Berlin election driven by radical ideas

Berlin, a city-state of 3.9 million people, is famously diverse, but it's also very atomized — a city of villages, where people often don't stray beyond their district, or Kiez, as Berliners like to call them.

That atomization extends to its political landscape: While the central districts of Berlin have recently voted Green or for the socialist Left Party, the outskirts — where in fact most Berliners live — is dominated by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and, in certain districts, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That makes it notoriously difficult to predict Berlin's elections, particularly in the past few years, when more parties have crowded onto the city's lampposts at election time.  

Ahead of Berlin's state election on September 20 (when Berliners will elect the state parliament, which decides who is the next mayor) three parties are neck and neck: The Left Party, the CDU and the AfD. In the latest infratest dimap poll, the Left Party has a slim lead: They're at 21%, with the CDU at 20% and the AfD at 18%. Not far behind are the Greens, with 16%, while the center-left Social Democrats, for so long a party of government in Berlin, is currently mustering just 12%.  

The AfD's relative weakness in Berlin means the situation is not as dramatic as it was in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6, where the scale of the far-right victory likely means it will be impossible to keep them out of government.

Nevertheless, a victory for the Left Party — and yet another defeat for Friedrich Merz's CDU — would both transform the politics of Berlin, where the CDU are currently in government, and increase the pressure on the chancellor.  

How to fight for election victory in a polarized city  

The capital's disparate political scene makes running an election campaign in Berlin tricky, especially for a conservative party like the CDU.

"Berlin is indeed particularly challenging," Lukas Krieger, the CDU's general secretary in Berlin, told DW.

Krieger is in a perfect position to understand the national implications of regional elections, as he is also a member of the federal parliament, where the CDU is still digesting the result in Saxony-Anhalt.

But, he insists, "Berlin isn't comparable to the country as a whole or to Saxony-Anhalt."

Dressed in a neat suit and about to enter a post-mortem meeting of CDU parliamentarians, Krieger remained bullish about the fight in Berlin, and said it was clear who the main opponent was.

"It's crystallizing more and more as a duel between the CDU and the Left Party," he said. "The AfD in Berlin has no option to negotiate a government. There's no one who wants to work with them. We have a very radical Left Party in Berlin, and that's why we say: Berlin will stay stable, and the CDU is the only party that guarantees that Berlin will stay in the middle of the political spectrum."  

Another challenge for the Berlin CDU is dealing with the loss of their incumbent mayor, Kai Wegner, who is still in office but is not running again thanks to his decision to play tennis in the middle of Berlin's biggest power outage since World War II.  

Instead, the party was forced to hastily present a new candidate, Wegner's Finance Minister Stefan Evers, who now has to navigate a course between two very different political threats: The super-confident AfD and the surging Left Party, both of whom look set to make significant gains on their 2023 election results in the city.  

Evers' main opponent is another new face: Elif Eralp, a lawyer born in Munich in 1980 just weeks after her parents fled a military putsch in Turkey. But Berliners are used to mayoral candidates not being natives of the city: Evers was born in North Rhine-Westphalia. In fact, polls show that none of the leading mayoral candidates are particularly well-known: In one recent poll, around half of Berliners said they didn't have any strong opinion on any of them. 

Tiny rooms at sky-high prices — Berlin's rental rip-off

Be credible and make offers  

The CDU's problem is that German politics is increasingly radical — as the Saxony-Anhalt election showed — and observers say this is partly because of the perceived failure of the centrist parties of government to present new solutions to the electorate.  

"The question is: Do you have your own political offers? Are you trying to unlock new groups?" said Julia Reuschenbach, political scientist at Hamburg University.

She thinks that the Left Party has established itself in Berlin as the most "credible" opposition to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That's partly, she says, because it's the only one of the left-of-center parties not willing to support the CDU (nor is the CDU willing to collaborate with the Left).   

But the Left Party has its own disadvantage: The party has been pursued by accusations of antisemitism after a rapper performing at a campaign event in Neukölln, where many of Berlin's large Palestinian community live, chanted "Death to the IDF," referring to the Israeli military. Eralp condemned the performance and promised an internal investigation, but Gaza has become vital to the Left Party's supporters: In June, the party officially resolved to consider Israel's military action in Gaza a genocide. 

Nevertheless, Reuschenbach thinks the Left Party's strength is that it is able to make tangible political offers.

"Of course, they're populist," she said. "They formulate maximalist positions: 'We want to socialize. we want to expropriate.' But it's straight. I'd say that for many people, the Left have more clarity, more of their own proposals."  

The pundit was referring specifically to what many consider the Left's most radical demand, an idea that has been at the heart of Berlin's politics for at least half a decade: The Left Party is the only one of the major parties that promises to implement the result of a referendum carried out in 2021, when 59% of Berliners voted to expropriate real estate companies that own more than 3,000 units in the city and transfer their property to public ownership.  

Since then, successive Berlin governments, led by center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and then the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have dragged their feet on the implementation, by setting up commissions on the question.  

It's the rents, stupid  

Kerstin Wolter, co-leader of the socialist Left Party in Berlin and candidate in the upcoming state election, rejects the idea that expropriating landlords should be considered "populist." After all, she said, the idea was written into the German constitution, or Basic Law, at the founding of West Germany in 1949 — though the expropriation article has never actually been invoked.

As far as Wolter is concerned, there's one reason why the Berlin population became so "radicalized," and made her party so strong.

"All the polls, all the surveys, all the conversations we have with voters ourselves, it's always the same: The rent situation is catastrophic," she told DW. "People can't find an apartment, people are scared of rent increases, people are losing their apartments because the landlords are claiming them for their own use."  

Housing, according to a recent Berlin Trend poll, is indeed by far the most important issue in this election: Some 32% of Berliners said it was the city's most important problem — way more than the 10% who said immigration and asylum, or the 9% who said security/crime/terrorism.  

Perhaps adding to this taste for revolutionary ideas is that this is the first election in Berlin's history where the voting age has been lowered to 16, and young Germans have become increasingly politicized in the last few years.

"I think a lot of young people — much more than when I was young — are concerned with questions like climate change, will I still get a job," said Wolter. "Even pensions: At an info-stand I had a girl, she seemed about 14, asking me about our pensions policy."  

Berlin, which has always been its own mix of conservatism and radicalism, is now also becoming more and more economically diverse, according to Wolter: "We have an increasing number of millionaires in Berlin, as well as an increasing number of people living in poverty."

That contributes to making the city a unique political challenge.