German Marxist has big plans for a new party, but faces accusations of a drift to far-right populism

Your typical German politician would not rock up to a public event 20 minutes late and still win over their audience in two. But Sahra Wagenknecht, a 54-year-old Marxist with big plans, is not your typical German politician.

It’s a drizzly night in Riesa, a small town in eastern Saxony famed for its egg noodles, and the Stern event hall is the place to be. Two weeks ago Dr Wagenknecht announced that she and nine other Bundestag MP colleagues were quitting their political home, the post-communist Left (Linke) parliamentary party, to go out on their own.

Their aim: to create a party of “common sense and justice” that challenges Germany’s political establishment, pulls in protest supporters from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and activates Germany’s silent army of disillusioned non-voters.

The provisionally-titled Sahra Wagenknecht Movement (BSW) has no funding, nor has it cleared any hurdles required for a new political party. The clock is ticking ahead of European and state elections next year but in Riesa, Wagenknecht has more on her mind than practical details.

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In a warm tone of conspiratorial concern, she offers her anxious audience a big-picture narrative that puts order on these disorderly times. “It’s scary, we are living in a world of more and more conflicts,” she says. “We have to finally understand that you cannot fight terrorism and other conflicts with military means.”

The crowd, many raised in East Germany with a pro-Russian and anti-American outlook, listens closely. Nearby a man snorts his approval at regular intervals.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine “contravenes international law and is without justification”, says Wagenknecht, before adding her “but”: US-led wars in the last decades have transformed Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan from places “with a certain stability into ungovernable failed states”.

As in the first Iraq war, she says, “PR agencies” are at work to manipulate German public opinion and set the country against Russia, the crowd hears. Part of this PR push, she says, is chancellor Olaf Scholz’s political Zeitenwende, or “watershed” plan to arm Ukraine and rebuild Germany’s military.

For Wagenknecht this is a “fairy-tale moralisation of politics...that defines itself through morality and posturing; questions of benefit and harm are relegated to second place”.

“The ‘who benefits?’ question is, these days, only being posed by supposed conspiracy theorists,” she says. Another grunt of approval from nearby.

However, Wagenknecht saves her greatest contempt for what she calls Germany’s “leftist-liberals”, Scholz’s Green coalition allies. They have pivoted in the Russia-Ukraine war from traditional leftist pacifism to “Prussian militarism”, she says, yet feel entitled to “excommunicate” critics of the war as “pacifist rabble”.

In Wagenknecht’s eyes German post-Russian energy policy is unsustainable, its support for sanctions against Moscow as self-defeating as its liberal migration policy. The latter she calls an unfair burden – in the housing and labour market – on the less well-off, and she demands faster deportations.

While mainstream German politicians criticise her as a Russian stooge, her former Linke colleagues have accused Wagenknecht of drifting into far-right populism. That may be why the AfD, sensing danger, invited Wagenknecht to join their ranks earlier this year.

She declined and rules out an alliance with the AfD, though political analysts say anything is possible with so-called horseshoe politics, where the far-right and far-left coalesce on hot button issues.

So what are Wagenknecht’s prospects? Just 37 per cent of Germans in a poll this week think the new party has a chance, rising to 48 per cent among eastern Germans.

That may be because Wagenknecht is one of their own, as the warm applause in Riesa makes clear. She was born two hours away in Jena in 1969, studied philosophy and literature and became a prominent hard-left member of the former East German ruling party in its two post-1989 permutations.

Her recent years as Linke floor co-leader were fraught, with her traditional left answers to social justice issues at odds with more moderate and progressive colleagues.

The rump Linke is now hovering in polls on the 5 per cent threshold for parliamentary entry, suggesting its future is in question. And not just in the Bundestag.

Sitting in her Riesa office, local Linke town councillor Uta Knebel says she has spent 30 years fighting for kindergarten places and social housing. Hours earlier, however, she and four other Linke town council colleagues announced they will leave the Linke and are in talks to join the Wagenknecht alliance.

“We believe in looking out for the little guy, when people in town have social problems they know to come to us,” she said. “But our party leaders are so far removed from the people, from their own voter base, that even we don’t recognise their political content. There is no way back.”

In Riesa’s last local elections in 2019 the AfD’s vote was triple that of the Linke. Knebel is confident a Wagenknecht-led alliance can turn things around next year in local and state elections. A radical voter shift will be required: polls suggest the AfD is by far Saxony’s most popular party, with 35 per cent support compared to 9 per cent for the Linke.

Back in the Riesa’s Stern hall, senior couple Helmut and Heide are quietly optimistic about Wagenknecht’s chances. “She can win back 100 per cent all the AfD votes, particularly here in the east,” says Helmut (72). Heide, his wife, is thinking bigger: “We need to change the entire system in Germany, and she can do it.”