Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most prominent far-left politician, has taken credit for the government’s decision to limit military aid to Kyiv, saying her strong opposition to arming Ukraine was influencing Berlin’s policy on the war.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Wagenknecht said the fact that the German government “has said it at least doesn’t want to continue to top up weapons deliveries” was “a result of our high opinion poll ratings”.
Finance minister Christian Lindner last week warned fellow government members that he would veto any new payment requests for Kyiv.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday denied that Berlin was giving up on Ukraine, saying Germany would donate €4bn in military aid to Kyiv next year, more than any other European country.
But Wagenknecht was adamant about the impact her stance made.
“We are already having an effect, even though we’re not even in power,” she said of her party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). “Our approval ratings are affecting the national debate.”
After splitting from the established far-left Die Linke party to form BSW seven months ago, Wagenknecht has emerged as the left’s disrupter-in-chief.
Her rise in the polls inserts fresh instability into a political landscape already challenged by the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which also espouses Ukraine-sceptical, pro-Russian views.
BSW has spiked in the polls ahead of elections next month in three eastern German states that are expected to confirm the region’s drift to the political extremes and deliver a stinging rebuke to Scholz’s increasingly unpopular three-way coalition.
A poll by Forsa on Tuesday put BSW on 13 per cent in Saxony and 18 per cent in Thuringia, both of which hold elections on September 1 — an extraordinary achievement for a party that is not even a year old. Scholz’s Social Democrats, by contrast, is at just 6 to 7 per cent in both states.
Squeezed on the left by the BSW and on the right by the AfD, mainstream parties now face a major dilemma: should they entertain coalitions with an outfit whose opposition to military aid to Ukraine has placed it firmly outside the political consensus?
The dilemma is most acute for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has been steadfast in its support for Kyiv since the very start of the war and has frequently castigated Scholz’s government for not doing enough to help the beleaguered country.
But polls suggest the CDU will not be able to govern — in Thuringia at least — without the BSW as junior partner. Having ruled out co-operation with both the AfD and Die Linke, which at present leads a minority regional government, the CDU has few options left.
“There’s no way this works without the BSW,” said Martin Debes, author of Germany of the Extremes, a political history of Thuringia.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz initially banned any coalition with the BSW, describing Wagenknecht as “rightwing extremist on some issues, and on others, leftwing extreme”.
But he later backpedalled, saying local branches of the CDU should decide on their own whether to team up with Wagenknecht’s party.
“Essentially we have to figure out what is possible on the local level and what will lead to stable majorities,” Mario Voigt, CDU leader in Thuringia, told the FT. “But one thing is clear: there will be neither a coalition nor co-operation with the AfD.”
A political contrarian who joined the East German Communist party just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wagenknecht is revelling in her new status as kingmaker.
She has already set out a series of tough conditions for any coalition, saying she won’t team up with any party that supports Scholz’s plan to station US medium-range missiles in Germany from 2026.
She has also said the BSW would only join a government that explicitly backed diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
CDU officials make the point that such issues are only dealt with by the federal government, not in regions such as Thuringia. Thuringia’s social democrat leader Georg Maier said: “She is just trying to blackmail all her potential coalition partners, especially the CDU.”
But Wagenknecht herself said she was only reflecting voters’ wishes. “People in the east want a change in foreign policy — they are scared of being dragged into a major European war,” she told the FT.
She also said that a majority of Germans living in the east rejected the US missile plan. Recent polling by Forsa shows that about two-thirds of respondents in eastern Germany are against the deployment, while at a national level, 49 per cent oppose it.
A “key condition” for any regional government was that it “reflects and represents such positions, because otherwise voters will just be disappointed again”, she said.
Though many in Berlin have bristled at Wagenknecht’s conditions, some in the east have echoed her rhetoric. Michael Kretschmer, the CDU prime minister of Saxony, has also spoken out forcefully against weapons supplies to Kyiv.
In Thuringia, the CDU’s Voigt — while stressing his party’s commitment to supporting Ukraine — has also backed the call for more diplomacy to end the war, urging the federal government “do more in this regard”. “Germany was always a force for peace and a force for diplomacy, but little of that is happening at the moment,” he said.
Wagenknecht said she found Voigt’s intervention “remarkable”. “We were always berated for taking this position, and now Voigt is demanding it, too.”
But others are outraged by the BSW leader’s rhetoric. A recent petition signed by civil rights activists accused Wagenknecht and her party of spreading Kremlin disinformation and called on other parties to “distance themselves much more clearly from the BSW and its ideas about ‘national Socialism’.”
The suggestion of a link to Nazism is a designation Wagenknecht firmly rejects. But her idiosyncratic platform does represent a curious mix of traditional leftwing ideas such as higher taxes on the rich with rightwing demands for curbs on immigration and sympathy for Russia.
In her interview, she cemented her status as one of Germany’s leading Putinversteher (Putin apologists), a reputation underscored by her decision to boycott President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech in the Bundestag in June.
She criticised the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk, saying it would “harden” the positions of the warring parties, and said the war happened only because Russia “wouldn’t accept Ukraine turning into an American military outpost”.
Wagenknecht said her party had already succeeded in changing German politics for the better by peeling votes away from the AfD.
“Before we existed, all the anger and protest benefited the AfD alone,” she said. “Now you see that when there’s a serious alternative, a lot of people will vote for it.”
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