The refugee crisis gave Die Linke a unique opportunity to articulate a principled, leftist response that connects antiracist and antifascist groups to the national pro-refugee movement.
Although the party largely continues to maintain a firm open borders stance, it has not been proactive in any real sense, outmaneuvered by Angela Merkel’s surprisingly humane policies in the crisis’s first months. [...]
It is an irony of recent German history that Die Linke figures with no influence over policy call for restrictions and deportations, while those with power publicly advocate open borders while quietly cooperating with the state’s deportation program in the background. But looking back at the party’s formation helps to understand this fault line.
Die Linke is both part of a broad European trend and uniquely German. Like other new left parties, its social and political base rests on a crisis of class representation and a rising but uneven wave of social protest that began in the early 2000s.
These European parties are — to a greater or lesser extent — contradictory formations, described by Daniel Bensaid as “part of a range of forces polarized between resistance and the social movements, on the one hand, and the temptation of institutional respectability, on the other.” [...]
Rather than pandering to chauvinism or trying to minimize the injury of deportation by having a “left government” carry them out more humanely, Die Linke ought to defend refugee rights as a matter of principle, while continuing to develop a popular narrative that links the current situation with wider international and social questions to win over disenfranchised German workers.
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