Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical Analysis

Thomeczek, J. Philipp Article — Published Version Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical Analysis Politische Vierteljahresschrift Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Thomeczek, J. Philipp (2024) : Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical Analysis, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, ISSN 1862-2860, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, Wiesbaden, Vol. 65, Iss. 3, pp. 535-552, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-024-00544-z This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/315570 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ RESEARCH NOTE https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-024-00544-z Politische Vierteljahresschrift (2024) 65:535–552 Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical Analysis J. Philipp Thomeczek Received: 24 January 2024 / Accepted: 24 April 2024 / Published online: 28 May 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Germany’s relatively stable party system faces a new left-authoritarian challenger: Sahra Wagenknecht’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party. First polls indicate that for the BSW, election results above 10% are within reach. While Wagenknecht’s positions in economic and cultural terms have already been discussed, this article elaborates on another highly relevant feature of Wagenknecht, namely her populist communication. Exploring Wagenknecht’s and BSW’s populist appeal helps us to understand why the party is said to also have potential among seemingly different voter groups coming from the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and far left Die Linke, which share high levels of populist attitudes. To analyse the role that populist communication plays for Wagenknecht and the BSW, this article combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis covers all speeches (10,000) and press releases (19,000) published by Die Linke members of Parliament (MPs; 2005–2023). The results show that Wagenknecht is the (former) Die Linke MP with the highest share of populist communication. Furthermore, she was also able to convince a group of populist MPs to join the BSW. The article closes with a qualitative analysis of BSW’s manifesto that reveals how populist framing plays a major role in this document, in which the political and economic elites are accused of working against the interest of “the majority”. Based on this analysis, the classification of the BSW as a populist party seems to be appropriate. Keywords Populism · Germany · BSW · Mixed methods · New parties J. Philipp Thomeczek Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, Universität Potsdam, August-Bebel-Straße 89, 14482 Potsdam, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] K 536 J. P. Thomeczek Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): links-konservativ – und populistisch? Eine empirische Einordnung Zusammenfassung Die langjährige Stabilität des deutschen Parteiensystems wird aktuell durch eine neue links-konservative Partei herausgefordert: Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Erste Umfragen deuten an, dass das BSW bundesweit bis zu 10% der Stimmen gewinnen könnte. Die Einordnung als links-konservativ oder in Anlehnung an die englische Literatur links-autoritär wurde bereits medial intensiv diskutiert. Weniger Beachtung hat bislang die populistische Kommunikation von Wagenknecht gefunden. Die populistische Ansprache durch das BSW kann bei der Beantwortung der Frage behilflich sein, warum das BSW scheinbar gegensätzliche Gruppen wie Wähler:innen der Linken und der AfD gleichzeitig ansprechen kann, da populistische Einstellungen unter den Wähler:innen beider Parteien weit verbreitet sind. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die Rolle der populistischen Kommunikation von Wagenknecht und dem BSW mithilfe qualitativer und quantitativer Methoden. Dazu wurden zunächst alle Reden (ca. 10.000) und alle Pressemitteilungen (ca. 19.000) aller Linken-Bundestagsabgeordneten der gesamten parlamentarischen Lebensdauer der Fraktion (2005–2023) untersucht. Die Ergebnisse dieser quantitativen Analyse zeigen, dass Wagenknecht unter den Linken-Abgeordneten mit Abstand am häufigsten populistische Kommunikationselemente einsetzte und sie ebenso in der Lage war, einige der populistischsten Abgeordneten zum BSWBeitritt zu überreden. Der Artikel schließt mit einer qualitativen Auswertung der populistischen Rhetorik im BSW-Parteiprogramm. Es wird deutlich, dass hier insbesondere die Kritik an der Politikund Wirtschaftselite eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Diese Elitenkritik wird mit einem starken Bevölkerungsbezug kombiniert, der beispielsweise in der Ansprache der „Mehrheit“ deutlich wird. Insgesamt erscheint damit die Klassifizierung als populistische Partei gerechtfertigt. Schlüsselwörter Populismus · Deutschland · BSW · Mixed Methods · Neue Parteien 1 Introduction After years of an increasingly difficult relationship with the Left Party (Die Linke), former co-faction leader Sahra Wagenknecht founded her own party in January 2024 under the name Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit (BSW; Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht—Reason and Fairness; Mudde 2024). Wagenknecht was immediately joined by several Die Linke politicians, including nine current members of the Bundestag (MPs; Tagesschau.de 2023).1In the following months, the former Die Linke Bundestag MPs Neu and De Masi also became BSW members (Herrmann and Slavik 2024; Schack 2023). 1Besides Wagenknecht, those were Amira Mohamed Ali, Christian Leye, Ali Al-Dailami, Sevim Dagdelen, Klaus Ernst, Andrej Hunko, Zaklin Nastic, Jessica Tatti, Alexander Ulrich (all MPs in the current Bundestag legislative period), and Sabine Zimmermann (former MP). K Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical... 537 As a (former) member of a relatively small party, one of the main puzzles around Wagenknecht is what the German electorate sees in her. She is one of the most popular politicians in Germany (Focus Online 2023), whereas her former party almost failed the 5% threshold at the last Bundestag elections. One possible explanation is that for many voters, Wagenknecht is a projection surface, as she never needed to make compromises in government. In this sense, the BSW includes aspects of a “purifier party” (Lucardie 2000). Public opinion data and first academic analyses show that Wagenknecht has strong potential among eastern Germans, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Die Linke voters, and those who are dissatisfied with the way politics works in Germany. Regarding policy preferences, she appeals to voters with immigration-sceptical, economically left, and culturally conservative attitudes (Ehni 2023; Wagner et al. 2023; Petersen 2024). The BSW already polls around 7% nationwide (Handesblatt 2024). However, in eastern German states such as Thuringia, the party is polling at almost 20% and could become the third strongest party (Kathe 2024). Nevertheless, it should be noted that the party has not competed in any election yet, which also explains the high volatility of BSW’s support. Why is Wagenknecht so much more popular than her former party? Her public statements and books indicate that she appeals to the “left-wing authoritarians” (Lefkofridi et al. 2014), namely voters who hold economically left positions but are culturally conservative. While Wagenknecht follows a clear left-wing economic agenda, emphasising issues such as social justice and redistribution (Wagenknecht 2023), she criticises Die Linke for being “too liberal” regarding immigration policies (Mudde 2024). This dissatisfaction was also the main motivation behind Aufstehen (“Get Up”), a short-lived social movement organised by Wagenknecht (Weisskircher 2018). References to left-authoritarianism are also found in BSW’s first manifesto (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht 2024). The party heavily criticises the government’s climate and immigration policies as a burden for crisis-ridden Germans. The BSW also speaks of a spreading “political authoritarianism” that “dictates people how to live, heat, think and speak.” So far, such positions were associated with the far-right AfD, which is why commentators and academics see a high potential for the BSW among AfD voters (Wagner et al. 2023; Wagner 2023; Petersen 2024). Regarding economic and welfare issues, the BSW criticises the growing social injustice and the power of digital multinationals. The party describes the taxation system as unfair. Besides cultural and economic issues, another important issue for potential BSW voters is foreign policy (Ehni 2023). The BSW demands peace negotiations to end the war between Ukraine and Russia and describes NATO and the United States as drivers of military conflicts. Sanctions against Russia are seen as harming Germany’s economy. Again, these are positions that have so far been associated with the AfD (Beltin et al. 2023). A recent publication shows that Wagenknecht is evaluated more positively among left-authoritarian voters in Germany compared to voters not holding such attitudes (Wagner et al. 2023). From a strategic point of view, appealing to these voters could be promising, as no party in Germany combines cultural conservativism with an economic left-wing stance (Hillen and Steiner 2020; Steiner and Hillen 2019, 2021). According to the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Bakker et al. 2019), there are K 538 J. P. Thomeczek several parties with a similar left-authoritarian profile in Europe. Examples are the Social Democratic Party in Romania (PSD), the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), and far-left parties such as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KS ˇ CM). Furthermore, a similar profile is found in the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland (Hillen and Steiner 2020, p. 344), which led the government for almost 20 years. Besides this left-authoritarian profile, there is an additional quality of Wagenknecht that could explain her popularity: her populist appeal. Academic and journalistic commentators regularly attach the label “populist” to her (Qvortrup 2018; Sevillano 2023). Although it is not possible to claim a causal relationship based on descriptive polling data, her populist rhetoric could explain why the BSW appeals to far-left Die Linke and far-right AfD voters at the same time (Petersen 2024; Wagner 2023). Since populist attitudes are common among voters of both parties (Loew and Faas 2019), they may play a role in explaining vote switching from these parties to the BSW. Communication research has shown how populist framing can work as a successful strategy to win over voters (Hameleers et al. 2018; Hameleers and Schmuck 2017). Such a strategy is especially promising for political newcomers, as the electoral successes of Donald Trump (Lacatus 2019), the Five Star Movement in Italy (Mosca and Tronconi 2019), and the Syriza party in Greece (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014) have shown. Since populist attitudes are widespread among voters (Akkerman et al. 2014), parties and politicians can reach large groups of society with populist rhetoric. Furthermore, since populist attitudes can compensate for the lack of programmatic congruence (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018), they can also help the BSW to appeal to voters outside the left-authoritarian quadrant. So far, no academic analysis has put the populism of Wagenknecht and the BSW into perspective. The following article aims to tackle this research gap by analysing how Wagenknecht’s level of populist rhetoric stands out within the group of her former colleagues from Die Linke. For this purpose, quantitative and qualitative methods are combined. The quantitative analysis covers all speeches (around 10,000) and press releases (around 19,000) published by Die Linke MPs during the faction’s lifetime (2005–2023). The results show that during these 18 years, Wagenknecht used populist rhetoric most frequently among all Die Linke MPs and was also able to convince a group of “populist” Die Linke politicians to join her new party, BSW. The article closes with a qualitative analysis of BSW’s party manifesto, in which the party pits the political and economic elites against the interests of the “hardworking majority.” The article is structured as follows. The next (second) section discusses the ideational approach of populism, which serves as a foundation for the analysis. The third section briefly summarises the history of Die Linke and Wageknecht’s role within the party, followed by a quantitative analysis of the press releases and parliamentary speeches by Die Linke MPs. This analysis is complemented by a qualitative analysis of populist communication in the BSW’s manifesto. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of the results and their implications. K Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical... 539 2 Populism: The Ideational Approach The following analysis builds on the ideational approach, which recently became the dominant approach in the empirical research of populism (Hawkins et al. 2018; Mudde 2017). This approach sees populism as a “unique set of ideas” (Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2018, p. 3). Populist ideas work as a mental map through which one can understand the political reality (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). One of the advantages of this approach is that it works as an umbrella for different perspectives, such as the (thin) ideological (Mudde 2004) or the communicational perspective. The latter, defined as the discursive communication of populist ideas (deVreeseetal.2018, p. 425), is the focus of this article. Populist ideas have two main nodal points: “the people” and “the elite” (Canovan 1981, p. 294; Rooduijn 2019, p. 363–364). Populists use a simplistic narrative in which “the good ordinary people” are oppressed by the “evil elite,” which works against the people’s interests (Hawkins et al. 2018, p. 3). Therefore, there is an antagonistic relationship between these two entities (Stanley 2008, p. 96), which is built on two core concepts: people-centrism and anti-elitism. For populists, “the people” forms the central nodal point, as the name (derived from the Latin word populus) suggests. One of the distinct characteristics of populism’s appeal is that it addresses “the people” as a whole and dismisses internal divisions by highlighting their homogeneity (Mudde 2004). However, the concept of the people is intentionally vague. The populist far-right defines “the people” mostly in ethnic terms (“people as nations”). Populists from the left typically use socioeconomic criteria (as in “the common people”) and focus their rhetorical attacks on the economic elite (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, pp. 501–503). 3 Die Linke, Wagenknecht, and Their Populism From a long-term perspective, Die Linke is the most successful and established far-left party in Germany. The party that was, until recently, the political home of Wagenknecht has an eventful past. Die Linke was founded in 2005 as the result of a merger between the East German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a far-left split-off from the Social Democrats, the Labour and Social Justice—The Electoral Alternative party (WASG; Olsen 2007). While there is consensus among academics that the PDS was classified as a left-wing populist party (Hartleb 2004; March and Mudde 2005), the classification of Die Linke is debated among scholars. In two recently published datasets, Die Linke is classified as a borderline case (Meijers and Zaslove 2020; Rooduijn et al. 2023). One of the main reasons for the difficulty around its classification is the considerable internal heterogeneity within the party. The split between the moderate and radical wings within Die Linke, which was already visible within the PDS (Koß and Hough 2006, p. 78), is well reflected at the level of subnational branches. In federal states where Die Linke is governing, the party uses much less populist communication than in states where the party is in opposition (Thomeczek 2023). Commentators have suggested that the party has become somewhat centrist in states K 540 J. P. Thomeczek such as Thuringia, where Die Linke has been leading the government since 2014 (Schwesinger 2019). On the contrary, there are also organisations within Die Linke, such as the Communist Platform (KPF), which are monitored by German authorities (Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat 2023, p. 158). There is little doubt that Wagenknecht was a crucial driver of Die Linke’s internal split, where she led the radical populist wing (Jesse 2022, p. 203). On Facebook and Twitter (now known as X), no other German politician uses populist rhetoric more frequently than Wagenknecht (see Supplementary Material in Gründl 2022). 4 Analysis: Populist Communication by Die Linke MPs, 2005–2023 The previous discussion leads to the expectation that Wagenknecht’s political language is strongly influenced by populist rhetoric. However, so far, the evidence for that is rather anecdotal. Furthermore, it is also an open question how populist she is compared to the other Die Linke MPs. The following section empirically tests this claim by analysing populist communication in the parliamentary speeches and press releases of Die Linke MPs published during the faction’s lifetime (2005–2023). Because Wagenknecht already convinced several Die Linke MPs to join her new political project, including faction leader Mohamed Ali (Tagesschau.de 2023), the analysis will focus not only on Wagenknecht’s rhetoric vis-à-vis Die Linke MPs but also on the other MPs who joined the BSW. For this purpose, all parliamentary speeches and press releases have been scraped from the website of Die Linke’s Bundestag faction (linksfraktion.de) using the R package “rvest.” The dataset includes documents published from when the party first competed for the Bundestag elections (September 2005) until December 2023. Currently, this dataset includes all speeches and press releases published by the Die Linke parliamentary faction: After the ten BSW MPs, including Wagenknecht herself, left Die Linke, the share of Die Linke MPs dropped below 5%, the threshold for parliamentary factions. Consequently, Die Linke had to dissolve its faction on December 6, 2023 (Deutsche Welle 2023). In total, more than 10,000 speeches and 19,000 press releases were analysed. Similar studies often only analyse one type of document (e.g., Breyer 2023; Thomeczek 2023; Rooduijn and Pauwels 2011). Analysing two different sources facilitates generalisation. The two text types cover a broad range of political discourse at the MP level and also provide relevant information for potential voters. Although voters may only rarely read press releases or speeches directly, they are informed about their content through mass media and social media. One other source may be social media data. However, leaving aside the growing problem of data accessibility, such data are not available for the full 18-year period: 1) social media sites only became mass-communication channels in the 2010s, 2) not all MPs have accounts, and 3) even if they do have accounts, MPs often delete them when they leave politics. For the analysis, the populism dictionary by Gründl (2022), which was developed based on an analysis of texts from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, was used, which consists of 238 terms. The dictionary is the currently most comprehensive dictionary project for the study of populism in German texts; it has been featured K Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical... 541 Fig. 1 Populist communication elements per 1000 tokens in press releases. Red colour: MP switched to BSW, blue colour:DieLinkeMPs K 542 J. P. Thomeczek in several recent publications (Breyer 2023;Thiele2022; Thomeczek 2023)andaddresses many of the shortcomings of previous populism dictionaries (Pauwels 2017; Rooduijn and Pauwels 2011). The greatest advancement is that it works based on multiword expressions. For example, instead of the word “party,” which could indicate anti-elitism but also neutral descriptions of political parties, “established party” and “party cartel” are included (see Supplementary Material in Gründl 2022 for the full list of terms). The dictionary results show high validity (e.g., Thomeczek 2023), something that was always a problem with previous populism dictionaries (Pauwels 2017). Furthermore, Breyer (2023, Supplementary Material A2) has shown that the correlation between manual coding and dictionary hits is high. Thiele (2022, p. 190) reports high reliability when comparing manual and dictionary coding (Krippendorff’s Alpha: 0.81). The following analysis was conducted with the R package “popdictR.” Short texts with less than 100 tokens have been removed as part of the data-cleaning process. The following press release by Wagenknecht (2011) shows an application of the dictionary. The two hits are marked in boldface. In the text, Wagenknecht shows strong anti-capitalist stances and describes the behaviour of economic elites (Wirtschaftseliten) as “irresponsible and immoral.” These economic elites are pitted against “the majority of the people” (Mehrheit der Menschen), who “provide the goods and services our society needs with their daily work” but are “demotivated by feudal capitalism.” Figure 1summarises the use of populist communication in press releases. The left plot displays the average number of populist communication elements (i.e., dictionary hits) per 1000 tokens2for Wagenkecht and the Die Linke MPs who joined her individually. Their populist communication is compared to the aggregated results for the other Die Linke MPs (blue bar). The figures provide evidence that Wagenknecht has been the populist spearhead of Die Linke, with more than three populist communication elements per 1000 tokens in an average press release. There are also other BSW MPs, namely Ulrich, Da˘ gdelen, and Ernst, who use populist rhetoric more frequently than those who did not join the BSW. It is also noteworthy that the “more populist” BSW members are generally more active (regarding the number of published press releases) than the MPs with lower populism scores. The score differences between BSW and non-BSW MPs are statistically significant at the 0.001 level.3Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that not all BSW MPs use populist rhetoric frequently in their press releases. Some BSW MPs, such as Mohamed Ali, Al-Dailami, and Zimmermann, use populist communication elements only rarely. In addition to press releases written by individual MPs, there are also press releases authored by multiple MPs. The right plot shows the effect of Wagenknecht’s (co-)authorship on populist rhetoric in press releases. While her level of populism is outstanding, press releases she co-authored also include more populist commu2Tokenisation refers to the process of processing raw texts into smaller analytical units, such as stems or words (Welbers et al. 2017, p. 246). In the following analysis, one token typically represents one word (compound nouns such as “e-mail” are also counted as one token). 1000 tokens are roughly equivalent to 1.5 pages of text. 3Pairwise t-test with Bonferroni adjustment. All tests were performed with the R package “psych.” K Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian—and Populist? An Empirical... 549 supply-side factors with demand-side explanations. Here, populist framing experiments have shown to be useful in other European contexts (Hameleers and Schmuck 2017; Hameleers et al. 2018). Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. 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