Sahra Wagenknecht is less a politician than an icon: a moving, speaking statue whose public appearances prompt fervour and fascination among her supporters.
Take Rudolstadt, a small town in eastern Germany, where a large crowd has packed into a small square.
For an hour, now, they have ignored the glaring sun and are waiting to bear witness.
To cheers she appears, slim, dark and watchful – a 55-year-old politician born half an hour away.
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“We feel so much support from people here,” says Wagenknecht, dubbed by observers as a populist “left-wing conservative”.
Clearly enjoying the home crowd, the politician first elected to parliament in 1991 is simultaneously a political veteran and a debutante.
Polls in advance of Sunday’s state elections in Thuringia and neighbouring Saxony show 15 and 20 per cent support respectively for her eponymous Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).
If the polling is accurate, the BSW could mark its first birthday next month by crowning two state governments and – so it hopes – change the course of the September 2025 federal election.
If the decade-old far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has put the cat among the political pigeons, with 30 per cent support and more in eastern Germany, the BSW is a dog chasing the cat – and the pigeons.
After sidelining the Left party, Wagenknecht’s old political home, goggle-eyed pollsters see the BSW pulling in eastern voters from every political grouping. Critics in Berlin see a looming populist danger for German democracy.
Back in Rudolstadt, the BSW leader praises eastern voters as “still able to think for themselves”.
In a swipe at the political mainstream, she says “people here are more sensitive to politicians who want to tell people what to think, to eat, which car to drive and which heating to use.”
She then makes a play for people who may have voted for AfD “out of anger or desperation”.
“That is not their responsibility,” she adds, “but of those who push politics over the heads of people – that is what endangers democracy.”
With a four-page political programme that is light on detail – no to lobbyists, yes to welfare – speakers at BSW events make direct appeals to emotion. One local candidate in Rudolstadt talks of a “feeling of helplessness”, another tells the crowd of his “feeling that something’s not right”.
So too Wagenknecht, who intersperses a long litany of Germany’s failings with emotive interjections: “crazy”, “outrageous”, “insane”, “fury”.
Most in the crowd nod along, but on the edge of the gathering, a middle-aged woman – who declines to give her name – snorts with laughter. “She a smart lady, she doesn’t want people to think,” she says. “Wagenknecht wants people to emote, to be outraged – and it works.”
Three decades after German unification, Thuringia, which was part of East Germany, is still a state in flux, but it is far from bleak. In Rudolstadt, for instance, unemployment (6.3 per cent) and average public pensions (€1,137) are near the national average.
In the current six-year funding term to 2027, Thuringia has secured more than €2 billion in EU support. Wise investment is visible in Rudolstadt and other towns and cities but nothing, it seems, can halt the decline of Thuringia’s many rural towns and villages.
For many here, the BSW appears an ideal protest vehicle to reject established parties without going full far-right.
Ask how the BSW will position itself vis-a-vis the AfD after Sunday’s state elections, Wagenknecht stays vague. She rejects the local AfD’s “extremist” leaders while dismissing as “failed” other parties’ “hysterical” arms-length approach to the far right.
With vague sources of financing and few members, the BSW remains a black box operated by Wagenknecht and her husband, the ex-Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine.
For political analyst Werner Patzelt, the BSW’s popularity – despite all the mystery – “shows just how disastrous the path of the established parties has been of late”.
Back in Rudolstadt, as the crowd begins to flag in the afternoon sun, Wagenknecht snaps them to attention again with one word: Waffen – weapons.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine is criminal, declares Wagenknecht, before raising the “huge bloodstains left across the globe” by US foreign policy.
After the US, Germany is Ukraine’s second-largest supplier of arms. To cheers from the Rudolstadt crowd, Wagenknecht decries “the German strategy of weapons, weapons, weapons; we need a diplomatic end to this war”.
Many in Germany predict this stance will decide Sunday’s result and be mainstream by the country’s federal election in a year’s time.
As Wagenknecht leaves the stage to cheers and a selfie session with supporters, local man Gerhard says he is “impressed by the complexity of her arguments”.
“Germany is not on Ukraine’s side at all in this war but on the side of the arms companies,” he says. “That approach will never bring peace.”