, arch-contrarian and disruptor of , may be about to throw one more spanner in the works.
On Monday morning, it was reported that her self-named party, the , founded only last year following an acrimonious divorce from the socialist , had fallen agonizingly short of the 5% threshold for entering the Bundestag — 13,435 votes short, to be exact.
Those votes could be momentous for German politics: Had the BSW entered parliament after all, the new numbers would mean that , leader of the and presumptive next chancellor, would be mathematically unable to form a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) alone. Instead, he would probably need to negotiate a tricky and likely more unstable three-way coalition.
Before the was out, BSW politicians duly raised questions about the result. At a press conference on Monday morning, Wagenknecht herself said that the closeness of the race “raised the question of the legal grounds of the result.”
How to contest a German election result
Any German citizen or group of citizens is entitled to challenge an election result, and there are typically dozens of challenges after every election. However, few make it past the election review commission, which comprises parliamentarians from each party. The commission is charged with evaluating all submissions and responding to petitioners.
To invalidate the results of a Bundestag election, an objection must meet two requirements. First, there must be an electoral error that violates the Federal Election Act, the Federal Election Code, or the . Secondly, the reported electoral error would have to impact the distribution of seats in the Bundestag. If the commission deems that those conditions are met, the procedure can go all the way to the .
Whether or not the BSW has any chance will depend on whether the commission, and then the court, believes that the party might have received the missing votes from the 230,000 registered voters abroad who could not send in their votes on time to change the overall result.
As the BSW’s Fabio De Masi pointed out, some observers expressed concerns before the election that because the election had to be brought forward due to the collapse of Chancellor coalition, the hasty arrangement meant that some voters abroad might not get their ballots in time.
Where did the BSW go wrong?
But whether or not the BSW enters parliament, there’s no getting around the fact that the result represented a deep disappointment for Wagenknecht. A former Left Party leader, ubiquitous on political talk-shows and easily the most recognized figure in the party, decimated its ranks last January by taking several Bundestag members away to join her breakaway group.
Wagenknecht had long grown disaffected with how the Left Party had, as she saw it, become bogged down in identity politics and abandoned working-class voters, especially in eastern Germany, to the far-right . For their part, many party colleagues had become annoyed at how much Wagenknecht’s media presence and the in-fighting had come to dominate the public discourse about the Left. The damage was evident in opinion polls.
Then, in September 2024, the BSW celebrated three successful regional election campaigns in eastern Germany, taking 10%-15% of the vote in , and . In two of those states, Brandenburg and Thuringia, the party even entered coalition governments. At the time, the BSW’s poll ratings hovered at around 10% nationally, and the party looked likely to enter the parliament easily.
A few short months later, the BSW ran out of steam when it came to the national vote. At Monday’s press conference, Wagenknecht blamed the media.
“At least after the state elections, a negative media campaign against our party began that I have really not seen in my entire political life,” she said. “Our content and positions were almost completely blocked … especially our positions on social issues.”
Meanwhile, political observers have a different take: They say that the party’s main problem was losing its core issues.
“I think it had a lot to do with the international developments: The intervention of the US in the and the fact that Ukraine could be forced into an unfavorable ceasefire, I think that took the peace issue from Sahra Wagenknecht,” said Ursula Münch, director of the independent Tutzing Academy for Political Education.
Münch also argued that the unexpected success of the Left Party among young voters and the reports of in-fighting in the BSW damaged the party.
The BSW also failed to pick up the expected voters from the AfD — according to a post-election analysis by the research institute infratest dimap, only around 60,000 voters switched allegiance from the BSW to the far-right party.
That should have been a surprise, considering that analyses showed that the two parties shared many of the same positions. Indeed, during the state election campaigns, BSW leaders often presented themselves as a vital bulwark against the far right.
“I think that was a rather unrealistic expectation,” said Philipp Thomeczek, a political scientist at Potsdam University who published an analysis of the BSW’s voters last year.
“My analyses showed that while AfD supporters quite like the BSW, sometimes it’s even their second choice, but the gap between the AfD and all the other parties is still too big. One could say that for AfD voters, the BSW is the least bad other option.”
Voters of more left-wing parties like the Left Party and the Greens, he said, are much more likely to switch back and forth.
In the aftermath of Sunday’s vote, a offered a brutal prediction to public broadcaster ARD, dismissing the BSW as a “temporary phenomenon.”
“We won’t remember them in two or three years,” he said.
That seems unlikely, given the BSW’s position in two state governments, and Wagenknecht’s avowed determination, reiterated on Monday, to continue in her post. There is also a state election in next year, where the BSW got its best result (11%) in Sunday’s election.
“There are certainly possibilities to regenerate and find new strength,” Thomeczek concluded.
Edited by Rina Goldenberg
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