The biggest surprise in Germany’s recent federal elections was the relative success of the Left Party (Die Linke). Despite polling at merely three per cent as recently in January, it secured nearly nine per cent of the vote. ‘Germany’s Left comes back from the dead’, said Politico of this unlikely rebound. The Left’s most notable achievement was its strong performance among young voters, winning 25 per cent of the 18-24 age group. It also came first in Germany’s capital, Berlin, with 21 per cent. So how did it pull off this comeback?
As mass migration rose up the political agenda, and especially when the eventual winner, the CDU’s Friedrich Merz, promised tougher border controls in January, the Left found its rallying cry. It promised to be the ‘Antifa’ party and to ‘fight against the far right’.
Heidi Reichinnek, the Left Party’s 36-year-old leader, delivered a fiery speech in the Bundestag that went viral on social media. ‘To the barricades!’, she said. ‘Stand up to fascism in this country!’ She accused Merz of recklessly pandering to the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. One commentator went as far as to say that Reichinnek’s speech ‘single-handedly rescued her party from oblivion’.
The speech certainly hit a nerve with many younger, leftish voters. More importantly, it marked a definitive break with the party’s old, anti-establishment roots. It signalled its transition to a party of the woke middle class.
It seems deeply ironic now that the Left was once seen as the prime populist threat to the German political establishment. Die Linke was born in 2007 out of a merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a breakaway grouping from the Social Democrats (SPD). The PDS was the post-reunification successor to the Socialist Unity Party, the former Stalinist party that ruled over East Germany. The disaffected SPD members had opposed former chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s economic and social reforms (akin to Tony Blair’s neoliberal ‘New Labour’ agenda). Die Linke soon became an outlet for millions of disgruntled, mainly East German voters to vent their anger at what they perceived as a West German political elite dismissive of their concerns.
In the 2009 federal election, at the height of its success, the Left won nearly 12 per cent of the vote (and up to 30 per cent in some eastern states). The establishment’s response to the successes of Die Linke was not dissimilar to its response to today’s right-populist AfD. Democracy was in danger, the elites warned. Bodo Ramelow, who became the minister-president of Thuringia in 2014, and the first politician from the Left Party to reach such heights, had been kept under close observation by Germany’s secret service. Today, it’s the AfD that’s under surveillance.
Nowadays, Die Linke can no longer win majorities in its old working-class strongholds. An internal 2024 party analysis revealed that working-class voters had defected in droves. Between 2009 and 2021, the party’s support among production workers plummeted from around 20 per cent to a measly four per cent. The report identified teachers, doctors and social workers as the party’s primary supporters – a far cry from its working-class origins.
In recent years, the party has become a mouthpiece for ‘progressive’ middle-class activists. Its migration stance epitomises this shift. Left co-leader Jan van Aken said his party did not want to deport ‘anyone’ when he was pressed on the string of terror attacks that have rocked Germany over the past year, many of which were carried out by rejected asylum seekers. In the 2024 European Elections, the Left picked Carola Rackete as its lead candidate, a captain of a charity ship who became notorious for ferrying migrants into Italy in defiance of the Italian government and coastguard’s orders. Those elections were a disaster, with the Left winning only 2.7 per cent of the vote.
The party’s pro-migration stance was actually critical to its success in the recent federal elections, however. As the terror attacks forced left-liberal parties like the SPD and Greens to shift (at least rhetorically) towards supporting stricter border controls, Die Linke was able to carve a niche out for itself. It could now pose as the antithesis of the AfD and populism.
Aside from open borders, the modern Left Party has also embraced a constellation of ‘progressive’ causes, including Net Zero, a degrowth agenda and transgender politics. Some of the party’s election demands – higher taxes for the rich, minimum-wage increases, higher unemployment benefits and rent caps – are not new. This narrow fixation on redistribution has never appealed much to working-class voters.
In the end, the left’s gains came mostly from the Green Party (over 700,000 votes) and the SPD (560,000 votes). This shift underscores the party’s transformation into a vessel for elite concerns.
The party realignment in Germany might continue to benefit the Left Party. However, it is clear that Die Linke will never truly be a working-class party and won’t be able to stop right-wing populism in its tracks. Unlike the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (a populist-left group that split off from Die Linke in 2023, and gained 4.7 per cent of votes), the Left has been unable to win back the voters it lost to the AfD.
Fundamentally, for all its success in the recent election, Die Linke has become a party pushing a middle-class agenda that misunderstands and undermines the interests of the voters it was founded to serve. It is now officially an anti-working class party.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.