Germany's Left Party Gains Traction with Fiery Election Push

By Leon Kuegeler

BERLIN (Reuters) - The successor to East Germany's Communist Party has made a late surge two weeks before a national election after its leader stood up in parliament to lash the front-running conservatives for breaking a historic taboo on cooperating with the far right.

Many legislators were numb after the conservatives passed a non-binding motion on restricting immigration on January 29 with the votes of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), unprecedented in a nation still painfully aware of its Nazi past. But Heidi Reichinnek was in her element.

"To the barricades!" she shouted in a speech that, polls suggest, has single-handedly rescued her party from oblivion and added a late twist to the election campaign.

Speaking so fast that the words tumbled over each other, the 36-year-old accused conservative leader Friedrich Merz of recklessness for letting the AfD claim its first parliamentary victory.

"You still don't get it," she told Merz, drumming the lectern, before urging voters: "Stand up to fascism in this country!"

The speech has been seen over 30 million times on social media and, while other parties' posts are more viewed, the Left's posts have more "likes" - suggesting that engagement is genuine and not the result of paid promotion.

A month ago, the party was languishing below the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament, deflated by the defection of its best-known figure, Sahra Wagenknecht, who took half its legislators to set up her own leftist-nativist party.

GERMANS PROTEST AT CONSERVATIVES' TOLERANCE OF FAR RIGHT

But her Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has flagged. It abstained on Merz's motion and, with the AfD, backed a similar draft law he attempted to pass two days later, disappointing those who had hoped it would be an anti-AfD bulwark.

The vote sparked protests nationwide and Reichinnek, a social worker from eastern Germany now living in the west, seemed to satisfy a broad hunger for a stronger political repudiation of the AfD.

The Left was still only scoring 7% in a survey released on Friday, but that was still its highest in years in a race of tight margins, with the BSW down at 4% from a high of 8%.

As disquiet grows over the power of billionaires, much of its appeal lies in its hard-left economic policies: its president Jan van Aken, a former U.N. weapons inspector, often sports a "Tax the Rich" t-shirt.

Merz's conservatives rule out working with a party whose predecessor ran a pro-Soviet dictatorship for 40 years, so it has almost no chance of entering government.

But the Left's gains are a warning to the centre-left Social Democrats and Greens, who could be asked to help Merz form a ruling coalition after February 23.

The Left is especially strong among fickle younger voters, where the SPD is weak, and its surge suggests that both the SPD and the ecologist-leftist Greens risk losing support on the left if they fish for voters on the right.

(Reporting by Leon Kuegeler and Andreas Rinke; editing by Thomas Escritt and Kevin Liffey)