The co-leader of Germany’s The Left suggested the failure of his former comrade Sahra Wagenknecht’s populist splinter party to win any seats in parliament suggests they could soon be forgotten.
Jan van Aken, who helped lead The Left in a remarkable campaign that saw the far-left party nearly double its vote share, likened Wagenknecht’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) to previous upstart parties that drew extensive media attention but failed to make a lasting impact on politics.
“I think it will be a phenomenon like the Pirate Party. We won’t even remember them in two or three years, but we’ll have to wait and see,” von Aken told public broadcaster ZDF on Monday morning, shortly after preliminary election results showed the BSW just missing the 5% threshold needed to claim seats.
Wagenknecht on Monday morning suggested the BSW would consider legal action. The fact that the party fell about 13,400 votes short “raises the question of the legal validity of the election result,” she said.
Wagenknecht quit The Left in late 2023 after repeated clashes with party colleagues over her anti-immigration views and increasingly right-wing stances on some hot-button social issues such as gender.
Her departure, and decision to found the BSW, led to speculation that The Left could be driven into political irrelevance.
Van Aken said on Monday that he did not feel any schadenfreude over the fate of the BSW. Asked whether the party could absorb BSW members again, he replied: “We’ll see. We haven’t even thought about it yet.”
He also vowed to put forward a “really strong opposition” in the Bundestag to conservative Friedrich Merz, who is now widely expected to become the next chancellor.
Van Aken said the party also won’t shy away from big projects, despite having no plans to join the government, and planned to force through rent control laws.
“As The Left, we once managed to push through the minimum wage without joining the government. We are now planning to do the same,” he said.
