Sahra Wagenknecht, arch-contrarian and disruptor of German politics, may be about to throw one more wrench in the political machine.

On Monday morning, it emerged that her self-named party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), founded last year following an acrimonious divorce from the socialist Left Party, had fallen agonizingly short of the 5% threshold for entering the Bundestag — 13,435 votes short, to be exact.

Those missing votes could be momentous for Germany's political future: If the BSW had entered parliament after all, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 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  Sunday's election nightwas over, BSW politicians were already on social media raising questions about the validity of 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." She pointed out that many of the 230,000 registered voters living abroad had failed to receive their ballots papers in time.

How to contest a German election result

Any German citizen is entitled to challenge an election result, and there are typically dozens of challenges after every election. However, few make it past the Bundestag's election review commission, which comprises parliamentarians from each party and is obliged to respond to all submissions.

To invalidate the results of a Bundestag election, the commission must find an error that violates election law or the constitution, and that error must impact the distribution of seats in the Bundestag. If those conditions are met, the procedure could theoretically go all the way to the Constitutional Court.

Some independent observers did express concerns that because the election had to be hastily brought forward due to the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition, some voters abroad might not get their ballots in time. But legal experts are doubtful that this will provide a strong enough argument for the BSW.

Where did the BSW go wrong?

But whether or not the BSW enters parliament via the courts after all, 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 its most recognized figure, she decimated the party's ranks 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, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has grown particularly strong.

For their part, many of Wagenknecht's party colleagues had become frustrated at how much Wagenknecht's media presence and the in-fighting she caused had come to dominate the public discourse about the party. The damage was evident in opinion polls.

Then, in September 2024, the BSW celebrated three successful regional election results in eastern Germany, taking 10%-15% of the vote in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. 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 set to cruise into the new federal parliament.

But a few short months later, the BSW's momentum had petered out. At Monday's press conference, a typically defiant 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."

Political analysts have a different take: The party's main problem was that it lost the issue that had become most closely associated with it: Making peace in Ukraine.

"I think it had a lot to do with the international developments: The intervention of the US in the war in Ukraine 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 (which Wagenknecht claimed had been overblown in the press) 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 on Sunday.

That should have been a surprise, considering that the two parties shared many of the same positions. Indeed, during last year's state election campaigns in eastern Germany, 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 a study of the BSW's voter potential 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 added, are much more likely to switch back and forth.

In the aftermath of Sunday's vote, a slightly euphoric Left Party co-leader Jan van Aken offered a brutal prediction, dismissing the BSW as a "temporary phenomenon."

"We won't remember them in two or three years," he told public broadcaster ARD.

That seems unlikely, given the BSW's position in two state governments, and Wagenknecht's determination, reiterated on Monday, to continue in her post. There is also a state election in Saxony-Anhalt next year, where the BSW got its best result (11%) last Sunday.

"There are certainly possibilities to regenerate and find new strength," Thomeczek concluded. "But they will have to find some new issues." 

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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