining the [Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in] government in Saxony and Thuringia: they are pissed about that. It’s like people recognize, OK, the BSW is doing the same stuff as the other parties, cutting deals, not really making a difference for me.

So the first step is to win back BSW voters in the areas where we lost a lot of them. But we cannot win them all back, and with the membership it’s even harder because there was a long process of losing them. But I’m getting lots of messages from people saying, your leadership gives me some kind of hope that we get on a good track again. I think this will take some time too.

They left after the party convention, which had been extraordinarily good, especially when it comes to the Middle East and the war in Gaza. We found a new way of talking about it, inviting involvement from each of the groups in Die Linke who we knew had different standpoints. We had a long process to get to a resolution that we can all agree on: the vast, vast majority agreed on a human-rights position that says Israel is committing severe war crimes in Gaza, but also that obviously we’re not supporters of Hamas. I think we should be clearly able to say that as a left-wing party. I really don’t understand people leaving the party after the last convention, especially with this kind of explanation. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

In Die Linke, there’s been a long process with a kind of dialectical opposition between the conservative camp, which went into BSW, and a kind of super-“progressive” wing. In a way, we have now lost both extreme ends. But the vast majority in Die Linke has reached a better position than we’d had the last couple of years. We know that the German left is very particular about the Middle East and about Israel. But I think we found a very good way to talk about it, and I don’t want to lose that because some people say it’s not enough for them; this is not how the party works.

We had our own resolution on combating antisemitism that was backed by lots of groups and artists and scientists. We said we’re not in favor of this kind of resolution [imposing the IHRA definition] because it obviously infringes on basic rights to freedom of expression and has all kinds of troubling implications.

Unfortunately, it had no chance to get through the Bundestag. So the party decided — or more precisely, the Die Linke MPs decided as a group — to abstain. I do think we could be stronger in presenting our own standpoint and not be supportive of what the government is doing. But for us as a party, it’s already a major step in the right direction to take a united position like we did.

It’s a two-sided approach. We should still reach to get over 5 percent, because 16 percent of people say they would be open to voting for us. We need to find who they are and what’s stopping them from voting Die Linke. But we also need to shoot for six directly elected MPs and win at least three constituencies.

We saw this strategy at work in the state election in Saxony in September, where we fell just short of 5 percent but in [its biggest city] Leipzig, Nam Duy Nguyen ran a really extraordinary campaign [and was directly elected, helping Die Linke back into the state parliament]. He hadn’t been well-known, but he rallied progressive voters, precarious workers, and people who usually don’t vote. That’s a coalition we need in other cities too. His parents emigrated from Vietnam and moved to the GDR [East Germany] as so-called “contract workers.” He had a strong personal history to tell people about and spoke to communities we usually don’t reach.

So in the federal election, we’ll be aiming for directly elected MPs in Berlin and a number of other eastern cities, also to show that we’re not giving up the East. At the same time, we’re trying to get into areas with a lot of more potential for us, like Hamburg, like North Rhine–Westphalia, where we could get more votes from workers and precarious people, even at the same time as talking to progressives fed up with Social Democrats and Greens. That’s what Nam Duy did and what we should do most places we’re running.

We have a party convention in Chemnitz in May. If we do get into parliament, we need to have this convention anyway and say, OK, how do we rebuild the party now with the resources that we have? If we don’t get in, we’ll still have to do that — with less resources, but it’ll be even more urgently clear that we need some drastic changes. We’ll still need a socialist party in Germany, oriented toward the working class. That’s why I wanted to become cochair: there’s nowhere else that such a party is coming from.

It’d be best, as new leaders, if we could arrive at the convention with some electoral success to show this can be done, and to resist the narrative of decline. But even then, we’d still have a lot of work to do. We have had important recent successes too; it’s a shame that not everyone knows about them. Take Eva-Maria Kröger, mayor of Rostock, elected in late 2022. We need to learn from our own victories as well as learn from other parties. Of course, maybe what works in Rostock might not work in central Berlin in quite the same way. But our campaigning needs to include these different parts of the working class.