SAHRA WAGENKNECHT is Germany’s most glamorous and enigmatic contemporary politician—and its most polarising. A party she launched only in January, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), is shaking up politics in eastern Germany and is likely to join coalition governments in two states there, Thuringia and Saxony, that hold elections on September 1st. This alarms centrists: the BSW offers a hotch-potch of far-right policies (on immigration and culture) and far-left ones (on social spending) with an admixture of anti-Americanism and pro-Russia sympathies.