As talk persists in Brussels of a new \u201canti-woke left\u201d bloc coalescing around Germany\u2019s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, the comfortable place enjoyed by Irish MEPs within the European Parliament\u2019s traditional left may soon face an unfamiliar test.<\/b><\/p>\n
Currently, three of Ireland\u2019s fourteen MEPs in the EU Parliament belong to the \u2018Left\u2019 group of socialist and rebranded communist parties.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Left bloc is small but not irrelevant, totalling 46 of the Parliament\u2019s 720 MEPs. The group runs the ideological gamut from Danish eco-socialists, Dutch animal rights activists, and Italian populists in the form of the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, alongside the erstwhile former Greek ruling party SYRIZA.<\/p>\n
At its core, the group is underwritten by a Franco-German axis of M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s La France Insoumise and Germany\u2019s Die Linke, still shaped by its East German inheritance. To no one\u2019s surprise, unless one counts (East) Germany, the Left group does not contain a single MEP from a former-Warsaw Pact state.<\/p>\n
The Irish left, through various independents and Sinn F\u00e9in in particular, slot well into this dynamic as a relatively safe pair of ideological hands, hitting the right notes when it comes to internationalism, Palestine, and NATO scepticism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When voters in Sligo pull the lever for Luke \u2018Ming\u2019 Flanagan, or hand Sinn F\u00e9in their number one preference believing in Mary Lou McDonald\u2019s promises to rein in mass migration, few likely realise they are also helping send MEPs into a Brussels bloc instinctively aligned with open-borders politics and the more uncompromising edges of the EU\u2019s green agenda.<\/p>\n
Shaped by the anti-austerity years, the Left group is marginal but not insignificant within the decision-making process of the European Parliament, with its influence coming through institutional pressure on the more moderate socialist S&D group and the Greens.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even without leading a single national government, the EU\u2019s green policies, migration reform and response to Big Tech are indirectly impacted by the subtle but real presence of their MEPs in the committee rooms of Brussels.<\/p>\n
Kept somewhat at arm\u2019s length by the Parliament\u2019s ruling coalition of Europhile progressives, Left MEPs are not under the same cordon sanitaire endured by even moderate right-wing populists despite overt hostility to NATO and nuanced opinions regarding the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n
Effectively operating as a ginger group within the EU consensus, the Left group has experienced palpable strain in the aftermath of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. Critical of the continued supply of arms to Ukraine due to its steadfast opposition to remilitarisation and inherent criticism of NATO, this stance has alienated it from former allies on the moderate left.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Additionally, since October 7th, the Belgian and French socialist parties within the group have been labelled as Islamist fifth columns (Islamo-gauchiste), born out of an extreme variation of anti-zionism and electoral necessity to cater to Muslim voters. This phenomenon is visible in Brussels itself with the Belgian Workers Party (PTB) enjoying an electoral renaissance to become the most popular party in the city thanks to Moroccan voters opting for the party due to its militantly anti-zionist stance.<\/p>\n
Formerly able to impact the EU consensus during the green wave of 2019, MEPs within the Left group have also found themselves out of sync with the new EU moves towards greater deregulation as even the centre left begins to shift its rhetoric on migration issues.<\/p>\n
Internally within the group more moderate parties, namely the Greek SYRIZA, are rumoured to be shifting away to the political centre, putting their continued participation in the group under the threat, but all in all, nothing new under the sun for Europe\u2019s hard left.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is new, however, is a challenge emerging not from the right or centre, but from within the left itself: the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht and her BSW project, which seeks to redraw the boundaries of European left-wing politics.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
European Socialism\u2019s Anti-Woke Splitters<\/b><\/p>\n
A DDR-born German socialist talisman within the Die Linke party, Wagenknecht split from her former comrades in 2023, citing their embrace of toxic identity politics and lax migration policies as detrimental to the fight around material realities of workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wagenknecht detailed her estrangement from the German left in her 2021 book Die Selbstgerechten (\u201cThe Self-Righteous\u201d) arguing that contemporary brands of socialism have shifted away from economic redistribution toward cultural debates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Documenting the emergence of \u2018lifestyle leftists\u2019 the Wagenknech lays out a counter-programme focused on social cohesion and national solidarity to counter the hegemonic \u2018cartel parties\u2019 of centre left and right within the German Bundestag.<\/p>\n
Her comments hit home within German post-communism, itself an awkward alliance of former-DDR nostalgics reacting against.the lifestyle leftists Wagenknecht so often condemns.<\/p>\n
After veering more and more away from left-orthodoxy, Wagenknecht got the chance to put ideas into practice with the launch of the eponymous B\u00fcndnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) finding an electoral niche in East Germany though it came just under the 5% threshold to enter the Bundestag in 2025.<\/p>\n
Framing migration and asylum matters as both a social justice issue and matter of state capacity the BSW proposes faster processing to distinguish between genuine claimants and a system of quotas, language integration and external border control.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen social welfare money intended for citizens is used more and more to fund asylum seekers, then the acceptance of these people will be damaged, and also prevents others, for instance, single parents, from obtaining a place in a nursery\u201d the party outlined in its 2025 election manifesto.<\/p>\n
Curiously the party is top heavy with second generation migrants often secular Kurds and Turks with Wagenknecht herself of partial Iranian heritage. On foreign policy the BSW is vocal against what it refers to as \u201cNATO expansionism\u201d and the presence of the American military on Germany soil preferring rapprochement with Moscow and return of Russian gas flow.<\/p>\n
Condemning political attempts to suppress and cordon off the right-wing AfD the BSW has driven a small but noticeable wedge in the traditional voting bloc of Germany\u2019s hard left between post-communist voters in the East demanding the continuation of the social protections from the DDR and the \u2018lifestyle leftists\u2019 Wagenknecht has repeatedly condemned.<\/p>\n
Speaking previously to BSW MEP, Thomas Geisel, I got a better sense where the party lies in the emerging new spectrum of German politics harkening back to deeper sociological concepts prioritising the organic society and social market economy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A former social democratic mayor of D\u00fcsseldorf and corporate employee in the energy sector, Geisel argues that mismanagement of the post-communist reconstruction of the GDR, namely economic carpetbagging, drives a lot of today\u2019s populist dissatisfaction.<\/p>\n
Not merely a reaction against American-imported identity politics, the BSW according to Geisel aims to resurrect 20th century German social democracy. Proud of his anti-racist political pedigree Geisel nonetheless is critical of the German left\u2019s embrace of open border ideology as well as idea of remigration as morally and politically unfeasible.<\/p>\n
Critics of the BSW on the left lambast Wagenknecht for being a reactionary careerist with the BSW riven infighting as it languishes well below even the 5% needed to enter the Bundestag. All the while the formerly moribund communist Die Linke party under its TikTok-savvy leadership of Heidi Reichinnek experiences a renaissance of popularity, particularly among zoomer women at 11% in opinion polls.<\/p>\n
Regardless, emerging at a time of political unease within the Bundesrepublik where the centrist ambition of Chancellor Merz is unlikely to stabilise Germany\u2019s fortunes the BSW is symptomatic perhaps of a new left-wing populist hybrid and one which has European ambitions.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The EU\u2019s \u2018left conservative\u2019 bloc<\/b><\/p>\n
The statutory requirement to form an ideology bloc within the EU Parliament is 23 MEPs at minimum from 7 different nation states. In the days leading up to the European elections in 2024, it was speculated in the press that BSW was on the cusp of forming a new \u2018left conservative\u2019 populists of Mediterranean populists and post-Soviet socialists.<\/p>\n
It was not to be, with BSW\u2019s 5 MEPs sitting as politically irrelevant non-inscrits or non-attached within the Parliament, thus deprived of money and influence within the EU bubble.<\/p>\n
By 2029, that may be enough to push such a bloc across the line, potentially drawing support from parties as varied as Slovakia\u2019s ruling social democrats, cast out of the mainstream socialist family in Brussels over alleged pro-Russian sympathies, as well as Romania\u2019s Social Democratic Party (PSD), now under scrutiny after aligning with the nationalist right in moves that helped destabilise Bucharest\u2019s Europhile governing coalition.<\/p>\n
An Irish party, helped by the nation\u2019s anti-NATO credentials and populist streak wouldn\u2019t go amiss in a potential new parliamentary bloc though most insiders say a jump by Sinn F\u00e9in is highly improbable.<\/p>\n
Still, whether or not such a coalition ever formally materialises, the deeper trend already appears underway. The European left is unlikely to abandon its progressive cultural instincts wholesale, but increasingly assertive \u201canti-woke\u201d variants are beginning to emerge that challenge, particularly in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
In much of Central and Eastern Europe, this shift is being driven less by ideology than by exhaustion with the post-Cold War liberal settlement and the oligarchic systems that emerged from it. Old socialist parties and clientlist systems orientated towards Moscow seek new life against their more Europhile colleagues\u00a0 Ireland is somewhat much a stranger in this dynamic.<\/p>\n
Even if her project fails which it is likely to, figures like Sahra Wagenknecht represent is not simply another split on the left, but the beginning of a more durable realignment in which class politics and national identity are once again becoming intertwined. The old assumption that economic radicalism must travel with cultural liberalism no longer holds automatically.<\/p>\n
For parties such as Sinn F\u00e9in and the wider Irish left, long accustomed to operating within a relatively stable ideological ecosystem in Brussels, the coming decade may bring competition not from old conservatives or centrists, but from newer, more disciplined forms of left-wing populism explicitly designed to win back the working-class voters drifting toward the nationalist right.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For all the attention lavished by the media on the \u201cfar right\u201d, the deeper political story unfolding across Europe may be the emergence of ideological hybrids that no longer fit neatly into the old categories of left and right.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Economic populism, cultural conservatism and hostility to the Atlantic alliance are increasingly beginning to coexist within the same political movements.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the Irish left, the age of arguing with Fine Gael liberals may soon give way to something far stranger: arguing with anti-NATO socialists who also think (some of the) the migrants have to go.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note: The author works for the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group in the European Parliament. The views expressed are personal.<\/b><\/p>\n
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