There are plenty of good reasons to despise Germany’s far-Left party – heir, lest anyone forget, to the old East German ruling communist party. Its brand of “democratic socialism” is a wealth-destruction machine. Its ideal state is weak where it ought to be strong – protecting citizens – and heavy-handed where it has no business being: interfering in markets, private contracts and property. And don’t forget its wretched identity politics and its suicidal habit of portraying Islamists as freedom fighters.
And yet one can only hope that Elif Eralp, the Left’s lead candidate at the recent election in Berlin, makes it to become the German capital’s next mayor – with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens in tow.
Reason one: trust in democracy. The Left won the election. That deserves respect. On paper, the Christian Democrats (down 9.4 percentage points) and the Social Democrats (down 6.3) could still scrape together a majority by dragging the Greens (down 4.1) along with them. Berlin, like every German state, is governed by a coalition, since proportional representation makes outright majorities all but non-existent.
But a coalition of the election’s losers would hollow out democracy’s core idea. The people are not always right, but they must be able to get rid of a government they consider wrong – as Karl Popper might have formulated it. Another CDU-led senate – Berlin’s state government – would be sticking two fingers up at the voters.
Christian and Social Democrats should also drop the shrill warnings of decline. Both old West Berlin and the reunified city have so far only produced mayors from these two parties. So when Berliners complain about extortion rackets run by organised-crime clans, overwhelmed public authorities, filth in the streets and no-go areas for Jews, well – that will all probably get even worse under Frau Eralp. But the current squalid state of Germany’s capital is chiefly the work of the self-appointed centrists of German politics. And it is something of which they should be ashamed.
Anti-capitalist, pro-Palestinian Elif Eralp has been dubbed ‘Berlin’s Mamdani’ – TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP
Reason two: the Left party’s power would not be untrammelled. Its flagship housing policy is not some bizarre socialist fantasy – it rests on Article 15 of Germany’s Basic Law, which explicitly permits the “socialisation” of land and property against compensation, a clause that has sat unused since 1949. Berlin voters backed exactly this in a 2021 referendum demanding that large landlords be forced to hand over tens of thousands of flats to the city. Should the city’s housing market collapse entirely in the shadow of this untested experiment, while crime and anti-Semitism spiral, it would fall to the Greens and the SPD to blow up the coalition. Because however strong the Left may be today, it does not have the seats to govern alone. It still needs these two partners to remain in power.
Which brings us to the third reason: the naïve belief that political exclusion deters. Just look at the AfD, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany. The “firewall” – the mainstream parties’ pact never to touch this pariah – didn’t shrink the AfD; it turbocharged it. The same is likely to happen with the Left party. A coalition of the election’s losers in Berlin would probably hand it an even stronger result next time round. Better, then, to let it govern now, while it still needs two Left-wing coalition partners to, one hopes, prevent the very worst folly.
And folly there will be. Berlin will be poorer and less safe in five years’ time. Socialism always ends badly. But sometimes telling people so isn’t enough. Sometimes they need to feel the decline in their own skin to recognise the mistake.
By then, a larger – and, given the German public’s dwindling faith in democracy, overdue – correction may well have taken place in the rest of the country. The “firewall” against the AfD will be dead in all but name the moment the Greens and Social Democrats hand Elif Eralp the keys to the city hall. Because the establishment parties cannot hoist one pole of the political spectrum into government while continuing to shun its opposite. German voters won’t wear that.
A socialist mayor of Berlin would thus, for the first time in decades, push open the door to non-Left politics across the rest of the Republic.
That would be quite an outcome.
Marc Felix Serrao is a writer for the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network