Die Linke Can’t Just Rely on Middle-Class Progressives
By Jonas Theil
November 6, 2024
Source: Jacobin
A new study explains an uncomfortable truth for Germany’s Die Linke: the left-wing party’s base is today highly educated and middle-income. While the party’s new leadership promises to rebuild working-class roots, it won’t be easy.
Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke is in decline, and many members understand that fundamental change is needed if it is even going to survive. Its weakness was brought into sharp relief during the 2021 elections, when it suffered a catastrophic defeat, falling under 5 percent support. If it weren’t for a few victories in local contests, Die Linke would have fallen out of the federal parliament, the Bundestag.
Since then, a number of analyses have been published by exponents of Die Linke’s various currents. In his contribution to this debate for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation — Die Linke’s think tank — Carsten Braband shows that the Left’s electorate hasn’t just shrunk, but has also moved decidedly into the middle class.
Die Linke’s defeats aren’t just due to unfavorable circumstances, but also the result of its own strategic orientation. By pointing out these facts, Braband is busting two of the myths that hinder efforts to rebuild the party.
Facts, Not Vibes
At the recent party conference in Halle, mentions of “class,” “class politics,” and “class perspective” earned roaring applause. But among the party intelligentsia, the question of whether Die Linke is still rooted in “class” is a hotly debated topic. This is at root an empirical question, so it’s surprising that there is such a slew of different answers. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this controversy is in large part due to a reliance on different datasets, but also because the different sides of this debate use very different conceptual frameworks.
Last year, one such party intellectual, Mario Candeias, prominently denied that Die Linke had lost its working-class base. He found that most people among the party’s potential electorate — those who say that they would consider casting their vote for Die Linke — identified as Angestellte (white-collar employees), rather than as workers. But this identification doesn’t reflect objective facts.
That people don’t identify as workers can be seen as an expression of the reality that most don’t see the world through Marxist categories. White-collar employees also aren’t a class in the sense of a group with objective interests in a relationship of exploitation. We might doubt how much claims about the relative weight of different groups within Die Linke’s potential electorate tell us about its absolute decline across different segments of society.
Braband takes a different approach in his paper. Instead of analyzing Die Linke’s electoral potential, he looks at its election results since 2009. He divides the electorate into a working class and a middle class, as well as into different occupational categories inside these classes: the working class is made up of manufacturing workers, service workers, and office workers, the middle class of “sociocultural semi-experts,” “sociocultural experts,” “technical (semi-)experts” as well as middle and upper management.
His findings are dramatic. In 2009, around 20 percent of manufacturing workers still cast their vote for Die Linke. In 2021, a mere 4 percent remained. Among service workers, the party’s share of the vote saw a massive decline of 12 percentage points. In contrast, Die Linke still made inroads with middle-class voters in 2017, despite stagnant election results overall. Among “sociocultural experts” they still made gains in 2021.
Because of its losses among working-class voters, says Braband, Die Linke’s electorate is more academic today than at any point in the past. What is also noticeable is that the party’s shrinking electorate is shifting more and more toward middle incomes. Between 2009 and 2021, Die Linke suffered its biggest losses in the lowest quartile of the income distribution.
What Goes Around Comes Around
These developments are a damning indictment of a socialist political party and have been downplayed within Die Linke. The insight that they made serious mistakes does not seem to have made its way to those that have been responsible for the party’s strategy in the past. Braband’s study now shows that certain positions Die Linke has taken have contributed to its defeats.
He identifies winning and losing positions among potential Die Linke voters in several policy areas as well as electoral trade-offs — positions that attract certain groups of voters but are off-putting to others. In terms of social policy, among potential Die Linke voters, as well as in the entire German electorate, there is broad support for substantially raising the minimum wage, for price controls on rent, electricity, and basic foodstuffs, and for raising taxes on the rich. No losing positions could be identified among Die Linke’s social-policy demands: only the blanket raising of unemployment benefits is a potential trade-off.
In contrast, positions supportive of immigration are largely met with rejection. Die Linke’s actual voters are much more open to making migrating to Germany easier than are voters in the party’s potential electorate. This indicates that its positions on migration policy are a reason why some potential voters end up not choosing Die Linke.
On the question of arms shipments to Ukraine, Die Linke’s electorate as well as potential voters are divided. But the data clearly shows that a majority of Green Party voters support such arms shipments, while a majority of people who vote for former Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party are against them.
That means there’s a clear electoral trade-off here as well. Yet current nonvoters are split on further weapons deliveries as well. What’s also interesting is that Die Linke’s electorate is by far the most critical of increased military spending. On this question, there is a large gap between the party itself and its potential voters, likely making its current stance a losing position.
In the debate on the study, the focus was understandably on the strategic implications of its findings, but some of the most common interpretations are in fact somewhat far-fetched. The left-wing paper ND, for example, claimed that Braband is suggesting that Die Linke should seek “partial concessions to the Right.” But what the study delivers, first and foremost, is empirical knowledge. The strategic implications of Braband’s study are themselves dependent on values, and the goals that Die Linke wants to pursue.
Don’t Get “Triggered”
One of the central findings of the book Triggerpunkte (lit. “trigger points” as in a PTSD trigger) by Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux, and Linus Westheuser, which received a lot of attention in German left discourse over the last year and to which Braband refers to at several points in his study, is that, contrary to a common claim, society is not getting more polarized. There is, in fact, a broad social consensus on many questions. Only certain “triggering” issues are sources of strong conflict. It is not unthinkable for Die Linke to avoid precisely these issues in its political communication, without making substantive concessions.
In the eyes of many leftists, rhetorically de-emphasizing issues like migration already means compromising your position, because they see the current rise of the far right and backsliding on the rights of asylum seekers primarily as discursive phenomena. If instead, you see them as a form of “punching down,” with causes on a more material level, a strategic focus on class interests could be a way to politically disarm the country’s lurch to the Right. In the past, many people have voted for Die Linke even while assessing themselves as being more conservative on migration than they perceived the party to be.
Above all, the existence of electoral trade-offs means that if Die Linke wants to be successful again, it has to stray from its “all of the above” approach. If a potential turncoat voter from the Green Party, who is attracted by a poster with a pro-immigrant message is put off by one against weapons shipments at the next streetlight, and the reverse is true for a Wagenknecht sympathizer, the end result can only be a debacle at the polls. If Die Linke speaks to the material interests that unite the working class and avoids “trigger points” that divide it, this can be a way to halt the party’s decline.
The new party chairs of Die Linke, Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, seem to be aware of this. Both have come out in favor of a stronger political focus, which would center a small number of key economic demands. Political focus could also be a way to solve Die Linke’s much decried factional squabbling. In terms of labor, rents, and the welfare state, the party has always been fairly united. But this is easier said than done. As long as Die Linke has few roots in working-class neighborhoods and in workforces, it can only affect change through periodic interventions into political discourse. And those only get attention if they touch on precisely the “triggers” that they might better avoid.
Die Linke doesn’t just have to engage in politics for its class, but from within it. This will take years of patient work and a fundamentally different style of politics. Whether the party can manage that continues to be uncertain. But with the party conference at Halle, it has set out a turn in the right direction.
A new study explains an uncomfortable truth for Germany’s Die Linke: the left-wing party’s base is today highly educated and middle-income. While the party’s new leadership promises to rebuild working-class roots, it won’t be easy.
Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke is in decline, and many members understand that fundamental change is needed if it is even going to survive. Its weakness was brought into sharp relief during the 2021 elections, when it suffered a catastrophic defeat, falling under 5 percent support. If it weren’t for a few victories in local contests, Die Linke would have fallen out of the federal parliament, the Bundestag.
Since then, a number of analyses have been published by exponents of Die Linke’s various currents. In his contribution to this debate for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation — Die Linke’s think tank — Carsten Braband shows that the Left’s electorate hasn’t just shrunk, but has also moved decidedly into the middle class.
Die Linke’s defeats aren’t just due to unfavorable circumstances, but also the result of its own strategic orientation. By pointing out these facts, Braband is busting two of the myths that hinder efforts to rebuild the party.
Facts, Not Vibes
At the recent party conference in Halle, mentions of “class,” “class politics,” and “class perspective” earned roaring applause. But among the party intelligentsia, the question of whether Die Linke is still rooted in “class” is a hotly debated topic. This is at root an empirical question, so it’s surprising that there is such a slew of different answers. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this controversy is in large part due to a reliance on different datasets, but also because the different sides of this debate use very different conceptual frameworks.
Last year, one such party intellectual, Mario Candeias, prominently denied that Die Linke had lost its working-class base. He found that most people among the party’s potential electorate — those who say that they would consider casting their vote for Die Linke — identified as Angestellte (white-collar employees), rather than as workers. But this identification doesn’t reflect objective facts.
That people don’t identify as workers can be seen as an expression of the reality that most don’t see the world through Marxist categories. White-collar employees also aren’t a class in the sense of a group with objective interests in a relationship of exploitation. We might doubt how much claims about the relative weight of different groups within Die Linke’s potential electorate tell us about its absolute decline across different segments of society.
Braband takes a different approach in his paper. Instead of analyzing Die Linke’s electoral potential, he looks at its election results since 2009. He divides the electorate into a working class and a middle class, as well as into different occupational categories inside these classes: the working class is made up of manufacturing workers, service workers, and office workers, the middle class of “sociocultural semi-experts,” “sociocultural experts,” “technical (semi-)experts” as well as middle and upper management.
His findings are dramatic. In 2009, around 20 percent of manufacturing workers still cast their vote for Die Linke. In 2021, a mere 4 percent remained. Among service workers, the party’s share of the vote saw a massive decline of 12 percentage points. In contrast, Die Linke still made inroads with middle-class voters in 2017, despite stagnant election results overall. Among “sociocultural experts” they still made gains in 2021.
Because of its losses among working-class voters, says Braband, Die Linke’s electorate is more academic today than at any point in the past. What is also noticeable is that the party’s shrinking electorate is shifting more and more toward middle incomes. Between 2009 and 2021, Die Linke suffered its biggest losses in the lowest quartile of the income distribution.
What Goes Around Comes Around
These developments are a damning indictment of a socialist political party and have been downplayed within Die Linke. The insight that they made serious mistakes does not seem to have made its way to those that have been responsible for the party’s strategy in the past. Braband’s study now shows that certain positions Die Linke has taken have contributed to its defeats.
He identifies winning and losing positions among potential Die Linke voters in several policy areas as well as electoral trade-offs — positions that attract certain groups of voters but are off-putting to others. In terms of social policy, among potential Die Linke voters, as well as in the entire German electorate, there is broad support for substantially raising the minimum wage, for price controls on rent, electricity, and basic foodstuffs, and for raising taxes on the rich. No losing positions could be identified among Die Linke’s social-policy demands: only the blanket raising of unemployment benefits is a potential trade-off.
In contrast, positions supportive of immigration are largely met with rejection. Die Linke’s actual voters are much more open to making migrating to Germany easier than are voters in the party’s potential electorate. This indicates that its positions on migration policy are a reason why some potential voters end up not choosing Die Linke.
On the question of arms shipments to Ukraine, Die Linke’s electorate as well as potential voters are divided. But the data clearly shows that a majority of Green Party voters support such arms shipments, while a majority of people who vote for former Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party are against them.
That means there’s a clear electoral trade-off here as well. Yet current nonvoters are split on further weapons deliveries as well. What’s also interesting is that Die Linke’s electorate is by far the most critical of increased military spending. On this question, there is a large gap between the party itself and its potential voters, likely making its current stance a losing position.
In the debate on the study, the focus was understandably on the strategic implications of its findings, but some of the most common interpretations are in fact somewhat far-fetched. The left-wing paper ND, for example, claimed that Braband is suggesting that Die Linke should seek “partial concessions to the Right.” But what the study delivers, first and foremost, is empirical knowledge. The strategic implications of Braband’s study are themselves dependent on values, and the goals that Die Linke wants to pursue.
Don’t Get “Triggered”
One of the central findings of the book Triggerpunkte (lit. “trigger points” as in a PTSD trigger) by Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux, and Linus Westheuser, which received a lot of attention in German left discourse over the last year and to which Braband refers to at several points in his study, is that, contrary to a common claim, society is not getting more polarized. There is, in fact, a broad social consensus on many questions. Only certain “triggering” issues are sources of strong conflict. It is not unthinkable for Die Linke to avoid precisely these issues in its political communication, without making substantive concessions.
In the eyes of many leftists, rhetorically de-emphasizing issues like migration already means compromising your position, because they see the current rise of the far right and backsliding on the rights of asylum seekers primarily as discursive phenomena. If instead, you see them as a form of “punching down,” with causes on a more material level, a strategic focus on class interests could be a way to politically disarm the country’s lurch to the Right. In the past, many people have voted for Die Linke even while assessing themselves as being more conservative on migration than they perceived the party to be.
Above all, the existence of electoral trade-offs means that if Die Linke wants to be successful again, it has to stray from its “all of the above” approach. If a potential turncoat voter from the Green Party, who is attracted by a poster with a pro-immigrant message is put off by one against weapons shipments at the next streetlight, and the reverse is true for a Wagenknecht sympathizer, the end result can only be a debacle at the polls. If Die Linke speaks to the material interests that unite the working class and avoids “trigger points” that divide it, this can be a way to halt the party’s decline.
The new party chairs of Die Linke, Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, seem to be aware of this. Both have come out in favor of a stronger political focus, which would center a small number of key economic demands. Political focus could also be a way to solve Die Linke’s much decried factional squabbling. In terms of labor, rents, and the welfare state, the party has always been fairly united. But this is easier said than done. As long as Die Linke has few roots in working-class neighborhoods and in workforces, it can only affect change through periodic interventions into political discourse. And those only get attention if they touch on precisely the “triggers” that they might better avoid.
Die Linke doesn’t just have to engage in politics for its class, but from within it. This will take years of patient work and a fundamentally different style of politics. Whether the party can manage that continues to be uncertain. But with the party conference at Halle, it has set out a turn in the right direction.
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