The city of Berlin has voted. And without any gloating, cynicism or schadenfreude, purely as a matter of fact: Berlin has got exactly what it deserves.
No voter can claim not to have known what sort of political creature the winner of this election is. A party that has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence service in several of its regional states because of extremist currents within their ranks – and which, not entirely coincidentally, would like to abolish that very service; a party that would happily hand Ukraine over to the Kremlin tomorrow, if not today; a party riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel; a party whose last politicians with any decency or moral compass fled long ago.
No, I am not talking about the far-right AfD. I am talking about the far-left Die Linke. The successor party to East Germany’s former communist ruling SED emerged as the clear winner on Sunday, taking 25.8 per cent of the vote – almost five points ahead of the second-placed CDU. A landslide.
Of all parties, it is the parliamentary representative of antizionism – or, more precisely, of the elimination of Israel – of Arab migrants and of pampered German middle-class kids spoiled by affluence, who for almost three years have flooded Berlin’s streets with antisemitic chants glorifying terrorism and screaming “Yallah Intifada”, that is now the strongest political force in the capital.
Can you spot the difference? The grandparents and great-grandparents of ethnically German left-wing voters chanted “Don’t buy from Jews”, “Jews, off to Palestine” and “The Jew is killing the German people”. Their descendants today chant, only slightly less directly, “Don’t buy Israeli products”, “Jews out of Israel” and “Stop Israel’s genocide in Palestine”.
Fittingly, on Sunday evening, Ferat Koçak, Die Linke’s directly elected Bundestag MP celebrated the election victory with none other than Ibrahim Ibrahim, a representative of the United Palestinian National Committee (VPNK) – an umbrella group that Berlin’s domestic intelligence service describes as bringing together supporters of Hamas and the PFLP and as pursuing anti-constitutional aims warranting surveillance. Numerous selfies posted on social media document this explosive association. Ibrahim has described Yahya Sinwar, the chief architect of October 7, as a role model.
With some justification, Ibrahim boasts of the influence he had on Die Linke’s electoral success. Koçak, too, benefits from the relationship: in the heavily Muslim Berlin district of Neukölln, he was elected directly to the Bundestag not despite his hostility towards Israel and his close links to supporters of terrorism, but precisely because of them.
At the same official Die Linke election party, none other than the head of the Arab Remmo clan also turned up and posed making the victory sign. With good reason. Part of Die Linke’s political DNA is a determination to slash police numbers in Germany’s capital. The Arab Remmo extended family is associated with organised crime. Berlin authorities most recently seized a total of 77 properties belonging to the family, then valued at around €9 million. Investigators believe the houses and plots of land were not purchased with legally obtained money.
Twenty-five point eight per cent for this party!
What on earth has happened to this city, which is in so many ways such a wonderful place to live, full of people who are in so many ways so likeable? Something has just broken for the majority of Jewish Berliners – and no non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either.
Of course, not every Die Linke voter chose the party because of its antisemitic outbursts or its links to terror supporters. According to post-election polling, a large proportion of its voters – almost 60 per cent of those surveyed – wanted “real political change”. Die Linke scored particularly strongly with its proposals on lowering rents and social issues. But those voters, too, were at the very least prepared to tolerate the party’s hatred of Israel.
So what now? Where does Berlin go from here? Arithmetically, a so-called black-red-green coalition would command a majority – in other words, a coalition of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens. It is now up to the leaders of Berlin’s SPD and Greens to reject Die Linke in light of its extremist politics and enter coalition talks with the CDU.
Because one thing should be clear: if the Social Democrats and Greens choose Die Linke, they could no longer credibly claim to be parties guided by a moral conscience. Still less could they claim to have drawn any lessons from that endlessly invoked “Never again!” which they themselves so often parade before them like a sacred relic.
If, in the eyes of the SPD and Greens, the AfD’s extremism disqualifies it from government, why should antisemitism on the Left count for any less?
Philipp Peyman Engel is editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, Germany’s most important Jewish newspaper
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