A burst of enthusiasm among the membership has given Germany’s socialist party Die Linke what might be its last chance at renewal. But becoming a party of the working class will take a lot more than a last-minute turnaround at the polls.
When former Die Linke leader Sahra Wagenknecht and her supporters quit to form their own party in October 2023, both sides of the split seemed confident that they would be the main beneficiaries. Her Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) hoped that, finally freed of their former comrades’ “lifestyle leftism,” they could reach out to the broad middle of society and win back disillusioned voters who had drifted to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Die Linke’s own leaders claimed they could now win back those who had abandoned the party over Wagenknecht’s alleged xenophobia and finally break out of the downward spiral that had seen its polling numbers plummet to 3 percent, well below the 5-percent threshold to remain in parliament.
At first, BSW appeared to have more realistically estimated its electoral potential. It took hundreds of thousands of votes away from its former comrades in the 2024 European and state elections and hit 10 percent in nationwide polls, while Die Linke faced its worst ever results. In the meantime, Die Linke launched a new corporate design, elected a new leadership (including a former Jacobin editor), and noticeably improved its digital outreach, yet remained stuck at 3 percent, increasingly relegated to a footnote by media.
The last few weeks, however, suggest that the tide may have turned. Repeated polls have placed Die Linke at 5 or 6 percent for the first time in years, and tens of thousands of new members have joined, including some 11,000 in January alone. Two weeks before the 2025 election, BSW and Die Linke are suddenly polling neck and neck, and mainstream media are beginning to cautiously speak of a “comeback” for a party that, just a few months ago, was only ever discussed in terms of decline and inevitable extinction.
What is fueling this new fighting spirit? Contrary to the leadership’s (understandable) claims that internal harmony reigns following BSW’s departure, the deep strategic and political rifts within the party have hardly been healed. This is particularly visible over Gaza, where a small but persistent minority of MPs continues to openly support Israel — flying in the face of the party’s official position, the international left and most scholars of international law. Nor have the party faithful exactly rallied around a coherent strategy: while one Die Linke campaign slogan boasts “Everyone wants to govern, we want to change,” in the eastern state of Saxony, its tiny parliamentary group, decimated after its worst-ever election result last September, has decided to tolerate a minority government led by the Christian Democrats (CDU).
Thus, it would seem that the party’s turnaround is fueled not so much by a newfound sense of political purpose so much as a shared desire to survive — and a relatively favorable political conjuncture. The party has benefited from the rightward shift on migration policy across the political spectrum, BSW included, as well as the latter’s decision to participate in two state governments less than a year after its founding. With support for the AfD growing by the day, Die Linke is gaining an unexpected boost from voters (and new members) aghast at the prospect of losing a left-wing parliamentary opposition.
It is a small irony of history that a far-right surge could prove to be the Left’s saving grace, but beggars can’t be choosers. Should Die Linke achieve a surprise success on February 23, it could give the party a chance to rethink and rebuild. But that will only happen if it avoids returning to the holding pattern of the past decade.
Dizzy With Success
Like many of its siblings among European “New Left” parties, Die Linke was founded on a platform that consisted primarily of opposition — to the center-left government’s labor-market reforms, to neoliberal economics, and to the destructive, illegal wars waged against Iraq and Afghanistan. What it was campaigning for, let alone how it was to achieve it, remained considerably vaguer.
The two parties that merged to form Die Linke in 2007 came from very different backgrounds. Labor and Social Justice – the Electoral Alternative (WASG) was a split from the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD), which they had deserted over its record in government under Gerhard Schröder. For them, any new formation would inevitably have to sharply demarcate itself from their former comrades. The ex-Communists of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), conversely, had spent fifteen years seeking to distance themselves from the record of East Germany, and quite a few of them probably would have joined the SPD after German reunification had only they been allowed. Governing together with the SPD, as they did in both Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the 2000s, became the horizon of their political ambitions at least in practice, if not in theory.
Bridging this gap would inevitably prove difficult. But the question of how Die Linke should relate to the center-left was initially resolved in practice by the SPD and Greens’ refusal to entertain any cooperation whatsoever with them. Die Linke’s then leader Oskar Lafontaine, formerly of the SPD, attempted to formulate a political response in the form of what he called “red stop lines,” a set of minimum demands for joining government. It is no coincidence that Die Linke reached its greatest influence during this period, serving as the only meaningful political opposition to the neoliberal zeal gripping the political mainstream at the time. Die Linke rolled into one state parliament after another and, in just a few years, achieved an institutional presence that bore little meaningful relation to its actual social weight or organizational strength.
But this constellation would not last, as symbolized by Lafontaine’s surprise resignation from the party leadership in 2010. Die Linke’s electoral advances came to a standstill and soon morphed into a long, slow retreat. Meanwhile, the party was unable to find a shared response to the situation. None of the successors to Lafontaine and coleader Gregor Gysi could unite the party around a common strategy.
In some states, Die Linke joined or even led regional governments whose policies were practically indistinguishable from the SPD. In others, it remained a marginal parliamentary presence, largely restricted to agitation and propaganda. While Syriza in Greece or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party shot to prominence, Die Linke drifted through the 2010s in a series of shifting alliances between rival factions with sometimes very different political ideas, increasingly held together by the routines and financial resources of parliament itself, until its near-total defeat in 2021 made it clear that something had gone fundamentally wrong.
Behind the Curtain
One cannot help but wonder whether Die Linke’s early success was not something of a poisoned chalice: precisely when the young party needed capable, enthusiastic grassroots leaders to build structures and develop a lively political culture, many of its best and brightest were drawn into the parliamentary apparatus, often to the detriment of party-building on the ground. Though Die Linke was briefly the country’s third-largest party by membership, a disproportionately high number of those members were already retirees. It was clear from the outset that it would quickly lose momentum without serious base-building.
Parliament is a crucial arena of political conflict in any capitalist democracy — but also one inherently biased against forces that seek to advance the interests of the working majority over those of the propertied elites. This is why socialist parties have historically always combined electoral campaigning with workplace and community organizing to bolster their forces both inside and outside parliament. Governments can easily bypass a parliamentary vote or even a referendum, as the Berlin campaign to expropriate private housing corporations proved a few years ago. A permanent organization that can threaten strikes and mass mobilizations, on the other hand, cannot be ignored so easily.
This kind of dual strategy was never seriously pursued by Die Linke, at least not in a coherent form, nor did a unified vision for party-building ever emerge. Many of its elected representatives probably had little interest in such a strategy from the outset, but they also had a compelling argument on their side: joining government coalitions was a much more immediate and tangible prospect than the abstract proposition of building class power outside the state. Indeed, what would that even look like in Germany, a country where parties to the left of the SPD had been marginal since the 1950s?
Not everyone in the party took this parliamentary drift sitting down. But organizational gestures toward a more interventionist strategy, such as the “connective” or “active members’ party” (to quote two slogans from the 2010s), remained half-hearted and paralyzed by a party apparatus inherited from the PDS, largely structured around parliamentary imperatives.
“Linksaktiv,” Die Linke’s first attempt at party-building, exemplified this dilemma: while a team of staff, interns, and volunteers conducted dozens of organizer trainings designed to use the 2009 election campaign as a recruiting tool, another section of the party apparatus launched a bizarre social network under the same label — a cheap Facebook knockoff for party supporters that was soon forgotten. Initiatives from the former Wagenknecht camp, above all the infamous “Aufstehen” campaign that claimed to represent a cross-party mobilization for social justice, sought to address this same dilemma by copying promising models from abroad.
The development of the party over the last fifteen years is thus less one of “bourgeoisification,” as some critics on the Left might claim, than a gradual domestication, largely caused by institutional inertia. On paper, the party’s positions have not moved rightward as such, but the gap between rhetoric and practice has widened. In the absence of a tangible alternative, parliamentary pragmatism dominates, coupled with abstract verbal radicalism and trendy culture war politics — a reflection of the changing composition of the membership. This drift in turn successively undermines Die Linke’s claim to the protest vote and thus its electoral fortunes. It is no coincidence that as this vicious circle appeared to be coming to an end, various prominent members from the so-called “reformer” wing announced their resignation or early retirement late last year. There was simply nothing left for them to gain in a party approaching electoral oblivion.
Best in Show
Looking back, it is fair to say that Die Linke’s outsize institutional presence served to disguise its fragile underpinnings and delay the realization that more radical change was needed. We will never know whether it could have been transformed into a workers’ party then, but now, as the party appears to be dragging itself out of the mud, there may be a chance to at least try.
Even prior to the reverse in fortunes in recent weeks, there had been calls for Die Linke to learn from the successes of sister parties such as the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) and focus on implanting itself in working-class communities and supporting labor struggles. These voices received a big boost at the recent party congress last October, even if they remain merely part of a much broader leadership. Their success is to be welcomed, but the innovators still have a long way to go — after all, the distance between Die Linke and Germany’s working class has never been greater.
In a recent study for the party-aligned Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, sociologist Carsten Braband shows how Die Linke’s electoral support among blue-collar and service workers has fallen continuously since its founding, from almost 20 percent in 2009 to 3 or 4 percent today. Though we have no comparable data on the composition of the membership, we can imagine that it is heading in the same direction. How could it be otherwise? Political activism in developed capitalist democracies has long been the domain of the middle class, a trend to which left-wing organizations are by no means immune.
The number of trade unionists among Die Linke’s members and voters has also fallen almost continuously. This reflects both leaders’ lack of a labor strategy as well as Die Linke’s weakening relevance for the trade unions as its parliamentary weight declines. Instead, their places are taken by new members and full-time officials, most of whom come from the professional middle class, or what Braband calls “socio-cultural experts.” Due to their socialization, members of this milieu tend toward the kind of politics that has become commonplace in capitalist democracies generally: “campaigning,” social media activism, flash mobs, and, ultimately, parliamentarianism. Their aesthetics may differ from the traditionalists, but it’s the same low-mobilization model.
Slowly, the realization seems to be seeping in that the status quo is no longer tenable. Yet reversing the current trend would require a concerted push throughout the party, also reflected in changing priorities in the organization and training of members. The often-cited example of Belgium’s PTB, which developed from a micro-party of a few hundred people into a small “mass party” with around 25,000 members since the 2000s, suggests that such a transformation is at least possible.
However, probably the most important lesson from this Belgian experience is that party-building takes time. For decades, the PTB fought on the fringes of political life, strategically identifying and organizing energetic campaigns around wedge issues and systematically training party cadres in a way that simply has no tradition in Die Linke. The Belgian comrades’ recent electoral successes were not the catalyst for broader organization, but the result of it.
For Die Linke, such a change of course would essentially mean starting from scratch, without the political discipline and ideological coherence that characterizes small parties like the earlier-generation PTB. It would mean a considerable redeployment of resources and personnel with no guarantee of short-term gains, and would thus likely face considerable internal pushback. Reentering parliament would give the party a few years of breathing space to begin such an undertaking. It would also mean that some of the most change-resistant elements of the party would remain in place. This makes it especially important that the new leadership remains tenacious and resists the temptation to compromise at the first available opportunity — lest the cycle start all over again after the elections.
On Rocky Terrain
The last few weeks of campaigning, and particularly Die Linke’s impressive membership gains, are nevertheless grounds for cautious optimism. New challenges keep adding to existing contradictions: the two state governments still including Die Linke are unlikely to survive upcoming elections, and the institutional strength of the old guard will likely continue to decline, crowded out by the massive influx of young members in recent months. Moreover, BSW’s ongoing strength in Die Linke’s former eastern heartlands means that a return to the status quo will be impossible. The party will have no choice but to explore new strategies.
None of these developments ensure that Die Linke is on the way to becoming a socialist party rooted in the working class. Nevertheless, there is some reason to believe that a left-wing strategy focused on party-building and campaigning on working-class issues can succeed today. The BSW may pose an existential threat to Die Linke in these elections, but this media-heavy vehicle’s political approach does not envisage building a class organization or politics outside parliament at all. Its strategic alliance with sections of small and medium-sized business would also make such an orientation impractical, to say the least.
In this sense, the field is wide open. Even if the political terrain is not ideal, there is no shortage of issues in Germany that a socialist party can organize people around. Exploding rents — the only issue with which Die Linke has had any meaningful success in recent years — is the most obvious choice, but there are others. German complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza, which every party from the AfD to the SPD and Greens supports unreservedly, would be another issue on which a fighting left could make its mark in an increasingly crowded political field.
Given Die Linke’s less-than-impressive track record, a pessimist could conclude that socialist politics is impossible in Germany — and, some days, it can feel like that. A slightly more optimistic view would be that Die Linke, for all its faults, proved that socialist ideas appeal to a sizable proportion of the German population, but the institutional structures it inherited proved insufficient to translate that appeal into meaningful organization.
Given the lack of alternatives, Die Linke will remain a central point of reference for socialist politics in Germany regardless of what happens on February 23. In the best-case scenario, it will boast a small but loud parliamentary opposition, and tens of thousands of highly motivated new members to hit the ground running. However, all of this will only matter if it uses its recent stroke of luck to not just copy the slogans of its more successful neighbors while continuing with business as usual, but finally clarify its political priorities and develop a real strategy to pursue them.