President Catherine Connolly take note: there’s an opening on the European stage for a left-leaning pacifist – preferably of the provocative variety.
That, at least, is the gap left by the departure of German leftist firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht as Germany debates military service and its main Protestant church revises its pacifist tradition.
As Europe marks the end of the first World War in 1918, Germany is embracing a new readiness doctrine prompted by fears that Russia’s four-year war in Ukraine may yet spiral into a third World War.
This slow, steady creep – away from pacifist idealism towards grim realism – is just one reason Wagenknecht ran out of political road.
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For 35 years the one-time Stalinist has been Germany’s most quotable leftist politicians, often running rings around mainstream opponents on frequent talkshow appearances.
Two years ago, Wagenknecht departed her political home Die Linke – the Left Party – in anger, claiming the party was more interested in culture wars and immigrants than the concerns of their traditional working class voters.
Within weeks she set up what sounded like a political contradiction in terms: an alliance that was named after one person – her – and even carried her initials BSW. It promised a more conservative, nativist and populist leftist politics and eastern German voters in particular – those not yet furious enough to back the far-right AfD – abandoned the Linke for the BSW.
From a standing start, it pulled in double-digit support in regional elections in the autumn of 2024 – even entering office in two federal states.
Recent concerns by Connolly and former first lady Sabina Higgins – about Germany’s military build-up, and demands that Kyiv enter diplomatic negotiations in which Russia has yet to express an interest – are straight from the Wagenknecht script.
Things began to go wrong for her last February, when the BSW fell just 9,000 votes short of entering the Bundestag in federal elections. The resulting internal feuds, finger-pointing and ongoing demands for a recount all contributed to a slump in support to just three per cent in polls.
Announcing her departure as leader, Wagenknecht promised to remain active in the background, devising party policy “that can really help the BSW”.
That sounded as much a threat as a promise to party colleagues who view Wagenknecht as a troublesome diva but know, too, they will struggle without her charisma.
Just as Wagenknecht handed back the BSW leadership tiara, Germany’s war-and-peace debate popped up in the Bundestag’s defence committee.
It held an public hearing on a looming plan to summon young German men from January for a military physical, a first step towards reintroducing the military service obligation set aside in 2011.
If not enough volunteers respond, Berlin is contemplating compulsory recruitment.
Even so, military historian Sönke Neitzel told the committee the recruitment legislation’s targets were halfheartedly optimistic, “and hope is not a serious basis to plan for the future”.
“Such lack of ambition relates in no way to the threat analysis of a Russian attack in the coming years, nor to related Nato planning objectives,” he said.
He was challenged by Daniela Broda, a spokeswoman for the youth lobby organisation Bundesjugendring. She complained that the new military recruitment legislation was being devised over the heads of those it would affect most.
“This draft Bill intervenes fundamentally in the autonomy of young people,” she said, “without an open, transparent and societal debate”.
Such a debate has been happening everywhere in Germany for the last four years and has yielded unusual fruit in the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (Evangelical Church in Germany/EKD), the country’s mainstream Lutheran Protestant church with about 18 million members.
After two years of hearings, visits and public meetings, the German church has presented a theological response to a “new global disorder” that “keeps a just peace in view”.
Responding to growing global conflict, the 150-page text insists that non-violence remains an “ethical principle for Christians, one that is not tied to political expediency”.
“But non-violence is not mandatory in every situation,” it adds.
EKD peace commissioner Friedrich Kramer said diplomacy and conflict resolution remained key concepts for the church, but that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted it now to “prioritise protection from violence”.
The human potential to make both peace and war requires a balanced response, the paper notes, where “counter-violence may be necessary to contain violence” but with “very strict conditions and only as a last resort”.
The EKD has a long pacifist tradition: its pastors and churches were key in the 1980s East German civil rights movement and the non-violent end of German division in 1990.
In a notable – and controversial – shift, the EKD document argues that “possessing nuclear weapons may be politically necessary, given the global distribution of these weapons”.
So far the EKD paper has received a mixed reception. The bestselling, left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung wondering if EKD church members wanted a report “with maximum connectivity to politics, or perhaps a few more messages of hope and confidence”.
“Who, if not the church,” it asked in a lead article, “could deliver this?”
