Friday, March 21, 2025
The German left-populist Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) narrowly failed to enter Germany’s parliament in the February 23 national election. Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht complained the day after the elections that many overseas German voters were unable to cast their ballots due to tight deadlines caused by the snap election. BSW fell just 13,400 votes short of the 5 percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag (German Parliament). “Given how close the result was, we have to examine the legal standing of this election,” Wagenknecht told a press conference. Wagenknecht, 55, was born in East Germany before unification.
Her father was an Iranian communist who came to East Germany as a student and disappeared in Iran when he returned there after the 1979 revolution. Her mother was German. Wagenknecht remained vague about her future as party leader. “This will be discussed within our leadership bodies, and we will announce a decision in due course,” she said, refusing to rule out stepping down. The preliminary vote results showed her party received 4.97 percent of the ballots. The result is a major blow for Wagenknecht, who turned her back on the far-left party, The Left, in 2023 to form her own party. The Left was formed on the base of the old Communist Party that had once ruled East Germany and gets little support in the western states of unified Germany. But while BSW struggled in the western states it had targeted, The Left performed better than expected in the vote.
The Left leader Jan van Aken dismissed BSW as a passing phenomenon, comparing it to the short-lived Pirate Party. “We won’t even remember it in two or three years,” he said. The contrast between the two parties highlights the difficulty Wagenknecht faced in carving out a distinctive political space. Many voters who had considered BSW ultimately stayed with The Left. Van Aken suggested that some disillusioned BSW supporters could return: “We haven’t thought about that yet, but we’ll see.” Wagenknecht formed her party a little over a year ago with an amalgam of both far left and far right positions. She pursues an anti-capitalist, pro-labor Marxist line, while taking populist positions such as opposition to transgender rights mixed in with a vocal position against migrants entering Germany. She has also been generally supportive of Russia and opposes sanctions on it for its its invasion of Ukraine. Now she must try to figure out if she can keep her party alive without a seat in the federal legislature by using as her base seats that were won last year in state legislatures in former East Germany
