Left field: a new force in German politics

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Russia is up to its tricks again, this time in Moldova, a former Soviet republic that has increasingly moved towards Europe. This weekend, a Russian campaign of sabotage and disinformation aimed to disrupt two important votes there. And do you know what "mogging" means? Or "skibidi"? I feel old even saying those things. But TikTok is apparently changing how people speak. And by people, yes, I do mean the younger members of society. First up, though. In German politics, if you're glamorous and outspoken, it's pretty easy to stand out. But Sahra Wagenknecht is doing more than just wearing colorful suits on TV talk shows. She's shaking up the political realm, using her popularity to try and reshape the national agenda. In January, she started a political party named after herself. It's doing astonishingly well. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance is in a celebratory mood after the state election in Thuringia. But it's controversial. Our chief Germany correspondent Tom Nuttall went to speak to her in person to find out what she really stands for.

I met Sahra Wagenknecht in her office in the Bundestag, the German parliament. And I think maybe one of the things that really stands out when you're deep in conversation with her about politics and policy is that she really knows her runnings. She speaks in full paragraphs, she's got a full command of the facts, she doesn't really make mistakes, she has a comprehensive worldview. And it's something that's quite striking when you meet her, and I think it's one reason why she is such a regular fixture on the German talk show scene as well, is that she just is an impressive performer.

So this party was just formed in January. Tell me why it's so important in German politics.

Yeah, so Sahra Wagenknecht has been on the German scene for a very long time, decades, and generally as a fixture of Die Linke, which is a hard left party that she quit to set up this new outfit. She broke away from Die Linke at the start of the year to set up her own party, which is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. It's named after her. She did that because she thought that Die Linke had been taken over by the wokerati, the metropolitan elite and wasn't listening to ordinary people's concerns. And so she has created this new party. It holds a lot of what you might consider to be traditional left-wing views: higher minimum wage, higher taxes, skeptical about big business, skeptical about the growth of low-wage service sector jobs. Where she thinks people have to work very hard for very low wages and aren't offered proper career paths. But then on other issues, and in particular immigration, she sounds a lot like a right-winger. She spoke to me about Germany being overwhelmed by irregular immigration, about parallel societies, about radical Islamists. She thinks that any question of NATO membership for Ukraine ought to be taken off the table. She's very sympathetic to a lot of the talking points that you often hear from the Kremlin. That the war was inspired by NATO expansion, that Putin needed security guarantees that the West was unable to offer him, and this stuff has been at the heart of her campaign this I find it helpful to think of her as a sort of political entrepreneur who spotted a gap in the political market and went for it and has been able to satisfy it. And I think it's fair to say that really this is one of the most, maybe the most successful debuts of a political party in the history of democratic Germany.

Explain to us what role it's going to play.

Yeah, so that success can be quite specifically measured. In June, we had elections to the European Parliament. That was basically the first electoral test for the party. Less than 6 months after it was founded, and they got 6%. They finished 5th in that election. But then, more importantly, last month in September, there were 3 elections in states in Germany's East. And Sahra Wagenknecht herself is from the East. She grew up in communist East Germany, and the sort of politics that she peddles is especially popular in the East. And it was unsurprising then that the party did particularly well in all 3 of those elections. And crucially, because the AfD, the hard-right alternative for Germany that you may have come across, also does very well in the east, but every other party has to team up to keep it from office. That meant that basically Sahra Wagenknecht's party was in the perfect position to begin negotiations with the mainstream parties, your Christian Democrats and your Social Democrats, to form coalitions. So in other words, just 9 months after the party was founded, it was entering coalition negotiations in 3 of Germany's 16 states. It was quite an extraordinary achievement.

So does that mean they're actually heading for government in these states?

Well, that's the big question today, because Sahra Wagenknecht herself is laying down some extraordinarily difficult conditions for these coalition talks. And these are especially tricky for the Christian Democrats, the center-right party. So before these elections in the east, Bargain Connect said that any coalition deal that she signed needed to include in it a rejection of a deal that the German national government made with Joe Biden's administration to station long-range missiles on German territory from 2026. You might consider this a sort of an eccentric demand because German states have no competence, no say over foreign policy, over security policy. But it was considered such an important issue for her and for the party that she decided that that was crucial. She has stuck to her guns on that, and she has pressed pause on negotiations in one of these states, in Thuringia. That was tricky enough, but then over the weekend she went one step further. So Friedrich Merz, who is the national leader of the Christian and a strong candidate to be Germany's next chancellor. He wants Germany to deliver more weapons to Ukraine, and he said so in a speech in parliament last week. Afterwards, Sahra Wagenknecht said that his speech was so outrageous that local CDU leaders in these eastern states that her party was negotiating with had to publicly distance themselves from their own leader, otherwise these coalition talks would go nowhere. So these are quite extraordinary demands for a would-be junior coalition partner to make of her would-be senior coalition partners. And so now the question that everybody is asking is, does Sahra Wagenknecht actually want to get involved in government, or is she just looking for an excuse to blow the whole thing up and retreat to her comfort zone of opposition and campaigning and polemicizing?

And what's the answer? What do you think she wants?

So no one really knows the answer, but what lots of observers tell me is that Sahra Wagenknecht doesn't care about governments in 3 small states in Germany's east. She cares about the national election. Election, which is going to take place in just under a year's time, the federal election to the Bundestag next year. And the concern that she may have, people think, is that having built up such a strong political identity opposing stuff, that the moment that she ends up with the inevitable compromises that go with entering coalitions and signing coalition deals, then she loses that sort of special sauce that makes her such a unique proposition in the German political landscape. And she might really, really struggle to get herself heard in the cacophony of that election campaign. You can look at things the other way. If she does blow things up, then that could go rather badly for her. Germans like their politicians to accept responsibility, and if, when she's given the opportunity to take part in government, at the first opportunity she turns it down, there may be parts of her electorate that are rather unhappy with that in the days and weeks ahead.

And Tom, you've given me plausible explanations for why she might be a tiny bit player or she might play a huge role. And after your interview with her, where do you come down on which of those you think she's going to be?

Well, one extraordinary thing about Sahra Wagenknecht is she has this ability to make the rest of German politics kind of dance to her tune. They obviously don't agree with her. Lots of them absolutely detest her. I don't think there's any more divisive politician in Germany than Sahra Wagenknecht. None of them feel able to ignore her. She's everywhere. They have to respond to her. I think I should be clear, there is next to no prospect that her party could enter government at the national level, but she can act as a significant spoiler. So that, I think, is where Sahra Wagenknecht is going to end up, as Germany's spoiler-in-chief.

Tom, thank you so much for talking to me.

No problem. Thanks, Rosie.

Could you pinpoint Moldova on a map? If not, you probably aren't alone. But you may be more familiar with its former overlord, Russia. Since the Soviet Union broke up, Moldova has increasingly moved towards Europe. The war in Ukraine, on Moldova's border, has made that more urgent. This weekend, the Moldovan government held a referendum to back its pursuit of EU membership. It was expected to pass by a large margin, but it only just got through. In the presidential vote held at the same time, the pro-European incumbent Maia Sandu failed to win re-election outright. Addressing the country after the vote, Sandu said the government had "fought fairly and won justly in an unjust struggle." Though she didn't explicitly blame Russia, she said that theft and corruption had influenced the results. As we discussed on The Intelligence earlier this week, Since Russia invaded Ukraine, it has also increased its meddling elsewhere.

In both events, it was a much, much closer contest than the opinion polls had predicted.

Zan Smiley is The Economist's editor-at-large.

In the presidential contest, the incumbent Maya Sandu won, not quite as easily as she was predicted. And as for the referendum, that was very tight indeed. And the yes vote only just managed it by getting 50% against the no vote.

So it sounds like the surprise then was not the result, but the slim margins. What happened there?

Well, I think the reformers will definitely be blaming the slimness of the verdict on Russia. And what was very clear was that Russia went absolutely all out to try and get a no vote. They used every sort of dirty trick in the book, starting with massive disinformation, a huge amount of bribery and vote buying, and more sinister tactics involving sabotage, vandalism, and so forth. So they really put a lot of effort into it, and they nearly pulled it off.

So give me some of the context here. Tell me about Russia's relationship with Moldova.

Well, Moldova was quite simply a part of the Soviet Union. It was one of the 15 states. Of the Soviet Union until the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and Moldova became an independent country, albeit a very small one, 2.5 million people now. And between the two world wars, it was actually part of Romania. So it often has lent towards Romania. And at the moment, Romania, which is its big brother to the west and the south, is already a part of the EU and part of NATO. And there have been times in the past when Moldova wanted to actually just to join Romania, but clearly on the whole, it does want to move westwards and already its economy, which is very small, looks very much towards West Europe.

Moldova is a place that most of us don't think about very often, and we've thought about it a little bit more since the war with Ukraine. Where has it stood in relationship to that?

Well, that's a huge factor. And the war in Ukraine was one of the reasons that Maia Sandu, the incumbent president, wanted to move westwards. It caused a great amount of disruption to the economy. Over a million Ukrainians came as refugees. 100,000 are still there. And so it was enormously disruptive to Moldova. But clearly Moldova is absolutely desperate that Ukraine should fend off Russia. One bit of Moldova, I was told, where they have some vineyards, they could actually hear the bombs landing on Odessa, which is only 30 miles from Moldova's border. So they're very, very conscious that Ukraine and Ukraine's troubles impinge on Moldova itself. They're terrified of Ukraine actually losing to Russia, in which case Moldova would be highly vulnerable.

And what will this weekend's election mean for Maia Sandu herself and her presidency?

Well, I think it shows how tight everything is. The second round is in just over a week, and I think one has to be wary of predictions. She got 42% in the first round against 10 other candidates, and the runner-up got 26%. So she should pull it off, but most of the other candidates were, broadly speaking, pro-Russian. So even winning the second round won't be an easy thing. But I think she should pull it off, and if she does reasonably handsomely, then that will give her a proper fillip and it will enable her and her government to push on in its seeking to join the EU.

And of course, Moldova isn't the only former Soviet state that's facing Russian intervention. Georgia's election is on Saturday. Are we likely to see Russia trying to interfere there too?

Absolutely, almost certainly. There are many parallels. One thing is that the Russians have sort of proxy oligarchs. They had a very powerful rich man in Moldova who was the backer of the main opposition. And in Georgia, they have a similar person, Mr. Ivanishvili, who is right behind the current government in Georgia, which is trying very hard to get back into a cozy relationship within the Russian orbit. And the Russians are practicing all the same dirty tricks, the dark arts of disinformation and so forth. And so there's very much a similar case. I wouldn't dare to make predictions, but it could be tight there again. And if the Georgian current government, which has been trying to cozy up to the Russians, prevails, then it'll be a slap in the face of Brussels and the EU and a fillip to Vladimir Putin in his effort to try and reconstitute the peripheral bits of the old Soviet Empire.

Fascinating stuff, Zan. Thanks so much for talking to me.

Thank you very much, Rosie.

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You see how I do my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful. I don't come to work with a green cut crease. I don't look like a clown when I go to work. I don't do too much. I'm very mindful while I'm at work.

The word demure is old. It describes the sort of modest lady Victorians esteemed, but it is freshly fashionable. And it's all thanks to one video on TikTok.

Caitlin Talbot writes about culture for The Economist.

Around 800,000 posts on TikTok have the hashtag #demure. And there's nothing at all demure about the word's proliferation. Members of Gen Z are using the word with lashings of irony, invoking it to describe everything from Saturn to sunset to New York City's bin service. TikTok is changing how young people talk. Fusty words like coquette are fashionable again, and colloquialisms are on the rise. People use yapping instead of talking and trimmed delusional to delulu. New words have also become popular. There's everything from doomscrolling, which is when you spend too much time on your phone looking at negative content, to mogging, which which means that you are more superior to someone or look better than them. And even nonsense words like skibidi, popularized by a meme of an animated head singing in a toilet. It means cool, bad, or very, depending on the context. Put some of these words together and you get the sentence, "Stop yapping, it's skibidi delulu," which translates to, "Stop talking, it's very delusional." On social media, words spread far and fast. One expert told me at least 100 English words are produced or given new meaning on TikTok every year. Some linguists think there is a TikTok accent, which includes uptalk, when your voice rises at the end of a sentence. TikTok is very versatile, which encourages experimentation. Users can combine audio, text, and video in a single post. That means that words that sound especially satisfying go viral as much as those that look memorable written down. This versatility has led to a code language called algospeak developing. Videos that mention taboo topics like sex or drugs sex get buried and seen by fewer people. And so creators have come up with euphemisms—for instance, sex workers call themselves accountants—and misspellings. Instead of sex, they say seggs with two Gs. TikTok brings together fan groups and communities, from #Swifties to #KPopFans to #BookTokers. These groups create their own slang, and some of it leaks into the mainstream. Other slang comes from specific groups. For instance, Black people have innovated and spread hundreds of English words over the years, from "cool" to "tea," meaning gossip. All of this speeds up the evolution of language. The Oxford English Dictionary only adds a word after it has been used for about 5 years, That once seemed sensible, but it is too slow to keep up with modern slang. It's just now adding words such as cyberstalk or binge-worthy, which already feel tired. And its own word of the year for 2023, rizz, which means charm, has not yet made the cut. TikTok has just the phrase to describe such a modest approach: very demure.

That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. Do let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts@economist.com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.