German Left-winger Sahra Wagenknecht is stepping down as chair of the BSW, a party named after her and founded only last year. It may well be the end of her political experiment of “Left-wing conservatism”, in which she combined Left-wing economic policies, such as on labour rights, and Right-wing policies on social issues such as immigration. Her decision leaves Germany to fall in line with a broader trend: a surge of the Right, opposed by a smaller but growing current of “pure” Left-wing identity politics.

Wagenknecht’s offering was unique, and had the potential to disrupt German politics. Together with a small band of fellow travellers, she left her old party, Die Linke (“The Left”), and in January 2024 founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a movement so centred on her that it bore her name. The brand-new party made astonishing gains last year, winning over 6% of votes nationally in the European Parliament elections and between 11% and 16% in three state elections in the former East Germany.

Crucially, however, it fell at the ultimate hurdle: getting into the German parliament in the election of February this year. All parties must pass a 5% threshold and the BSW narrowly missed this, receiving 4.972%: around 13,500 votes short of the target. For the first time since 2009, Wagenknecht found herself without a seat in the Bundestag.

The BSW’s singular brand of Left-wing populism now seems doomed to fail because the two pillars on which it was built have fallen away. The first was that while Wagenknecht rightly identified that many working-class voters in Germany were disillusioned with mainstream politics, she was unable to channel this disgruntlement into political momentum. Emphasising what some have called a “Russia-friendly” stance, she neglected the two top issues of German voters: immigration and the economy. Workers turned to the Right in their droves, with a record 38% of them voting for the AfD.

Another factor in the BSW’s surprising success in 2024 was the eponymous leader’s personal charisma. Originally from East Germany, with an Iranian father who returned to his home country when his daughter was just three years old, Wagenknecht has a background which marks her out from her rivals. Combined with her keen intelligence and fiery rhetoric, this made her a standout politician — “Germany’s populist superstar”, as the Economist put it a year ago. But without a political platform in parliament, her charisma has no obvious vent, depriving the movement of its essential asset.

Wagenknecht stresses that she will not “retreat” from politics altogether, and will stay in the party to lead its newly established values commission. However, without her at the helm, it lacks a profile. This is already evident in its struggles to find a new name that excludes Wagenknecht but keeps the abbreviation BSW intact. The frontrunner is the unwieldy Bündnis Soziale Gerechtigkeit und Wirtschaftliche Vernunft, or “Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Common Sense”.

While Wagenknecht narrowly failed to clear the parliamentary hurdle, her old party Die Linke made a surprising comeback, gaining 8% in the federal elections. It was the most popular party among first-time voters by some margin, winning a quarter of the votes in this group. Now it’s polling at around 10%, almost neck-and-neck with the Greens and just four points behind the centre-left SPD.

The German Left’s future would now appear to lie not in Wagenknecht’s pick-‘n’-mix policies but in a return to undiluted identity politics. Die Linke thrives on positioning itself as a direct counterpoint to the AfD. Its voters said in a post-election survey that combatting the “lurch to the Right” was their number-one issue, followed by economic and climate concerns. The party is also vocal on Gaza in a German landscape where, for historical reasons, support for Israel is still stronger than in many other Western states. This package appeals to many young urban voters for whom the Greens and the SPD have become too compromising and mainstream.

In Germany and beyond, the Left is learning to build a populist base on identity-driven issues, unmoored from technocratic liberalism as a direct counterpoint to the larger Right-wing trend. Wagenknecht’s exit as leader is the logical consequence of her not fitting into this pattern. It may well mark the end of this chapter of her own political project. But the deeper story is only beginning.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.

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