BSW has been described as a left-wing to far-left party with populist and nationalist tendencies, and it is generally considered to be socially conservative. The BSW is skeptical of green politics, criticises support for Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War and Israel in the war in Gaza, and holds Eurosceptic and anti-American views on foreign policy.
The party is considered "left-conservative" or "left-authoritarian", as it combines economically socialist values with cultural and social conservatism.
The party originated as a split from the party The Left (Die Linke). In September 2023, Sahra Wagenknecht, Amira Mohamed Ali, Christian Leye, Lukas Schรถn, and several other long time Left party members announced their intention to form a new party. It was subsequently joined by others including former Left party leader Klaus Ernst, Fabio De Masi, and former mayor of Dรผsseldorf Thomas Geisel.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance was officially founded in January 2024 with Wagenknecht and Mohamed Ali as its leaders. In February, they formed a group in the Bundestag.
The BSW contested its first elections in May 2024. In June 2024, the party won 6.1% of votes nationally in the European Parliament elections. In September, it won between 11% and 16% in three eastern state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. The BSW co-governed Brandenburg (SPD-led Redโpurple coalition) until January 2026 when members defected.
BSW was part of the governing coalition in Thuringia (CDU-led Blackberry coalition with SPD) until in early September 2026 almost all parliament and government members left BSW party to continue as members of new parties.
In a setback, the party narrowly missed the 5% threshold required for seats in the Bundestag 2025 German federal election with 4.981% of second votes. Even worse were the BSW results in the next three state elections, held in March 2025 and March 2026. In Hamburg, Baden-Wรผrttemberg, and Rhineland-Palatinate, the party earned under 2% and no seats.
It should be noted, however, that this owed in part to Germany's regional politics. In September 2026, the party won 5 seats in Saxony Anhalt.
Wagenknecht announced in November 2025 that she would resign as leader, designating MEP Fabio De Masi as her successor. In 2026, the party faced internal conflict with breakaway groups forming including We for Brandenburg in Brandenburg and both Your Vote Counts and Thรผringen.Gerecht in Thuringia. It is the only German political party to signal a willingness to work with the Alternative for Germany, against the firewall policy maintained by Germany's major parties.
In connection with the 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election, the party has expressed that they could work with the AfD on specific issues without voting for a member of the AfD to head the state's parliament.
History
Background
Wagenknecht, who has been described as a prominent left-wing politician, was a member of The Left and its predecessors, such as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS); her political positions are generally identified as left-wing populist. Although she was co-leader of The Left from 2015 to 2019, conflict with other party members on topics, such as the German refugee policy, COVID-19 vaccination, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, had led to speculation since 2021 that she would leave The Left and found a new political party.
Speculation increased in the run-up to the 2023 Hessian state election and the 2023 Bavarian state election on 8 October, in which The Left failed to reach the 5% electoral threshold while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged in both. The success of the AfD led Wagenknecht to claim that a left-wing populist party could compete with the AfD while also respecting the German constitution.
In 2022, Sahra Wagenknecht blamed Die Linke's successive electoral failures (the party's national share of the vote having fallen from 12% in 2009 to 5% in 2021) on its emphasis on policies to combat sexist, racist or homophobic discrimination, to the detriment of economic issues.
She argues for the primacy of the latter, in contrast to the intersectional approach of the party's leadership, which uses the term "classism" to refer to the social question as a form of discrimination, in the same way as sexism or racism. In her view, the working classes no longer recognise themselves in the discourse of the left, and are turning to the far-right AfD party as a receptacle for the protest vote.
Association registration
The association BSW โ Fรผr Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit e.V., based in Karlsruhe, was entered in the association register at the district court in Mannheim on 26 September 2023. In mid-October, over fifty members of The Left submitted an application for Wagenknecht's exclusion from the party in order to prevent her from building a new party with the resources of The Left.
Members of the party and political commentators blamed the ongoing speculation about the founding of a new party and the resulting breakup of the Left for its poor results in the state elections. Martin Schirdewan, federal chairman of The Left and co-chair of The Left in the European Parliament โ GUE/NGL, declared that the party would expel members who committed to the founding of a rival party by BSW. The Federal Executive Board of The Left passed a resolution of incompatibility with BSW.
Shortly after the press conference was announced, a fake website was registered under www.bswpartei.de that presented itself as the official website of the party, using copyrighted imagery and Wagenknecht's office address in its imprint. Wagenknecht filed a criminal report against the website, which is now offline. It is still unclear who created it.
Members of BSW in the German Bundestag want to continue working as a parliamentary group and have submitted a corresponding application to the president of the Bundestag. When the Wagenknecht Group was constituted in the Bundestag on 11 December 2023, Wagenknecht was elected its chair, Klaus Ernst its deputy chair, and Jessica Tatti its parliamentary managing director.
The association also started being represented in the Berlin House of Representatives by Alexander King, the Hamburg Parliament by Metin Kaya and, the Parliament of Rhineland-Palatinate by Andreas Hartenfels, a former member of Alliance 90/The Greens.[citation needed]
Party foundation
The party was officially founded on 8 January 2024, followed by a two hour long press conference. This formation process saw the creation of a new website and the publishing of the first party manifesto for BSW. The party also named its lead candidates for the 2024 European Parliament election in Germany and announced that it had already created a full list of candidates due to be approved at the first party conference.
The University of Potsdam developed a political test, BSW-O-Mat (name being a reference to the Wahl-O-Mat by the bpb), based on the first party manifesto. The test was released on the same day as the manifesto.
It was announced on 1 December 2023 that the first party conference is planned to be held on 27 January 2024. Ralph Suikat also commented at the time, that the association had thus far received an amount of donations in the seven figures, this was later clarified to be 1.4 million Euros collected during the whole of 2023.
The majority (90%) of which were small donations, only โฌ12,000 in total were donated from non-EU foreign countries, thereof โฌ75 in total from Russia.
On 27 January 2024, the party held its first party conference and invited 450 of its founding members. The party elected its executive committee and formulated a draft program for the 2024 European Parliament election in Germany, which included criticisms of the European Union in its current form and demands for more decision-making power to the member states and significant restriction of migration to Germany. The party won six seats, and saw particular strength in eastern Germany.
Mandates and offices
The ten BSW members of parliament represented in the German Bundestag were elected to parliament via the respective state lists of the Left Party. They were recognised as a parliamentary group on 2 February 2024. It bears the name Gruppe BSW im Bundestag and had already constituted itself internally on 11 December 2023.
Sahra Wagenknecht was elected chairwoman, Klaus Ernst as deputy chairman and Jessica Tatti as parliamentary manager. The other MPs in the group are Amira Mohamed Ali, Ali Al-Dailami, Sevim Daฤdelen, Andrej Hunko, Christian Leye, ลปaklin Nastiฤ and Alexander Ulrich.
With Alexander King (Berlin House of Representatives), Metin Kaya (Hamburg Parliament) and Andreas Hartenfels (Rhineland-Palatinate State Parliament) the party is also represented in three state parliaments through defections. With the switch of Katja Wolf to the BSW in March 2024, the party provided the mayor of the city of Eisenach in Thuringia until the end of June 2024, because she did not run again in the local elections in Thuringia in May 2024 and instead ran as the top candidate for the BSW in the Thuringian state elections in September 2024.
In the 2024 European Parliament election in Germany, six candidates of the BSW secured their seats and became members of the European Parliament: Fabio De Masi, Thomas Geisel, Michael von der Schulenburg, Ruth Firmenich, Jan-Peter Warnke and Friedrich Pรผrner. The party unsuccessfully sought to form a parliamentary group in the European Parliament together with the Italian Five Star Movement. In February 2025, Pรผrner resigned from the party, reducing the BSW's number of seats to five.
In September 2024, Slovak Smer began negotiations with two other parties in the Non-Inscrits, the BSW and the Czech Staฤilo!, on establishing cooperation between left-wing conservative parties in the EU.
In September 2024, the BSW achieved a double-digit share of the vote and third place in the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. In February 2025 the party fell just below the 5% threshold to win seats in the German Bundestag, and thus lost all their representation. A few weeks later they distantly failed to reach 5% in the Hamburg state election, and lost their seat.
Since December 2024, the BSW has been involved in state governments in Brandenburg (Woidke IV Cabinet) and Thuringia (Voigt Cabinet) for the first time.
2024 state elections in eastern Germany
In September 2024, BSW faced its first large electoral test in Landtag elections in the states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. In Saxony and Thuringia, the BSW came in third place. In Brandenburg, the BSW competed with largely unknown candidates. Although 13 BSW candidates were elected to the state parliament on September 22, their names were missing from the state party's homepage before and after the election.
On 11 December 2024, Dietmar Woidke formed the Woidke IV Cabinet in Brandenburg and the first nationwide redโpurple coalition with the BSW was formed. In Thuringia, a Blackberry coalition was formed.
2025 federal election
The 2025 federal election was initially scheduled for September, but was moved up to 23 February following the collapse of the governing traffic light coalition. The Bundestag was formally dissolved on 27 December.
During the election campaign, the public broadcaster ARD invited the most promising top candidates from the parties to a TV debate called the "Election Campaign Arena" on 15 February 2025, however BSW was excluded. Sahra Wagenknecht filed a constitutional complaint to ensure that the BSW was also invited. However, the courts decided that the BSW did not have a significance comparable to that of the other invited parties at that time.
In the summer months of 2024, the BSW polled at over 10% of the vote, and polled as high as 7.9% as late as 5 February, but the party ultimately received 4.9% of the vote, coming just short of the 5% threshold that would have entitled it to Bundestag seats. Wagenknecht's former party, The Left, recorded its best result since 2017, 8.8%, following a late surge in momentum. The BSW would only outperform The Left in Saxony-Anhalt, finishing behind The Left in all other states.
After the federal election, Wagenknecht left open what the result meant for her and her party. She did not appear publicly, with the BSW's co-chair Amira Mohamed Ali delivering the post-election press statements. Before the election, Wagenknecht had said "The election is of course also a decision about my political future. Anyone who is not in the Bundestag is no longer a relevant factor in German politics."
In BSW official statement at the federal press conference the day after the election, Sahra Wagenknecht blamed the media and the polling institute Forsa for the failure. A "negative media campaign" had contributed to the failure of her party. In addition, she claimed that the polling outfit Forsa had always reported BSW vote shares that were too low in its poll results and had engaged in "targeted manipulation". Wagenknecht's accusations were hardly taken into account; the DJV called them "absurd".
She also stated that she sees the result "as a mandate to further develop the BSW and lead it into the Bundestag by 2029 at the latest". Jรผrgen W. Falter attributed the party's defeat to "internal factional struggles and resignations", pointing to Wagenknecht's dispute with Katja Wolf, BSW's regional chairperson in Thuringia.
On 11 March 2025, the party appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court for a recount of the election, arguing that because of the irregularities that were found in the preliminary results, it might have crossed the 5% threshold. The appeal for nationwide recount came after isolated recounts of polling stations in North Rhine-Westphalia produced 1,295 additional votes for the BSW.
Irregularities were found in other states as well โ in Brandenburg, post-election corrections resulted in the BSW claiming 218 more votes; corrections also had to be made in polling stations of places such as Aachen, Lahn-Dill-Kreis, and Duisburg. On 13 March, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the appeals for a recount from BSW and voters' committees were inadmissible; the ruling noted that an election review is a matter for the Bundestag and not the Federal Constitutional Court, and is only available after the final elections results are announced.
On 14 March 2025, the Federal Returning Officer released the final results of the 2025 parliamentary election - BSW's vote margin increased to 4.981%. Compared to the preliminary results from February, the party gained 4,277 votes after isolated corrections. Final results benefited the BSW in particular, as 57% of revised second votes were assigned to the BSW.
In contrast, the margins of major parties such as CDU and SPD only changed by a few hundred votes. Following the announcement of final results, the BSW announced that it would continue to contest the election by filing an appeal to the Bundestag electoral commission, and then again to the Federal Constitutional Court if necessary.
It stated its belief that a recount is necessary and that a thorough inspection could show that it crossed the 5% threshold. According to BSW, despite no irregularites being detected at first, a recount in Marzahn-Hellersdorf still found two additional votes for the party, which would amount to 15,000 votes if extrapolated nationwide.
Internal disputes
After the poor result for BSW in the German Federal election, Wagenknecht blamed BSWs participation in the government in Thuringia, accusing state party Katja Wolf of being partly responsible for the BSW's poor performance in the federal election. Though Wolf built the largest and most successful BSW regional association in Germany, she is considered to represent a pragmatic political position, as opposed to Wagenknecht's more radical position, and under Wolf's leadership BSW is participating of the Thuringian state government with the CDU and SPD.
Ultimately, Wolf would be challenged for leadership of the Thuringian BSW by Anke Wirsing, who was backed by Wagenknecht. In April 2025, Wolf would defeat Wirsing and retain control of the Thuringian branch of the party.
Later history
In September 2025, the BSW won 40 seats in the North Rhine-Westphalia local elections.
On 10 November 2025, Sahra Wagenknecht stepped down as the chair of the party and was replaced by the party's MEP Fabio De Masi. However, Wagenknecht stated that she would continue to maintain an "active leadership role" in the party.
On 5 January 2026, in the wake of a coalition dispute between the SPD and BSW in Brandenburg, Deputy Minister-President Robert Crumbach announced at a news conference that he was leaving the BSW, calling it unfit for the responsibilities of governing. Minister-President Dietmar Woidke dissolved the coalition and formed a new one with the CDU.
He kept Crumbach, a former SPD member, as deputy Minister-President and finance minister. Crumbach later rejoined the SPD in March. The two other BSW ministers of the fourth Woidke cabinet, health minister Britta Mรผller and infrastructure minister Detlef Tabbert, also left the party.
Crumbach was replaced as BSW state chair by Friederike Benda. Three other MPs who left the BSW during the crisis formed their own group We for Brandenburg.
The BSW won no seats in the 2026 Baden-Wรผrttemberg state election and the 2026 Rhineland-Palatinate state election. In September 2026, 13 of the 15 BSW members of the Landtag of Thuringia, as well as the entire state executive committee, left the party (and have since regrouped into two parties: Your Vote Counts and Thรผringen.Gerecht) in protest of increased public pressure from Wagenknecht to end its participation in the Voigt cabinet.
This also came days before the 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election in which Wagenknecht advocated for the party, should it enter that Landtag, to support an independent Minister-President and end its participation in the firewall policy regarding the AfD. BSW ended up winning five seats in Saxony-Anhalt.
Intra-party structure
The BSW has a unique organisation compared to other parties in Germany. Compared to its electoral performance, it has a small and intentionally limited membership base. Unlike other parties, BSW distinguishes between full members and "registered supporters". Applicants for membership must be vouched for by an existing member, and all applications must be approved by the party's federal executive board.
The membership was initially capped at 450, most of them being close associates of Wagenknecht and party functionaries with the aim to build the party. In March 2024, the party had 17,000 registered supporters, 8,000 applications for membership, and 500 full members. The party aimed to have "no more than" 1,000 members by the end of the year, and only around 2,000 by the 2025 German federal election.
At that time, Wagenknecht explained: "We just make sure that no one comes in who doesn't share our program or who would appear destructive and chaotic."
Journalists were barred from the founding conferences of the state associations in Lower Saxony and Bremen.
The first party executive elected in February 2024 is as follows:
State branches
Most current state parliaments have 5 year terms and had held their last election before BSW state branches were founded or able to fulfill requirements. Unless members defected to BSW, BSW is not represented. For the state elections the BSW participated in since 2024, see Sahra_Wagenknecht_Alliance#State_parliaments_(Landtage)