The Harbinger of a Viable Future

Thomas O’Reilly writes:

Berlin’s new political reality hit home this week as the Bundestag met for the first time since February’s federal election, which saw a drubbing for the Ampelkoalition coalition of Olaf Scholz.

Whilst the handover to the ashen-faced Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz may suggest a semblance of stability, nonetheless a stormy transatlantic relationship, worsening war news from Ukraine and a right-wing revolt against migration beckons a new age of instability for Europe’s powerhouse economy.

Despite the AfD being locked out of key parliamentary roles in the Bundestag’s first sitting, the symbolic fact that an overtly nationalist party claims just under a quarter of the seats presents a significant psychological burden for the German mainstream.

AfD Vice President Stephan Brandner was keen to lash out at the “cartel parties” of German politics in his inaugural speech at the new Bundestag, with initial polling showing a small bounce for the populists in the weeks after February’s election.

As well as encompassing the radical right, German democracy must now accommodate a newly buoyant left as the post-communist Die Linke party resurrected itself from the grave, courtesy of the savvy TikTok-driven leadership of Heidi Reichinnek.

Germany’s chancellor-to-be, Friedrich Merz, has a lot of political balls to juggle heading into his new tenure as rearmament, deindustrialisation and an unending asylum crisis, never mind the ditching of the fiscal debt break, put wind in the sails of populist outsiders.

Amidst this reordering of German politics, it would be hard not to notice one political absence in the Bundestag’s return in the form of a party that wishes to change the calculus on the traditional right-left dichotomy.

The eponymous Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is a complex yet simple political formation born out of the ideological drifting of German social democracy and even radical left, in the face not just of big issue questions like migration and geopolitics but the embrace of caustic woke politics.

The party was forged by the DDR-born and half-Iranian leftist luminary Sahra Wagenknecht in 2023, in response to her party comrades in Die Linke’s endorsement of American-imported identity politics and mass migration to the detriment of social solidarity.

“A left-wing party that sees itself primarily as an advocate for minorities instead of standing up for the majority will fail,” wrote Wagenknecht in her literary denouncement of the idpol-left, arguing that a permanent ideology cleavage had now emerged between “lifestyle leftists” and those serious about social justice.

A 2016 call by Wagenknecht to restrict asylum numbers earned her a pie in the face by a disgruntled left activist in a targeted act of humiliation, with socialist academic Pablo Castaño accusing the BSW of facilitating the “burial of class politics” through the imitation of the far right.

In its 2025 platform, the party sought to temporarily halt asylum applications and suggested that individuals without legal residency should not receive state benefits.

Initially assumed to be a flash-in-the-pan spoiler against the insurgent AfD, the contrarian leftists of the BSW have instead taken an electoral bite out of the moribund German Social Democrats, particularly in the former DDR.

Denounced by the left as reactionary nostalgics, the right for being incoherent hippies and the pro-Atlanticist centre for peacenik stances on Ukraine, BSW MEP Thomas Geisel defied all of those stereotypes when he sat down with me at his Brussels office.

The 61-year-old former social democratic mayor of Dusseldorf defected to the BSW in 2021, citing a “denial of reality” amongst his former SPD comrades regarding migration and asylum.

Despite a respectable 6 per cent showing during last year’s EU elections, the BSW was a mere 10,000 votes shy of the 5 per cent minimum to enter the Bundestag, a major albeit recoverable loss.

Geisel put the setback down to the inability of the young party to grapple with the logistics of a snap election, as well as the Trump victory, which, to the MEP, placated some of the German public’s unease over the Ukrainian war.

To Geisel, an American-educated former Enron employee, the selling point of BSW is its harkening back to a time of 20th century social stability safeguarded by German industrial strength and a holistic civic system.

Hardly a Soviet nostalgic as many of his party comrades and even leader are often portrayed, Geisel and the BSW look favourably at social democratic figures of yesteryear like Willy Brandt with the policy of Ostpolitik (rapprochement with East Germany) doing much to inform the party’s conciliatory approach to Putin’s Russia.

Comfortable in his identity as a German but critical of outright nationalism, Geisel even links the contemporary globe-trotting progressivism of Berlin’s elites, such as foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, to the continuation of national chauvinism from the early 20th century.

Very much proud of his record in defence of LGBT rights and opposition to neofascists when mayor of Düsseldorf, Geisel is nevertheless scathing of the cordon sanitaire tactic against the AfD as ultimately enabling the right in the long term.

“You basically give the right-wing a lot more control over the debate than they deserve,” Geisel argues in reference to de-platforming the populist right, with Sahra Wagenknecht condemning attempts by the German state to clamp down on the AfD.

His tone is similar on Ukraine, where, whilst being supportive of Kyiv having the moral right over an expansionist Kremlin, the MEP is critical of those in the European Parliament who think that Germany and Europe can continue without Russian natural resources.

A father of five who laments the decline of large families, a formative moment for Geisel came when witnessing the post-Cold War carpetbagging of the East German economy, which saw many companies torn apart to the financial gain of American and West German investors.

The cornerstone concept for the BSW remains the idea of “Gesellschaft” (Society), demanding that political leadership protect the social space away from the all-consuming demands of the globalised market. “Bread and butter” issues of social justice must overtake the whinging of woke politics, with economic security only secured through a vibrant industrial economy regardless of the demands of the green agenda.

Denouncing the AfD’s signature policy of remigration as immoral as well as impractical, Geisel highlights the popularity of his party amongst second-generation migrants with the party co-chaired by the half-Egyptian Amira Mohamed Ali.

To Geisel, neither the ethno-nationalist wing of the AfD, embodied by Maximilian Krah and Björn Höcke, or the more libertarian minded Alice Weidel can rise to the challenge of reconstructing the German social contract as the traditional left and centre-right stumble over their own contradictions.

On Europe, whilst arguing for a return of some powers to EU member states, Geisel mimics most social democrats as seeing the EU as an imperfect bulwark against predatory platform capitalism and a way to force a social dimension to the market.

“Germany is a social state unlike the United States,” Geisel declares, warning against the formation of “parallel societies” created by mass migration. Surprisingly critical of the Danish left approach to mass migration as lacking a pan-European dimension and suitable only to Denmark, Geisel sees a solution to the migration as demanding an EU response.

Somewhat hampered by the fact the party sits unaligned in the EU Parliament, nonetheless, the BSW tried in vain to create an alternative left-wing group of NATO critical parties in the months following the 2024 European elections. Prospective international partners for Sahra Wagenknecht include Slovakia’s SMER party and the Italian Five Star Movement.

BSW’s arrival to EU politics comes at an inflection point for the traditional and radical European left coming to terms with the remilitarisation, losing grassroots support to populists and even Islamo-gauchists.

Viewing NATO expansion as provocative, to the ire of many in the German establishment, the BSW proposes a pan-European security architecture that potentially includes Russia and opposes the further arming of the Ukrainian army. “Where is it all going to end up?” Geisel laments, referencing botched 2022 peace negotiations in Istanbul.

Whilst Geisel is confident that his party’s pragmatic approach is better suited to address Germany’s migration woes, Brussels-based AfD members I spoke to about the BSW were scathing. To many in the AfD, whilst respecting some of the party’s pillars, the BSW is an ideologically nebulous personality cult consisting of many who cheered on mass migration until it became unviable to do so.

Regardless, the zeitgeist of instability striking Germany bodes well for the BSW in a country where many expect an eventual electoral dividend for anti-war voices. Perhaps as likely to create a new pragmatic centre within Germany when the dust settles on Ukraine and the woke agenda, BSW is a variable in a nation more and more synonymous with political instability.

Germany’s political future is more and more up for grabs and against the Zoomer-driven populism of the AfD and Die Linke.

If German social democracy experienced its original heyday combatting the indecencies of industrial life, then its 21st century proponents may find the BSW turns out to be the harbinger of a viable future in a post-woke world.