In 2007, Lafontaine’s SPD splinter party merged with the PDS to form The Leftthe Left Party, whose executive board Wagenknecht joined. Wagenknecht and Lafontaine later married. After Lafontaine retired from politics in 2009 for health reasons, Wagenknecht became one of the party’s leading voices.

In the years that followed, however, Wagenknecht became an increasingly controversial figure within the Left Party, including when, in the midst of the refugee crisis in 2015, she criticized then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers into the country, with the mantra: “We make it!” (“We can do it!”). In 2016, after a series of terrorist attacks by migrants, Wagenknecht released a statement saying: “The reception and integration of large numbers of refugees and immigrants is associated with considerable problems and is more difficult than Merkel’s careless ‘We can do it’.”

Members of her own party sharply criticized her, arguing that no true leftist should be allowed to attack Merkel from the right on the migration issue. That same year, a man from a self-proclaimed anti-fascist group threw what looked like a chocolate cake topped with whipped cream in Wagenknecht’s face at a Left Party gathering. Relations with many members of her own party became more strained after Wagenknecht became a fierce critic of the government’s “endless lockdowns” during the Covid-19 pandemic and after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Wagenknecht frequently appeared on German television to express views that echoed Kremlin propaganda.

Finally, last year, she announced that she and a group of allies would leave the Left Party to form their own party, which her husband, Lafontaine, later joined. “We live in a time of global political crises,” she said in Berlin. “And at this very time, Germany probably has the worst government in its history.” Many people, she added, “no longer know who to vote for, or they vote out of anger and desperation.” The election led to the disintegration of the Left Party, which was forced to dissolve its parliamentary group, liquidate assets and lay off staff.

Wagenknecht has now managed to find a left-wing approach to normally right-wing positions. Her scepticism about immigration is largely due to her support of the welfare state, which she believes needs a certain degree of homogeneity to function.

“The stronger the welfare state, the more sense of belonging there must be,” Wagenknecht told me in Berlin. “Because if people have no connection to the recipients of social benefits, they will eventually refuse to pay for these benefits.”