She has been compared to iconic political figureheads such as Frida Kahlo and Rosa Luxemburg, as much for her strident leftwing views as for her striking looks.
Sahra Wagenknecht is a household name in Germany and the best-known figure on the far left. The most prominent and outspoken member of the 15-year-old Die Linke party, she has been rattling the Berlin political scene for years with her vague pronouncements that she is planning to form her own breakaway bloc.
Approval ratings are on her side, as are the up to 2 million viewers known to tune in to her regular YouTube broadcasts.
But now the woman revered as something of a heroine of the German left by some is receiving overtures from the far-right Alternative für Deutchland, with party influencers urging her to effectively join forces with them.
She recently appeared on the front page of the monthly magazine Compact, a self-declared mouthpiece of the AfD. In its latest issue her upturned face appears next to the cover line: “The best chancellor – a candidate for the left and the right.”
In recent far-right rallies, participants have even chanted “Sahra, Sahra”, after her own party disinvited her from protests against energy price hikes after she appeared to side with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Wagenknecht’s drift away from Die Linke coincides with the party’s disastrous standing in the polls, despite its key principles of social justice and equality taking centre stage amid high inflation and the energy crisis.
Instead, Die Linke’s popularity ratings are at rock bottom and it has had a succession of pitiful election results, just under a decade after the party – formed in 2007 after a merger between the successor to East Germany’s Socialist Unity party and disillusioned social democrats – was the largest opposition force in the Bundestag. At the last election it only managed to squeeze into parliament with 4.9% of the vote. It did so purely because it had secured three direct mandates.
In her bestselling book The Self-Righteous, Wagenknecht, a member of the Bundestag for North Rhine-Westphalia, accused Die Linke of having neglected “ordinary people” in favour of what she refers to as a city-dwelling “academic clientele”. She says its preoccupation with issues such as “gender-conscious language and pricey organic products” rather than bread-and-butter issues such as “fighting low pay” has made it a stranger to its grassroots working-class support base.
While Wagenknecht remains a member of Die Linke, her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, a former finance minister under Gerhard Schröder and erstwhile Social Democrat leader who helped found the party, left it in March.
Political insiders believe Wagenknecht is biding her time and waiting for the right moment to leave. She has said: “I am still a member of the party, but I see the need for a credible party that stands for peace and social justice.”
Polls show her chances of succeeding as head of a new party to be good. In research by pollster Insa, 10% of voters signalled they would be “very certain” to vote for her. In a survey for Der Spiegel magazine carried out by Civey, 30% said they could imagine supporting her. In eastern Germany her approval rating is even higher, with 49% saying they would consider voting for her.
Among AfD voters the interest was a staggering 68%, a percentage point above the proportion of Die Linke supporters who would back her. Among conservative voters of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance, a quarter said she was an option for them. The lowest support of 7% was among Green voters. Wagenknecht recently called the party “the most dangerous in the Bundestag” over its environmental reforms.
A key moment in the battle for the future of Die Linke was a recent speech to the Bundestag in which she accused the government of damaging German-Russian relations for launching “an unprecedented economic war against our most important energy supplier”, over its decision to free itself from dependence on Russian gas supplies in protest at Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. It drew a furious response from across the political divide, with some Die Linke members applauding while others resigned in protest.
But she was backed by members of the AfD, who have expressed similar disquiet over Germany’s cold-shouldering of Russia and questioned its allegiance to Ukraine as well as probing the prudence of its support for refugees.
Much of the commentary on Wagenknecht focuses on her appearance and can cross the line into sleaziness.
In its front-page article, Compact’s editor, Jürgen Elsässer, calls Wagenknecht “the most appealing national temptation since the foundation of socialism”, saying the days when she was referred to as “the most beautiful face of Stalinism” and considered a “freak” were now over.
Elsässer, who as a former leftwing radical used to share political platforms with Wagenknecht but has since drifted to the far right, describes her variously as “chic as Coco Chanel”, or as being like an “Avon lady but with gumption and razor-sharp rhetoric”. He praises her for not being afraid to show her feminine side, unlike “the women’s libbers that you normally find amongst the left and the Greens, who deliberately disown their gender”.
Among AfD supporters, Wagenknecht is “as popular as the party leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla,” he claims, and asks how realistic a future coalition or toleration between Die Linke (the “reds”) and the AfD (the “blues”) may be. His conclusion: the AfD has little to no chance of achieving an absolute majority on its own. So if it wants the chance to enter government, it has little to lose if it joins forces with a Wagenknecht party. The prospect of political change would mobilise millions of disenchanted voters, he argues.
“The prospect of a socialist government leader prepared to appoint rightwing ministers, or who would at least allow herself to be tolerated by the right ... would electrify the people and once again draw the large mass of the politically apathetic to the ballot box.”
He even admits to fantasising about a “coming together” of Wagenknecht and Weidel, in a “sisterly kiss”, in reference to the encounter between the Russian and East German leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, immortalised on the Berlin Wall.
Against her are Wagenknecht’s failed attempts in September 2018 to bring the masses on to the streets of Germany with her protest movement Aufstehen (Get Up), inspired by the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France, for which she took advice from the UK Labour party’s Momentum faction. Wagenknecht’s defence is that she never intended the movement to be a political party.
Her lack of presence so far at Monday evening anti-government protests against cost of living rises and sanctions against Russia has also not gone unnoticed.
The leftwing newspaper Taz has reported that Wagenknecht, buoyed up by polling figures, is planning a party launch in time to be able to compete in the 2024 European elections.
Reporting on a recent emergency summit held by Die Linke in Leipzig, Taz’s chief parliamentary reporter, Anna Lehmann, referred to Wagenknecht as Lady Voldemort, owing to the fact that, like Harry Potter’s arch enemy, whose name is not allowed to be uttered, “the name Sahra Wagenknecht was not mentioned once, even though it’s clear to everyone that she and her supporters have long since been following their own separatist agenda ... their direction is to head outside the party, beyond the left and to turn sharply to the right … for which the AfD gives thanks.”
