I am an outsider who only lived there a long time ago but it looks to me like the party was highjacked by neoliberals in order to split the vote. As far as I can tell German intelligence should have cracked down on both bsw and afd as soon as evidence emerged that they were part of a russian influence campaign. However the neoliberals instead ignored bsw’s russian support… this seems to be an obvious attempt to split leftist parties in half. Die linke is one of the last remaining leftist parties in the g7 outside of france. italy’s m5s is the other. And these parties seem to be losing to the right because the neoliberals sabotage them at every opportunity