ByDavid Broder
On Sunday, Germany’s socialist party Die Linke won the Berlin elections for the first time. Like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, it beat the establishment parties by offering Berliners concrete action on rents and the cost of living.
Germany’s socialist party Die Linke came first in Sunday’s Berlin election with a huge vote among young Berliners and the multiethnic working class. Now its lead candidate, Elif Eralp, hopes to become Berlin’s new mayor. (Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images)
Ok, Berlin doesn’t have a socialist mayor quite yet. But left-wing Die Linke, which won Sunday’s Berlin state election, is in a strong position to lead its next government. Even as the far right rises across Germany, Die Linke has distinguished itself with a strong stance in defense of multiethnic society and a constant focus on the cost of living and housing. For this, it was rewarded by many Berliners.
The result is vindication for a party which was on life support just two years ago, after messy internal conflicts. Many of the conditions for its growth were already then in place. Berliners had long seen their rents rising; the establishment center left has for decades cut back social protections and labor rights; the call to mobilize against rising nationalism is hardly new either. Yet only more recently has Die Linke become an outward-facing force, able to galvanize resistance to the current reactionary drift in German politics.
Die Linke’s campaign centered on the cost of living and specifically on rent. West Berlin was historically cheaper than the Federal Republic’s main cities, and even after reunification the capital boasted much empty space. Yet the sell-off of the public housing stock to private profiteers in the 1990s–2000s, plus a lack of new builds, has pushed up costs. While Berliners voted in a 2021 referendum to renationalize the housing stock, the city government didn’t make good on the result. In this election, Die Linke promised that it would do so.
Getting coalition partners to agree may be tougher. The previous “red-red-green” coalition in 2021–23, where Die Linke and the Greens backed a government headed by centrist Social Democrat (SPD) Mayor Franziska Giffey, didn’t deliver. Indeed, polls suggest Die Linke’s success on Sunday owed much to broadly leftish Berliners moving across from the Greens and SPD, as well as to first-time voters. If it’s easy to imagine Berlin as a progressive fortress, in fact all these parties added together only cornered 52 percent of the vote.
Shifts within this electorate were important. Germany’s softer-left parties have routinely governed with conservatives, today subordinate budget policy to military spending, and side with Israel. Die Linke has done better than these nominal progressives in defending basic humanitarian principles. No wonder it scored massively in a multiethnic district like Neukölln 2 (on 53 percent) and among all twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-old Berliners (48 percent). This stand, too, explains the renewal of its activist base over the last couple of years, and its ability to become an attractive force speaking to a broad electorate.
