The German Left’s Future Is Unwritten

“The longing associated with the BSW [Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance] is above all a longing for ‘peace’”, wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 26 September 2024. Although this is probably true, we should also bear in mind that when the Greens emerged in around 1980, the same could have been said of them. Their ascent to the Bundestag would hardly have been possible, were it not for the protests against the imminent stationing of US medium-range missiles in West Germany. Nevertheless, they were — and still are — first and foremost a party centred around environmentalism, while their stance on peace has taken a 180-degree turn.

In the case of the BSW, too, we might similarly ask whether peace — like migration — only serves to pave the way for a party whose primary significance is embedded in its opposition to prioritizing a policy of ecological recovery and rehabilitation. BSW party leader Sahra Wagenknecht recently reiterated this during an appearance on a talk show. According to her, Die Linke is going down the wrong path by seeking to be “even more radical” than the Greens. Long before this, she had stated that the Greens were the most harmful party out there.

It has been clear for some time that the party system in Germany is undergoing something of a shift. Before the arrival of the Greens, the party system in West Germany was clearly characterized by the contrast between two opposing stances: pro-business, represented by the conservative (CDU/CSU) alliance, and the defence of social policy in the interest of workers, championed by the Social Democrats (SPD). The Greens initially allied themselves with the latter, but when their coalition with the SPD failed at the federal level, they realized that their core issue, the environment, cut across the opposition between the CDU/CSU and SPD, and forged their independence from both by entering into coalitions interchangeably with either side.

Since then, we have had a new party system superimposed onto an old one. Although the CDU/CSU and SPD still alternate power at the federal level, both parties and Die Linke have been torn between ecological and anti-ecological policies for years. Judging by the divisions within the parties, the new system already seems to be prevailing over the old one. The CDU/CSU and Die Linke were decimated by the founding of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the BSW respectively. Even without any internal division, the SPD has also been weakened by the BSW, which is presenting itself as a new brand of right-wing social-democratic politics amidst new authoritarian-populist conditions.

How can a party attract supporters from all other parties, although it has never clearly and comprehensively stated what it actually stands for?

It is precisely because these conditions stand out the most in the public’s perception that it might seem arbitrary to consider the anti-ecological streak of the BSW more important than its policies on peace or migration. However, this view is supported by the timing of the new party’s emergence — not its pre-history but the objective context of its immediate founding phase: the period when potential voters became aware of the party and first formed an opinion of it. The BSW was founded at a time when the “traffic light” coalition had reached its limits and was beginning to decline, due in large part to the ecological dimension of its policies.

In 2022, during its first year, the policies of the traffic light coalition were met with general approval — these included a special budget for the armed forces, an increase in the minimum wage, and the nine-euro ticket, which already constituted an effort in favour of socio-ecological transformation. The push to build more wind turbines was also largely welcomed by the coalition. And the parties’ phasing-out of nuclear power was in line with decades of popular demand — although the move has recently become controversial once again. However, it was in 2023, when the amendment to the Building Energy Act (GEG) was introduced in the hope of expediting the ecological transition, that the backlash consequently began.

Due to government funding, five times as many heat pumps were ordered in 2022 as in 2021. As recently as 4 March 2023, the FAZ reported that gas was “the most popular heating system in Germany. But where there is political will, there is no getting around the heat pump”. But on 5 July, at the request of the parliamentary group of the CDU/CSU, the Constitutional Court halted the vote on an amendment the Building Energy Act. On 20 July the BSW adopted its statute. On 8 September a watered-down version of the bill was passed in the Bundestag. On 26 September the BSW was registered as an association. On 23 October the alliance introduced itself at a federal press conference. On 15 November the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the federal budget essentially laid waste to the ecological policy of the federal government. On 13 December, as the government decided to scrap subsidies for agricultural diesel, fierce protests erupted on the part of farmers, culminating in the blockade of Berlin streets by tractor convoys in January 2024. On 8 January, the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) was founded as a party. On 12 January, the FAZ proclaimed the end of the “green hegemony”. On 27 January, the BSW celebrated its first party congress.

The Dark Side of Wagenknecht’s Party

According to its founder, the BSW is a German workers’ party that intends to work together with the owners of medium-sized businesses — a plan that already hints at some potential problems. The party’s perspective is fundamentally economistic — Sahra Wagenknecht has failed to take note of the years-long engagement with the phenomenon of economism by West German Marxists, the flip side of which is attacking the lifestyle choices of others. Furthermore, the BSW intends to engage in labour policy without even conveying to workers what was historically understood under the banner of class consciousness; instead, their aim is to deliberately reinforce workers’ consciousness as it currently stands and for political gain. This means not challenging capitalism’s indifference to the nature of labour — whether it is ecological or anti-ecological — as long as it pays a wage.

In his article “Die Trigger-Partei” (The Trigger Party), Oliver Nachtwey succinctly described the general problem underlying this position: the BSW is not leading the working class in a fight against capital, but against the supposedly privileged academic and urban middle class whose progressive side the Greens purportedly represent and who should actually be courted as allies, despite all the political criticism that they deserve just as much as the working class.

In hindsight, it is clear that the major German media outlets have been cultivating the emergence of Führer-like figures for some time, probably since 1990.

The BSW also deliberately encourages an aversive attitude on the part of many German workers when it comes to migrants.[1] The party is by no means as hostile towards migrants as the AfD, which promotes “remigration” — the fact that so many of the BSW’s members come from a migrant background is grounds to the contrary. However, it is also widely known that this — no longer so small — population of people fears that further migration could jeopardized their own hard-won position in Germany. It is therefore undeniable that the working-class politics of the BSW has a somewhat nationalistic bent. While this is unlikely to surpass Oskar Lafontaine’s political position, which was criticized by members of the Left even during his time in the SPD, that does not change the fact that a socialist party would reject such an orientation — as Wagenknecht herself did in the past.

Fuelling an Authoritarian Climate

But there is another and perhaps bigger problem: the BSW runs the risk not only of becoming an authoritarian party in its own right, but also of shifting the entire German political climate towards authoritarianism — not so much because of its own motivations, but rather as the result of a socially assigned role. In this sense, it is less due to the name of the party — which may still pass as a clever political move — but rather to the fact that the party’s rapid growth has revealed a latent authoritarian element in German society that was present before the advent of BSW, but that people now feel magically drawn to.

How can a party attract supporters from all other parties, although it has never clearly and comprehensively stated what it actually stands for? The strength of the BSW is based solely on the hope associated with Sahra Wagenknecht. She cannot be blamed for this, but it is also obvious that she elicits the will to follow a charismatic leader, a Führer-like figure.

In hindsight, it is clear that the major German media outlets have been cultivating the emergence of Führer-like figures for some time, probably since 1990. Their first step was to paint Joschka Fischer as the “secret” chairman of the Greens before he had even assumed the role, and they also exerted pressure in 1998 for Gerhard Schröder to be appointed over Lafontaine as the SPD’s chancellor candidate. Moreover, Wagenknecht owes her career to the media: starting with the talk shows, and then the tremendous response to the initial steps that led to the founding of her party — the kind of response that other political players can only dream of.

Just as the economism debate eluded her, Wagenknecht appears not to have paid any attention to the studies on “authoritarian character” conducted at the Institute of Social Research from its exile in New York. In the absence of any contact with Western Marxism — neither Gramsci nor Horkheimer or Adorno — it is no wonder that she, a person living in a Western society, could not remain a Marxist. However, this means that the long- and even medium-term success of her party remains uncertain. Because, whether we like it or not, the West is where the action is, and those who do not want to pay attention to it will be dealt a worse hand. While the BSW is enjoying electoral success now, its voters will ask and evaluate what it has to offer them. The party has no discernible strategy for altering social conditions.

Democratic Socialism Is Still Relevant

After the SPD ceased to be a traditional social democratic party under Gerhard Schröder’s leadership, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) saw itself as its heir, and when the Die Linke emerged from the PDS, the new party continued on the same course. This is one of the reasons why its ecological policy, which Wagenknecht calls “radical”, was and still is perceived by the public as nothing more than Green policy that Die Linke has merely quantitively expanded and supplemented with its demand for sufficient social policy measures.

Just as the SPD allows the CDU/CSU to take the lead on economic policy, only to add a “yes, but also” when it comes to social policy, Die Linke also allows itself to be guided by the Greens. In the dispute over the direction of Die Linke, the only element that was made public was the rejection of the party’s socio-ecological policies by Wagenknecht’s faction, not the fact that — alongside socio-political adjustments to Green-party policies — the other side has advocated for a socio-ecological class politics and a Green New Deal based on such politics. The latter position has enjoyed majority support at party congresses since 2020. Nevertheless, in the public consciousness, Die Linke, unlike the Greens, is still perceived as part of the old party system that revolves around socio-political issues.

The Greens are incapable of leading an ecological transformation worthy of their name because they are unwilling to understand that the logic of capital lies at the root of the current ecological crisis. But Die Linke does not fully grasp this either. While the party is right to denounce “the corporations”, it also seemingly ignores the fact that members of the public — the consumers — stand on the side of these corporations.

Since the BSW is not radical, it is questionable whether it will be able to draw many voters away from the AfD. But Die Linke could.

So what is the ecological crisis? In a nutshell: that capital, in its search for infinite surplus value and faced with the dramatic fall of profit rates, must sell enormous amounts of goods whose production and consumption are no longer compatible with the ecological balance of the Earth. The constant purchase of ever newer smartphones — a commodity that arguably need not even exist in addition to domestic internet access, but which causes tremendous ecological damage — is a prime example of this complicity on the part of consumers. A “radical” ecological politics would attempt to break this complicity so that consumers could be free to turn against capital. If Die Linke were to engage in such a politics, it would join the BSW in the new party system. Not only would it occupy the pole opposite the anti-ecological politics of Wagenknecht and the AfD, it would also lead and actually embody it — unlike the Greens, who only address the ecological question in technical terms.

Die Linke should remember that it seeks to be a socialist party, a real party of “democratic socialism”, and that it wants to be truly democratic, rather than simply imagining a socialist state that would fix everything. Because there is nothing a state can do on its own in the face of this kind of complicity — not even a socialist state. The people who follow capital today must be won over, and every ecological step must be taken with their approval.

The recent reflections on socialist democratic planning published in the magazine LuXemburg were a hopeful sign, but there are a couple of other things to consider when it comes to everyday politics. First, planning models are not something that the masses can grasp in the here and now. It is important to engage in public discourse not only about the ecological crisis as a burden that cannot be addressed with the logic of capital, but also about how capitalism is the ecological crisis. These are not two converging phenomena; they are one and the same. The ecological crisis is the visible manifestation of the fall in profit margins.

And therein lies the second point: that such an approach would also be politically promising because it is truly radical. After all, what does the fact that young people are leaning more towards the AfD than towards the Greens tells us, if not that they want to be “radical”? There is still no radical position on the left of the new party system because the Greens do not have one, and Die Linke is not yet part of the new system. Once it does happen, and the party proves itself to be truly radical, there is a chance that the younger voters will return.

Since the BSW is not radical, it is questionable whether it will be able to draw many voters away from the AfD. But Die Linke could. From that radical position, I imagine Die Linke would treat the BSW with a certain degree of leniency and protect it as much as possible from making any major mistakes, which would ultimately bring the BSW back into its ranks sooner or later.

However, the role of the BSW as the party that occupies the anti-ecological pole of the ecological cleavage in the new party system arises from the fact that the new party’s essential impulses must be those generated by the economic basis on which it stands. This basis is the capitalist mode of production that currently finds itself in the stage of plummeting profit rates, which confronts us with a stark choice: capitalism or saving the planet.

This article originally appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Andrea Garcés and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective.