The leader of Germany’s upstart Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) shared her trepidation at initial projections, whereby the newcomer party may yet fall short of the 5% threshhold to enter parliament.
“We’ll have to sweat it out for now,” Sahra Wagenknecht said in Berlin. But the populist party leader told supporters that regardless of the final election outcome they carried out a “tremendous” campaign.
If in the end it is not enough for them to enter the Bundestag, “then it is a defeat, but it is not the end of the BSW,” Wagenknecht said. “We disrupted and we will continue to disrupt.”
Sahra Wagenknecht, top candidate and party leader of the Sahra Wagenknecht BSW alliance, speaks after the first forecasts of the German federal election for the 21st German Bundestag. Jens Büttner/dpa
