Bluesky

In late January 2025, a month before the German federal elections, a little-known 36-year-old politician took to the Reichstag’s central podium and ignited a movement. Heidi Reichinnek had been co-leader of Die Linke for a few weeks, and until that moment, her leftist party had been written off. The elections were expected to mark Die Linke’s collapse.

For weeks, the presumptive next chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, had been threatening to put forward a hard-line immigration resolution “regardless of who supports it,” suggesting that he would break a long-standing taboo by collaborating with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The proposal followed a string of violent holiday-season attacks by former asylum seekers.

Reichinnek had been steadily speaking out against the bill on social media, but her speech in Parliament was a crescendo.

Pounding her fist on the lectern, she declared, “We are the firewall” against the far right. Throughout her speech, Merz smirked as she appealed to Die Linke’s fellow progressive parties. “To the SPD and Greens: Rule out a coalition with this union. It will only harm you. But I also say to the people out there: Don’t give up but fight back, resist fascism,” Reichinnek intoned as she closed her remarks. “To the barricades!”

Her speech went viral, getting around 6.5 million views on TikTok, and was shared almost 30 million times across social-media platforms. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets in protest, chanting, “We are the firewall!” The tagline from her speech became the slogan for a movement against the AfD and the centrist German government’s willingness to accommodate its demands.

Although Merz still became chancellor, Reichinnek’s party made a shocking return from the dead. Before the speech, Die Linke had been projected to garner less than 3 percent of the vote in the federal elections—below the 5 percent needed to enter Parliament. In the end, Die Linke got nearly 9 percent. It was the most popular party in Berlin and among young people: 34 percent of women voters under 25 voted for Die Linke, more than double the total for any other party.

Since then, support for Die Linke has continued to climb, and it is now tied with the Greens as Germany’s fourth-largest party, behind the AfD and the current ruling coalition partners, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In just a few months, Reichinnek became one of the most recognizable voices in German politics, and her star keeps rising. But while her party has grown, the AfD has grown even faster. In the federal election, the AfD saw its best-­ever results, coming in at over 20 percent, and now the party has hit nearly 26 percent in the polls, surpassing the CDU as the most popular party in Germany.

Reichinnek finds herself in a position where she must build up not only her own party but, if Germany is to avoid a far-right takeover, a broader progressive movement as well.

Just hours after her speech in Parliament, Reichinnek headed to a packed hall in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s hipster district. The lights were low, and the music blaring. The social-media feeds of the 700 or so mostly young Berliners in attendance had been lighting up with messages from the party for weeks.

To the tune of Taylor Swift’s “…Ready for It?” and thunderous applause, Reichinnek and her party co-chair, Ines Schwerdtner, danced their way through the crowd and onto the stage. Schwerdtner, like Reichinnek, is young. Now 36, she entered politics after working as the editor in chief of Jacobin magazine in Germany. Photographers gathered to take pictures as the pair sauntered in, all smiles, good vibes, and bright-red lipstick. The evening’s moderator, a gynecologist and queer feminist Instagram influencer known as @Gynäkollege, joked to the audience, “I wish it was always like that when I show up.”

The excitement was a surprise—and a sign of things to come. “Heidi had been writing to me for around two weeks, asking if we should do something together, and I said, ‘Sure, we can meet in a pub with maybe 20 or 30 people,’” Schwerdtner said onstage. “But that escalated quickly, and now we’re here with all of you.”

“The left is back,” Reichinnek told the crowd. “And we have so much we need to do.”

It’s Friday afternoon, a time when the offices of the Bundestag, which sits across the River Spree from the glass dome of the Reichstag, are usually quiet. Most members of Parliament have already left for their home districts, but Reichinnek is still around. Dressed in leggings and a gray sweatshirt, she’s ready for her train home to Osnabrück, four hours west of Berlin. More than nine months after the speech that shot her to fame and into the Bundestag, she has settled into a routine.

“I just hope there are no big delays on the train,” she says with a laugh. The slowdowns on Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s beleaguered federally owned rail system, have become a meme­able national embarrassment, and Reich­innek provocatively argues that it should cease operating as a for-profit company and become a public service.

In a TikTok video that racked up nearly 80,000 likes and 1,200 comments, Reichinnek lays out the Deutsche Bahn’s myriad problems and bemoans that its CEO earns €2.24 million a year. “We must nationalize the rail. And until that happens, I have another idea,” she says in the video. “The head of the Deutsche Bahn and the transportation minister will take no more domestic flights, no more service cars. They will have to make all of their appointments with the Deutsche Bahn. Just like you. And just like me.”

If German politics had been a study in technocratic subtlety under Angela Merkel’s long reign and the much shorter tenure of her successor, Olaf Scholz, then Reichinnek is offering Germany a new course curriculum. Her policy proposals are bold and bluntly delivered. Her arms are covered in tattoos, her hair deep red, and her speaking style is so rapid that TV viewers have called the networks to complain. She is a whirlwind of energy—a savior of the left, a villain for the center and the right.

On this evening in the nearly empty Bundestag, her sleeves are rolled up, exposing a tattoo of the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, along with the quote “Your ‘Order’ is built on sand. The revolution says: I was, I am, I will be.” Among other tattoos higher up on her arm is an image of Nefertiti in a gas mask, inspired by her time as a student of Middle Eastern politics living in Cairo during the Arab Spring.

Reichinnek is bubbly, but her smile turns steely when she speaks about the stakes of the moment. “The AfD is growing stronger, which is alarming,” she tells me. “But I see people standing their ground, saying that this is not how they want the country to end.”

Her office is spare, save for a small video studio set up in the corner, a reminder that many of her voters meet her through a screen. Unlike potential political corollaries in the United States like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani, both of whom came to national prominence via social media but represent local constituencies in a winner-take-all system, Reichinnek is a federal representative elected through proportional representation. More like a national delegate than a local representative, she can lead her party in Parliament without holding a direct district seat—a feature of Germany’s mixed electoral system that favors coalition-building over servicing local voters.

That doesn’t stop her from connecting with the grass roots, she insists: “I’m going from door to door knocking, asking, ‘Hey, can I help you? We are from Die Linke. This is what we do.’” Inspired by activism in the United States and coupled with an aggressive social-media campaign, Die Linke managed to knock on 600,000 doors across the country.

But grassroots campaigning has its limits in Germany, where door-knocking is not a political norm. In Reichinnek’s home district of Osnabrück, for example, the chancellor’s party, the CDU, dominates, followed by its federal coalition partner, the SPD. Die Linke trails each of these parties by more than 20 points, hovering at around 11 percent of local support, which is relatively strong for the party in western Germany, where Die Linke has struggled to gain a foothold.

That struggle owes much to history. In western Germany, Die Linke still carries the stigma of its roots in the former East Germany’s ruling socialist party, even after it merged with a splinter party from the Social Democrats and rebranded itself in 2007.

Despite her East German roots, Reichinnek is a child of the reunified Germany. Born in 1988 in the small town of Merseburg, she grew up in a working-class family that attended church, which was a highly surveilled and marginalized institution in the German Democratic Republic. Her mother was a chemical technician, and her father was an electrician at the Buna-Werke complex in Schkopau, a synthetic-rubber plant. After the collapse of East Germany in 1989–90, it eventually became a subsidiary of the US-based Dow Chemicals. Both of her parents, like many East Germans, embraced the end of the socialist regime. The narrative of her childhood was that reunification was a good thing.

“I was very fortunate that my parents didn’t become unemployed after the fall of the Wall,” Reichinnek said during a podcast produced by the newspaper Die Zeit. (The show ends only when the interviewee has decided that “all has been said,” and her interview lasted for nearly eight hours.) “I always had that family support. That was also a political impetus for me: I wanted people who weren’t so fortunate to still be supported. This requires a strong welfare state. This requires public services and social justice.”

Ultimately, the forces that shaped Reichinnek’s politics are not specific to any one place. Like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, she belongs to a generation molded as much by global upheavals as by national and local ones. For her, economic precarity, mass migration, and democratic crises are transnational phenomena.

At the University of Halle, she studied Middle Eastern politics before earning a master’s degree at Marburg University and spending a semester in Cairo during the Arab Spring. Reichinnek joined Die Linke in September 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, while she was teaching German to newly arrived refugees. Within two years, she was on the Osnabrück City Council and serving as the state spokesperson for the official youth organization of Die Linke in Lower Saxony.

In 2019, at the age of 30, she was elected as party chair for the state, winning more than 86 percent of the delegate votes and becoming the youngest person to hold the position. If Reichinnek’s world­view reflects the transnational left of her generation, the party she inherited was struggling to reconcile its East German origins with a new political landscape defined by migration, climate change, and the online left. By the time she was elected to lead Die Linke in November 2024, the party comprised elderly communists and a smattering of young Jacobin readers—and was polling at historic lows.

In large part, this was caused by the departure of its star, Sahra Wagenknecht, the year before. A die-hard heir of East German socialism, she had joined the GDR’s Communist Party just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, hoping to prevent the state from collapsing because of what she called “counter­revolutionary forces.” Wagenknecht thrilled loyalists and infuriated her critics, who saw only an unreformed nostalgia for authoritarianism.

By 2015, as the AfD began to gain ground on an anti-­immigrant platform, Wagenknecht joined its opposition to then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Willkommenskultur, calling Merkel’s “we can do it” stance on immigration “flippant” and “reckless.” The criticism from within Die Linke of her calls for stricter asylum laws was fierce. Wagenknecht’s protectionist populism divided Die Linke, and in 2023, she broke away, forming her own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), and taking with her much of Die Linke’s devoted eastern base.

Wagenknecht’s departure left Die Linke alone among Germany’s major parties in its unequivocal defense of asylum rights. While the CDU, SPD, BSW, and AfD called for tighter immigration controls—even the Greens compromised as part of the governing coalition that collapsed in late 2024—Die Linke drew a firm pro-migrant, anti-fascist line.

With Reichinnek as its most prominent leader, Die Linke has become the definitive voice of inclusive politics, championing queer voters as well as immigrants. But if you listen to Reichinnek’s speeches, appearances, TikToks, and podcasts, you won’t find much discussion about specific policies. The party does offer concrete demands—federally legalized rent-cap legislation and a higher federal minimum wage—but these proposals function more as a political direction than as a legislative agenda. There is little appetite, internally or externally, for the politicking that could build the necessary momentum to make such policies viable.

“When Sahra left, we could start anew,” Reichinnek said in November. “And we said that we would let no one on the inside or outside of the party destroy what we have built.”

That does not mean that Die Linke’s strategy has been without its successes. Reichinnek’s viral January speech played a major role in blocking Merz’s resolution calling for a “five-point plan” to dramatically restrict immigration. She has also been instrumental in pushing the conversation on Israel to the left. Die Linke was the first party to demand the immediate halt of weapons deliveries to Israel. Like all other major parties, Die Linke has affirmed Israel’s right to exist, but it’s also one of the few voices to criticize the Israeli government—a radical position in a country whose anxiety over antisemitism has translated to such staunch support for Israel that it was famously referred to by Merkel as Germany’s Staatsräson (“state reason”). In August, when Germany announced that it would suspend weapons exports for use in Gaza, it marked a shift that had long been demanded by Die Linke and amplified by Reichinnek—a rare alignment between outsider pressure and government action. The suspension, however, was lifted by November 2025.

While immigration helped define the party after Wagen­knecht decamped, this new version of Die Linke has been keen to remain focused on rent, wages, and taxing the rich. “All the other parties were talking about immigration, but we were talking about rent,” Reichinnek said in November. “Anyone who wanted to talk about anything other than immigration, they came to us.”

As a way to take up the issue, the party released two apps to help people assess whether they were being overcharged. Although these apps are helpful as a resource for anyone who feels they pay too much for basic living costs, they work best in major cities but fail to reach the many rural Germans who are flocking to the AfD.

Without greater parliamentary pull, which can be achieved either by gaining more seats or by forming coalitions with other parties, Die Linke’s power is oppositional, not executive­—the party is large enough to jam the machine, but not to steer it. It can claim few, if any, direct legislative wins.

Parliamentary systems like the one built in Germany after World War II are designed to limit the rise of charismatic leaders and encourage coalitional deal-making. Yet Die Linke is thriving not only by refusing to compromise its values but by rejecting the system itself. After the “Traffic Light” coalition—made up of the SPD, the Greens, and the centrist Free Democrats—collapsed in 2024 amid infighting, the politics of measured deliberation between parties no longer seemed to work. Die Linke has capitalized on this dysfunction. But anger at the center has been unevenly distributed: While many progressives drifted from the Greens or SPD to Die Linke, far more voters moved to the AfD, including many from Die Linke’s old eastern base.

Die Linke’s refusal to bend the knee, then, is both its strength and its curse. By positioning itself as morally unyielding, it offers a political home for those who are disillusioned by the deals that centrist and progressive parties have made to remain part of a governing coalition. It also means that, while “Red-Red-Green” coalitions can work at the municipal level, at the federal level the “pragmatic left” parties like the SPD and the Greens essentially view Die Linke as unfit to govern and exclude it from coalition negotiations.

As much as Reichinnek despises the right, much of her disdain is reserved for centrist progressives. When I asked her if she would work with other leftist parties, she laughed. Die Linke is Germany’s only leftist party, she said, with the others being left of center, not truly on the left. “There is a possibility of progressive politics, and of course, I want my party to grow stronger, but it is not helping if, at the same time, the Greens and the SPD are getting weaker,” she said. “The SPD, they need to get their shit together; they need to think about what they want to show for themselves in this coalition,” she added, pointing to the SPD’s campaign promise for higher minimum wages but its inability to keep such promises when the CDU rejects them.

Her reputation for acid-tongued criticism of other parties, including other progressives, has left her with numerous enemies and not many allies. Her comments angered conservative Chancellor Merz to such a degree that he and his governing party, the CDU, led an effort to block Reichinnek from taking a seat on the parliamentary committee that oversees intelligence agencies. In response, Sören Pellmann, the co-leader with Reichinnek of Die Linke’s parliamentary group, told reporters, “It is questionable how the [CDU] intends to secure two-thirds majorities without Die Linke in the future.”

Being too small to govern but also too popular for the other parties to ignore allows Die Linke to make demands without apology. Reichinnek cannot yet write the laws she wants, but she and her colleagues can stop the ones she doesn’t. In a moment when people are weary of technocrats and half measures, obstruction can read as conviction—and, for now, conviction looks like leadership.

The biggest danger to Germany, however, is not the centrist parties or the conservative CDU—it’s the rapid growth of the AfD. In November, Reichinnek said that Die Linke ultimately needed to “broaden the whole left spectrum.” There are Nazis among AfD voters, she explained, and “there’s barely anything you can do but contain them.” But other AfD voters are simply dissatisfied with the status quo—especially many in the east whose lives became more precarious after unification. Reichinnek said it was important to tell people, “When you go and vote for a democratic party, they will better your life.” But, she added, “the problem is that for decades all the parties have been lying.”

“We say, ‘OK, people are angry, and that’s OK’—I’m angry too,” she continued. “I wouldn’t be a part of the left party if I weren’t angry about something, but I want to use this anger to create something positive. And that’s what separates us from the right-wing party. They want just more anger, more hate. They want to exclude people, and we want to include them. We want to change something, and we want to show them there is hope.”

The 2025 federal election was the first time in Die Linke’s history that young people played a decisive role in the party’s success at the polls. After reunification, the party was predominantly made up of former functionaries, army and police officers, and state security officials. This has fundamentally changed. Even as Die Linke launched “Mission Silberlocke”­—a campaign fronted by three “silver-haired” party elders to secure key constituencies in the 2024 federal election—Reichinnek became the face of the party’s revival.

“I came to Heidi in 2021 and told her I would make her like Taylor Swift,” said Felix Schulz, Reichinnek’s social-media director. “‘I will get you an army of teenagers,’ I told her. Heidi kind of scoffed at that and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

A lanky, chain-smoking 33-year-old with tattoos and a mop of red hair, Schulz matches Reichinnek’s sardonic energy and disregard for dusty formal politics. With a wink, he called himself Reichinnek’s “minister of propaganda.” Sitting in the courtyard of Die Linke’s headquarters, Schulz explained that the goal of Reichinnek’s messaging is to reach as many young people as possible.

“We were continually losing members. We had a big base in the former east with predominantly older voters who kept dying on us,” Schulz said. “We needed to reach young women in particular, and so we needed to be on the platforms where women were.”

The strategy worked. But for a party that insists it is about class, not identity, there is a tension in building so much of its appeal around a single figure and a shared aesthetic. Bead bracelets, memes, and Taylor Swift–coded inside jokes bind young supporters to Reichinnek personally. Whether that attachment can survive the compromises that governing would require is a question the party has not yet had to answer.

Above all, Schulz explained, the party wants to focus on how the AfD harms the working class. “We can often reach people by talking about what parties like the AfD actually offer in terms of social policy, in labor policy.”

But given its unwavering stances, I wondered, is Die Linke a party of morals?

“No, I don’t think politics is the place for morals,” Schulz said. “If we were to say that, we would be the Green Party. We’re not. We’re the party for people who go through economic hardships. We are the party of disenfranchised people.”

The result is a strange duality. Outwardly, Die Linke presents itself as the moral firewall of the republic; internally, its own strategists insist that it’s not in the morality business at all, but in the business of material interests.

In Reichinnek’s first TikTok video in late 2021, grainy and with scratchy sound, she speaks slowly and clearly—a far cry from the breakneck speed with which she speaks in her more recent videos. Some of the videos are like blooper reels­—you can hear Schulz joking in the background—which lends a casual quality to her profile. While many of her videos show her delivering a spirited rebuttal or speech in the Bundestag, in most of her videos she speaks directly to the camera.

“She’s a youth worker—she knows how to talk to young people. She knows how to talk to disenfranchised people,” Schulz said. “Heidi just works in short-form video.”

They also “try to make all of her videos with language that can be understood at a fifth-grade level,” he added.

This is in stark contrast to Wagenknecht, who cultivated a sleek intellectual image and a signature polished look: a jacket with padded shoulders, a knee-length skirt, and pumps.

Reichinnek is much messier. Schulz likes to talk about her appeal as a combination of “freak, cheat, and familiar.”

She is a “freak” for her tattoos, the speed with which she talks, her love of heavy metal, and her informal, often mildly expletive-laden and freestyled speeches in Parliament. She is a “cheat” because, unlike many other politicians, she does not come from law or the private sector but from the world of social work, assisting refugees and young people. And she’s “familiar” because of how well she’s cultivated an aura of accessibility.

Reichinnek’s appeal also taps into something far beyond German politics. From Washington, DC, to Berlin, as old parties weaken and social media turns politics into performance, familiar figures appear: the strongman, yes, but also the charismatic young socialist. Reichinnek is a local expression of an emerging global type, and she faces the same dilemma that confronts members of the contemporary left elsewhere. She must wrestle with how a left party can reconcile its identity as both a protest movement and a political vehicle. The question for Reichinnek and her peers is no longer only what the left wants. It is whether it intends to rule or merely to rage.

On a rainy July evening in Schwaan, a village of around 5,000 near Germany’s northern coast, Reichinnek arrived to support a Die Linke mayoral candidate. Around 50 people showed up—a respectable turnout given that only months earlier, the party worried it could not fill a pub in Berlin.

Lucy, 21 and Artur, 25, had taken the train from nearby Rostock just to see Reichinnek. “She is one of the first politicians who managed to convince me and who creates a politics that I feel fully a part of,” Artur said, thumbing a CD of his metal band that he hoped to slip her.

Teenagers hovered, waiting for selfies, with some offering handmade bead bracelets, a ritual borrowed from Taylor Swift fandom that has become a miniature youth movement in itself. Reichinnek wears them like talismans on the Bundestag floor and says the box in which she stores them is overflowing.

That day, she wore bracelets with green beads to match her green shirt that spelled out “Mad Woman,” “Enchanted,” and “Mietendeckel”—the rent-cap proposal at the center of Die Linke’s platform. She talked about building power from the ground up, not as a slogan but as the testimony of someone who once spent weekends in community centers, teaching German to new arrivals and convincing teens to get involved.

“I’m so excited that so many young people are joining, that they feel so seen, that I give them hope and power,” Reichinnek told me. “That’s all very cool, but on the other hand, there’s the question: Can I fulfill everything they hope from me? I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

The next afternoon, at a small riverside cookout, the mood was even gentler. Families milled around or sat with plates balanced on their laps. Reichinnek moved slowly through the crowd, her sleeves pushed up, chatting, laughing, listening. In a quiet moment, she tied her hair back and straightened her shoulders, as if bracing for combat.

In a village that most Germans will never visit, she briefly looked like what she wants politics to let her be: a local organizer trying to keep people from giving up on each other and a fighter ready to battle the far right, revive a party, and reassure a frightened generation. But whether Germany’s left can grow will help decide not only Die Linke’s future but how much space remains for the far right.

Standing on the bank of the river, she filmed a short video. Between takes, she thumbed one of her Swiftie bead bracelets. “I have one that says in German, ‘Do it for us.’ This is the one I always wear when I’m really frustrated,” Reichinnek said. “OK, I’ll do it for you.”