Grow a Spine: Democrats Have a Lot to Learn From the German Left

The Intercept

25-02-2025

Die Linke party co-leaders, Ines Schwerdtner, Heidi Reichinnek, and Jan van Aken, attend a press conference in Berlin, Germany, on Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: Carsten Koall/Picture Alliance/DPA via AP
Germany's election results may at first seem like just another success for conservative and far-right forces. The Christian Democrats won the most votes of any party with 28.52 percent. Their leader, Friedrich Merz, who has pushed the party significantly rightward during his tenure, will likely be the next chancellor. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD – Elon Musk's cause célèbre – came second, winning just over 20 percent, or around one in five votes. The AfD will remain outside of any ruling coalition in the parliament, thanks only to an enduring postwar commitment from Germany's other major parties to never form a coalition with an explicitly far-right entity.
The centrist Social Democratic and Green Parties both earned record low results, with 16 and 11 percent of the votes respectively. Democrats in the U.S. would do well to learn from their mistakes, and instead take notes from Germany's left-wing party, Die Linke, or The Left — the only party to dramatically exceed expectations on Sunday.
Based on the vote counts alone, this could seem counterintuitive: Die Linke only won 9 percent. As recently as a month ago, however, it seemed feasible that the party could fail to garner the 5 percent of votes necessary to earn seats in Germany's parliament at all. The party outperformed, especially with young women voters; it won 27 percent of all first-time voters and gained 30,000 new members in the last month of the election campaign. Their surprise comeback offers a lesson in what is required to build — or at least begin to build — party political resistance to the far-right.
Die Linke's relative successes, and the accumulating failures of the Greens and the Social Democrats, are further grounds to reject the centrist liberal insistence on bending to the right to keep the far-right at bay. The centrist strategy, aside from being morally turpitudinous, has been a losing one; it only serves to legitimize far-right frameworks and bolster right-wing parties.
Die Linke, meanwhile, gained significant ground with an unambiguously leftist economic platform, which also — and this is crucial — refused to throw minorities under the bus. They focused on so-called 'bread and butter' issues like rent and the rising cost of living, transport, and pensions, and defended trans and immigrant rights. They ran as the only party to robustly oppose far-right politics with strong words and policies.
The election results undermine claims that the left must embrace 'anti-woke' positions if we are to challenge the racist far-right. One German party specifically deployed this strategy and failed to win enough votes to enter parliament.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, named after its famous leader, formed as a split from Die Linke early last year and pushed a program of economic redistribution and worker protections, alongside anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ stances — a nationalist social democracy, willing to treat many thousands of people as disposable, while pushing to segment the international working class with protectionist nation-state borders. Wagenknecht was not rewarded. Meanwhile, her former party's clarity on class struggle as a clear priority, but intractable from race and gender struggles, appealed far more.
Hundreds of thousands of German voters disturbed by the rise of the far-right sought an anti-fascist alternative. This was particularly true after the Christian Democrats' Merz caused public outcry in January when he pushed through a harsh anti-immigrant proposal in parliament by relying on votes from the AfD. The move was seen as a breach of the 'firewall' prohibiting collaboration with far-right parties, upheld since 1945. The Christian Democrats may have won the most votes on Sunday, but it was nonetheless the party's second lowest result in its history.
Most other major parties condemned Merz, but it was only Die Linke that had any real ground to stand on. The Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats under current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and even Green Party leaders, have all to varying degrees spent the last decade-plus weakening the so-called firewall with their own support for harsh immigration restrictions. The German center's commitment to supporting Israel and its genocide, while violently criminalizing support for Palestine at home, is matched only by the U.S.
Die Linke has also not been strong enough across the board when it comes to condemning Israel's war crimes and Germany's complicity in them, but it is also one of the only parties openly opposed to sending weapons to Israel. (The only other party was Wagenknecht's, with its attempt to pair anti-imperialist foreign policy with domestic xenophobia and racism.) Die Linke candidates like Ferat Koçak, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian freedom, modeled what a thoroughgoing anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-working class platform can look like – putting economic issues front and center, but refusing to pander to a notion of the working class that prioritizes white men. Koçak will be the first member Die Linke to ever win a seat in West Germany.
'I knocked on doors and when people said they voted AfD, I said 'Okay, but if you want, you can still come to my office and I'll check if your heating bill is too high.''
On Monday, the New York Times credited Die Linke's savvy social media campaigning for its surge in support – which was by far the strongest with young, urban, and particularly women voters. And there's no doubt that the party's TikTok and Instagram game is strong. One of Die Linke's leaders, 36-year-old Heidi Reichinnek, has over a million viewers across the platforms, where she posts well-edited, accessible, educational content to push the party's core message. Jan van Aken, another co-leader, clearly expressed Die Linke's message on mainstream talk shows and the like. Social and traditional media efforts were no more vital, though, than a mass door-knocking strategy, in which Die Linke candidates and organizers made a point to ask would-be voters about their challenges and struggles.
'I knocked on doors and when people said they voted AfD, I said 'Okay, but if you want, you can still come to my office and I'll check if your heating bill is too high,'' Ines Schwerdtner, another of the party co-leaders, said in a press conference on Monday.
There are, of course, limits to mapping Germany's multiparty liberal capitalist democracy onto the U.S.'s two-party leviathan. Certain similarities and patterns are, however, too strong to ignore. As is true with establishment Democrats, the German parties that span the liberal-to-conservative center have all lurched rightward on anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the last decade, while attempting the impossible balancing act of serving capitalist interests and claiming to stand for the working class. Redistributive economic reforms and state investment in social welfare have been insufficient. Ideological commitments to austerity pervade, bolstering the right-wing, anti-immigrant myth that there is too little to go around.
Concerns about fascism from the lips of figures like Merz can ring hollow when AfD leaders have accused — with good reason – the Christian Democrats of copying their far-right anti-immigration program. Likewise, former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris warned of the fascistic threat of Trump, but were complicit in genocide, the criminalization of left-wing and pro-Palestine protest, and racist fearmongering over immigration and crime. These liberal capitalists have failed to offer a bulwark to the right, let alone an alternative.
Die Linke's example is not a clear road map to anti-fascist victory; the AfD earned twice as many votes and further cemented gains in its strongholds in Germany's east. The mistake, though, would be to treat the German election as a story of political polarization, in need of centrist correction. There has been a repudiation of the liberal center: The Green Party, a green capitalist liberal party that has drifted far from its leftist roots, lost 700,000 voters to Die Linke compared to the 2021 elections; the Social Democrats, who will likely form the governing coalition with Merz's party, lost 560,000 votes to Die Linke.
The neoliberal austerity paradigms that helped foster 21st century fascist movements will not be the answer. Die Linke's proposal is a simple one: We don't need to moderate fascism, we need to oppose it.