Europe - Germany

A surprising link

SITTING down with The Economist in her office in Berlin, Sahra Wagenknecht is restless: “Do we think that anyone can just migrate to Germany and have a claim to social welfare?” asks the doyenne of the Left (Die Linke), a socialist party. “Or do we say that labour migration is more of a problem?” The party’s leader in the Bundestag worries about its direction. “If you concentrate more on hip, urban sorts of voters—on identity and lifestyle debates—you don’t speak to the poorest in society. They no longer feel properly represented.” Her answer, launched on August 4th, is a new, non-party movement called “Rise Up” designed to reach those who have switched off from politics. It may point to a significant realignment in both German and European politics.

The Left was formed in 2005 when leftists who had quit the Social Democrats (SPD) merged with the successor party to the former East German communists. It has always been an uneasy alliance of provincial socialists and urban left-libertarians. At last year’s election it lost some 420,000 voters, principally older ones in the former communist east, to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, but offset that loss by gaining 700,000 from the SPD and 330,000 from the Greens, mainly in western cities and university towns. It now faces a choice: consolidate its new strength as a lefty alternative to the Greens (as Katja Kipping, the Left’s leader, wants to do) or prioritise winning back traditional working-class voters as a lefty alternative to the AfD?

For several years now Ms Wagenknecht has raised eyebrows by pursuing the latter strategy. She has argued for limits on refugee numbers and blamed the Berlin terror attack in 2016 on Angela Merkel’s open-border policies. She is Eurosceptic, critical of NATO and broadly friendly to Russia. All of this aligns her with aspects of the AfD, whose leader, Alexander Gauland, has praised her and said he wants closer co-operation. Though Ms Wagenknecht rejects the idea (“out of the question,” she declares firmly), the fact that the comparison can be made angers some in her party. In 2016 pro-refugee activists threw a chocolate cake at her at one of its conferences to protest against her supposedly “brown” (meaning far-right, a reference to the Nazis’ brownshirts) politics. When, at this year’s conference on June 9th, Left party delegates voted in favour of open borders, it was seen as a defeat for Ms Wagenknecht.

She presents her new movement as a chance to bridge divisions within the left. Some suggest it may prepare the ground for a future SPD-Left-Green government, and its early supporters include figures from all three parties and none. However, it is better understood as her bid to develop her own brand of economic statism and cultural conservatism. “The AfD does not represent poor people. But if they turn to the AfD nonetheless, I think we should not insult them but ask what we have done wrong.” Such voters and others “have not found their way to the Left party”, she adds, noting that polls show that she would win more votes as an independent than as a candidate representing the party. Unsubmissive France, a brand-new party set up to support Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left bid for the French presidency last year, has impressed her.

If Rise Up evolves into a bridge between the anti-establishment left and right, it will not be an isolated case. The two ends of Germany’s political spectrum routinely rub shoulders at anti-NATO protests. Compact, a prominent right-populist magazine, has cheered on Ms Wagenknecht’s new movement. It is edited by Jürgen Elsässer, a former far-left activist who has switched to the pro-Putin right. The AfD has started to involve itself in workers’ protests—like those over the threatened closure of a Siemens factory in Görlitz, near the Polish border, this spring. Some form of AfD-Left co-operation in state politics is probably only a matter of time (the two parties may together win enough seats for a majority in Saxony’s parliament in the election due there next year).

As the left-right divide gives way to an open-closed one, new alignments are taking place in European politics. Elements of the left are resembling the hard right: witness the British Labour Party’s anti-Semitism scandals and limp opposition to Brexit, or Mr Mélenchon’s diatribes against foreign workers, or coalition arrangements between the anti-immigrant populists and the anti-capitalist left in Greece and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, elements of the hard right are borrowing from the left: once free-market but anti-migrant outfits like Austria’s Freedom Party, France’s National Rally and the AfD are learning to love redistribution. A new space is opening up: Russia-friendly, anti-Atlanticist, Eurosceptic, economically interventionist, sceptical of or hostile to immigration and trade. Watch out, centrists.