Rebuilding the left as Germany turns right

Sean Larson: Could you outline the situation in Germany now a couple months after the snap elections? What can we expect from the Merz government as we enter a new phase of geopolitical upheaval?

Martin Haller: Yes, now that the coalition agreement with the SPD has been settled, Merz is expected to be elected Chancellor in early May. Three things characterize the situation in Germany: the deep crisis of the economy, the political shift toward rearmament, and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

German capitalism is in a deep structural crisis. The current recession is not just an economic downturn or a cyclical fluctuation, but I would say that the growth model of German capitalism, as it has prevailed for the last 20 years or so, has failed more fundamentally.

There is no clear answer from those in power as to how to deal with it. The growth model came about with the introduction of the euro, which allowed for Germany to out-compete surrounding capitalist countries with industrial exports all over the world. The foundation for the resulting over-industrialization was created in the early 2000s under the SPD and Green backed “Agenda 2010,” a sharp attack on the working class through social cuts, labor market reform, and deregulation. What emerged from this was a huge low-wage sector, a division of the workforce in many companies, a relatively well-protected core workforce, but an increasingly precarious one, temporary workers, contract workers, and so on.

Germany emerged relatively strongly from the 2008 crisis. However, despite the strength of the industrial base and export economy, inequality has increased significantly since the early 2000s and broad sections of the population now live precariously or in anxiety of downward mobility.

The growth model of German capitalism was shaken by the COVID crisis and then collapsed even more with the Ukraine war. The end of cheap energy from Russia destroyed a significant part of Germany’s growth model. In addition, the Chinese market was a decisive sales market for German companies, with roughly 700 million Chinese people rising into a kind of middle class and buying German cars. This has now collapsed, precisely because China is increasingly substituting imports and building better cars itself than Germany.

The current Trump trade war exacerbates the existing crisis and is the greatest challenge facing the German ruling class right now. Even under Obama and Biden there has long been pressure from the U.S. that Europe should bear the costs of its economic growth itself, including militarily. Now, under Trump, it has tipped over into coercion, one could say. This is, of course, something that plays into the hands of some of the ruling class in Germany.

These rearmament plans have been in the drawers for a long time, and there has long been a faction within the ruling class that complains that German imperialism—an economic giant, a military dwarf—is actually incapable of militarily asserting its own interests. That is now changing, but it is nothing entirely new. There have already been several major waves of rearmament. Starting with reunification, we had essentially the transformation of the Bundeswehr (German army) into an intervention army to wage wars of aggression all over the world alongside the U.S.

A turning point in rearmament came in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea with the creation of an army capable of waging large-scale land wars, and another turning point came in 2022 under Olaf Scholz as Chancellor. Now it’s even more dramatic, with the Merz government dropping the bombshell shortly after the election that it wants to rearm on an even more massive scale, part of a larger project of European capitalism as a whole. That is the second major new development: a return to open imperialist power politics and an armament buildup that is being pushed hard by the media in a way that is clearly attempting to establish a consensus.

The third element that is crucial for the political situation is the rise of the AfD. A few days ago there was the first poll in which the AfD overtook the CDU/CSU as the strongest party in the polls. This is, of course, a significant challenge for the ruling classes in Germany in general. From their perspective, the AfD is not capable of governing, not because of their blatant racism or their fascist core, but primarily due to foreign policy: it is not a reliable partner in terms of the the main principles in foreign relations of the majority in the ruling class, that is support of NATO, the EU and the common currency, which has always been the main point of attack against the Die Linke in government. The AfD’s openly stated aim is to destroy the CDU. The CDU has already recognized that. At the same time, they hope that the AfD can be integrated into a government somewhere and tamed, or become disenchanted in the eyes of voters. The CDU/CSU is in a dilemma: the AfD is getting stronger and stronger. At the same time, it is the CDU’s only option for power beyond a coalition with the SPD. The CDU therefore seeks cooperation with the AfD, whereby it has to proceed in stages in order to initiate and ultimately justify the breaking of taboos.

It’s a difficult situation for the Merz CDU. Their reaction to the AfD’s rise has been to adopt its demands, especially racist demands regarding asylum, migration, citizenship, and so on. That was, of course, doomed to failure from the start and further strengthens the AfD.

SL: To that point, the AfD is now an established force in Germany—what is responsible for the rise of the AfD and do you consider it a fascist party?

MH: The AfD is over ten years old now. It was founded in 2014 as a melting pot of various right-wing radical and right-wing conservative circles. On the issue of the euro in particular, it also had a bourgeois-libertarian wing, or you could say national-conservative one, that was dominant at the beginning. But from the very beginning, it was a kind of coalition project in which fascists also participated. And it has actually become increasingly radicalized since its inception. There were several, you could say, moltings of the party based in factional struggles. These were ultimately always driven by the fascist wing, which also allied itself with supporters from the right-wing conservative corner of the party in order to promote radicalization, and that goes hand in hand with a fascisization of the party.

I wouldn’t say that the AfD is a fascist party in its entirety today, but it did have a fascist wing in the beginning. Then it became a fascist party in the making, so to speak, because the dominance of this wing grew ever stronger. Today I would say, you could say it is a fascist party at its core, because without the fascists in the AfD, it’s actually no longer possible to conduct any politics in the party. So, the top fascist Björn Höcke, you could say, is the unofficial leader of the party.

Nevertheless, other wings still exist. There’s this, perhaps one could call it a right-wing nationalist, free-market radical, partly libertarian wing. There has also always been a religious-fundamentalist clerical wing, which you could compare to the evangelicals in the US. They also overlap with the free-market radicals—people from the Hayek Society and so on–who have extremely anti-democratic ideas, such as demanding the withdrawal of voting rights for benefit recipients and the like. They embody a very elitist right-wing image.

And then there are the fascists, who differ from the others in this respect. Ideologically, they are defined by a kind of ethnic nationalism, and unlike the other wings, strategically they have a stronger focus on extra-parliamentary politics, building power in the streets, on building fascist politics. They clearly come from the tradition of German National Socialism. They hide it here and there, of course, but they also repeatedly send clear signals to their tough milieu about who they are and what they want.

SL: What is the state of the fight against such an extreme right party? Have there been particularly effective efforts to stop them? And what kind of base-building work is being done or can be done to build an antifascist movement above and beyond parliament?

MH: Not only is there an extra-parliamentary element, but that is actually the core element. In parliament itself, there is not much of a fight against the AfD. It’s being excluded based on the “firewall” of democrats against fascists, but that has been questioned and attacked many times by the CDU. That’s the parliamentary level; the decisive one is the extra-parliamentary level in the fight against the AfD.

In order to understand what I consider to be the most promising approach in the fight against the AfD, you have to delve a bit into the contradictions that the fascists have had in rebuilding power in the Federal Republic after the Second World War. After WWII, the Nazis weren’t gone, but because of the lost war, millions of dead, the complete destruction of the country and the monstrous crime of the Holocaust, they could no longer maintain a positive connection to Hitler without being socially marginalized. That is to say, the fascists have always played a form of hide-and-seek in the post-war period but also had to signal to their cadres that they are operating ideologically within the tradition of German fascism. That dance has been central to the re-establishment of fascist ideas, demands, and movements.

It is that contradiction that we must address in the fight against fascism, in order to separate the hard core of the Nazis from their wider milieu. The question is, how do you do that? I’d say it’s about clearly labeling them as fascists, openly confronting them, and thereby forcing them to reveal their fascist face. The central means is a united front policy.

We of course have an analysis that fascism is a danger to everyone, to all democrats, whether left-wing or not. So, anyone willing to fight against fascism must be part of the anti-fascist movement. The strategy is to build the broadest possible united front and mass resistance, and not be limited by questions like what one’s stance on racism is, or militarism, or on social policy, or anything like that. Instead, everyone who is willing to fight against the fascists should be part of this movement and not allow themselves to be divided. And at the same time, I think it’s important to seek the most direct confrontation possible. That is, to disrupt them wherever they appear, wherever they want to march, to create counter-blockades, to disrupt them directly within sight and hearing distance, and not to cede public space to them.

In Germany, there have been repeated moments of partly spontaneous mass movements in recent years. The last time on a truly massive scale was at the beginning of 2024. There were protests in hundreds of cities, hundreds of thousands of people in major cities, a total of more than a million people on the streets on individual days of action, the largest mass movement in post-war history, comparable at best to the revolution in the GDR in terms of numbers.

These were very broadly supported protests, but they weren’t really aimed at direct confrontation; they were essentially rallies where the conservative mayor gave a speech, where people went en masse to make a statement. The anti-fascist network Widersetzen was founded in the wake of these mass protests in early 2024 and set out to organize a broader fight against the AfD, one that also involved a direct confrontation, with the concrete strategy of targeting the AfD’s party conferences.

The strategy was first tried out in Essen at the party conference in June 2024 and then repeated again in the winter, in January 2025, at the party conference in Riesa. It took place spontaneously because of the early federal election. Riesa is a smaller city in Saxony, practically a direct stronghold of the AfD, a home turf for them. But we succeeded in traveling there with many thousands of activists on buses and creating blockades. These didn’t prevent the party conference outright, but they did delay it. And above all, it was a powerful moment of empowerment, especially for young activists who were simply shocked and afraid of the developments.

That’s the core of the united front idea: calling for joint action, the grassroots of course, but also the leadership of other parties. Then they’re left with the choice of joining in, or not joining in, and thus revealing themselves as unwilling to fight the fascists. But then you can challenge them in the movement by being the more determined and better part of the protests.

Of course, there’s a risk that bourgeois actors will succeed in taking over, there is a danger of losing control. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to understand that the fight against fascism isn’t something that only concerns leftists, but rather, it encompasses as many sections of society as possible that are willing to take part. It doesn’t exclude anyone from the outset because they have different political positions.

So that’s the most promising approach at the moment: the broadest possible action alliances that confront the AfD as a fascist party. At the same time, parallel to this, there is of course also the need to actually remove the breeding ground of the far right. So, as in all countries, the rise of the new right and fascism is also an expression of the downward spiral I already mentioned, the social injustices, the loss of something like a liberal hegemony in discourse, and a deep crisis of confidence in parliamentary democracy and dissatisfaction in the face of a promise of social advancement that can no longer be fulfilled, of crises that follow one another. And in this respect, part of the fight against the AfD is, of course, to build a left-wing alternative to the neoliberal mainstream and the fascist anti-establishment. The same applies to the fight against racism. Racism is not a unique feature of the AfD, but is fuelled by the entire political establishment in order to create a scapegoat and channel the growing dissatisfaction into right-wing directions. The AfD is merely taking this bourgeois racism to the extreme. Their racism is not tactical, but exterminatory.

Building a left-wing alternative to the neoliberal policies of the elites and the fight against racism, including racism from the political “center”, is the specific task of the Left, while the fight against fascism on the streets is a task of society as a whole. And that is why united front politics is the means of choice for the Left to confront the Nazis as broadly and decisively as possible.

SL: In light of the current shakeup in global geopolitics, the German Left confronts a rapidly evolving situation. What are the main priorities of the Left for the coming year?

MH: I think there are four areas in particular that are pressing right now.

Firstly, we expect the structural crisis of capitalism will continue, and that the ruling class will launch further attacks on the welfare state, workers’ interests, and so on, precisely as a solution to the crisis. Because of that, the scope for social redistribution will simply be smaller, and the defensive struggles within workplaces will accordingly become harder. Job cuts are coming, especially in the export industry, even while they are still making billions in profits. Also, in all major cities and numerous medium-sized cities, rents have exploded and are incredibly high. The German real estate market has opened up to foreign capital, and that has corresponding expectations of generating a return, which is why many households are now spending nearly half of their income on rent. So during the crisis, we expect defensive struggles in the economy, labor and on social issues.

The second major area is anti-fascism, the rise of the AfD, I’ve already said a lot about.

The third is fighting racism, which the ruling politicians are using to cover their social cuts. Throughout the entire election campaign, there was a racist campaign by all the leading bourgeois media. All parties except Die Linke participated in it, practically outdoing each other in demands such as mass deportations, border closures, and the revocation of citizenship, even for people who have already been naturalized, if they don’t behave according to expectations. The accusations of anti-Semitism and loyalty to Israel is a key gateway, and is part of a shift to the right in society as a whole, which relies primarily on racism and has now also influenced government policy.

The fourth area would be the fight against armaments, militarism, and German imperialism.  It’s pretty shocking when you look at the debate in Germany not even twenty years ago, when it was a no-go for virtually all bourgeois parties to supply weapons in war situations to war zones, at least officially. That has been completely reversed with the Ukraine war, driven by fear-mongering about Russian despotism and expansionism overrunning Europe without the protection of the U.S. The dominant theme is that Europe has been naive and must now learn from its mistakes and become ready for war again, hence the massive militaristic campaign that aims to restore the German people’s ability for warfare, so to speak. The fight against rearmament therefore also becomes a significant challenge.

Die Linke actually has relative unity on many of these issues—not at all when it comes to the issue of arms deliveries to Ukraine—but on the issue of opposing rearmament in Germany. With the departure of Wagenknecht and her associates, there is also unity on the issue of anti-racism and anti-fascism. Of course, the social and labor side is part of the Left’s identity. In that sense, it already has potential to address these challenges.

I think the question for the party will be how it finds a focus somewhere that not only puts forward the right demands through propaganda, but also demonstrates in individual areas how demands can be fought for from below, beyond government policy and parliament. That’s not something that will necessarily happen in all four of these areas, but if things go well, it can concentrate on one issue and actually make a difference there. But ideologically and in terms of movement-building, I think all four of these areas are central to the coming period.

SL: How would you describe the state of the German labor movement, and what changes, trends, or opportunities does this movement have?

MH: The organized labor movement in Germany has been in crisis for a long time, with union membership numbers in decline since the early 1990s. Collective bargaining coverage is becoming increasingly weaker and fewer and fewer companies are actually bound by collective agreements. All of the neoliberal legislation has massively weakened the unions.

And yet, a form of social partnership cooperation remains dominant within the unions. By that I mean the union leaders see themselves as a social partner alongside employers, who work together with what they see as a common interest in Germany as a business location. This tradition has existed in Germany since the founding of the Federal Republic. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, this dominant form of industrial relations was challenged by militant strike movements and also wildcat strikes, but it was resumed in the mid-1970s. The SPD is the political bastion that embodies this social partnership model, with close ties to the unions.

Despite the crisis in the trade union movement, up to now nothing fundamental has changed in this cooperative social partnership approach. Instead, it has transitioned into what one might call crisis cooperation, where the employer side has more or less terminated the partnership but the unions try to re-establish it instead of pursuing a more militant strategy and building strike power. That approach remains absolutely dominant in the industrial unions especially, such as the IG Metall, the largest and most powerful trade union in Germany. For example, IG Metall recently agreed without any major resistance to a rotten compromise at VW, one of the largest employers with almost 300,000 employees in Germany alone, after the company threatened job cuts and plant closures. Although there is growing dissatisfaction with this social partnership approach of the trade unions, overall it continues to dominate the industrial sector.

It’s partly different in the service sector, and in the public sector in particular, where employees have had a relatively strong bargaining position in recent years. In many areas, be it public transport, hospitals, schools, and so on, there is a massive labor shortage and, accordingly, a strong bargaining position for employees. And in individual sectors, there are at least budding attempts at union renewal, with an open conflict orientation, forms of democratization, of collective bargaining, that is, giving the employees themselves more responsibility and enabling them to have more say and participate. This has been the case particularly in the hospital sector, where strikes have been successful repeatedly in recent years, and where new forms of strike strategy, of democratization, of building grassroots power, have actually been attempted.

These more militant efforts are strongest within Verdi, the service sector union. To be clear, it’s still a minority orientation. There was just the agreement in the public sector, which isn’t good. In practice, the union leadership ultimately agreed to a rotten compromise and allowed little grassroots participation. But there are these tender shoots of democratization and conflict orientation, on which we can build in order to challenge this mainstream course of social partnership.

Of course, the crisis is now playing a role in this, which, on the one hand, naturally means a weakening of the working class. On the other hand, of course, it allows for moments of escalation which can lead to these tender shoots being further developed. But of course, that doesn’t happen automatically; it only happens if there are genuine alternative leadership options in the workplace to the hegemonic union strategy that relies on compromise negotiations and managing expectations. Alternative orientations are emerging that instead rely on participation, power building, and the members’ fighting spirit.

SL: What plans does Die Linke have now after the elections? And what opportunities do you think are opening now after the party’s revival?

MH: Die Linke was in a truly existential crisis. I would say that just a few months ago the vast majority of observers outside the party, but also within the party, foresaw its failure, its end, its death, or at least feared that these were very possible. In a very surprising turn of events, Die Linke has achieved this electoral success, has gained tens of thousands of new, predominantly young, activist members. So the party now has over 100,000 members, which is an all-time record. Almost half of them have only joined this year.

So, it’s essentially a refounding of the party. The most significant change is that Die Linke is now a project of hope again, which is great, but there’s still no clear plan for how to deal with that. I think the key challenge will be to offer all these new members an activist campaign, a way for them to get involved in the party, how they can become active and fight for winnable demands.

This has to go beyond a purely parliamentary strategy, which looks like, “At some point we’ll be in government and then we’ll be able to make better policies than the others.” But what this project will become hasn’t really been developed yet.

There have been discussions, for example, about the rent issue after the movement in Berlin to expropriate the major landlords (Deutsche Wohnen und Co.), and whether such a project could be scaled up to a larger scale and provide a means for grassroots members of the party to get involved beyond the election campaign. But that hasn’t been fully formulated yet, and it’s still unclear what that will be.

At the same time, I would say there’s of course a great danger that the Left Party will fall back into old patterns. There is now a strong parliamentary group in the Bundestag again for Die Linke. It’s polling at the state level, even in the western states, at around 10 percent everywhere. That means it will enter state parliaments again with a strong parliamentary group. There will be renewed pressure to parliamentarize the party, to decouple the parliamentary groups from party committees and, in fact, from grassroots work, and also to once again discuss participation in government. So, in Berlin, the Left became the strongest force in the federal election. Next year, parliamentary elections will take place in Berlin, and the pressure on the Left to enter government will naturally be enormous.

The direction in which the party develops is very open, and no one would have predicted this a few months ago, but there is the potential to reinvent Die Linke right now. There is a great openness, especially among new members, towards developing something like a concept of a modern member-party, of a class party, which Die Linke is far from being. Of course, there’s the danger of falling into the same traps we’ve fallen into before, focusing solely on parliamentary business and ultimately seeing the only prospect for social change in parliament and entering government. But right now the situation is very open, and other possibilities exist.

SL: That’s very interesting, and we’ll delve more into the dynamics within Die Linke in a second interview with some other organizers. But as a final question, could you talk about marx21 and its activities and what perspectives you have for revolutionary politics in Germany?

MH: marx21 is a network of revolutionary socialists within Die Linke, but in recent years it has also taken increasing steps to work within the trade unions. Our perspective can be summarized by the image of the “strategic triangle,” which essentially sees three strategic locations in the three corners: Die Linke, trade unions, and social movements / the anti-capitalist milieu, and these are the constituent parts for building, ultimately, a revolutionary mass party in the future. That is the goal of marx21.

We don’t believe that Die Linke will itself ever become a revolutionary party. We also don’t believe that we, as a network, are the embryo that will continue to grow and eventually emerge as a large revolutionary party. But we believe that there are various strands that need to be connected to get there.

That means building class struggle, which means building an alternative pole within the unions to the majority leadership’s social partnership course, through grassroots networking from below, a conflict orientation, building power through strikes, and the emergence of alternative leaderships, at least in local areas, that can model a different kind of union work and politics.

At the same time, we believe it is a historic achievement that there is a socialist party to the left of the SPD in Germany, that Die Linke can have an important social function, and that it is actually necessary for all socialists in Germany to work within this party and to fight for its direction.

We also believe—this is the third corner—that there is a milieu, particularly at universities but also in general, a milieu around the social movements that is open to anti-capitalist politics, and that it needs to be activated and connected to the struggle for the party, but also to the struggle for the unions.

Our project is to try to connect these three corners with each other and, from this, to build self-activity in the class and in the movements, and thus contribute to creating a revolutionary consciousness in broader circles. Of course, we have an ideological-political foundation on which we build, but we also have a strategic foundation, which we actually see as the core of our network.

A major problem on the Left is that many feel they have the right answer to everything, but they don’t actually have any prospect of implementing their politics. We cut against that in practice, and that means trying to set larger wheels in motion by becoming a “strategic actor” in order to advance the building of the class struggle movement in Germany as a whole. Part of that is simply having a focus on waging certain battles that can be won, or making a difference in certain disputes in order to bring about real successes. Of course we do that together with other actors, we are not alone, but we try to show how concrete successes can be achieved for the class through self-activation of the class. That is, I would say, the strategic crux of the project.

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Featured Image credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy; modified by Tempest.