Well, there’s definitely a European context to this shift. That much is obvious. Whether we’re talking about France, Italy, or even Spain and Portugal—though they might be a bit behind the trend—there’s been a general strengthening of far-right parties across Western and Eastern Europe for the better part of a decade. In many ways, Germany had been lagging behind.

In the last election, four years ago, the AfD got around 10 percent of the vote, whereas parties like the National Rally in France were already nearing 20 percent. So, in a sense, Germany was slow to catch up. You could see Sunday’s election as a kind of normalization or “Europeanization” of German politics.

At the same time, there are clearly specific domestic factors at play. If we look at where the AfD performed best, it was particularly strong in former East Germany, where the party got well over 40 percent. If you look at a map of electoral districts, the borders of former East Germany are still clearly visible—almost every constituency there voted for the AfD, whereas that wasn’t the case anywhere in western Germany.

This reflects a broader pattern: In many deindustrialized regions across Europe and North America, we’ve seen a similar drift towards right-wing populism. Think of the Rust Belt in the US turning to Trump, or deindustrialized parts of the UK backing Brexit and Boris Johnson. There’s definitely a correlation.

But even in wealthier parts of Germany, the AfD made gains. Germany, overall, is a wealthy country, but if you look at a state like Baden-Württemberg—one of the richest in the country—the AfD still managed to get around 20 percent. So, while the rightward drift is particularly concentrated in East Germany, it’s not exclusive to it.

A combination of factors explains this: deindustrialization, a general sense of disenfranchisement and alienation, and the absence of what sociologist Steffen Mau calls the “pro-political space.” This is partly due to the abrupt collapse of the East German state in 1989–1990. Almost overnight, the entire system was dismantled and replaced with West German institutions. That left much looser social ties, both within communities and between individuals and the state, compared to West Germany. I think this explains a significant part of why the far right has found such fertile ground in that region.

That’s a great question, and there are a few layers to it.

On the surface, one of the contradictions in East German political attitudes is that there is widespread, genuine nostalgia for some parts of life under state socialism—the job security, the feelings of social solidarity between colleagues and neighbors, etc. 

At the same time, this sense of solidarity coexists with strong support for the AfD. That seems paradoxical, but it makes more sense when you consider the psychological and social impact of reunification.

Once again, Steffen Mau, whom I interviewed for Jacobin a few years ago, has written extensively about this. He argues that the transition of 1989–1990 was traumatic for many East Germans. People took to the streets demanding democracy, freedom of speech, and reforms to the socialist system. But very quickly, those demands were swept up into reunification—something that, while it did have majority support, was extremely abrupt. Overnight, the institutions that structured daily life in East Germany disappeared and were replaced with Western ones.

Mau describes this as something like an open wound—a deep rupture that has prevented many East Germans from fully identifying with the post-reunification democratic state. It also meant that fewer mediating institutions—like trade unions, civic associations, and political parties—took root in the East.

In the 1990s, the PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], the successor to East Germany’s ruling party, still had hundreds of thousands of members. It consistently won 15 to 30 percent of the vote in East German states and maintained a lively political culture. There were community festivals and local gatherings that, while not always explicitly political, served as outlets for popular frustration.

Voting for the ex-communists was, for many, a way to protest reunification’s social and economic consequences without supporting the far right. I don’t think East Germany has necessarily become more racist in the past 15 to 20 years. But many of the people who used to vote for the ex-communists now vote for the AfD. Perhaps their views on race and migration were never particularly progressive, but they nevertheless voted for a progressive party to express their frustration.

Over time, however, the AfD has successfully presented itself as the only real alternative to the political establishment. German politics tends to be very polite, middle-class, and—frankly—quite boring. The AfD, more than any other party, excels at using irony, sarcasm, and provocation. Sometimes, they even employ self-deprecating humor. But their main strength is in mocking the political elite and channeling public anger in ways that no other party dares to.

This perception of the AfD as the ultimate outsider has only been reinforced by the other parties’ strategy of cordoning them off. The so-called firewall—the consensus that the AfD must never be allowed to govern—has, in some ways, backfired. It has reinforced their image as the only real opposition.

And obviously, there is the polarization around migration. Beyond Germany, we see this dynamic everywhere. In the US, in South Africa—right-wing forces have successfully cemented the idea that migration is a zero-sum game, that every new migrant takes something away from native citizens. This narrative, whether true or not, has become dominant across European politics. And while the AfD was one of the first to push it, their position has now been echoed by the center right, the center left, and even figures who straddle the line between both, like Sahra Wagenknecht.

Well, first, I should say I’m not an expert on migration policy, so there are certainly others who could give a more detailed answer, but I think we need to go back to 2015. That was the moment when over a million refugees—primarily, but not exclusively, from Syria—entered Germany in a short period of time. For a brief moment, maybe six months or so, there was a near society-wide consensus that these people should be welcomed and accommodated. Even right-wing tabloids were running front-page stories about volunteers helping out at train stations and raising money for refugees.

But that mood started to shift. One major turning point—at least in the mainstream media narrative—was New Year’s Eve 2015–2016 in Cologne. There was a mass sexual harassment incident, largely blamed on North African immigrants. But if we look at the issue through a materialist lens, the deeper issue is that Germany in 2015 had already been experiencing austerity for over a decade. It started with labor market reforms in the early 2000s, and in 2009, the government passed a debt brake amendment to the constitution, limiting federal debt to around 0.35 percent of GDP.

For years, working-class people had been told there was no money for public services. Their local swimming pools were closing. The roofs of primary schools were caving in. Train stations were deteriorating. And then, suddenly, a million refugees arrived in Germany, and the federal government’s message was: “We have the money to take them in.”

Now, how much the government actually spent on refugees and to what extent that money would have otherwise been spent on public services is another question. But the perception was that resources were being made available for them, while the “native” working class had been told, for years, that there was no money for them. This was especially pronounced in East Germany, where—despite massive infrastructure investments since 1989–1990—most towns have been steadily losing population for decades. Not just a little—millions of people have left since reunification. Many small and mid-sized cities feel depressing and desolate, and then, almost overnight, they see large groups of refugees being housed there.

Of course, we know that refugees are not being given luxurious apartments or thousands of euros in handouts—that’s a right-wing myth. But myths gain power when people feel abandoned. If you’ve spent 15 years being told there’s no money for you, and then you suddenly see an influx of government spending on refugees, it breeds resentment. That’s the root of the backlash. And opportunistically, the Christian Democrats—and increasingly even the Social Democrats—have used migration as a distraction from austerity. Instead of addressing the economic issues directly, they co-opt the far right’s argument: “Yes, the problem is migration. Too many asylum seekers. That’s why we don’t have money for X, Y, and Z.”

Once that narrative takes hold—once it becomes political common sense—it gets amplified over and over. Every violent incident involving a migrant is blown out of proportion, reinforcing the idea that migration poses a threat to “native” Germans.

Well, whenever a party on the left does well, everyone interprets its victory as confirmation of their own theory or approach. We’re seeing the same thing now with Die Linke. That a party polling at 3 percent just two months ago has now jumped to 8 percent is impressive, but the notion that they suddenly have all the answers for the left is a bit over the top. A lot of their success was due to a favorable political conjuncture and, frankly, quite a lot of luck.

If you compare the campaign Die Linke ran this time to, for example, the European elections last year, when they got just 2.7 percent, the difference is striking. This time, their campaign was far more focused and class-based. In German, you might call it “class-political”—it was centered on material demands. Drawing inspiration from the Workers’ Party of Belgium, the party began conducting door-to-door surveys in the neighborhoods and constituencies where they had historically been strongest to identify the key concerns of their voters and potential voters. They zeroed in on two main issues: skyrocketing rents and the cost-of-living crisis.

Germany is a country where over half the population lives in rented accommodations, meaning that the last decade of drastic rent increases has hit working-class people especially hard—more so, I would argue, than in many other European countries where homeownership rates are higher. By narrowing their message to a few material concerns that resonated not only with their core voter base but also with broader segments of the population, Die Linke was able to reach voters more effectively and push themselves over the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. In past campaigns, they presented more of a laundry list of concerns—defending the right to asylum, showing solidarity with Ukraine, advocating for more funding for education and transportation—often to the detriment of a core message or narrative. If we look at the exit polls, it’s clear that a large portion of Die Linke’s votes came from former Green and Social Democrat voters. This shift had a lot to do with developments in the last three or four weeks before the election. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s next chancellor, took another hard right turn on migration and even accepted votes from the far right to pass a motion restricting migration. That sent a shockwave through civil society and clearly motivated about a million people to vote for Die Linke instead of the center-left parties they would usually support.

But that voter base is not stable. A lot of those people voted for Die Linke not because they have deep loyalty to the party, but to send a message to the moderate parties they typically support. They wanted to make it clear that they reject their capitulation to the right on migration and are concerned about the rise of the far right. 

Still, beggars can’t be choosers. An 8.8 percent result for a party that was essentially on its deathbed three months ago is obviously a positive development and something to build on. But a sober look at the results suggests that while Die Linke ran a strong campaign and had a good ground game, they were also lucky to be operating in a particularly favorable political moment that may not be repeated in the future. The question now is what they can do between now and 2029 to consolidate and systematically expand their voter base.

The same goes for the approximately 50,000 people who have joined the party in the past few months. These new members are overwhelmingly young, urban, and university-educated. Interestingly, a majority of them are women, which suggests there is a gendered dimension to the recent surge in support. There’s nothing wrong with living in a city, being under 30, and having a university degree, but there is a clear overrepresentation of a certain demographic in terms of who is joining the party right now. The real question is whether Die Linke can integrate these new members, train them up, and send them into communities to build the party from the ground up. Or will this influx of members push the party toward becoming something more like the Greens—an upper-middle-class, liberal-left party that primarily does politics for its own affluent voting base?

I don’t think there’s any immediate danger of that happening in the next couple of years, but across the industrialized world—whether we’re looking at Germany, the UK, or the United States—the left increasingly consists of middle-class, educated people. If we ever want to win, we need to re-anchor ourselves in the broader working class. Die Linke is still very far from achieving that, but there is more conversation within the party about how to do it than there was five or ten years ago. That seems to have changed.

For the last few years, whenever German mainstream media talked about politicians on social media, it was usually about the AfD and its runaway success on TikTok and Instagram. Six months ago, if you looked at a list of the top ten politicians in Germany with the most TikTok followers, probably seven out of ten would have been far-right figures. But in the last few months, something has clearly changed—I don’t know who they fired or hired in their social media department, but the party’s online campaign has become much more aggressive and irreverent.

That said, I think we need to be really careful with narratives that focus too much on social media. Social media is particularly useful for reaching young people and will continue to be an important outreach tool, but we have had social media for twenty years now, and for twenty years, bourgeois journalists have been telling us that social media is transforming politics. We also have twenty years of evidence showing that social media alone is not enough to transform society.

Going forward, the experience of door-to-door campaigning and conducting neighborhood surveys to identify what concerns the party’s base—then responding to those concerns—will be far more important than any TikTok strategy. That kind of approach is what could give Die Linke a real future. In my Jacobin article a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Die Linke performed very well in elections in the late 2000s and early 2010s because they were able to ride the wave of social frustration with austerity and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, there was no far-right competitor, so Die Linke was really the only protest party, attracting votes both from classical left-wing milieus and from a diffuse protest vote. Many of those voters may have held some right-wing views, but they still agreed with Die Linke enough to support them. That gave the party a parliamentary presence that bore no real relation to its actual organizational strength or its rootedness in communities, particularly in its traditional heartlands in the East.

By 2010, for example, most of Die Linke’s members were already retirees, and the party was facing what was referred to at the time as its “biological problem”—it was literally dying out in many of the places where it had been strongest over the previous two decades. For the next ten years or so, parliamentary politics dominated the party. There was still party life outside of parliament, and there were efforts to implement more of a community-organizing strategy, but overall, the rhythms and routines of parliamentary life dictated how the party did politics. 

Going forward, it will be vital for the party and the parliamentary group to work as one. That means enforcing discipline within the parliamentary group and subordinating parliamentarians to the party leadership. Enforcing some kind of discipline on the parliamentary group would be an important step in recalibrating the party’s approach to politics so that it pursues an overarching strategy that integrates parliamentary work with organizing in the workplace and on the streets.

Some important foundations for this kind of orientation were laid in the last few months, but there is by no means consensus within the party. There are still different wings, with some eager to work with the Greens and the Social Democrats as soon as the opportunity arises, while others are committed to a more oppositional line. The key question is whether a base-building approach can become the dominant one. If it does, there is plenty of space for a socialist political formation to grow in Germany. There are millions of people who struggle to pay their rent, who struggle to make ends meet, and who, at this point, often see only the AfD as an alternative. Relating to those people and bringing them into a socialist political project will be crucial.

This is especially true given the economic turbulence on the horizon. Whether it’s the crisis in the automobile industry or a potential trade war with the United States, Germany’s economy is already in recession and has been for two years. The situation will likely get worse before it gets better. Whether Die Linke can put forward a progressive response to these problems, as opposed to allowing reactionary, racist, and xenophobic forces to set the agenda, will be critical for the future of German and even European politics.

The BSW’s failure to make 5 percent is important to note, but they got 4.97 percent, so they missed the mark by just a fraction. I wouldn’t completely count the party out. That said, it’s clear that their attempt to win back voters from the far right by moving rightward on migration didn’t really work. They took around 60,000 votes from the AfD, which is barely a dent.

Their underperformance had more to do with the fact that they joined two regional governments last fall following their strong performance in state elections. For voters looking for a protest party, BSW quickly began to seem like just another establishment force. Another major factor was that the war in Ukraine was simply not a dominant issue in the election debate in the months leading up to the vote. Just yesterday, we saw a public spat between Zelensky and Trump, followed this morning by European politicians saying that, no matter what the United States does, Europe will continue sending weapons to Ukraine. If something like that had happened two or three weeks before the election, BSW might have gotten 6 or 7 percent, because they stand out, along with the AfD and to some extent Die Linke, as one of the few parties clearly and loudly opposing arms shipments to Ukraine. A significant minority of the German electorate agrees with that position.

The main lesson to draw from BSW’s failure is not necessarily about migration. We can conclude that their strategy of moving right on migration didn’t work, but their decision to join governments so quickly was far more damaging. The takeaway for Die Linke should be to avoid making that mistake. Just because you have a strong election result doesn’t mean you have the social weight or organized base to carry out an aggressive reform program. If you join a coalition too soon, you’ll be outmaneuvered by the larger parties and end up disappointing a significant portion of your base.

On the broader question of how to approach migration and racism, I think the German left made a mistake in the 2010s by uncritically adopting the outlook of left-liberal NGOs. For a while, Die Linke almost appeared to celebrate migration as an inherently positive thing. That message doesn’t necessarily resonate with people who are worried about whether they have enough money at the end of the month, whether they can afford their rent, or whether they will have a job if the car industry collapses—whether they are from a migrant background themselves or not. These are people with day-to-day, bread-and-butter concerns, and a liberal, multiculturalist message that simply says, “Migration is great, open the borders,” doesn’t speak to them. It might resonate with part of society and part of Die Linke’s electorate, but it also divides the party’s potential base.

Rather than emphasizing divisive issues like migration, the left should focus on issues that unite—housing, wages, infrastructure investment. These are all areas where you can build a coalition that includes people who may otherwise be well into the right-wing camp on certain social issues. That doesn’t mean making concessions to the right on migration, but it does mean being mindful of how you talk about it. Our response should be framed in both class and human rights terms. The hundreds of thousands of people who have moved to Germany in the last ten years and have integrated into the labor market and society are colleagues, neighbors, and classmates. We won’t let them be deported.

We should build a narrative that includes all of these people without focusing on them in a way that makes migration itself the core issue. Migration is neither inherently good nor bad. It simply is. We also shouldn’t ignore the fact that migration has negative effects on the countries migrants are leaving. Whether we’re looking at Southeastern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, any region that experiences large-scale emigration—especially of young, educated, working-age people—suffers serious consequences. The left should have a balanced view of migration, recognizing that everyone should have the right to live and work where they choose while embedding that position in a broader narrative focused on economic justice and class solidarity rather than cultural or identity politics.

The political shifts are already beginning. I mentioned the debt brake earlier. At this point, I wouldn’t say there is consensus, but there is agreement—even deep within centrist circles, whether in the media, politics, or among mainstream neoliberal economists—that the debt brake has become a real structural impediment to pulling Germany out of recession. There is widespread recognition among large parts of the political class that Germany needs to either eliminate or at least reform the debt brake, perhaps by passing some kind of temporary exemption.

Because this is a constitutional issue, it would require a two-thirds majority in parliament. It could, in theory, be done with AfD votes, but since no one wants to be seen working with the far right, they need Die Linke’s votes instead. Friedrich Merz, however, is going to try to link the vote on the debt brake to a vote for another massive expansion of defense spending.

Friedrich Merz created facts on the ground the other day by cutting a deal with the SPD to exempt military spending from the debt brake, allowing him to spend hundreds of billions on armaments without starting a fight. Nevertheless, there continues to be widespread pressure on Die Linke to “modernize” its “dogmatic” anti-war positions and embrace a massive boost in arms spending, not least from the party’s own right wing.

Obviously, Russia started the war in Ukraine—there’s no denying that. But if the left joins the rest of the mainstream parties in boosting defense spending and escalating tensions with Russia, especially at a time when the transatlantic alliance is facing serious internal strain, I see no reason why our voting base would bother to vote for us again in four years. We would become, on key issues affecting Europe’s future, indistinguishable from the Greens.

That will be Die Linke’s first major challenge: to not become like the Greens. There are certainly different views within the party on this, particularly on how to vote on weapons for Ukraine, which remains a divisive issue both among Die Linke’s electorate and within parts of the membership. If we get pulled into some kind of grand coalition, even just for the sake of reforming the debt brake—perhaps to fund new bridges or renovate schools, which are obviously important—while breaking with our anti-militarist principles, I think the party will quickly become electorally irrelevant once again.

Across most of the political establishment, that support is ironclad. There are, of course, historical reasons for this: Germany bears responsibility for the industrialized murder of six million Jews. But beyond that, there are also foreign policy considerations. Germany has strategic interests in the region in much the same way that the United States does.

What will be interesting to observe is how this plays out within Die Linke. The party made a strategic decision to remain fairly quiet on what is happening in Gaza in order to avoid controversy prior to the election. Strategically, it may have been the correct choice, but morally, I think it is extremely problematic. Party representatives tend to point out that, on paper, Die Linke has a fairly strong position. It opposes weapons sales to Israel and supports the recognition of the State of Palestine. But in practice, its parliamentary leaders have made no attempt to introduce any motions on these issues.

This is largely because, in the old parliamentary group, there were about five MPs who, quite frankly, held positions on Israel that would place them firmly on the center right in any other country. Most of those MPs have now retired. So, it is possible that Die Linke could become more vocal on Gaza, especially if mass ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip escalates further or if the full extent of Israel’s actions becomes a more prominent part of public discourse in Germany. There is a huge fear within the party that talking about issues like Gaza and Ukraine will split the electorate and make it more difficult to stay in parliament. That might be true for Ukraine, which is perhaps a trickier issue, but I don’t think it holds for Gaza. If you look at polling, the majority of German citizens oppose Israel’s conduct in Gaza and oppose sending weapons to Israel. Yet no party in parliament, aside from the BSW, vocally criticizes Israel or calls for an end to weapons shipments.

Frankly, I think it was a mistake for Die Linke not to campaign on this issue, at least to some extent, because it was an opportunity to stand out as a voice of moral clarity in a German political establishment that has made itself openly complicit in what has been the most televised genocide in human history. Just a few weeks ago, Olaf Scholz outright denied that there was a genocide happening in Gaza and refused to even entertain the question, calling it an obviously false premise. The entire German political establishment has blood on its hands. Something like a third of the weapons used by the IDF come from Germany. By remaining silent, or at least very quiet, on this issue, I think Die Linke made a strategic mistake. I hope they will correct it in the coming months, because the situation in Gaza is certainly not going to improve.

I do think it is only a matter of time before the AfD joins a government. It will probably start at the state level. In the eastern states, when you have a party winning over a third of the vote—as they did in Saxony, where they got nearly 40 percent on Sunday—you can’t keep them out of government forever. No matter how revolting one might find the party, if that many people vote for it, it becomes very difficult to justify excluding them indefinitely.

At some point in the next few years, we’ll likely see state governments either led by the AfD or at least tolerated by them, perhaps with the Christian Democrats still in leadership but increasingly reliant on AfD support. We have a couple of years to breathe, since we just had elections in most of East Germany, but sooner or later, this will happen. Whether we see an AfD-led federal government in 2029 is harder to say—probably not. But looking at most of our European neighbors, it seems to be only a matter of time before the AfD enters government in some form.

The key question is what happens once they do. Will joining government demystify them and reveal them for what they really are—namely, harsh neoliberals? We can look to Trump in the US as an example. His assault on American institutions is really hurting a lot of his own supporters. The question is whether that translates into declining support and popularity. I’m a bit more agnostic on that because, if we look at figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, it seems that many people are willing to vote against their own material interests for the sake of anti-migrant, anti-foreigner sentiment. For a certain segment of the electorate, seeing images of migrants being deported is more satisfying than securing higher wages or a stronger welfare state.

At least part of the AfD’s base is ideologically committed. They’re not necessarily dyed-in-the-wool fascists, nor do they have particularly strong or well-defined political ideas, but they are emotionally invested in the party’s project in a way that isn’t purely rational or based on material interests. This makes it difficult to predict whether a turn toward economic neoliberalism would actually hurt their support.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Trump’s base in the coming months. The AfD wouldn’t engage in quite the same spectacle as Trump, but if they were to implement their economic program, it would be even more damaging than what the Christian Democrats are planning for the next few years. That could at least create an opening for the fragmentation of their base. The real question, though, is whether a left force will be positioned to take advantage of that moment—whether it can reach those voters and offer an alternative explanation for the crisis, as well as a compelling path forward.

Right now, the left is still very far from being in that position. Getting 8 percent in an election and recruiting 50,000 members—most of them in just the last few months—is a strong foundation, but Die Linke needs to make up for ten wasted years in just four. That would be a difficult task even for the most talented political leaders and organizers.