Is this Germany's 'Stop the Steal'?

The party that missed the Bundestag by fractions of a point in February is reluctant to accept the result... but do they have a point?

Dear Reader,

Modern Germany has never witnessed a party edge so close to entering the Bundestag — only to fall short by such a small margin. In February’s federal election, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) missed the five-percent threshold by just 9,529 votes, a difference of 0.019 percent — not bad for a party founded just a year earlier that still hadn’t written up a full policy programme by the time the snap election came round.

Yet what initially looked like a case of Pech gehabt (bad luck) has since turned into a protracted dispute. Wagenknecht and her party continue to question whether the final tally is accurate.

There is more than a passing resemblance between Wagenknecht and Donald Trump. Both are reluctant to give Vladimir Putin the blame for the war in Ukraine; both have found success by tapping into public discontent over “wokeness” and the “liberal elite”; and both tend to see conspiracies around every corner. Like Trump with his “Stop the Steal” campaign after the 2020 U…