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BERLIN — An iconic figure of Germany’s far left is extending a hand to the surging far right in an effort to bring down the mainstream parties governing the country.
Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW, the populist-left party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht — formerly a member of East Germany’s ruling communist party and one of the country’s best-known politicians — says it is prepared to work with the far-right Alternative for Germany to defeat the establishment they both rail against.
The offer to break the so-called firewall that keeps other parties from working with the far right is at least in part intended to bolster Wagenknecht’s own party as it tries to peel away AfD voters, and it potentially augurs the birth of a radical, left-right alliance in eastern Germany, where distrust of the centrist parties that have long governed is more widespread than in the West of the country.
BSW “has criticized the ‘firewall’ against the AfD from the very beginning,” the leaders of Wagenknecht’s party wrote in a letter to the far-right party’s national leaders dated June 26. “It is undemocratic and does not solve any problems.”
