Germany’s election results may at first seem like just another success for conservative and far-right forces. The Christian Democrats won the most votes of any party with 28.52 percent. Their leader, Friedrich Merz, who has pushed the party significantly rightward during his tenure, will likely be the next chancellor. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD – Elon Musk’s cause célèbre – came second, winning just over 20 percent, or around one in five votes. The AfD will remain outside of any ruling coalition in the parliament, thanks only to an enduring postwar commitment from Germany’s other major parties to never form a coalition with an explicitly far-right entity.

The centrist Social Democratic and Green Parties both earned record low results, with 16 and 11 percent of the votes respectively. Democrats in the U.S. would do well to learn from their mistakes, and instead take notes from Germany’s left-wing party, Die Linke, or The Left — the only party to dramatically exceed expectations on Sunday.

Based on the vote counts alone, this could seem counterintuitive: Die Linke only won 9 percent. As recently as a month ago, however, it seemed feasible that the party could fail to garner the 5 percent of votes necessary to earn seats in Germany’s parliament at all. The party outperformed, especially with young women voters; it won 27 percent of all first-time voters and gained 30,000 new members in the last month of the election campaign. Their surprise comeback offers a lesson in what is required to build — or at least begin to build — party political resistance to the far-right.

Die Linke’s relative successes, and the accumulating failures of the Greens and the Social Democrats, are further grounds to reject the centrist liberal insistence on bending to the right to keep the far-right at bay. The centrist strategy, aside from being morally turpitudinous, has been a losing one; it only serves to legitimize far-right frameworks and bolster right-wing........

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