Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most prominent far-left politician, takes responsibility for the government’s decision to limit military aid to Kyiv. She said her firm opposition to arming Ukraine had an impact on Berlin’s war policy.

The fact that the federal government “has declared that it does not want to further increase its arms deliveries” is “a result of our high poll ratings,” Wagenknecht said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Finance Minister Christian Lindner warned his government colleagues last week that he would veto any new payment requests to Kyiv.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday denied that Berlin was giving up on Ukraine and said Germany would donate four billion euros in military aid to Kyiv next year, more than any other European country.

Wagenknecht, however, insisted on the effect of her stance.

“We are already having an impact, even though we are not even in power yet,” she said of her party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). “Our approval ratings are influencing the national debate.”

After splitting from the established, radical left-wing party “Die Linke” and founding the BSW seven months ago, Wagenknecht has become the Left’s chief troublemaker.

Their rise in the polls brings new instability to a political landscape already challenged by the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – which also espouses Ukraine-skeptical, pro-Russian views.

The BSW has surged in the polls ahead of elections next month in three eastern German states, which are expected to confirm the region’s drift to the political extremes and deal a sharp rebuff to Scholz’s increasingly unpopular three-party coalition.

According to a Forsa survey on Tuesday, the BSW is at 13 percent in Saxony and 18 percent in Thuringia. Elections are taking place in both states on September 1 – an extraordinary achievement for a party that is not even a year old. Scholz’s Social Democrats, on the other hand, are only at 6 to 7 percent in both states.

The established parties are under pressure to the left by the BSW and to the right by the AfD and are now faced with a major dilemma: Should they enter into coalitions with a party that is clearly outside the political consensus due to its opposition to military aid for Ukraine?

The dilemma is particularly acute for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, which has steadfastly supported Kyiv since the beginning of the war and frequently accuses Scholz’s government of not doing enough to help the troubled country.

But polls suggest that the CDU – at least in Thuringia – cannot govern without the BSW as a junior partner. Since the CDU has ruled out cooperation with the AfD and the Left Party, which currently leads a minority government in Thuringia, it has few options left.

“Without the BSW, this would not be possible,” says Martin Debes, author of Germany of Extremesa political history of Thuringia.

CDU leader Friedrich Merz had initially ruled out a coalition with the BSW and described Wagenknecht as “right-wing extremist on some issues, left-wing extremist on others”.

However, he later backtracked and said that local CDU associations should decide for themselves whether they wanted to work with Wagenknecht’s party.

“Essentially, we need to find out what is possible at the local level and what leads to stable majorities,” Mario Voigt, CDU leader in Thuringia, told the FT. “But one thing is clear: there will be neither a coalition nor cooperation with the AfD.”

A political maverick who joined the Communist Party of East Germany just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wagenknecht is now reveling in her new status as a kingmaker.

She has already formulated a series of tough conditions for a possible coalition and declared that she will not work with any party that supports Scholz’s plan to station American medium-range missiles in Germany from 2026.

She also said that the BSW would only join a government that explicitly supports diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

CDU representatives stress that such issues are only being dealt with by the federal government, not by regions such as Thuringia. Thuringia’s SPD chairman Georg Maier said: “They are just trying to blackmail all their potential coalition partners, especially the CDU.”

But Wagenknecht herself said she was merely reflecting the wishes of voters. “People in the east want a change in foreign policy – they are afraid of being drawn into a major European war,” she told the FT.

She also said that a majority of Germans living in the east oppose the US missile plan. Recent polls by Forsa show that about two-thirds of respondents in eastern Germany oppose the deployment, while at the national level 49 percent are against it.

A “central requirement” for any state government is that it “reflects and represents such positions, because otherwise the voters will be disappointed again,” she said.

While many in Berlin are annoyed by Wagenknecht’s conditions, some in the East have also adopted her rhetoric. Saxony’s CDU Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer has also spoken out firmly against arms deliveries to Kiev.

In Thuringia, CDU politician Voigt supported his party’s commitment to supporting Ukraine, but at the same time supported the call for more diplomacy to end the war. He called on the federal government to “do more in this regard.” “Germany has always been a power for peace and a power for diplomacy, but little of that is happening at the moment,” he said.

Wagenknecht said she found Voigt’s intervention “remarkable.” “We have always been insulted for this attitude, and now Voigt is demanding it too.”

Others, however, are outraged by the rhetoric of the BSW chairwoman. A recent petition signed by civil rights activists accused Wagenknecht and her party of spreading disinformation about the Kremlin and called on other parties to “distance themselves much more clearly from the BSW and its ideas on ‘National Socialism'”.

Wagenknecht firmly rejects any suggestion of a connection to National Socialism. But her idiosyncratic program represents a strange mixture of traditional left-wing ideas such as higher taxes for the rich and right-wing demands for immigration restrictions and sympathy for Russia.

In her interview, she consolidated her status as one of the leading German Putin understander (Putin apologists), a reputation underlined by their decision to boycott President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Bundestag in June.

She criticized the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk and said it would “harden” the positions of the warring parties. The war only broke out because Russia “would not accept Ukraine becoming an American military base.”

Wagenknecht said her party had already succeeded in changing German politics for the better by stealing votes from the AfD.

“Before we existed, all the anger and protests benefited the AfD alone,” she said. “Now you can see that many people will vote for a serious alternative if it exists.”