The last few weeks in German politics have been eventful, to say the least. Despite falling short of a majority, the right-wing AfD sent shockwaves far beyond Germany with an unprecedented result of 43.8% in the Saxony-Anhalt state election. The ruling centre-right CDU, left with less than a fifth of the vote after 24 years in state government, is now facing an existential crisis. The populist BSW, once proclaimed politically dead, has made a surprise comeback and is now dictating terms for a potential government. But ultimately, a completely different party is emerging as the actual kingmaker — Die Linke. The self-proclaimed ‘democratic socialist’ party, revitalised by the rise of the AfD and Germany’s own ‘cordon sanitaire’ (the infamous ‘Brandmauer’, or ‘firewall’ in English) and openly campaigning for the right-wing competitor’s ban, is about to tighten its grip on the established parties – and thus continue its ‘long march’ to successfully sabotage any genuine right-wing attempts to cure the late-stage Federal Republic’s woes.
‘You’re not alone. Don‘t be afraid.’ These were the ‘motherly’ words uttered by one of Die Linke’s most notable figures, Heidi Reichinnek, on the election night in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany’s state broadcaster ARD. But who did she mean specifically? ‘Many young people here are now frightened: Those with immigration history, queers, those identifying with the left in some ways, those with disabilities, those looking for a job.’ For her, this was a remarkably calm tone: In January 2025, Reichinnek, as Die Linke’s Bundestag faction leader, chanted a rallying cry to those wanting to resist ‘fascism’ in the country: ‘To the barricades!’ This call became necessary after the CDU successfully pushed through a non-binding Bundestag resolution calling for stricter immigration policies with AfD support.
Reichinnek is, in fact, one of the friendlier faces of the party. Die Linke has notably backed the anti-fascist alliance, ‘Widersetzen’ (‘To Resist’), in organising several protests to disrupt AfD party conferences — which, unlike in Britain, are mandated to take place as federal party law strictly enforces a democratic party structure and bi-annual leadership elections. This did not dissuade Antifa militants from blocking the roads leading to the conference sites or physically attacking AfD delegates and journalists reporting on the protests. One of Widersetzen’s speakers, Noa Sander, also declined to distance herself from the latest violence in Erfurt, openly stating that ‘fascists with a press card are still fascists’. None of this has seemed to harm Die Linke’s electoral success: At the 2025 federal election, it secured its third-best nationwide result with 8.8% of the vote. By this point the party was already propping up two CDU-led state governments — the same CDU that had secured many of its electoral victories with ritual ‘red scare’ style campaigning found itself in bed with Antifa car-burners in Leipzig-Connewitz.
How did it come to this? The success of Die Linke is noteworthy on the grounds of the party’s roots alone — legally speaking, a successor to the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which ruled the communist GDR, erected the Berlin Wall (and, like the Brandmauer today, was also dubbed ‘antifascist’) and ordered soldiers to fire at those fleeing the ‘workers’ and peasants’ paradise’ to West Germany. After the 1989 revolution, the SED began to reinvent itself under the leadership of an influential lawyer named Gregor Gysi and changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Though it only half-distanced itself from the SED era, it now aimed to become the primary leftist opposition within the democratic system.
Fueled by anti-immigrant riots and far-right murders in several Eastern cities, it quickly sought punctual cooperation with ‘civil society’ alliances and local far-left groups. Young radicals from other far-left organisations, disillusioned communists from the West, post-1968 movement pacifists and reform-minded leftists all flocked to the party. This ideological diversity quickly built a mountain of internal conflict. More often than not, the successor party’s national and state conferences ended in chaos — over condemnation of the SED dictatorship, political strategy, how far bans on military exports should reach, the Israel-Palestine question, and so on.
Regardless, it slowly entrenched itself into national politics, coasting on the widespread resentment over the economic downfall in the former GDR states. In 1994 — ironically enough, in Saxony-Anhalt — the SPD secured a historic confidence-and-supply agreement with the PDS to replace the incumbent CDU-led state government. In 1998, the post-communists entered their first state cabinet with the SPD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and again in Berlin four years later. In 2005, the party made its breakthrough riding anger over the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s pro-market welfare and labour policy reforms. Schröder’s former Finance Minister chose to leave the SPD and join the breakaway ‘Electoral Alternative for Social Justice’, which quickly secured a list arrangement with the PDS for the subsequent federal election. The two parties formally merged two years later. Over the next two decades, the party joined the governments in the Western city of Bremen and the Eastern states of Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Thuringia, they also pushed through their first Chief Minister with the backing of the SPD and Greens. Notable electoral successes in Western states have followed as well.
What of the ‘new’ Left’s old conflicts? As late as 2021, after only narrowly escaping their ousting from the Bundestag and losing seats in Western state parliaments, it looked as though their habit of reopening old sores could finish off the party. But in an ironic twist of fate, the friendly face of GDR nostalgia and self-proclaimed critic of mass immigration, Sahra Wagenknecht, seemingly aided their comeback albeit involuntarily. She left the party in 2023 to create the BSW, taking several MPs with her. Since then, Die Linke has seen unprecedented growth in its ranks from just 50,000 to 123,000 members in just three years. One of their new MPs and former migrant rescue NGO activist, Lea Reisner, told the former party newspaper that she had never publicly admitted her party membership so long as Wagenknecht played a part there: ‘My friends that are affected by racism would lose their minds’.
Leaving the old ‘Streitigkeiten’ behind, Die Linke has built and sustained a new coalition of voters akin to the British Greens or the French La France Insoumise. The party won over generally precarious, urban, and somewhat more schooled and female voters with targeted campaigns for rent control and, in Berlin, the expropriation of major private housing corporations. It also mobilised ethnic voting in immigrant-dominated areas like Berlin-Neukölln with their candidate Ferat Koçak, securing Die Linke its first FPTP mandate outside of the former GDR. In the former East, several Linke figures have strong ties to unions like IG Metall and are on good terms with the traditionally SPD-aligned DGB union confederation. At the last federal election, it led the polls with voters under 25 with a quarter of the vote, slightly ahead of the AfD.
Thanks to the CDU’s strict anti-AfD stance, Die Linke has been able to establish itself as the main beneficiary of the firewall — in Saxony and Thuringia, it has secured a veto on several budget cuts, including the ones to the friendly NGOs combatting ‘racism’ and ‘right-wing extremism’. The BSW part of the CDU-BSW-SPD governing coalition in Thuringia, meanwhile, is in a state of chaos over Wagenknecht’s approach to the AfD and top-down leadership. 13 of 15 BSW Thuringian state MPs have left the party, 10 of whom forming a breakaway ‘Just Thuringia’ parliamentary group to remain in government. As the coalition only has 39 of 88 MPs, Die Linke is now a crucial partner. The Left’s state leadership already demands ‘fixed agreements’ beyond the existing tacit confidence-and-supply to ensure ‘stability’ amid the crisis.
Despite only getting 8.6% in the recent Saxony-Anhalt election, it seems likely to become a central force there once the AfD and BSW fail to reach an agreement. The AfD’s candidate for Chief Minister, Ulrich Siegmund — ‘the most dangerous man in Germany’ — has already managed to irritate his potential partners. In the old pacifist tradition, the BSW had campaigned against the construction of an Israeli arms factory in Sangershausen. Siegsmund’s response was characteristically provocative: ‘We do not condemn the production of military equipment in itself, because we will, of course, need the necessary resources for future remigration and deportation campaigns’. Despite a deep enmity, Wagenknecht’s party already offered Die Linke a joint opportunity to block the factory. To add to the paralysis, the BSW’s insistence on a ‘cross-partisan’ Chief Minister thus deprives Siegmund of this function despite the AfD’s commanding lead. While Die Linke has rejected the idea so far, the looming threat of new elections — only this time with an absolute AfD majority on the horizon — could quickly change that.
And then there are the two other states that voted last week. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the humiliated CDU fell below the 5% threshold and is set to be ejected from the state parliament. The AfD achieved a historic 39% of the vote, but the ruling SPD’s Manuela Schwesig was able to exploit the polarisation to her benefit, retaining 35.5%. With the remaining left combined above 11%, a left-wing governing coalition will tick on in the state. In Berlin, Die Linke has made history with its first post-unification mayor, Elif Eralp — for whom the Greens had made clear they would prefer a Left-led state government, and the CDU’s incumbent candidate was weakened by a long list of gaffes (including playing tennis during a major far-left terror attack on the city’s energy grid and then shamelessly lying about it).
The remaining challenge for Die Linke is to tighten its grip on the CDU. Despite internal turmoil after its debacle in Saxony-Anhalt and the SPD trying to block several welfare reforms, the Christian Democrats’ commitment to the firewall remains strong. This should be a tough pill to swallow given the historic enmity and the ideological differences. To keep Die Linke out of the negotiations over its record one trillion euro debt scheme (euphemistically called ‘special funds’ for the infrastructure, ‘climate protection’ and the rearmament) that required a constitutional change, the CDU and CSU had pushed through a parliamentary session of the outgoing Bundestag, where the SPD and Greens secured a sufficient number of votes.
But with the ‘Brandmauer’ against the AfD still standing and an increasingly fragile party environment, Die Linke can’t be ignored for much longer. CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz, despite losing control over the increasingly disgruntled party base, recently attacked the AfD once more, comparing its ‘remigration’ proposals to ‘ethnic cleansing’. His prospective competitor Hendrik Wüst, Chief Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, called for an examination of an AfD ban — just as the Left has done. The latter, on the other hand, had already thrown Merz two lifelines: once after his first chancellor vote failed and a constitutional amendment was needed to enable a second vote on the same day (just weeks after the ‘special funds’ roll call) and during a CDU dispute over pension policy.
While the prospect of having to compromise in the CDU to save the country from ‘fascism’ isn‘t attractive to many Linke members either, it is trapped by voters’ own expectations as well. Its current co-leader Luigi Pantisano had claimed in Bild, Germany’s Axel Springerite equivalent to The Sun, that there is no difference between the CDU’s ‘fascist policy’, the AfD and the fascists themselves. But within less than a day, he apologised for it during Die Linke’s national conference — and received only 53 per cent of the delegates’ votes. Among Die Linke’s voters in Saxony-Anhalt, 78 per cent would support a confidence-and-supply deal to keep the AfD out of government, as mentioned in an analysis by the party-affiliated Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The same applies to 63 per cent of the CDU voters. In an essay for the foundation’s magazine Zeitschrift Luxemburg, a long-time Left leader Bernd Riexinger had warned that right-wing governments across the West would set up an authoritarian state architecture that would have consequences ‘beyond their government phase’, serving as a ‘blueprint’ for the AfD.
But right now, it is Die Linke dictating the long game. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Die Linke successfully pushed for a GDR apologist Barbara Borchardt to become the state constitutional court justice in 2021, with the CDU ditching its protest after weeks. In Saxony-Anhalt, it has recently backed a controversial constitutional reform aiming to prevent ‘extremists’ from ‘capturing state institutions’ like courts and the state Political Education Centre. Unless the Brandmauer falls (which looks unlikely), Die Linke’s leverage over the state will only continue to tighten. Good news for its allies: ‘You’re not alone, don’t be afraid.’ Those who are not should watch Die Linke’s next moves with caution.
This article was written by Kuba Kruszakin, a Pimlico Journal contributor and an editor for Junge Freiheit, a German conservative weekly. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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What we have here is a conspiracy amongst career politicians to keep the democratically expressed wishes of the wider population at bay, excluding them from the entire governing process.