A Qualified Victory

The first is to treat the victory of Die Linke (“The Left”) as proof that the German capital has finally surrendered to the combined forces of veganism, gender-neutral bathrooms and people who own six tote bags but no automobile.

The more respectable error is to throw Berlin into the same sack as the recent elections in Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and declare that Germany is being squeezed by “the extremes”, much as it was during the final years of the Weimar Republic.

This second formulation has the advantage of sounding grave while explaining almost nothing. It places a party campaigning to prevent tenants from being priced out of their apartments on the same analytic plane as one whose leading figures dream of an ethnically purified national community. Evidently both are alarming departures from the sensible centre, where rents triple at a constitutionally moderate pace.

There’s no minimising the threat posed by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

In Sachsen-Anhalt, the AfD won nearly 44 per cent of the vote and came within three seats of governing outright. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, it reached roughly 38 per cent and emerged as the largest party. Nationally, it is polling around 29 per cent. To make matters worse, the party’s more radical branches in former East German territory aren’t even bothering to hide the ethnonationalist substance beneath the populist wrapping.

The AfD combines hostility towards immigrants, contempt for liberal institutions, historical revisionism, climate nihilism and a foreign policy suspiciously well adapted to the requirements of Vladimir Putin. Its advance threatens not merely another alternation of government but the very political and moral architecture of the Federal Republic. Anyone tempted to describe the AfD as a routine protest party should consider what sort of protest involves deporting one’s neighbours.

Because the AfD is dangerous, we must understand its specific character rather than invoke it as a universal solvent for political explanation. Berlin’s election was not Sachsen-Anhalt with better nightclubs.

Die Linke won 25.7 per cent, more than doubling its 2023 result and finishing almost seven points ahead of the CDU. The AfD rose substantially, from 9.1 to 16.3 per cent, but remained third. The CDU collapsed from 28.2 to 18.8 per cent, the Greens fell to 14.3, and the SPD—once so thoroughly identified with the city that it might have charged royalties on the name Berlin—only managed 12.1 per cent, its worst result there since the war. Berlin’s governing CDU-SPD coalition was not nudged aside. It was evicted.

The “comforting” centrist account of these results holds that voters abandoned moderation for radicalism. But moderation in this instance meant a housing system in which tenants were handed over to predatory institutional landlords. At the same time, the parties responsible issued competing plans to commission additional studies.

Rents in the German metropolis have risen by approximately 69 per cent since 2016. Since more than 80 per cent of Berliners rent their homes, this massive increase doesn’t just signal hardship for the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Rather, it represents a slow reorganisation of the city by income: displacement, overcrowding, longer commutes, postponed families and the conversion of formerly ordinary neighbourhoods into investment vehicles with bakeries attached.

When 53 per cent of voters identify housing and rents as Berlin’s most important problem, insisting that politics should return to the reasonable centre is a little like responding to a kitchen fire by adjusting the thermostat.

Die Linke understood this situation with a clarity that escaped parties staffed by people with graduate degrees in understanding situations. Elif Eralp campaigned on rent controls, tenant protections, municipal construction, and implementing the 2021 referendum calling for the socialisation of approximately 220,000 apartments owned by large corporate landlords. She wore a gold necklace spelling out Mietendeckel, which is either effective political symbolism or evidence that German compound nouns have finally entered hip-hop.

More importantly, Die Linke connected its program to everyday experience. Its canvassers offered to check tenants’ bills for illegal charges and overpayments. This was politics not as delivering messages to demographic segments but as intervening in the relations governing people’s lives.

The campaign’s much-discussed resemblance to Zohran Mamdani’s surprising triumph in last year’s New York mayoral election is real. However, the international political class will no doubt oversimplify the explanation into “young candidate good at TikTok”. For Die Linke, what mattered most was not the medium but the relationship it created. Party activists knocked on doors, listened to complaints and presented themselves as participants in a conflict already taking place between tenants and property owners.

Die Linke’s rapid membership growth supplied the people required to do this at scale. The organisation gave the program credibility; the program gave the organisation purpose. Although that’s how mainstream political parties used to operate, this approach is now regarded as an innovation, since most political parties have spent thirty years replacing their social bases with consultants.

The voter movements show the breadth of the achievement. Die Linke gained an estimated 75,000 votes from people who had not voted in 2023; 57,000 from the Greens; 39,000 from the SP; and even 16,000 from the CDU. It lost only around 10,000 to the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). The AfD also mobilised abstainers—about 61,000—and took roughly 60,000 votes from the CDU.

The superficial similarity is obvious. Both Die Linke and AfD profited from the governing centre’s exhaustion. But these outsider parties differ crucially in how they have converted dissatisfaction into politics.

Die Linke made corporate property and unaffordable housing its primary target: the AfD named foreigners, liberal elites and the entire treacherous apparatus of pluralist society. One created solidarity among people subjected to the same market power; the other manufactured unity by dividing the population into those who belong and those who do not.

That distinction is obscured by the endlessly recycled horseshoe metaphor, according to which left and right bend toward one another as they move away from a virtuous centre. The metaphor survives because it flatters the people standing in the middle. It converts their declining authority into evidence of their moral superiority.

But the Berlin election result looks less like a horseshoe than a struggle between incompatible ways of organising insecurity. Die Linke proposed that people become political subjects as tenants, workers and users of public services. The AfD proposed that they become political subjects as Germans menaced by aliens and betrayal. Although both parties begin from social dislocation, only one requires a fantasy of ethnic restoration.

Berlin’s electoral geography underscores the difference between these parties. The metropolis retains both an East-West division and a centre-periphery division, though neither is absolute. The outer eastern neighbourhoods combine weaker infrastructure, lower household wealth, resentment of metropolitan cultural power and the accumulated injuries of reunification.

The AfD’s Berlin vote underscored these historical divisions. It was strongest in the eastern outer districts, winning 33.8 per cent in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, while performing much more weakly in the former West.

By contrast, Die Linke did almost equally well in the former East and West of the city, taking 27.8 per cent in the East and 24.1 per cent in the West. It conquered inner-city districts previously dominated by the Greens, sometimes by astonishing margins. In the Wedding constituency, famous for being red a century ago, it reached 50.5 per cent after gaining twenty-nine points.

Die Linke also performed strongly in neighbourhoods with large migrant populations and led among employees, workers and the self-employed. Among women under twenty-five, it won an absolute majority.  But it wasn’t simply the party of students who have recently discovered that landlords are bad. It led every age group below sixty.

The AfD has become adept at translating abandonment into national grievance. In the inner city, Die Linke translated renters’ insecurity into class conflict. Geography did not determine the result, but it furnished the social terrain on which rival explanations could operate.

This is where Berlin diverges most sharply from the AfD’s development elsewhere. In much of the former DDR, the AfD has become more than a repository for protest. It is constructing a durable political identity from regional humiliation, demographic decline and the sense that reunification transformed East Germans into guests in a country formally their own. It offers recognition in a poisoned form.

The East is recast not as Germany’s backward province but as its patriotic vanguard, the portion of the nation capable of penetrating the veil of liberal hypocrisy. Economic dissatisfaction matters, but it is woven into a cultural narrative possessing its own emotional force. Voting AfD becomes less a judgment on this month’s electricity bill than an affirmation of who one is and whom one refuses to become.

The AfD’s development is therefore not a hydraulic response to deprivation, as though pouring social spending into the East would cause fascism to drain harmlessly away. Material abandonment creates opportunities, not automatic political conclusions. The party has spent years organising those opportunities through local networks, social media, historical resentment and a language of national rebirth.

The AfD has also benefited from the CDU’s recurring belief that repeating the far-right account of immigration in a more expensive suit will lure voters back to Christian democracy. This approach has been a colossal failure. In Berlin, the CDU lost 60,000 voters to the AfD and another 16,000 to Die Linke, achieving the difficult feat of being simultaneously too reactionary for the metropolis and insufficiently reactionary for the minority of the population inclined to overrecht.

The Berlin election results suggest no universal formula for defeating the AfD. A tenant-centred campaign suited to a metropolis of renters cannot simply be air-dropped into depopulating districts along the Polish border. Nor should Die Linke’s victory be romanticised as evidence that material politics automatically supersedes racism. After all, the AfD still added more than seven points in one of Europe’s most liberal cities.

The AfD’s strong showing reveals constituencies that Die Linke’s campaign did not reach and antagonisms that housing policy alone cannot dissolve. Moreover, the BSW’s 4.7 per cent shows that a market remains for combining social protection with nationalism, hostility to migration, and indulgence toward Moscow: the welfare state imagined as a gated community.

What the Berlin election does make clear is that the far right grows most easily when voters are left to choose between neoliberal administration and ethnonationalist revolt.

The governing centre tells people that the forces transforming their lives are complex, global and regrettably beyond democratic control. The far right replies that control can be restored by closing borders, purging institutions and silencing enemies. Although this answer is monstrous, it at least acknowledges the desire for agency that technocratic politics treats as an embarrassing cognitive error.

Die Linke interrupted this exchange by identifying a field in which democratic power might actually be exercised. Corporate landlords are not an imaginary enemy. Their holdings can be regulated, taxed, purchased or socialised. A rent bill is not a metaphor. That made Die Linke’s campaign a particularly useful commitment device.

Berlin’s likely governing coalition of Die Linke, the Greens and SPD would hold ninety-five of the 158 seats in the new Abgeordnetenhaus. The arithmetic is comfortable, but the politics will not be. The SPD is deeply uneasy about socialisation, the Greens will demand concessions on climate and transport, and both parties are pressing Die Linke over allegations of antisemitism in parts of its Berlin organisation.

The Berlin result is therefore encouraging without being consoling. It does not cancel the AfD’s victories elsewhere, nor does it prove that a sufficiently lively left campaign can banish fascism with door hangers and a rent calculator. Instead, it shows something more modest but also more important: the crisis of the centre has no predetermined beneficiary.

The AfD’s rise is a warning about what happens when democratic societies cease to offer credible means of collective action. Die Linke’s victory is evidence that this vacancy can still be contested. Germany remains in danger. Berlin, for the moment, has at least chosen the right enemy.