Fight back - resist fascism! How left's 'angry woman' fired up young voters with a speech

How left's 'angry woman' fired up young voters with a speech

- Kate Connolly

The latest tattoo on Heidi Reichinnek's lower right arm reads "Angry Woman". "A present to myself," she says, after the unexpected return to the German parliament of her party, Die Linke (The Left), in February's elections. Months before the vote, it had been widely predicted that the far-left party, successor to the east German communists, would be decimated. But the naysayers were proved wrong: Die Linke won nearly 9% of the vote, an increase of almost 4 percentage points on the 2021 election, giving them 64 seats in the new Bundestag.

Much of the credit for their upswing has gone to Reichinnek, who in the run-up to the vote gave a fulminating speech in which she admonished the incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for having used the votes of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to try to push through migration reform.

"Don't give up, but fight back, resist fascism... We'll all take to the streets... To the barricades!" the 36-year-old urged fellow MPs and those watching at home. The speech, says Reichinnek, was spontaneous - "I quickly scribbled some things down but then couldn't read my scrawl" - and proved dynamite.

Shared on social media almost 30m times in just five days, it became the most widely watched speech in the history of the Bundestag and catapulted Reichinnek - who polls show is the country's favourite female politician - to a level of political stardom, particularly among young people, that just months previously the then beleaguered party could have only dreamed of.

"It earned us a lot of support. People said I spoke to them from the heart, but also lots of others said things like: 'What's that hysterical old bint screaming about?' - hence the tattoo.