Latest news with #HeidiReichinnek
The Intercept
25-02-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
Grow a Spine: Democrats Have a Lot to Learn From the German Left
Die Linke party co-leaders, Ines Schwerdtner, Heidi Reichinnek, and Jan van Aken, attend a press conference in Berlin, Germany, on Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: Carsten Koall/Picture Alliance/DPA via AP Germany's election results may at first seem like just another success for conservative and far-right forces. The Christian Democrats won the most votes of any party with 28.52 percent. Their leader, Friedrich Merz, who has pushed the party significantly rightward during his tenure, will likely be the next chancellor. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD – Elon Musk's cause célèbre – came second, winning just over 20 percent, or around one in five votes. The AfD will remain outside of any ruling coalition in the parliament, thanks only to an enduring postwar commitment from Germany's other major parties to never form a coalition with an explicitly far-right entity. The centrist Social Democratic and Green Parties both earned record low results, with 16 and 11 percent of the votes respectively. Democrats in the U.S. would do well to learn from their mistakes, and instead take notes from Germany's left-wing party, Die Linke, or The Left — the only party to dramatically exceed expectations on Sunday. Based on the vote counts alone, this could seem counterintuitive: Die Linke only won 9 percent. As recently as a month ago, however, it seemed feasible that the party could fail to garner the 5 percent of votes necessary to earn seats in Germany's parliament at all. The party outperformed, especially with young women voters; it won 27 percent of all first-time voters and gained 30,000 new members in the last month of the election campaign. Their surprise comeback offers a lesson in what is required to build — or at least begin to build — party political resistance to the far-right. Die Linke's relative successes, and the accumulating failures of the Greens and the Social Democrats, are further grounds to reject the centrist liberal insistence on bending to the right to keep the far-right at bay. The centrist strategy, aside from being morally turpitudinous, has been a losing one; it only serves to legitimize far-right frameworks and bolster right-wing parties. Die Linke, meanwhile, gained significant ground with an unambiguously leftist economic platform, which also — and this is crucial — refused to throw minorities under the bus. They focused on so-called 'bread and butter' issues like rent and the rising cost of living, transport, and pensions, and defended trans and immigrant rights. They ran as the only party to robustly oppose far-right politics with strong words and policies. The election results undermine claims that the left must embrace 'anti-woke' positions if we are to challenge the racist far-right. One German party specifically deployed this strategy and failed to win enough votes to enter parliament. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, named after its famous leader, formed as a split from Die Linke early last year and pushed a program of economic redistribution and worker protections, alongside anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ stances — a nationalist social democracy, willing to treat many thousands of people as disposable, while pushing to segment the international working class with protectionist nation-state borders. Wagenknecht was not rewarded. Meanwhile, her former party's clarity on class struggle as a clear priority, but intractable from race and gender struggles, appealed far more. Hundreds of thousands of German voters disturbed by the rise of the far-right sought an anti-fascist alternative. This was particularly true after the Christian Democrats' Merz caused public outcry in January when he pushed through a harsh anti-immigrant proposal in parliament by relying on votes from the AfD. The move was seen as a breach of the 'firewall' prohibiting collaboration with far-right parties, upheld since 1945. The Christian Democrats may have won the most votes on Sunday, but it was nonetheless the party's second lowest result in its history. Most other major parties condemned Merz, but it was only Die Linke that had any real ground to stand on. The Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats under current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and even Green Party leaders, have all to varying degrees spent the last decade-plus weakening the so-called firewall with their own support for harsh immigration restrictions. The German center's commitment to supporting Israel and its genocide, while violently criminalizing support for Palestine at home, is matched only by the U.S. Die Linke has also not been strong enough across the board when it comes to condemning Israel's war crimes and Germany's complicity in them, but it is also one of the only parties openly opposed to sending weapons to Israel. (The only other party was Wagenknecht's, with its attempt to pair anti-imperialist foreign policy with domestic xenophobia and racism.) Die Linke candidates like Ferat Koçak, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian freedom, modeled what a thoroughgoing anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-working class platform can look like – putting economic issues front and center, but refusing to pander to a notion of the working class that prioritizes white men. Koçak will be the first member Die Linke to ever win a seat in West Germany. 'I knocked on doors and when people said they voted AfD, I said 'Okay, but if you want, you can still come to my office and I'll check if your heating bill is too high.'' On Monday, the New York Times credited Die Linke's savvy social media campaigning for its surge in support – which was by far the strongest with young, urban, and particularly women voters. And there's no doubt that the party's TikTok and Instagram game is strong. One of Die Linke's leaders, 36-year-old Heidi Reichinnek, has over a million viewers across the platforms, where she posts well-edited, accessible, educational content to push the party's core message. Jan van Aken, another co-leader, clearly expressed Die Linke's message on mainstream talk shows and the like. Social and traditional media efforts were no more vital, though, than a mass door-knocking strategy, in which Die Linke candidates and organizers made a point to ask would-be voters about their challenges and struggles. 'I knocked on doors and when people said they voted AfD, I said 'Okay, but if you want, you can still come to my office and I'll check if your heating bill is too high,'' Ines Schwerdtner, another of the party co-leaders, said in a press conference on Monday. There are, of course, limits to mapping Germany's multiparty liberal capitalist democracy onto the U.S.'s two-party leviathan. Certain similarities and patterns are, however, too strong to ignore. As is true with establishment Democrats, the German parties that span the liberal-to-conservative center have all lurched rightward on anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the last decade, while attempting the impossible balancing act of serving capitalist interests and claiming to stand for the working class. Redistributive economic reforms and state investment in social welfare have been insufficient. Ideological commitments to austerity pervade, bolstering the right-wing, anti-immigrant myth that there is too little to go around. Concerns about fascism from the lips of figures like Merz can ring hollow when AfD leaders have accused — with good reason – the Christian Democrats of copying their far-right anti-immigration program. Likewise, former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris warned of the fascistic threat of Trump, but were complicit in genocide, the criminalization of left-wing and pro-Palestine protest, and racist fearmongering over immigration and crime. These liberal capitalists have failed to offer a bulwark to the right, let alone an alternative. Die Linke's example is not a clear road map to anti-fascist victory; the AfD earned twice as many votes and further cemented gains in its strongholds in Germany's east. The mistake, though, would be to treat the German election as a story of political polarization, in need of centrist correction. There has been a repudiation of the liberal center: The Green Party, a green capitalist liberal party that has drifted far from its leftist roots, lost 700,000 voters to Die Linke compared to the 2021 elections; the Social Democrats, who will likely form the governing coalition with Merz's party, lost 560,000 votes to Die Linke. The neoliberal austerity paradigms that helped foster 21st century fascist movements will not be the answer. Die Linke's proposal is a simple one: We don't need to moderate fascism, we need to oppose it.
Local Germany
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Local Germany
German far left in surprise comeback ahead of election
"I say to everyone out there: don't give up, fight back, resist fascism," Heidi Reichinnek said in a recent parliament speech against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and those who cooperate with it. "To the barricades!" declared the 36-year-old, who has a picture of the revolutionary left's icon Rosa Luxemburg tattooed on her left forearm, in a fiery speech that has racked up over 6.5 million views on TikTok. Die Linke has been especially popular among young voters with its promise to fight for social justice, tax the rich, bring down surging rents and make public transport cheaper. With the anti-immigration AfD polling at a record 20 percent ahead of Sunday's election, Die Linke has become a standard bearer in the pushback against the extreme right. Founded from the ashes of communist East Germany's ruling party, it had been plagued by infighting and a damaging defection and until recently faced the threat of political oblivion. Only weeks ago, Die Linke was polling below the five-percent threshold for reentry into parliament, but latest polls give it between seven and nine percent. It's a strong comeback for the party that was in disarray after its key figure Sahra Wagenknecht left the party early last year to found her own "left-wing conservative" movement, the BSW. But while Die Linke has been on the up and up in recent weeks, the BSW, which also demands curbs on irregular immigration, is now hovering around the five-percent death zone and must fear for its survival. 'Anger in my belly' Reichinnek joined Die Linke in 2015 with "anger in my belly about many social injustices", she told AFP. The MP who spent time in Cairo during the Arab Spring protests also has an arm tattoo of a street art image showing ancient Egypt's queen Nefertiti with a gas mask. "I really wanted to find people who saw things the same way as me, with whom I could change things together, and I found them in Die Linke," she said. Reichinnek was relatively unknown before her blistering speech in the Bundestag against the AfD and the conservative CDU/CSU alliance. The conservatives had breached a long-standing taboo by accepting AfD votes to push through a motion calling for an immigration crackdown. The shattering of the anti-AfD "firewall" sparked mass street protests. Since the fateful vote and Reichinnek's spirited response, Die Linke has seen a surge in grassroots support with membership reaching its highest point in 15 years. In a recent mock election of under-18s, Die Linke emerged as the biggest party at 20.8 percent. The party had already laid the groundwork with a light-hearted social media campaign centred around three of its "old comrades" aged in their 60s and 70s -- Bodo Ramelow, Dietmar Bartsch and Gregor Gysi. Die Linke has run an "effective" campaign and set "very clear priorities", said political scientist Antonios Souris of Berlin's Free University. Berlin student Thomas Jaeschke, 23, who has been distributing Linke flyers and putting up campaign posters, said the mood in the party was "very positive". "At the campaign events there are really a lot of people there, some from all over Germany and a lot of newcomers," Jaeschke said. He puts this down to a "well-communicated" campaign focused on core left-wing values such as "rent prices and redistribution of wealth", but also credited Reichinnek with "mobilising younger people in particular". 'German duty' It's a far cry from a year ago, when Die Linke was plunged into crisis as Wagenknecht, 55, left to set up the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The new, Moscow-friendly party made a strong start, scoring 6.2 percent at EU elections last June and entering the government after two eastern regional elections. Die Linke scored just 2.7 percent of the EU vote. But support for BSW has waned this year as the party was hit by infighting and corruption allegations. BSW drew the ire of many left-wingers when it also joined the AfD in voting for a drastic crackdown on immigration in parliament. "In the end, Wagenknecht has not made the impact in the media that BSW might have hoped for," Souris said. Berlin hairdresser Thomas Marienfeld, 43, said he voted for BSW in the EU elections but has now joined Die Linke. Backing Wagenknecht in June was an "impulsive" decision that he regretted when he saw her party "voting with the AfD", he said. Watching Reichinnek's speech, he said "I was 100 percent saying, 'Yes!' If the world swings to the right, then it is my German duty to go left." By Claudia HORN and Femke COLBORNE
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
German far left in surprise comeback ahead of election
Germany's far-left Die Linke party has enjoyed a late poll surge ahead of Sunday's elections, boosted by a spirited anti-fascist speech by its new rising star that quickly went viral. "I say to everyone out there: don't give up, fight back, resist fascism," Heidi Reichinnek said in a recent parliament speech against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and those who cooperate with it. "To the barricades!" declared the 36-year-old, who has a picture of the revolutionary left's icon Rosa Luxemburg tattooed on her left forearm, in a fiery speech that has racked up over 6.5 million views on TikTok. Die Linke has been especially popular among young voters with its promise to fight for social justice, tax the rich, bring down surging rents and make public transport cheaper. With the anti-immigration AfD polling at a record 20 percent ahead of Sunday's election, Die Linke has become a standard bearer in the pushback against the extreme right. Founded from the ashes of communist East Germany's ruling party, it had been plagued by infighting and a damaging defection and until recently faced the threat of political oblivion. Only weeks ago, Die Linke was polling below the five-percent threshold for reentry into parliament, but latest polls give it between seven and nine percent. It's a strong comeback for the party that was in disarray after its key figure Sahra Wagenknecht left the party early last year to found her own "left-wing conservative" movement, the BSW. But while Die Linke has been on the up and up in recent weeks, the BSW, which also demands curbs on irregular immigration, is now hovering around the five-percent death zone and must fear for its survival. - 'Anger in my belly' - Reichinnek joined Die Linke in 2015 with "anger in my belly about many social injustices", she told AFP. The MP who spent time in Cairo during the Arab Spring protests also has an arm tattoo of a street art image showing ancient Egypt's queen Nefertiti with a gas mask. "I really wanted to find people who saw things the same way as me, with whom I could change things together, and I found them in Die Linke," she said. Reichinnek was relatively unknown before her blistering speech in the Bundestag against the AfD and the conservative CDU/CSU alliance. The conservatives had breached a long-standing taboo by accepting AfD votes to push through a motion calling for an immigration crackdown. The shattering of the anti-AfD "firewall" sparked mass street protests. Since the fateful vote and Reichinnek's spirited response, Die Linke has seen a surge in grassroots support with membership reaching its highest point in 15 years. In a recent mock election of under-18s, Die Linke emerged as the biggest party at 20.8 percent. The party had already laid the groundwork with a light-hearted social media campaign centred around three of its "old comrades" aged in their 60s and 70s -- Bodo Ramelow, Dietmar Bartsch and Gregor Gysi. Die Linke has run an "effective" campaign and set "very clear priorities", said political scientist Antonios Souris of Berlin's Free University. Berlin student Thomas Jaeschke, 23, who has been distributing Linke flyers and putting up campaign posters, said the mood in the party was "very positive". "At the campaign events there are really a lot of people there, some from all over Germany and a lot of newcomers," Jaeschke said. He puts this down to a "well-communicated" campaign focused on core left-wing values such as "rent prices and redistribution of wealth", but also credited Reichinnek with "mobilising younger people in particular". - 'German duty' - It's a far cry from a year ago, when Die Linke was plunged into crisis as Wagenknecht, 55, left to set up the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The new, Moscow-friendly party made a strong start, scoring 6.2 percent at EU elections last June and entering the government after two eastern regional elections. Die Linke scored just 2.7 percent of the EU vote. But support for BSW has waned this year as the party was hit by infighting and corruption allegations. BSW drew the ire of many left-wingers when it also joined the AfD in voting for a drastic crackdown on immigration in parliament. "In the end, Wagenknecht has not made the impact in the media that BSW might have hoped for," Souris said. Berlin hairdresser Thomas Marienfeld, 43, said he voted for BSW in the EU elections but has now joined Die Linke. Backing Wagenknecht in June was an "impulsive" decision that he regretted when he saw her party "voting with the AfD", he said. Watching Reichinnek's speech, he said "I was 100 percent saying, 'Yes!' If the world swings to the right, then it is my German duty to go left." fec/fz/fg
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Heidi Reichinnek: the young, tattooed hard-Left German leader seeing a late election surge
Heidi Reichinnek is causing a stir in German politics. The 36-year-old tattoo-sleeved 'Queen of TikTok' is the leader of the country's hard-Left Die Linke – which is experiencing a polling surge ahead of Sunday's election. Down and out on 3 per cent at the end of January – below the threshold of 5 per cent needed to gain entry to the parliament – the party's obituaries had already been written. However, a tumultuous three weeks in German politics has catapulted Die Linke up to 9 per cent in a recent poll, meaning that it is breathing down the necks of the Greens and Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats. The Left-wing party, successors to East Germany's communist SED, has found a niche by talking about the cost of living crisis while other parties compete over who has the best plan to revive Germany's flailing economy. More significantly though, it has been able to mobilise young voters in a polarising debate over whether it is correct to 'normalise' the AfD, a hard-Right party that some believe is seeking a return to the darkest chapter in German history. The figurehead of this movement is Ms Reichinnek, a no-nonsense newcomer with a reputation for fiery speeches and catchy social media content. When the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) passed a resolution against illegal migration in late January by relying on votes from the AfD – a watershed moment in a country where the populist Right has previously been completely ostracised – Ms Reichinnek gave a thundering speech accusing the conservatives opening the door to a return to fascism. The CDU was giving a 'leg up' to a party who 'carry forth the ideology of Auschwitz', she said during a debate that took place two days after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp. 'I can only tell the people out there, don't give up, resist the rise of fascism, man the barricades,' she said. The two-minute speech immediately went viral, launching the previously unknown Ms Reichinnek to nationwide fame. Her social media accounts have since gathered a million followers, leading party colleagues to label her 'the Queen of TikTok'. The tattoos that decorate her left arm, still something of a rarity in Germany's straight-laced debating chamber, soon became the talk of the Bundestag – and of the wider electorate. One piece of ink work depicts Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist leader who was murdered shortly after the First World War. Another is an image of Egyptian queen Nefertiti wearing a gas mask, a nod to Ms Reichinnek's time spent as a student in Egypt during the Arab Spring. Since her Bundestag speech in late January, Die Linke says that it has been inundated with membership applications, while young voters have turned out in droves to watch her stump speeches. In a country in which the rise of Right-wing populism has a unique ability to get pulses racing, the CDU's decision to pass a bill with AfD votes has turned this into the most heated election in living memory. Thousands of people have taken to the streets to reject the AfD, while CDU offices have been vandalised, while one Right-wing politician narrowly avoided injury after someone loosened the nuts on a wheel of his campaign bus. However, Die Linke has also been able to position itself as the only party talking about the impact high that inflation has had on poorer households While the larger Left-wing parties, the Greens and the Social Democrats, are seeking to burnishing their economic credentials during a historic lull in Germany's industrial output, Die Linke has campaigned on lowering rents and cutting food prices. The party could also be profiting from factional infighting that initially threatened its existence. Die Linke's manifesto is full of hard-line demands including the expropriation of housing stock from private investors without offering financial compensation, the legalisation of all drugs, the doubling of dole payments, and a ban on all weapons exports. It also advocates access to artificial insemination for everyone 'regardless of gender' and the establishment of 'queer trade unions'. Last year, party grandee Sahra Wagenknecht left Die Linke to form a new 'anti-woke' Left-wing faction. Staunchly anti-American, Ms Wagenknecht blamed Nato for the war in Ukraine and made it her mission to stop weapons supplies to Kyiv. She also railed against 'gender sensitive language' and adopted migration policies similar to those of the AfD. But, after surging in polling last summer, Ms Wagenknecht's star has waned and her party now looks set to fall short of the bar for entry into the next parliament. In her absence, Die Linke has been able to focus more on young voters. Ms Reichinnek meticulously 'genders' her language – a linguistic novelty popular in university towns – and unabashedly stands for the open-border migration policies that many blame for a spate of terror attacks that Germany has suffered in recent months. This week, the former leader of the Green party's youth movement came out in support of Die Linke, lamenting a 'slide to the Right' in her former party. Meanwhile, a study of 150,000 under 18s put Die Linke top among those still too young to vote. The party's surge in polling has led to speculation about the possibility of a 'Left-wing front' akin to the coalition formed in France last year to keep out the hard-Right there. However, with the Greens on about 13 per cent and Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats struggling to make it above 16 per cent, the Left-wing parties are still well below the level needed to build a stable majority. Instead, the rise of Die Linke makes it more likely that the CDU will need to forge a coalition with two Left-wing parties, a scenario that the campaign team in the CDU headquarters desperately wanted to avoid. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Euronews
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
Germany's The Left party sees surge in support after going viral online
Germany's Die Linke or The Left party is experiencing a last-minute surge in numbers less than one week before Germany's national election on 23 February. The left-wing populist party, which polled at around 4% in January, has seen its numbers rise to 6% to 7% in recent weeks. One survey from pollster YouGov puts the party at 9% — a significant jump from a month ago and well above the 5% threshold it would need to enter the Bundestag. Ahead of a surge in numbers, one of the party's rising stars, Heidi Reichinnek, went viral on social media for passionately criticising Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, for his controversial decision to accept votes from the far right for his migration proposals. 'You've made yourself an accomplice, and today you've changed this country for the worse,' Reichinnek said of Merz in her spontaneous speech, which the party says has been seen over 30 million times. "Resist fascism in this country. To the barricades," she said. According to Maik Fielitz from the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, Reichinnek's speech went viral, similar to the content that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has successfully promoted on social media for years. "Candidates like Heidi Reichinnek act as political influencers. The aim is to make them known first through their personality and only later through their political positioning," Fielitz said. The party is aware of its recent social media success, with The Left politician Dietmar Bartsch telling Euronews the party aims to counter the flood of pro-AfD online messaging with "well-made, credible left-wing content". The Left want to "clarify misinformation and set our own topics" online, he added. Doubters to believers? According to domestic media reports, The Left's membership has surged to its highest point in 15 years, causing the party to hunt for larger campaign venues in the past two weeks. An under-18 survey also found that the party came first among children and young adults, with 20.84% of support. Prior to the last-minute surge in popularity, The Left was unsure if they would reach the threshold to enter the Bundestag. The party's fate seemed uncertain when one of its most prominent faces, Sahra Wagenknecht, splintered from it and created her own just over a year ago. The leftist-nationalist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) had a strong showing in the June European elections and the September three-state elections. Yet, the BSW's national campaign has failed to have the same impact. Meanwhile, the doubts among The Left party candidates about their chances were so strong that three of its members campaigned for direct mandates to enter the parliament. However, the viral star Reichinnek said the recent boost in popularity gave her renewed confidence. "I don't have to believe in miracles, I experience them," she told daily newspaper Rheinische Post. The Left has put forward two candidates for chancellor, Reichinnek and Jan van Akken. It has made taxing the wealthy and ensuring affordable housing fundamental to its campaign. The party is focusing on "people's everyday problems", she said. "For example, we on the left have programmed a rent gouging calculator and a heating cost calculator," Reichinnek explained.
