Soon enough, though, the backlash against the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance began. Quite aside from the usual suspects — the Social Democrats and the Greens to name but two — Wagenknecht’s venture quickly attracted the ire of other recent insurgents: the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, has described her populist counterparts on the Left as mere “footstools of the establishment.” And to be sure, while the BSW has been quick to grab the anti-establishment mantle, it’s already in discussions to join three state governments in eastern Germany, partnering with the Social Democrats (SPD) in Brandenburg and the Christian Democrats (CDU) in Thuringia and Saxony. 

In a country where the conservative CDU has held the chancellorship for 52 of the Federal Republic’s 75 years, and the SPD the remaining 23, you can’t get more establishment than that. Weidel, indeed, has argued that the BSW “allows the CDU to look for governing majorities on the far-Left as a way of excluding the AfD from participation in government.” After all, Wagenknecht was once a Communist, unsurprisingly anathema to the centre-right Christian Democrats until recently. In a sense, though, this populist bickering is irrelevant. Even if they don’t work together, after all, both the BSW and AfD are nonetheless transforming Germany — not least by pressuring more mainstream parties to do their bidding. 

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When the BSW first exploded onto the political scene, some in Germany wondered whether they might partner with the AfD to revolutionise German politics. From Ukraine to migration, after all, both parties agree on much — even as their leaders seemed to get on personally. That was clear enough when Wagenknecht and Weidel met in a much-discussed TV debate, finding themselves speaking as one on the origins of the Ukraine war and jointly rebutting the moderator’s lazy assertions that they were mirroring “Putin narratives.”

Since the BSW threw its lot in with the CDU, however, things have changed. Quite aside from her infamous “footstool” comment, Weidel has speculated that the BSW will fail to achieve its core demands. But things aren’t quite that simple. Recent developments, after all, show that Wagenknecht is trying to drive a hard bargain on an issue that is also on the top of the AfD’s agenda: settling the war in Ukraine. It would certainly be a political masterstroke if Wagenknecht could press the CDU closer to her own position here. Next to the Greens, no other German party is as hawkish. But Wagenknecht insists on a “peace provision” in any formalised coalition agreement. She’s also demanded that the CDU reject the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil.

For a while, this strategy appeared to bear fruit. In early October, a trio of politicians from the CDU and SPD published an op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine where they called for a “ceasefire and negotiations” in Ukraine. All three authors want to lead eastern German states where elections were lately held. Equally relevant, all three need the BSW to get into office. Steffen Quasebarth, the BSW’s newly minted deputy speaker of the Thuringian state parliament, says the op-ed was lacking in parts, especially since the authors noticeably avoided an outright rejection of stationing the American missiles. Even so, he calls the article a “step in the right direction.” And as Wagenknecht herself pointed out in her debate with her AfD rival, you’re hardly a “footstool” if you push the establishment closer to your own politics.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU and the party’s candidate for chancellor, was quick to rebut such ideas. Pushing back against the op-ed, he demanded that German-made Taurus be sent to the embattled Kyiv government. Soon enough, Wagenknecht herself piled on the pressure too, suggesting in an interview with Der Spiegel that local CDU parties in Germany’s east should distance themselves from Merz’s sabre-rattling. In essence, Wagenknecht was asking them to disobey their party leader in exchange for her seal of approval, something they’re hardly willing to do. 

Wagenknecht may be her party’s namesake, but not every member seems willing to take things quite so far. Some Thuringian BSW leaders seemed fine with the op-ed, both as a sign of accommodation and because they pushed negotiations with the CDU along. Any peace provision would be probably symbolic anyway: German state governments don’t make foreign policy. Interestingly, those BSW politicians who appear more willing to appease the CDU include its Thuringian state chair Katja Wolf, like Wagenknecht formerly of Die Linke.

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Nowhere was Wolf’s eagerness to cooperate with the CDU clearer than last month, when the newly elected Thuringian state parliament convened in Erfurt. The AfD politician Jürgen Treutler was supposed to preside as the eldest member. The most important order of business was to elect the parliamentary speaker and his deputies, and as the largest party, the AfD had the privilege to nominate one of their own. It was clear that the AfD’s nominee would never have been elected. But rather than being allowed to follow proper procedure, Treutler was repeatedly heckled by other parties, including BSW members, in a clearly staged disruption. One CDU politician shouted that Treutler was leading a Machtergreifung (“seizure of power”), an obvious reference to Hitler’s rise.

The meeting descended into chaos and a subsequent legal dispute over the proper order had to sort things out. The state constitutional court, which is stacked with CDU and Left appointed judges, quickly ruled against the AfD, who were ultimately barred from the deputy speakership and important committee chairs. A party with nearly 33% of the vote was left without influence over parliamentary rule-making while the SPD, which had won only 6%, was given one of the deputy speakerships.

Why the casual dismissal of a third of the voters’ will? What about democracy? Steffen Quasebarth insists that the AfD in Thuringia falls far outside the realm of acceptable democratic politics, noting the presence of its notorious state chair Björn Höcke. Quasebarth and others attack as a far-Right extremist, pointing especially to his probable past in the German neo-Nazi scene. For his part, Quasebarth concedes that the AfD was within the law when it ran the constituting session, but thought the protest was nonetheless necessary. “Excluding the AfD from the parliamentary speakership,” he says, “was not a decision against the voters, but a decision for democracy.”

Not everyone in the BSW agreed with the party’s apparent coordination with the CDU. Friedrich Pürner, one of the first BSW members in the EU Parliament, wrote a long post claiming that actions of the anti-AfD bloc looked worryingly like the “ominous behaviour of politicians” during lockdown years. That was a time when “power-hungry politicians wanted to achieve full control over the population and massively restricted fundamental rights to do so.” The scenes in Erfurt were no different. Instead, Pürner told Die Welt that the BSW should have held talks with the AfD, as well, given that it is a “democratically legitimated party”. Yet the Thuringian BSW swiftly dismissed Pürner’s protests, suggesting he should stick to politics in Brussels.

Nonetheless, Pürner’s outcry shows that there are indeed some in the BSW who oppose a strategy of simply demonising the AfD. Another example is Robert Crumbach, a union activist and former SPD member who today leads Wagenknecht’s party in Brandenburg. Before the election, Crumbach said that the BSW should treat AfD bills like those of any other party, considering them on their merits. But then a Syrian Islamist stabbed three people to death at a diversity festival in the town of Solingen. The AfD reacted by demanding a blanket ban on asylum seekers, refugees and certain other foreigners from public events. This went too far in Crumbach’s eyes, who said the idea reminded of the Nuremberg Law. All the same, he can see a future in which the BSW and AfD would join forces, he says today. “But that depends entirely on the AfD and its further development.”

AfD leaders disagree that the ball is in their court. Nationally, after all, the BSW polls at just 8%. Compare that to the AfD’s 18%. “If the AfD will one day closely work with the BSW, the BSW should remember that it will do so as the junior partner,” says René Springer, another Brandenburgian and an AfD member of the Bundestag. Springer is one of those outspoken easterners who occasionally gives the national party leaders massive headaches. When, in January, the state-aligned “fact-checking” website Correctiv led a sting operation claiming to have exposed a “secret plot” by AfD members and Right-wing activists to mass expel non-ethnic German citizens, the party leadership distanced itself from any such plans. Springer, however, Tweeted that “we want to lead back foreigners into their home country. By the millions. That’s not a secret plot but a promise.” It’s a promise Springer ultimately thinks the BSW — for all its criticisms of mass migration — wouldn’t make and certainly never keep. During her debate with Weidel, in fact, Wagenknecht categorically rejected mass-deportation schemes, instead committing to focus on criminal aliens.

At least Springer seems to have the zeitgeist on his side. A majority of young voters regularly report that the AfD is their favourite party, in keeping with Gen Z’s move Right generally. The Right-wing populists do equally among working-class voters, nominally Wagenknecht’s pro-welfare base. That’s possibly because they see the AfD as more credible on the number one issue in German politics: immigration. In fact, the BSW seems to be treading water for the moment. For a party founded in January, it’s certainly impressed, winning seats in state parliaments right off the bat. But its results so far have ultimately proved underwhelming, especially when compared to Wagenknecht’s fame and all the media attention she’s enjoyed.  

And whether that represents BSW’s electoral ceiling may be tested sooner than expected. The next major elections in Germany would normally occur next September, when polls for the Bundestag take place. But if the coalition negotiations in the eastern German states fall apart — due partly to Wagenknecht’s insistence on further concessions from the mainstream — snap elections would be necessary. It’s possible that those eastern Germans who felt betrayed by the BSW’s behaviour during the antics in Erfurt might gain new respect for Wagenknecht’s hard line on the Ukraine war. But there’s one thing Wagenknecht doesn’t seem willing to budge on: during her debate with Weidel, Wagenknecht insisted that there could be no common cause with a party that offered a political home to the likes of Björn Höcke. The AfD can’t purge the Höcke wing, of course, lest it loses populist appeal with voters. Whatever else you might want to say about it, anti-immigration policies sell.

In a sense, though, any future partnership between the AfD and BSW matters less than their embrace by the mainstream. While Wagenknecht’s outfit can only go so far on issues like immigration, both populists parties have put the establishment under such pressure that they’re now shifting Germany’s Overton Window. Merz’s protestations aside, the CDU’s rhetoric on Ukraine has become softer. The mainstream parties are showing a new toughness elsewhere too. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has demanded “deportations on a large scale” while Merz, too, has recently called for tougher border enforcement. Whether the AfD and BSW will or won’t, in short, is beside the point. The real question is how far the old establishment is willing to go to win over the hearts of the ever-growing share of voters who flirt with populism.

In Brandenburg, the SPD won largely because its leader Dietmar Woidke, who is also the state’s governor, has very high favourability ratings. Woidke also bet everything on one hand: he announced ahead of the vote his intention to resign from office if the AfD won more votes than the SPD. He succeeded in turning the election into a binary choice, with most supporters of the CDU, Greens and others casting their lot with the SPD to defeat the AfD. But even so, the SPD only won decisively among the elderly, according to exit polls. All other demographics, most notably the youngest voters and those from a working-class background, broke clearly for the AfD.

Today, with the AfD out of the question as a coalition partner, Woidke’s SPD will now have to choose between securing a majority with the help of the CDU or the BSW. And immediately after the polls closed on Sunday, Woidke stated his preference for the CDU. The problem, however, is that the combined seats of the SPD and CDU are short of an absolute majority. In the end, it might be the BSW that will govern with Woidke — just as it may have to do in Thuringia following its election earlier this month, where secretive talks are being held between the CDU, SPD and BSW. Thus, Wagenknecht’s BSW might find itself in power in two of Germany’s 16 states less than a year after its official founding.

To many, this is a stunning result; after all, in its first year, the AfD didn’t even cross the 5% threshold in the Bundestag elections. But the BSW has something unique: the media-savvy Wagenknecht, who is the party’s main draw and regularly polls among Germany’s most popular politicians. The BSW’s co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali said on Sunday that the party would eventually get “a more neutral name” — but not until after next year’s federal elections which will determine the national government. Indeed, why rush it?

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Exit polls in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony showed that more than half of BSW voters cast their ballot for the party because of Wagenknecht personally. And her appeal is far from superficial. She shares with many Western populists a compelling rejection of the dying neoliberal order and all that it represents today: Nato expansion, censorship, open borders, transgenderism, and public health authoritarianism. And crucially, she has managed to maintain this platform while continuing to win voters from the Left.

Yet even so, the expectation when it launched last year was that the BSW’s ranks would swell far more than it has for now. Some polls suggested that enough voters found a Wagenknecht party appealing enough to catapult it into second place; instead, it now polls nationally in the low double digits. Has it reached its ceiling?

Interestingly, the BSW has not drawn as many voters away from the AfD as was once expected. Indeed, in the most recent state exit polls, only around a quarter to a third of BSW voters stated that the AfD may have been their alternative choice. This raises a question: could it be that populist voters, especially the deeply independent-minded ones of the former GDR, see through the move and just opt to vote for the original? After all, on immigration, Ukraine and identity politics, the AfD had taken similar stances — and years before the BSW came into existence. What, in the eyes of voters, does the BSW add there that’s new?

That BSW and AfD voters for the most part do not overlap is to some extent easily explained: Voting for the BSW permits that section of the German left, especially its urban intelligentsia, to publicly take anti-woke, anti-war, and anti-immigration stances without losing what the Germans call Salonfähigkeit, the ability to continue to move in socially acceptable circles.

Of course, it isn’t as if the BSW and AfD are identical in all matters. They are radically opposed on the question of welfare-spending, where the AfD represents a more classically free-market radicalism compared to the BSW’s old-school social-democratic stance. But the question of how to keep social insurance systems liquid has taken a backseat in recent years, as Covid lockdowns and the Ukraine war came to the fore.

Add to this the fact that the BSW explicitly rejects any collaboration with the AfD, at least for as long as it includes the likes of Right-wing firebrand Björn Höcke in its ranks, and voters might wonder whether the BSW really means what it says. Why not form a Left-Right coalition with the AfD if you are so aligned on the key issues of the day? Especially if the alternative is that the BSW could now find itself in the role of organising majorities for mainstream parties it has sworn to oppose. This is not to prematurely brand Wagenknecht’s alliance as “sell-outs”. It is yet to sign a single coalition agreement, and its defenders might argue it is successfully changing the parameters of Germany’s national debate on both Ukraine and immigration.

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After all, there are certainly signs that the German establishment is becoming more receptive. Chancellor Scholz recently indicated that he was open towards finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, while agreeing at the same time with the moves by the Christian Democrats to halt the vast influx of migrants into Germany. And as the former SPD chair Franz Müntefering famously said in 2004: “Opposition is bullshit. Let others do that — we want to govern.” The adage has since become received wisdom in Germany: it’s better to shape the world from the seat of power than stand on principle and be outside of the room. But historically, this has also meant that the coalition partners usually give up on a whole lot of their key campaign demands during the secretive talks in which an agreement is brokered.

In a sign that the BSW really does aim to stand firm on principle, the Wagenknecht alliance hopes to force the SPD’s hand. Its Brandenburg party chief Robert Crumbach is now demanding that the Social Democrats come out in no unclear terms against the stationing of US long-range missiles on German soil if they want the BSW as partners. Is it a mere bargaining chip or truly a red line for the Left-populist upstarts? The answer must be the latter if it wants to remain credible with its voters and become more than just a vehicle for Wagenknecht’s personal brand.

Granted, in Thuringia at least, forming a stable governing majority in the state parliament might now be tricky and require some unusual alliances, such as between the centrist Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Left-wing Die Linke, which the CDU for decades has denounced as the irredeemable successor to the old GDR’s Stalinist ruling party and thus beyond the pale. The new left-conservative BSW party of Sahra Wagenknecht, who has ruled out collaborating with the AfD, has also signalled its openness to entering into a coalition with the CDU if certain conditions are fulfilled. In Saxony, meanwhile, the current ruling majority of CDU, Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens will remain in power, even though the SPD and Greens barely passed the 5% threshold needed to win seats.

The outcome of Sunday’s elections, then, is that the AfD will remain an opposition party, Germany’s largest, but still one without any real power. Some privileges come with the AfD’s strong showing in Thuringia: because it now holds more than a third of seats in the state parliament, it can block a number of measures for which two-thirds of votes are needed, such as changes to the state constitution or the election of state judges. An inconvenience, perhaps, but hardly a revolution.

And this seems unlikely to change. Since the AfD was founded in 2013, Thuringia and Saxony have been its strongholds, which means that for now the party seems to have reached a preliminary ceiling. Except for the AfD’s few office holders at the municipal and district level, the Brandmauer (firewall) erected by all other major German parties against the right-populists remains rock solid. There is simply no clear path to power for the AfD short of an absolute majority of votes, which it is extremely unlikely to secure anywhere. The centre and the policies that it represents will hold — until, at least, a major war or devastating economic crisis further destabilises the crumbling European order.

The more interesting question, then, is not what the Right-wing firebrands will do with their newly won seats, but rather how Germany’s leadership class will react to their increased prominence. And if past is present, this is likely to take two forms. First, they could threaten the German Right with legal challenges and bans; and second, they could carefully adopt some of its positions to take the wind out of its sails.

Let’s start with the idea of outright AfD ban, a theoretical possibility which is being discussed openly in the German mainstream media. Such proposals normally start by acknowledging that the Federal Republic of Germany is the legal successor to the Third Reich. To distinguish itself from its predecessor state, the framers of the Federal Republic’s constitutional order wanted to make the nation a wehrhafte Demokratie, which loosely translates to “resilient democracy” or “well-fortified democracy”. As a result, the Federal Republic was given the legal tools to defend itself against challenges from within, including its domestic intelligence apparatus, the Bundesverfassungsschutz, which can monitor political activists and parties even if they haven’t committed a crime. If a party is deemed “extremist” and in opposition to the German constitutional order, it can be banned and its assets seized. The idea is to stop a new Hitler in his tracks before he can even give his first beer-hall speech. A denazification before the fact, in other words.

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Since its inception in 1949, the German state has already made use of this power in numerous cases, most notably against the Communist Party in 1952. Most recently, in July, the German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser used it to unilaterally ban the publication of the AfD-adjacent magazine Compact for its “extremist” views. While the move appeared like a major assault on the freedom of the press, the ban won widespread support from the German mainstream, with even the public news broadcaster Tagesschau denouncing the magazine’s agitation against a “vaccine dictatorship”. Since then, however, the Federal Administrative Court has suspended the ban and Compact is temporarily back in print, although the litigation continues and could still result in an eventual ban.

By contrast, the decision to outlaw an entire political party that nationally polls at just below 20%, and is the most popular in some eastern German states, could be deeply destabilising. Most obviously, it would expose the centre’s democratic pretensions as little more than a façade. This would also risk isolating AfD voters further from the political system, merely confirming them in their belief that the powers that be are out to get them.

So, if banning the AfD isn’t a viable option, can the centre adopt some of its policies? Certainly, the AfD’s most distinct policy position — hostility to immigration — has increasingly become normalised. Only last month, after a Syrian migrant carried out a mass stabbing attack in Solingen, CDU leader Friedrich Merz called for a Trump-style block on all immigration from Syria and Afghanistan, though he has since walked back on his proposal after denouncements in the mainstream press.

More likely, it seems, is the introduction of a patchwork of bureaucratic measures designed to streamline the deportations of some migrants with criminal records. Shortly before the state elections in Thuringia, Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted that his government had deported 28 Afghan criminals — simply to show that they are actually doing something. But the small number, as well as the fact that each of the migrants was given €1,000 as an allowance (technically mandated by law), led to widespread ridicule. To the AfD supporters, the deportation of 28 offenders is a drop in the ocean. Many AfD supporters want that figure to be in the millions, making it unlikely that the ruling parties will ever credibly co-opt the party’s anti-immigration views.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for Wagenknecht’s BSW. She has already stated that one condition for the party’s entrance into a coalition with the CDU is an opposition to further military aid to Ukraine and the stationing of US long-range missiles in Germany, which had already been jointly announced by the Biden and Scholz administrations. It is doubtful that the hawkish CDU will submit to these demands, nor do state parliaments make foreign policy, so it will be interesting to observe who will cave first. If the BSW does and helps the CDU into power to spite the AfD, its carefully maintained maverick image will crumble barely a year since the party’s inception.

But perhaps that would be to the AfD’s benefit. In such a scenario, the party would be left once again as the most credible source of opposition in many voters’ eyes — and its thwarted revolution simply deferred.

***

For more analysis of the German results, watch the below:

Admittedly, Wagenknecht hasn’t gone out of her way to make friends. In her 2021 book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous), she condemned the rise of a so-called “lifestyle Left” that was made up of “the academic middle class, software programmers, and marketing experts” whose obsessions with political correctness, climate change, and unregulated immigration threatened to alienate Die Linke’s supporters in the working class and among the unemployed. The attack was taken badly by her comrades, who saw the book as a declaration of “literal war against her own party” and “the marginalised”.

But perhaps Wagenknecht doesn’t need their support. For months now, rumours have been circulating in the German press that she is planning to found her own party before the end of the year. The tabloid Bild claims to have confirmed that the launch of the new party is imminent, while one Wagenknecht ally, the political scientist Ulrike Guérot, told the news magazine Cicero in August that she had been offered to run on the new party’s ticket for next year’s elections to the EU parliament. If Wagenknecht goes ahead with her plan, the German political landscape might realign in unprecedented ways, both condemning Die Linke to oblivion and possibly slowing the rapid rise of the AfD.

Born in 1969 to a German mother and an Iranian immigrant father in the former GDR, 54-year-old Wagenknecht was associated with the Stalinist party faction “Kommunistische Plattform” until 2010 when she left the group. Since then, she has noticeably moderated her image, dressing in conservative pantsuits, wearing her hair tightly pinned up — and approvingly quoting Roger Scruton’s “philosophy of belonging”, which she pits against the “individualism and cosmopolitanism” of the “lifestyle Left”.

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Still, she continues to appeal to popular anti-capitalist sentiments. Her worldview, which she first set out in her 2011 book Freiheit statt Kapitalismus (Freedom over Capitalism), sees the sovereign nation-state as the essential bulwark against what she calls a “rule-less, globalised capitalism”. National welfare systems exist, she writes in Die Selbstgerechten, “to protect domestic workers and domestic consumers” (the italics are hers). German Leftists, still deeply scarred by the country’s national socialist past, see such protectionist appeals to national interests as little more than far-Right dog whistles.

Yet to many, she is a bold tribune of the people. In her YouTube show, she presents herself, somewhat awkwardly, as a news anchor commenting on the latest news in simple German. She regularly advocates views that are commonly associated with the German Right, whether it be attacks on Covid vaccine mandates or the Biden administration, which she accuses of having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines last year. A fierce critic of Germany’s membership of Nato, which she blames for having provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she demanded that the German federal government publicly reveal everything it knows about who blew up Nord Stream. But the Scholz administration responded enigmatically that “in the interest of the welfare of the state” the findings needed to be kept secret.

Predictably enough, Wagenknecht has been condemned as “Vladimir Putin’s voice in Germany”, especially after she helped initiate the Manifest für Frieden (Manifesto for Peace) petition in February that demanded an end to German weapons deliveries to Ukraine and a diplomatic settlement of the war. This ultimately triggered a falling out with her party: after she refused to condemn the support of the manifesto by Right-wing activists, Die Linke leadership denied its endorsement of the peace initiative.

Yet her actions drew praise from surprising corners. Björn Höcke, an influential voice of the AfD and an advocate for Russo-German rapprochement, suggested that Wagenknecht should join his party. His proposal, however, was clearly tongue-in-cheek — the AfD leadership is aware of the dangers that a Wagenknecht party would pose to its unprecedented rise in national polls. While the AfD would be the second strongest party in the Bundestag if elections were held today, a new Wagenknecht party might slice off as much as a third of its support. “We’ll need to regard a Wagenknecht party not as an ally but as a competitor,” Höcke said recently, adding that a Wagenknecht party would more likely provide “opposition within the ruling cartel than opposition to the cartel”.

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Neither side is keen on an alliance. Wagenknecht has regularly condemned the AfD as beyond the pale of acceptability and excluded any collaboration with it, despite overlapping on crucial issues such as immigration, Nato membership, and the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. “To me, any cooperation with the AfD is absolutely unacceptable”, said Amira Mohamed Ali, co-chair of Die Linke faction in the Bundestag and one of Wagenknecht’s closest allies who would most likely follow her into a new party. “The AfD is a party which in parts holds extreme Right-wing views… Many politicians in the AfD do not clearly distance themselves from the National Socialist era and its rhetoric.”

Such a view is common in German political discourse. The oppositional Christian Democrats (CDU), who were in power for most of the history of the post-war Federal Republic, most recently under the 16-year chancellorship of Angela Merkel, have self-imposed a so-called “Brandmauer” (firewall) that mandates a total prohibition on any collaboration with the AfD. The CDU party chair Friedrich Merz recently had to reaffirm his commitment to the firewall after causing an uproar when he told the public broadcaster ZDF that the party would have to be “pragmatic” at the local level if CDU council members were confronted with resolutions put forth by AfD politicians. His point was that if AfD members of a small-town council suggested repaving a road, the CDU faction shouldn’t reflexively oppose the measure.

Elsewhere, this firewall rhetoric has boxed the CDU into a corner. Recently, the party proposed a bill in the state parliament of Thuringia to cut taxes. But after the AfD faction voted in support of the bill, embarrassed handwringing ensued. Did the CDU inadvertently violate its own firewall by taking a position with which the AfD agrees? Should it withdraw proposals if it becomes clear that the AfD might endorse them? Some prominent CDU members indeed seem to believe so.

In this, the CDU has found an unlikely sympathiser in Amira Mohamed Ali. “What should they have done?” she told German media. “Refuse to propose a motion or withdraw it after the wrong ones voted for it? I find that rather absurd.”

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Might this present an opportunity for a future party led by Wagenknecht? While the AfD and a potential Wagenknecht party would likely denounce each other in public and promise no formal collaboration, on key issues of the day — such as the Ukraine war or energy policy — they could vote in line. And even though the AfD might earn smaller vote shares with Wagenknecht as a competitor, the two parties together may still earn a larger combined vote share than the AfD does by itself. This would allow them to form subtle coalitions on specific issues.

The status quo, by contrast, limits Wagenknecht’s reach because in national polls Die Linke is stagnating around the 5% mark that parties need to cross in order to gain seats in the Bundestag. In Sunday’s elections for the state parliaments of Hesse and Bavaria, the party incurred heavy losses and failed to win seats in either parliament — in Hesse, Die Linke earned only half as many votes as in the last elections five years ago. Prominent Linke politicians blame it all on Wagenknecht. “It is the stated goal of Wagenknecht and her associates to destroy Die Linke,” tweeted the Bundestag member Caren Lay.

But Wagenknecht could still lose her nerve. After all, this would not be her first time trying to launch a novel political organisation. In 2018, she helped to form an extra-parliamentary movement named Aufstehen (“Rise Up”), which she modelled after the British Momentum campaign of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, to provide grassroots support for her Left-wing goals. Yet the project quickly fizzled out after Wagenknecht complained that she felt “burned out” and withdrew from leadership.

If she proceeds, Wagenknecht will have the crucial support of Klaus Ernst. The former union executive helped to lead a sizable chunk of members out of the Social Democratic Party in 2005 to protest the party’s cuts to social welfare during the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. He then helped to form the Left-wing social-democratic party WASG, which in 2007 merged with the Party of Democratic Socialism to become today’s Linke. Ernst, who is discontented with Die Linke’s support for “genderism” and apocalyptic climate activism, recently told Cicero that if Wagenknecht were to launch such a party, “it would really be a realistic option for me to participate”.

The combined vote share of Germany’s Nato-supporting mainstream parties is ever-shrinking as more and more Germans, especially in the East, feel alienated from Berlin and seek to punish their leaders by voting for disruptive populist forces. So far, the AfD has fought a lonely fight in total rejection of the status quo. If Wagenknecht starts to address many of the AfD’s complaints against Germany’s energy or foreign policy as well, the Right-wing populists may not be lonely for long.