In Conversation with Lukas Hermsmeier

On the German election and Die Linke’s surge.

Sunday’s election in Germany produced two seemingly contradictory takeaways. “The most devastating lesson,” journalist Lukas Hermsmeier told me, “is that the far right hasn’t been this strong in Germany since 1945, since the fall of the Nazi regime.” Half the German electorate voted for either the very conservative Christian Democratic Union (28.5%) or the increasingly fascist party Alternative für Deutschland (20.8%). “The center was very weak, especially the Social Democrats and the Greens who governed with the hyper-neoliberal Free Democratic Party for the last three years.”

But the surprise was that left party Die Linke outperformed expectations, garnering about 9% of the vote and substantially growing their fraction in the Bundestag after their recent catastrophic trouncings. They gained over 43,000 members since the beginning of the year. While there is much to say about the far right in Germany, we focused primarily on the ascent of the left and what we, in the U.S., have to learn from it. —Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD My understanding is that Die Linke’s support increased among women and among young voters. Is the shift in support important?

LUKAS HERMSMEIER Yes. If you look at the left party since their founding in 2007, the base has dramatically shifted. The party had a stronghold in eastern Germany and was popular among middle-aged, working class and unemployed people, with solid results in rural regions. Now, it’s a party that is stronger among young voters, women, especially in cities. There are two ways to look at this. One is that Die Linke has lost their main constituency of traditional working class people. Another is that young progressives are voting for the left party for the first time, maybe, ever — if you’re twenty years old and an anti-racist activist, or a housing activist, or a climate activist, Die Linke is the one party to go to.

This party that was really thought to be dead, they were at 3-4% in polls for so long, within a few months, maybe six weeks, revived. You have the New York Times claiming this is about TikTok but that misses so much.

SL Let’s talk about those factors. It sounds like they talked a lot about rent and about bread and butter issues, but they also really went after the right on immigration in a way that nobody else has. 

LH A hundred percent. It was a strong anti-fascist stance — a focus on bread and butter issues without throwing minorities under the bus, be it trans people or refugees. What we’ve seen in Germany in the last years is a pretty significant shift to the right, as almost every party, and the population, has shifted to the right on immigration. Friedrich Merz, head of the Christian Democrats, escalated these politics when he put up his anti-immigration proposal that could only win a majority of votes with the help of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right party. This move created outrage among progressive and centrist voters, but it also highlighted that the left party is the only credible opposition to the right wing. Centrists have all been in coalition with the Christian Democrats to some degree. That’s when the left party starts to rise in the polls — in late January. 

But the reason many people were already open to the left is because of something that was changing across the last year. Voters associated the party with concrete demands like rent control, cancellation of the value added tax on groceries, taxing the rich, and also free public transport and fair wages. So the left is not just vaguely for social justice. In a country that has been governed by austerity politics for so long, that was a clear message. 

Another big factor was unity in the party. The left party had been led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a popular figure who was constantly attacking the party for being “too woke.” She left the party in late 2023 and founded her own party, hilariously named after herself, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. Her party stands for social democratic reform, anti-immigration measures, demilitarization, anti-wokeness — and it didn’t make it to the parliament in Sunday’s election. They only got 4.9% of the vote. I would say that the Wagenknecht’s split has been a blessing for the left party.

SL What does the new leadership look like? 

LH The new leadership is more credible as a force. There are three main leaders: Jan van Aken, kind of like a Bernie Sanders figure, who went to all the talkshows and is very good in focusing on brand and butter demands; Ines Schwerdtner, in charge of organizing on-the-ground who won her district in Berlin-Lichtenberg; and Heidi Reichinnek, who became popular through certain speeches in parliament and on TikTok. 

SL How did the party reframe the immigration issue away from crime or competition for resources? 

LH Die Linke successfully argued that the main problem is not migrants, trans people, wokeism, and all that, the problem is fascists, billionaires, scammy landlords and a system of inequality and underinvestment.

I think they were just very pragmatic and they did very well on-the-ground. They were inspired by the Communist Party of Austria and the Workers’ Party of Belgium and started organizing door-to-door a few years ago, just going to hundreds of thousands of doors and asking them, what are your problems? They also offer an online heating costs check. Ines Schwerdtner said that she knocked on doors and when people said they voted for AfD, her response was: “OK, but if you want, you can still come to my office and I’ll check if your heating bill is too high.” This approach of concrete direct aid has been key in winning certain districts.

SL What was the actual role of TikTok here?

LH For many years, the AfD was the only party using TikTok successfully. All the other parties were completely behind. And then in the last couple of years, distinctively through parliamentarians such as Heidi Reichinnek, Ferat Koçak and Caren Lay, they realized that it was a powerful way to reach young people. It helps that Reichinnek is young and has tattoos and has an interesting and charismatic appearance. She would mix snippets from speeches and just look into a camera and attack the AfD, saying: you guys pretend to help the working class and you don’t! I mean, nothing here is wildly innovative. It’s more like they realized that this is a way to use media in 2025.

SL What do we think about the fact that Die Linke has won over these young voters in cities, but has lost its traditional working class constituency?

LH If you look at exit polls, it is undoubtedly true that the left party is not strong among the unemployed, among union members, among all these classic constituencies anymore — they lost voters. People believed what Wagenknecht was saying for years — that the left had become too woke — which is maybe partially true, but also Die Linke was the only party talking about wages and rents credibly before this election cycle. Wagenknecht pushed that story while she was jumping from talk show to talk show, complaining about “lifestyle leftists,” and hadn’t been seen on a picket line for a thousand years.

What the left party is doing now is, in my view, the only way to reach these constituencies again — saying the rents and costs are too high, the wages are too low, and we need more public infrastructure — in order to speak to alienated and precarious voters. What happens if you don’t? The other approach would be to say that we have to curb migration because they steal jobs, which would mean, in my view, it’s no longer an emancipatory left-wing project, no longer an internationalist project, no longer a project of solidarity. So I’m glad they’re not doing that. In the long run, this combination of bread and butter issues and heavy local organizing strategy is, in my opinion, the only realistic way to win back voters.

It is very, very difficult to do that in rural east Germany because there is little [left-wing] infrastructure. There are states in eastern Germany, Saxony, where AfD got almost 50% of the votes. 50% of the votes for an extreme right party! 

SL Trump and Musk and JD Vance coming in and trying to boost AfD. Did that make a difference? 

LH If you look at polls, it didn’t matter. I could imagine it even rather helped the left party to become stronger.

SL To what degree have gender politics around abortion or trans rights played a role in this election?

LH These issues weren’t big priorities for the parties. That being said, Merz was asked what he thought about Trump’s executive order recognizing “only two genders” and said that it makes sense to him. Merz also has announced that he wants to undo a new law making gender self-identification easier. The AfD program is heavily chauvinistic, committed to the traditional family model, anti-trans, and anti-LGBTQ despite the fact that the head of the party is a lesbian herself (her and her partner live in Switzerland).

SL And on Gaza, my understanding is that it played less of an electoral role in Germany — where the movement for Palestine is small and heavily repressed — than it did in the US.

LH I would say that the issue did not play a big role in the election campaign, but played a role among leftists and Arab Germas, especially of course among Palestinians. Die Linke is against arms sales to Israel and also to Ukraine. There is a wing within the party that is connected to the Palestine solidarity movement, in part because the left party has gained migrant members and non-white members, especially in Berlin. There is, however, also still a fraction, the so-called Antideutsche, heavily committed to supporting Israel, but my sense is that they’re getting smaller.

SL And what comes next now for Die Linke?

LH I’ve never in my life seen a left wing party in Germany be so energized. They can be a strong, unabashed opposition, and I think they should use that — right? Not make compromises on economic issues, not throw minorities under the bus. Perhaps they can become an anchor for the broader left.

For a long time there was a skeptical relationship between many left-wing groups and the left party, but now there is new hope that they can help each other. A few years ago, housing activists in Berlin told me that when they knocked on doors to expropriate landlords, they made sure that they were not associated with the left party. Now it’s different. In the last month of the election campaign, I saw many non-member housing activists canvassing. They said that they were still not members, but they wanted the party to be in parliament so they went from door to door. That is a remarkable shift.

Lukas Hermsmeier is an independent journalist from Berlin based in New York. He writes for publications such as Die Wochenzeitung, Zeit and the New York Times about politics, with a focus on social movements. His first book Uprising: Amerikas neue Linke, published in 2022, is about the resurgence of the U.S. left since Occupy Wall Street. You can follow him on Bluesky and Instagram.