When the Left Turns National: Adaptation Strategies of the Left in Slovakia, Czechia and East Germany

Across Europe, the “crisis of the Left” is not only a story of electoral decline but also of strategic and ideational transformation under a populist Zeitgeist. This paper examines the emergence of National-Left projects: actors that combine economically interventionist or redistributive commitments with cultural traditionalism and a stronger emphasis on national sovereignty and contested geopolitical alignments. Building on recent evidence that Slovakia’s social-democratic space became electorally sustainable through differentiation into a more moderate and a more conservative-national variant (Hlatky & Gyarfášová, 2025), the paper extends the analysis beyond a single-country account by adding Czechia and East Germany as comparative cases. The paper asks two questions: (1) Under what conditions does a National-Left adaptation become strategically attractive? and (2) What are its consequences for democratic contestation and coalition possibilities? This paper argues that National-Left trajectories become more likely when three conditions coincide: (a) high salience of sociocultural conflict, (b) geopolitical alignment (e.g., Ukraine) functioning as a mass-level identity marker, and (c) organisational opportunity structures that allow either party transformation, party splitting, or coalition vehicles that reduce internal heterogeneity costs. The Slovak case illustrates how differentiation within the left can sustain electoral relevance but also increases exposure to illiberal rhetoric and permissive attitudes toward institutional conflict (Hlatky & Gyarfášová, 2025). Empirically, I compare (1) Slovakia’s post-2020 election reconfiguration of the social democratic space, (2) Czech Left mobilisation associated with Stačilo, and (3) East Germany as a key arena for the BSW’s National-Left appeal. Methodologically, the study combines comparative process tracing with qualitative content analysis of party communication and positioning on economic redistribution, cultural order, and geopolitical alignment, triangulated with available survey evidence where feasible. The contribution is twofold: it specifies a mechanism of left adaptation that treats populist challengers as drivers of left transformation, and it seeks to raise a conceptual issue: “what counts as left” in contemporary Europe.