24.09.2026

A chink of light

Politics are still going to the right - recent state elections show that in no uncertain terms. But then there is Berlin. Die Linke is now the biggest party. Should it compromise and form a red-red-green city administration? No, says Carla Roberts. Better, far better, to be a principled party of opposition

So far there have been four Länder elections in Germany this year. The results vary widely, often reflecting the economic situation in each state. On March 8 the Greens (Alliance 90) came first in the western state of Baden-Württemberg, with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coming second. A few weeks later in Rhineland-Palatinate it was the CDU first and the social democrats second. In both states Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had to settle for third place. The picture is very different in the east. Here, the AfD - generally - comes first. In Saxony-Anhalt, on September 6, it managed its best ever result, achieving 43.8% of the vote.

Politics in Germany are incredibly fluid. For now at least, the CDU’s Friedrich Merz is clinging on to his job as chancellor and there are surprisingly few voices calling on him to go - perhaps the revolving door of British prime ministers, spitting out leader after leader, serves as a warning. He has thanked his partners in the federal government, the Social Democratic Party, for “sticking with the coalition”. The SPD in turn would be mad to leave the coalition, which could trigger new national elections: it currently hovers at around 13% in the national polls - down from the 16.4% it achieved at the last general election in February 2025.

Die Brandmauer (the firewall) is still in place - the leaderships of all mainstream parties continue to refuse forming a government coalition with the AfD, either regionally or nationally. Only the (barely) left-populist Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) has agreed to work with the AfD, as we previously explained.¹ But a government coalition between the two parties in Saxony-Anhalt has been ruled out by the BSW and it refuses to lend its votes to elect a regional AfD minister-president (so it does have principles, you see!). Yet the BSW has few qualms about quid-pro-quo deals. Ahead of the first meeting of the new state parliament on October 6, the two parties agreed to the AfD having the president and the BSW the vice-president posts.² In theory, parliament could function without electing a new minister-president. The old one from the CDU could continue, but without any real powers, while the BSW props up an AfD minority government.

A very odd situation for sure, but then, so are many things in today’s Germany. The former powerhouse of Europe is in dire straits, economically and politically. The Times seems to believe that things might move to the left now: “There is dawning recognition on both sides of the government that its unpopular reforms to pensions, social care and healthcare may need revision.”³

Actually, instead of posing left, the mainstream parties are aping the AfD - particularly when it comes to the question of migration. There is talk of abolishing dual citizenship, for example, which would affect around five million people, including many of the Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’!), who were brought into the country to help rebuild capitalism after World War II. In the last few years, the biggest group of people granted dual citizenship have come from Syria - the so-called ‘Merkel refugees’.

In 2014, former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a million Syrians affected by the civil war into the country and, unlike normal refugees, they were granted the right to work straightaway. For years, this was hailed as an unmitigated success story, which helped to supply the German economy with cheap labour. The vast majority of refugees had found fulltime work within months; crime rates were negligible; their kids started going to German schools, etc. Now, with the rise of the AfD, this episode has been entirely rebranded as a “failed experiment” and all mainstream parties are vying to get rid of the Syrians (and other ‘foreign-born’ people).

Unsurprisingly, this has helped to make the AfD even stronger. Why vote for a tame copy, when you can vote for the real thing? Almost anything can happen in such a fluid political period - chances are it will not be anything good though.

Berlin, which voted on September 20, looks like the odd one out - and not just because it is one of only three Stadtstaaten (‘city-states’) - the others are Hamburg and the tiny Bremen. Here in Berlin, Die Linke came first with 25.7% of the vote - an increase of 13.5% - beating the CDU into second place with 19.1% (down 9.4%) and the AfD into third with 16.3%. The Greens got 14.3%, the SPD a measly 12.1% and the BSW failed the 5% hurdle.

Federal structure

We will discuss Berlin and the many problems of Die Linke below, but it is worth taking a brief look at the federal structure of Germany, of which Andy Burnham claims to be a big fan (his book Head north is full of references to it). Devolution is, generally, a good idea - communists favour devolving power down to the people, so that as many decisions as possible can be made locally, on the ground.

But there can be no doubt that a certain Karl Marx would have been thoroughly opposed to today’s federal republic. Of course, Marx died in 1883, long before federalism was imposed by the three western allies (USA, Great Britain and France) after World War II. During the German revolution of 1848-49, Marx and Friedrich Engels fought for a ‘one and indivisible German republic’. Germany was a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of independent kingdoms, duchies and principalities ranging from the tiny - ie, Oldenburg - to the relatively big Austria and Prussia. Otto von Bismark brought about unity under Prussia with the victories over first Austria in 1866 and then France in 1870-71. However, Germany still remained a patchwork state constitutionally. The Reich was the unity of kingdoms, duchies and principalities brought about not from below, but from above.

While Marx and Engels welcomed the unity of Germany, they had no illusions in the Reich state. Nevertheless, the development of capitalism took off and, along with that, the size of the working class too. In 1875 German social democracy had united itself into a party and it grew rapidly through the snowball effect. It more than survived Bismark’s anti-socialist laws and before World War I counted as the largest party in the Reichstag.

The federal structure after 1945 was not only imposed from above too, but from the outside. The federal set up was supposed to allow Germany to become strong again economically, but keep it weak politically and militarily. The two world wars were often blamed on Prussian militarism, not German capitalism.

The federal structure is a real problem - and not just because the federal representatives in the second chamber, the Bundesrat, often block legislation decided by the first chamber, the Bundestag. (This also happens in Britain, of course, where the House of Lords can act as a barrier to proposals decided by the Commons - which is why communists generally oppose second chambers). In Germany, every aspect of education, for example, is decided by each of the 16 states, which leads to radically different outcomes. For a few years, some conservative-led states had imposed hefty student fees, while in other states education remained free. Following massive protests (often led by Die Linke), the fees were gradually abolished.

Certainly federalism allows conservative and rightwing states to pursue so-called culture wars. In Bavaria, for example, Christian crosses have to be prominently displayed in public buildings, and schools cannot use gender neutral language. Users of illegal drugs face particularly harsh treatment and the police have sweeping powers of detention, not least when it comes to migrants. All done in the name of ‘state rights’. In short, the federal structure of Germany is a barrier to democracy.

Berlin

The situation in Berlin is very interesting and symbolises, in a nutshell, the many challenges and problems Die Linke faces - as does the whole international left. Some are self-made - chiefly the absolute urge to enter government (more below); others are imposed by the mainstream establishment.

“German centrists are smearing Die Linke as antisemites!” is the title of a shocked new article in the magazine, Jacobin. It states:

Let’s be clear: The Linke, Germany’s leading leftwing force, which resoundingly won Sunday’s elections in Berlin, is not an anti-Semitic party. It does not have an ‘anti-Semitism problem’, nor is it a menace to Jews in Germany or Berlin. While some Jews in the city perceive Die Linke as a threat, this perception is fuelled by a false media narrative lacking a factual basis.⁴

One wonders if the dears from Jacobin have been hiding under a rock for the last 25 years. The smearing of leftwingers as ‘anti-Semites’ has become a standard charge, well before Jeremy Corbyn rolled over and gave in to the Zionist witch-hunters.

Since the early 2000s, it had been very seriously pursued in Germany around the Zionist-sponsored campaign, ‘Anti-Deutsche’. It did not initially have quite the same mainstream impact as the anti-Corbyn campaign, but this trend ploughed on and got its hooks into Die Linke too, particularly its leadership.

For a few decades, the Parteispitze (leadership) could, at best, be described as soft Zionist and it always clearly took the side of Israel. This can partially be explained by Germany’s history, of course. The idea that Germans carry ‘collective guilt’ for the holocaust is still very widespread and is taught from a young age - the fact that Hitler first murdered communists, social democrats and trade unionists opposed to the Nazis does not change the fact that everybody should feel guilt and therefore has a moral obligation to support the ‘Jewish state’. This sentiment is still very strong in Germany, even today.

But the ongoing genocide in Gaza has forced Die Linke to (slightly) move on the issue - chiefly because of pressure from the membership, which has doubled to over 120,000 in the last couple of years, with particularly many young people joining (being pro-Palestine comes more ‘naturally’ to them than to their older comrades). At its national party conference in Potsdam in June 2026, the party adopted a resolution that described Israel’s military actions - for the first time - as “genocide”. But the same resolution also explicitly emphasises “Israel’s right to exist” as a “safe haven for Jews”, noting its special historical and contemporary significance. The motion also peddles the illusionary ‘two-state solution’.⁵ A stronger counter-motion that made no mention of Israel’s right to exist was, however, defeated.

The party remains incredibly vulnerable to charges of anti-Semitism, as can be seen over the ‘scandal’ at an election party in the Berlin district of Neukölln. The rapper, Dahabflex, copied the British musician, Bob Vylan, and shouted “Death to the IDF!” from the stage. All hell broke loose. The media went into overdrive and various Die Linke politicians quickly obliged, declaring their outrage. Elif Eralp, the Berlin lead candidate of Die Linke (and possible city mayor) fumed: “I condemn the performance in Neukölln in the strongest possible terms. Calls for violence and the killing of people are absolutely unacceptable. I am appalled; those responsible should have intervened immediately.” Tobias Schulze, who has been chair of Die Linke fraction in the Berlin senate since 2024, declared: “Anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist does not belong in our party!”

This is not enough for Steffen Krach, the lead candidate for the Berlin SPD, who said that any cooperation with Die Linke must require not just “an apology from the lead candidate”, but, he demands, “an unequivocal stance against anti-Semitism from all members of the new Die Linke parliamentary group in the house of representatives and there must be consequences”. Needless to say, a number of the new members of the Berlin senate are strong supporters of the beleaguered Palestinians and this is an attempt to ‘break’ them, even before they take up their seats.

Another media scandal erupted over the presence of a certain Issa Remmo at not just one, but two election parties of Die Linke. Remmo is the Lebanese head of the well-known, influential Remmo-clan, whose members are repeatedly linked to spectacular organised crimes - for example, the theft of the 100-kilogram ‘Big Maple Leaf’ gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum in 2017, of which other members of the clan were found guilty. Remmo himself has never been charged with any crime, though in 2018, 77 properties (!) linked to his family were seized as part of a money-laundering investigation. In an attempt to defend his dad, Firat Remmo published the text of a chat with the (elected) Berlin Die Linke politician, Ferat Koçak, in which they call each other “brother”. Although Firat Remmo too has never been charged with a crime, Koçak announced that he will “rest” his mandate in the Berlin senate for now.

Having won in Berlin, Die Linke is once again on the radar of the establishment and the media: while most of their big guns are trained on the AfD, they will find the time to occasionally take potshots at Die Linke too. Bending over backwards when it comes to charges of anti-Semitism will not stop those attacks, but merely add fuel to the fire, as the experience of the Corbyn years should have proven beyond doubt.

The biggest problem of Die Linke though is entirely self-made. The comrades in Berlin are hell-bent on governing locally, once again. Since its inception, the party has grappled repeatedly and without ever truly answering the key question: ‘Without an outright majority, should it really (help to) govern?’ If so, how and under what conditions - and what to do if those conditions are not met? Over the decades, various ‘red lines’ have been drawn, redrawn, then discarded altogether. As can be expected, the party’s leaders, locally and nationally, are usually much more keen to prove how responsible they are by joining government coalitions, while the membership is more sceptical. A red-red-green coalition in Berlin is now very likely.

Elif Eralp

Elif Eralp makes no secret of her wish to become Berlin’s first Turkish-German mayor. Her mum was heavily pregnant when she and Elif’s father fled Turkey after the September 12 1980 military coup - as socialists and trade unionists they had been imprisoned a number of times. Her heritage will have played a large part in the party’s success in a city like Berlin - as will the fact that Die Linke was the only party that did not move to the right on the question of migration. This includes the Green Party (which has already been tarnished in the eyes of many leftwingers by being the most gung-ho when it comes to propping up the Zelenskyy regime in Ukraine), as well as former communist Sahra Wagenknecht, who proposed a national referendum to reduce migration from the current 500,000 per year to just 50,000.

Of course, Die Linke does not have a particularly radical programme and does not fight for open borders, but its long-standing policy of defending the right to asylum and the rights of migrants, and its rejection of proposals from the establishment to further tighten both, have been enough to make it stand out. A quarter of the population of Berlin, almost a million people, hold foreign citizenship - half of them Turkish. Another 100,000 or so foreign-born Berliners have recently become German citizens. Berlin is a true melting pot, which partially explains the party’s success.

Elif Eralp also made the right decision to concentrate on the very widespread problem of ‘Mieten und Wohnen’ (rents and living) in Berlin - she often wears a gold necklace with the word ‘Mietendeckel’ (rent cap). Rental prices in Berlin have gone through the roof, and have become a real problem for many people. She focused her campaign on the promise to implement a 2021 Berlin referendum, in which 58% of people voted for what the Financial Times calls the “expropriation” of big landlords like Deutsche Wohnen. Others have described it as “forced nationalisation”, which would affect 243,000 rental apartments out of the 1.5 million in Berlin.

The reality is somewhat less dramatic: Vergesellschaftung mit Entschädigung is better translated as ‘socialisation with compensation’. The cost of the plan is fiercely disputed, with estimates ranging from €7 billion to €36 billion. Die Linke says the money would be gradually recouped by the rental income that the city would receive.

It is no surprise that the establishment is hell-bent on avoiding Vergesellschaftung and chancellor Merz has announced he will oppose it - “above all to send a clear message to international investors: there is no expropriation of private property in Germany!”

There is a small problem though: this is actually a provision covered in the German Grundgesetz (‘basic law’) of 1949. True, article 15 has never been applied and is therefore regarded as ‘dead law’ or a ‘constitutional fossil’. But it is also a reflection of the fact that in 1949 things were not quite as black and white as they are now. Article 15 (and article 14, which allows for actual expropriation - for example, to build a motorway) are a reflection of what has been dubbed the ‘historic compromise’ (also known as the ‘Bonn compromise’) of the parliamentary council that drafted the Grundgesetz in 1948-49 under US ‘guidance’.

While conservatives and liberals advocated a clear orientation to the ‘market economy’, the social democrats still fought for a (more) ‘socialist’ economic system and an extension of publicly owned services. Contrary to what kids still learn in school today, this did not, of course, enshrine Germany’s ‘economic neutrality’, especially after the allied powers parted ways in 1948: the east of Germany was declared ‘socialist’, while the west became capitalist (with a lot of Keynesianism thrown in to reduce the danger of the German Democratic Republic looking more attractive than the German Federal Republic).

Merz has announced that he wants to change the Grundgesetz to avoid these flats being, effectively, nationalised. The success of Die Linke in Berlin has made this a huge question nationally. Merz announced that initial drafts are already being coordinated and that the CDU-SDP coalition will reach a decision “relatively quickly”. This is mainly designed to assure international markets. But as a two-thirds majority is required in both the Bundestag and Bundesrat to change the basic law, it is unlikely to happen. For a start, the AfD would not support such an unpopular move - ditto Die Linke. The Greens too are likely to oppose it and the SPD could easily split on the question. So there is very little chance of any proposed change going through.

In Berlin, the regional party conferences of both the SPD and the Greens previously voted in favour of implementing the referendum. But that was all pre-election, and things tend to change once you are in government. There will be great pressure from below on Die Linke to implement the referendum - while the pressure to stop it from above will be there too. We suspect though that in the end it will be ‘the economy, stupid’ that stops this plan from being implemented.

Responsibility

Unsurprisingly, what Eralp and co do not mention is the fact that it was Die Linke that had privatised much of the Berlin housing stock in the first place!

The party has been part of two previous government coalitions in Berlin: its forerunner, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), achieved 22.6% in the 2001 Berlin snap election. This period was truly awful. At first, the PDS supported the SPD minority government; then, having proven its reliability, it was welcomed into the Berlin senate in 2002, where it remained until 2011. (Halfway through, in 2007, the PDS was renamed Die Linke.) The tenor of this coalition can be summed up as “restoring the budget” and “balancing the books”: It did indeed manage to cut annual spending by around four billion euros. How? 35,000 public-sector jobs were eliminated. Public-sector wages fell by up to 12%. Support staff at the Charité hospital were outsourced. Schools were starved of funds; the previous policy of free educational materials was abolished.

Most interestingly in the current context, more than 100,000 state-owned apartments were privatised by the ‘red-red’ coalition. Speculators such as Goldman Sachs and Cerberus (later renamed Deutsche Wohnen) bought up the flats, kicking out thousands of tenants. Die Linke agreed to all of it - and actively implemented it.⁶ No surprise, come the 2011 election, the party was severely punished, securing only 11.7% of the vote - less than half of its 2001 total.

But it bounced back, and from 2016 to 2023 it was ‘junior partner’ in a red-green-red government coalition. This time things were not quite so bleak and, while some privatisations - for example, of the S-Bahn - continued, there was an actual budget surplus which created scope for some redistribution and investment. A rent cap was introduced (which was, however, struck down by the federal constitutional court in 2021) and the Berlin city senate introduced subsidised travel passes and abolished daycare fees. But these measures relied on economic conditions that no longer exist today - Berlin is projected to have a whopping deficit of around €84 billion by 2029.

However, one thing the Die Linke fraction did not do in that period was implement the referendum on socialising housing. In fact, rather than work on the text for an actual law - as the referendum demanded - they agreed to kick the can down the road, outsourcing the question to various ‘expert commissions’, while doing nothing to ease the shortage of rental housing, like launching a programme to build more homes, for example.

Will the new Die Linke fraction behave differently from the old, now that it is the main party in any new coalition and not just the junior partner? We doubt it. We suspect that, as so many times before, Realpolitik will come knocking. In these dire economic times, there will be very little wiggle room for any progressive policies. For a start, which bank would lend the red-red-green coalition an additional €36 billion (or even just €7 billion) to buy those apartments? Even with the best of intentions, Die Linke will in all likelihood end up doing exactly what it did between 2002 and 2011: enforce austerity and act ‘responsibly’. Those elected will feel compelled, no matter how reluctantly, to once again manage capitalism. Eralp has already said: “Of course, we will also have to make compromises - that goes without saying.” It really should not!

Many people in Die Linke argue that it is necessary to take ‘government responsibility’, given the danger posed by the AfD. We believe the exact opposite is the case. A minority Die Linke government in Berlin can only disappoint. And who are the disappointed likely to turn to? It could easily make the AfD even stronger.

We would urge comrades in Berlin to vocally oppose Die Linke joining a government coalition that waters down the very manifesto it stood on this month. Instead Die Linke should insist that the SDP and the Greens agree to that manifesto in whole when it comes to immediate demands. Certainly there should be a binding commitment to implement Vergesellschaftung mit Entschädigung. If that fails, so be it. The SDP and the Greens would completely expose themselves before the population - show that they care more about the bond markets than about the hard pressed people of Berlin.

That way Die Linke can become a majority, first in Berlin, then in other big cities and finally in Germany as a whole. To achieve that there has to be a massive growth in membership, and communists, towards that end, must organise and hegemonise. Coalitions with parties who are unwilling to commit to Die Linke’s full immediate programme must be ruled out as a matter of principle. Better, far better to be a strong opposition party that intransigently fights capitalism, than a party of compromise, a party that serves capitalism.

A Die Linke Red Berlin would not go cap-in-hand to the banks and the money men. Instead it would demand the expropriation without compensation of the big property companies. If there is sufficient political pressure the federal government can be forced to agree. Of course, any such gain can only but be temporary. But with the eating, so the appetite grows.

De Linke must take the fight to high politics. Break with Israel, break with the proxy war in Ukraine, break with Nato. The transport, energy and banking sectors must be nationalised and put under democratic control. All church privileges need to be ended. The standing army and the police must go, and be replaced by a well-drilled popular militia. The war against migrants must be ended. No repatriations, no deportations. Anyone who has lived in Germany for more than six months should be eligible for citizenship and full legal rights. Above all the Bundesrat must be abolished along with state rights, and Germany reconstituted as a centralised democratic republic.

1. See ‘Politics of the firewall’ Weekly Worker September 10: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1600/politics-of-the-firewall.↩︎

2. www.fr.de/politik/pakt-nach-wahlsieg-in-sachsen-anhalt-afd-und-bsw-schmieden-brisanten-posten-zr-94505249.html.↩︎

3. The Times September 21.↩︎

4. jacobin.com/2026/09/die-linke-antisemitism-accusations-berlin.↩︎

5. www.die-linke.de/partei/parteidemokratie/parteitag/potsdamer-parteitag/potsdamer-parteitag/beschluesse/detail/news/fuer-gleiche-rechte-im-nahen-osten-westasien-gegen-jeden-rassismus-und-antisemitismus-1.↩︎

6. www.akweb.de/ausgaben/729/berlin-sieht-rot-rot-gruen-wahl-linkspartei-elif-eralp-ist-eine-linke-reformregierung-moeglich.↩︎