Marc Martorell Junyent Informed Comment
Her name is Elif Eralp; she is the daughter of Turkish political refugees and has a strong chance of becoming Berlin’s next mayor. Her left-wing party, Die Linke (“The Left”), won the city-state elections in the German capital on Sunday 20, taking 25.7% of the vote, up from 12.2% in the 2023 elections. If Die Linke reaches a coalition agreement with The Greens and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Eralp could become the second Die Linke member to lead a land, or German state. She would be following the steps of Bodo Ramelow, who presided over the eastern land of Thuringia almost uninterruptedly between 2014 and 2024.
Eralp’s campaign has drawn comparisons with Zohran Mamdani’s race to become mayor of New York. Both politicians subscribe to democratic socialism and have focused their campaigns on issues of affordability. Under the slogan “Berlin bezahlbar machen” (Making Berlin affordable), the core issue in Die Linke’s campaign has been the lack of access to affordable housing. During the last decade, rent prices have risen by 69% in the German capital – where only 15% of the inhabitants own the house they live in.
Die Linke proposes to introduce a rent cap in the apartments owned by the state of Berlin, to build more public housing, and to put an end to the business of illegal vacation rentals. But the left-wing party’s flagship proposal is the expropriation of more than 200,000 housing units from corporate landlords. A majority of Berliners already voted in 2021 in favor of such a measure in a non-binding referendum. Following the vote, in 2023 a commission established that expropriation is legal and possible. What remains contested is the amount of compensation the expropriated companies would be entitled to. The proponents of expropriation talk about 13.7 billion, whereas the Berlin government provides estimates of up to 36 billion.
The departing Berlin government, led by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a coalition with the SPD, halted any progress towards expropriation. This is hardly surprising if we consider that both the CDU and SPD party sections in Berlin have received generous donations from property companies. On election day, these two parties, which also form a deeply unpopular national government, were severely punished by the electorate. Whereas the conservatives fell from 28.2% to 18.8% of the vote, the SPD moved from 18.4% to 12.1%.
As journalist Sebastian Friedrich has pointed out in the weekly newspaper Der Freitag, Die Linke’s election success shows the importance of issue ownership. This concept in political science refers to the way a political party benefits from being perceived as competent to solve an issue that has achieved particular salience. According to election day polling, more than half of Berliners identified the housing market as one of the main political problems in the German capital, followed by transportation with a very distant 23%. At the same time, 34% of the voters saw Die Linke as the most competent party to deal with this housing crisis. This is the same principle that has conversely secured massive gains for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD or “Alternative for Germany”) when immigration and asylum have been at the center of the debate.
Die Linke can congratulate itself on having reached not only previous voters of The Greens and the SPD (with whom Die Linke often interchanges voters), but also around 75,000 people who had not voted previously. This represents a significant fraction of the total 468,060 votes the party received. Die Linke’s best results were in the particularly multicultural borough of Neukölln and in the city centre, and much better in the external boroughs of eastern Berlin than in western Berlin. For a party that aims to represent the working class, it is also remarkable that voters who perceive their own economic situation as bad were significantly more likely to vote Die Linke than better-off voters. This was far less the case in the 2025 national elections despite the left-wing party also achieving good results back then.
Will Elif Eralp become mayor of Berlin?
The AfD, which achieved 16.3% of the vote in Berlin, will be isolated from political power by the other parties represented in the regional parliament. Meanwhile, the CDU and Die Linke decline to reach coalition agreements with each other. This leaves only two options for a ruling coalition. One of them, which would enjoy an ample majority, would be the sum of Die Linke, The Greens, and the SPD. The other one, which would only have two seats over the absolute majority, would also include The Greens and the SPD but be led by the Christian Democrats, the second most-voted party.
The first option, known as Rot-Rot-Grün (Red-Red-Green) after the colours of the three parties, is the most logical considering that Die Linke won the elections and that these parties have significant policy overlaps. But it might never come to fruition due to two main reasons. The first one is that, whereas Die Linke considers the expropriation of corporate landlords a red line and The Greens appear to be open to it, the SPD seems so far reluctant to implement the results of the 2021 referendum.
The second obstacle to the formation of a Rot-Rot-Grün coalition has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the debate on antisemitism in Germany. An election campaign event of Die Linke featured a rapper, Dahabflex, who sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada Westbank, Palästina, Gaza” as well as “Death to the IDF”. Eralp quickly criticised these words and committed herself once again to the protection of Jewish life in Berlin, building upon a five-point plan against anti-semitism she had previously presented. But this did not prevent the beginning of a campaign by vast elements of the mainstream media and numerous political opponents portraying Die Linke as a whole as having a serious anti-semitism problem.
Left-wing antisemitism certainly exists, as it does in any other social context. But here Die Linke does not appear to be paying the price for any specific mistake. Rather, the outcry has far more to do with the left-wing party being the only political group in the German parliament that recognizes the Gaza genocide, although only since last June. Far too often, legitimate criticism of Israel has been conflated with anti-semitism. Also important to understand the demonisation of Die Linke is the fact that Muslims represent an important voting bloc for the party (51% of them voted for it in Berlin) and Eralp herself is the daughter of refugees from a mainly Muslim country.
The campaign against Die Linke gained new strength after its victory on September 20. It did not help that a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was spotted at the election party of Die Linke in Neukölln. The PFLP is classified as a terrorist group by the European Union. Soon enough, the CDU was applying renewed pressure on The Greens and the SPD to discard a coalition with Die Linke and build a new government with the conservatives instead. The Central Council of Jews in Germany published a letter asking for Die Linke to be kept away from the Berlin government. The letter was countered by a group of 150 prominent Jews in Berlin, including authors Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, who argued that “this barrage of accusations is intended to suppress differing opinions and undermine international law.”
The Rise of the AfD
The focus on this allegedly widespread anti-semitism within Die Linke is all the more shocking in a time when the AfD appears to be closer to political power than ever before. Also on September 20, parallel to the elections in Berlin, regional polls took place in the eastern land of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. For the third time in history, the AfD emerged victorious in a regional election with 38.2% of the votes, right behind the SPD with 35.5% of support. Even so, the next government in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will most likely be a Rot-Rot-Grün coalition led by Manuela Schwesig, the popular SPD regional president.
Die Linke campaign poster: “The Nazi remains a Nazi: No Place for Racism and Hate.” Public Domain. Via Picryl
But the situation is different in the land of Saxony-Anhalt, also in the East, where the AfD secured 43.8% of the vote in the September 6 regional elections – only three seats away from an absolute majority. Preventing the AfD from taking power in Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, would require the difficult cooperation of the other five parties represented in the regional parliament.
Ulrich Siegmund, leader of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt and candidate for regional president, surrounds himself with staffers and party colleagues who were members of the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (Patriotic German Youth), a neo-Nazi group banned by the German state. The group organized summer camps that featured military-style drills and courses on “racial purity.” In a 2025 interview, Siegmund refused to provide his opinion on whether the Third Reich had represented “the worst of humanity.” Meanwhile, Björn Höcke, the first AfD leader to win a regional election in Thuringia in 2024, has been convicted for repeatedly using a Nazi slogan. Of note, the AfD currently leads national polls with around 28% of the vote, far ahead of the second-placed CDU. The Greens would receive more support than the SPD (something that has never happened in a national election) and Die Linke would go back to a percentage of the vote it did not enjoy for almost two decades.
German politics has definitely entered a new era, marked by the decline of the CDU and the SPD, the only two parties ever to appoint a chancellor. The country’s political landscape is undergoing major changes, and this will only complicate the negotiations to form a new regional government in Berlin, which are expected to drag on for weeks.
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