TikTok Door Knock

What Democrats can learn from a surging German left

How do you stop a fascist takeover? A strong TikTok game doesn’t hurt — but an old-fashioned approach may be what it really takes to close the deal.

As the conservative CDU/CSU and the centrist Social Democrats look set this week to form a coalition government, Germany seems to have dodged a bullet — and a constitutional crisis — keeping the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) out of power in the February 23 federal elections, and out of the governing coalition. AfD did win the second biggest share of votes — nearly 21 percent — doubling its performance over the previous elections and making them the biggest opposition party in the new parliament.

A bigger surprise for international observers — and a lot of Germans — was the performance of Die Linke (The Left). After being declared dead by many analysts last year when former leader Sahra Wagenknecht left to form her own populist party, Die Linke got a surprising 9 percent of the vote — almost doubling its share from the previous elections, and even winning majorities in cities like Berlin. And they won a quarter of the vote among 18-24-year-olds, outdoing even the AfD, who took 21 percent of younger voters. And they did it though a combination of social media savvy and a U.S.-inspired ground game — survey research, tailored messaging, and lots of door-knocking — built on the Race Class Narrative guidelines Anat Shenker-Osorio has been working on since 2017, fine-tuned for European voters.

To find out more, we talked to Julia Weidemann, head of Die Linke’s international politics department and a party chairwoman in Oder-Spree, Brandenburg. She told us about Die Linke’s surprise gains, their shoe-leather approach to reaching German voters, their plans for the future as an opposition party, what the youth turnout might mean — and how the party used TikTok to make left politics cool again.

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So the biggest surprise in the German elections was how well your party, Die Linke, did, and especially how big a share of the youth vote the left got. I don't know how unexpected that was within Germany, but a question a lot of people here have is just how did you manage to make politics cool again for young people?

I have to admit we didn't expect it either. In the autumn the polls were somewhere between 3 and 4 percent. I remember when one of our co-chairs in was telling us, “Oh, we will manage 7 percent.” We smiled and we said, “Okay, nice to have someone in the forefront who's so optimistic.” But, none of us really believed it.

Even Heidi Reichinnek?

I think she hoped for this, and part of the play was that we were running figures who were optimistic and who said, “We have to, and we believe in it.”

So she in particular organized a campaign around the media spaces where younger voters were, and your turnout was very, very good with younger voters. How much of that had to do with mobilization beforehand, and how much of that was her being on TikTok?

More than a year ago she opened her TikTok channel. We had a lot of experience because of the European elections in June last year. We also analyzed how social media worked, and how well the Alternative for Germany, the far right, did on social media, especially on TikTok. We saw we had to put much more effort as well in social media. So Heidi already had her channel, and the party started a channel.

The idea was not just to have a channel and to fill it with content, but also to connect with other influencers. So for our party Congresses in October and January we invited interesting people who are in the progressive camp, and they got the chance to have an exclusive interview with Heidi, or exclusive access to the Congress. They reported about us, and this was kind of a joint collaboration. And during the campaign we did this with other influencers as well. So we had interesting people who were also somehow politicized —

But outside of politics proper, right?

Yes, yes. For example, we had a clip with Heidi and Siegfried and Joy, these two guys who are like magicians, they’ll make people and things vanish and appear. They do this with sightseeing stuff, very non-political issues. But they are also political guys, and sometimes they try to put their ideas into a political context. So then we had the idea to ask them if they would like to do this with Heidi. So we had a video clip of Heidi disappearing and then appearing in a crowd of people, not just Heidi, but Heidi and the team. And this video just took one day, and was viewed more than a million times.