On a chilly autumnal evening last month, the Berliner Platz in the eastern German city of Cottbus was buzzing by the time Sahra Wagenknecht appeared. One activist, busy handing out leaflets promoting the latest maverick force to disrupt European politics, said she was there because Wagenknecht “understands people like us”. Anti-war banners were dotted around the square. One elderly woman proudly displayed a badge reading Omas für Frieden (grandmothers for peace).

Formed only last January, the eponymous Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has been collecting voters from across the political spectrum, although mainly from the left. An unscientific straw poll suggested much of the Cottbus audience had previously voted for the Social Democrats, or the Left party to which Wagenknecht used to belong, or not at all. Her stump speech checklisted blue-collar anxieties: the cost of living crisis, declining healthcare provision, a lack of access to good jobs and affordable housing, and meagre pensions. Mainstream political and cultural elites, Wagenkecht told many nodding heads, suffered from an abject lack of empathy with these “ordinary realities”.

What’s not to like? Well, quite a lot, it turns out. Popular, charismatic and combative, Wagenknecht is the rising star of German politics following elections in which the BSW came a strong third in three states in Germany’s east. Her origins are on the left, but to say her rise has not been welcomed by mainstream progressive opinion would be to hugely understate the level of antipathy.

Wagenknecht was once a youthful communist in the former East Germany. Pairing her with Björn Höcke, the current neo-fascist luminary of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD), one high-profile commentator recently told Die Zeit: “Wagenknecht and Höcke are the political bride and groom of the moment. What belongs together in the former GDR is growing: the heirs of Hitler’s national........

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