The rise of ‘left-conservatism’

It’s not often that German regional elections capture the world’s attention, but establishment parties all across the West have good reason to be terrified by Sunday’s results. In the east German states of Thuringia and Saxony, the three ruling parties – the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals – came under assault from both ends of the political spectrum. The right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored an historic victory in Thuringia, winning its first-ever state election. Just as striking was the success of another consciously populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which emerged from the rubble of the German left.

When the BSW first arrived on the political scene, the great hope of the elites was that it would splinter the anti-establishment vote, helping to put a lid on the seemingly inexorable populist revolt. But Sunday’s elections have shattered that illusion. Instead, the BSW has broadened the populist base. Voters who loathe the establishment, but could not bring themselves to vote for the increasingly unsavoury AfD, now have an outlet for their frustrations.

The BSW was only officially launched in January, yet by June it had won six MEPs in the European Parliament elections. This weekend, it came third in both Saxony and Thuringia. Because of the cordon sanitaire placed around the AfD by the mainstream parties, the upstart BSW will likely be the kingmaker in the coalition negotiations for both regional governments (although the CDU is almost as wary of parties of the left as it is of the AfD). This is an extraordinary breakthrough for a party that’s just nine months old.

The BSW gets its name from its founder and leader, Sahra Wagenknecht, formerly a leading figure in the Left Party (Die Linke). She left last year out of frustration with its abandonment of the working class and its embrace of what she calls ‘lifestyle leftism’ – that is, an obsession with identity politics, consumption habits and political correctness. Instead, she argues for a ‘left-conservatism’ – a mixture of redistributive economic policies and more conservative, or at least anti-woke, social policies.

Wagenknecht has fashioned herself as a champion of the ‘kleine Leute’ (little people), as opposed to the ‘hip, urban sorts of voters’ the modern left now chases. She and her voters are repelled by a left that seems more interested in chastising workers than winning them over. ‘People don’t like being told by politicians what to eat, how to talk, how to think’, she says. ‘We want to meet people where they are – not proselytise to them about things they reject.’ Voters resent feeling like they have to ‘apologise’, she argues, for expressing their views while being ‘straight’ or not coming from a ‘migration background’.

Wagenknecht doesn’t shy away from poking the contemporary left’s shibboleths. During the Covid crisis, she railed against the ‘endless lockdowns’. Earlier this year, she denounced the government’s plans to introduce gender self-ID, arguing that they would be ‘ridiculous, if they weren’t so dangerous’.

She was also an early critic of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, blaming the open border for a rise in Islamist terrorism back in 2017. Unlike much of the left, which frets more over the largely imaginary problem of Islamophobia than the very real and deadly threat of Islamist extremism, Wagenknecht says there must be ‘zero tolerance’ for Islamism.

Her fiercest ire is reserved for Germany’s Green Party, which she once memorably described as the ‘most hypocritical, most aloof, most mendacious, most incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, also the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag’. As it happens, the BSW was launched just as tens of thousands of German farmers were descending on Berlin to protest against the government’s environmental policies. Net Zero, Wagenknecht rightly warns, is tipping Germany towards deindustrialisation and is placing an excessive burden on the poorest.

Although Wagenknecht’s strident criticism of the left made her many enemies within her former party, her message has clearly resonated with voters. Tellingly, in Thuringia, the biggest losses were endured by Die Linke. In the 2019 state election, it topped the polls but was this year beaten into fourth place.

The BSW’s success in east Germany speaks to a number of factors. Firstly, more than three decades on from reunification, the eastern states remain considerably poorer than the West. This means there is a larger pool of voters who are receptive to a leftist, redistributive programme and who are also more wary of the AfD’s more conservative economic policies. Secondly, eastern voters are far less loyal to the established parties, providing greater opportunities for political entrepreneurs like Wagenknecht. Thirdly, political correctness evokes bad memories among the Ossis – those old enough to have lived through the bad old days of the German Democratic Republic. As Wagenknecht herself has put it, ‘East Germans are particularly sensitive today when they realise that you want to educate them, that you want to lecture them, that you want to restrict their freedom… That’s also a bit of the legacy of East Germany, the legacy in the sense of a certain resistance and renitence that people acquired back then.’

The establishment and what remains of the left have predictably sought to paint her as ‘far right’, or as the AfD in sheep’s clothing. But Wagenknecht insists it is the left that has changed, not her. Given that she has spent her entire adult life on the left, these attacks have largely fallen flat. Although the BSW says it will refuse to enter any formal coalition with the AfD, it has not ruled out collaborating where the two parties’ interests align, such as in opposition to migration and greenism. ‘If the AfD says the sky is blue, [the BSW] will not claim that it is green’, she recently told the FAZ newspaper.

Arguably, the most controversial point of crossover between the BSW and the AfD is their opposition to supporting Ukraine. This has caused Wagenknecht to be portrayed as a puppet of Putin. In truth, her confused stance on Russia-Ukraine seems to stem from a mixture of wishful thinking – including the naive belief that immediate peace negotiations would somehow not result in Ukraine’s subjugation – and a simplistic, economistic view of geopolitics that, regrettably, is all too common on the left. For Wagenknecht, the US, not Russia, is the primary driver of the war and is sacrificing Ukrainians simply to boost its energy and arms interests. The fact that Ukrainians are willingly fighting for their freedom is apparently lost on her.

Still, for all the BSW’s flaws and limitations, its success on Sunday is welcome news. The rise of right-wing populism speaks as much to the failure of the left as it does to the aloofness of the liberal-centrist parties. The BSW, at the very least, has successfully pinpointed the German left’s most egregious betrayals of the working class. A left worth its name should be opposing the misogynistic trans movement, murderous Islamists, authoritarian cancel culture and the impoverishing green agenda with as much force as the BSW does. Crucially, this upstart party has given voters another outlet to express their frustrations with an intolerable status quo – and shown that anti-establishment energy is not the sole preserve of the new right. This ‘left-conservatism’ shows populism is only growing stronger.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.