Last week, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral elections, and reformists around the world cheered. In Germany, Die Linke came up with the admittedly great slogan: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” (Yes, I know it’s a song—check out this amazing cover by Enrique Moreno.)
The shoe doesn’t fit, though. Mamdani is known for his solidarity with Palestine—he at one point refused to distance himself from the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” (before caving in to the Democratic Party establishment). According to exit polls, this opposition to the genocide in Gaza was a major factor for 38 percent of Mamdani’s voters. While he did focus on a simple message of affordability, he could not help but be the pro-Palestinian candidate.
Die Linke, in contrast, would prefer to not talk about the war. Former co-chair Martin Schirdewan posted a Mamdani hype video. Yet Schwirdewan spoke at the German government’s pro-Israel rallies and boycotted his own party’s limited Palestine solidarity work. Schwirdewan successfully had the Palestinian-German Trotskyist Ramsis Kilani expelled from the party.
Caren Lay, former vice-chair of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag, similarly cheered about New York results—just a month after she helped organize a counter-demo (!) against the huge Gaza demonstration in September.
Die Linke’s Berlin candidate, Elif Elrap, made a video on the anniversary of the November Pogroms, talking about the need to fight antisemitism today. As examples of antisemitism, she could have talked about cops beating up Jewish activists or Nazi billionaire heirs controlling the economy. Instead, the posts only lists two examples of modern antisemitism:
1. A non-Jewish woman being refused service in the left-wing café K-Fetisch for wearing a Zionist t-shirt in the middle of a genocide.
2. The non-Jewish, pro-Israel bar Bajszel being criticized for supporting genocide. (Bajszel once held a pro-Israel event where they kicked out all Jewish participants and had one of them beaten up.)
In other words, Die Linke agrees with Springer tabloids, the CDU, and the AfD that antisemitism is when right-wing supporters of Israel are criticized.
Is the Guard Changing?
Die Linke is certainly quite a different party than last year (when I and many others saw it on the verge of disappearing.) Tens of thousands of young people have joined the party, and they are instinctively pro-Palestinian. That is what forced the leadership to participate in some kind of Gaza protest.
Yet even if a couple of the vilest Zionists abandoned the party, such as former Berlin vice-mayor Klaus Lederer, the party apparatus is still unflinchingly pro-Israel.
This was shown when the party youth, Linksjugend-Solid, passed a resolution criticizing Israel’s “racist and colonial character.” 17 members of the Bundestag ran to the far-right press to denounce them (including Pascal Meiser of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, who represents one of the largest Palestinian communities in Europe).
Some of the most fanatical genocide supporters, like Gesine Lötzsch or Petra Pau, are approaching retirement. But Bodo Ramelow remains the Bundestag’s vice president, and thus Die Linke’s most powerful elected representative. The new leadership is only slightly less Zionist: Co-chair Inés Schwerdtner continues to defend Israel’s right to exist. Jan Van Aken has defended the expulsion of Kilani, and said further expulsions of pro-Palestinian activists could be necessary.
Once Again
This is not some personal moral failing. Die Linke is a party that has, from the day of its founding, been involved in the administration of German imperialism—they have been part of numerous state governments. As recently as 2023, Die Linke had senators in Berlin. In that role, these “leftists” were responsible for evictions, deportations, and the privatization of 200,000 public apartments. They helped sabotage the referendum to expropriate big corporate landlords—and they also carried out the first bans of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, long before Kai Wegner.
I don’t agree with what Pepe T. wrote last week, that “Die Linke once represented a revolutionary alternative to establishment politics” and that it was “once an anti-imperialist force against oppression worldwide.” That is simply not true: the main founder of Die Linke was a former German finance minister who has attacked refugees for decades.
Die Linke’s unbroken Zionism is just a symbol of their fundamental commitment to Germany’s capitalist state—they are willing to throw their supporters under a car whenever the ruling class demands it. They would have expelled a Berlin Mamdani years ago.
But there is hope! Mamdani’s victory shows that leftists can push back against false accusations of antisemitism—Mamdani didn’t just win, but he even won a large majority of young Jewish voters. Die Linke could potentially speak to the large majority of Berlin’s population (70-80 percent in polls) who oppose the genocide.
But for this to happen, all those new young left-wing members of Die Linke need to get organized. They need to call for the expulsion of Ramelow and all the other supporters of genocide. Most importantly, they need to oppose Die Linke’s orientation to joining capitalist governments—another “left-wing government” will only lead to new betrayals and disappointments.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, the role of a socialist party “in bourgeois society, is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”
The resolution by Linksjugend-Solid—and the furious reactions to it from far-right tabloids and Die Linke’s leadership—show a way forward. This kind of militant opposition to Germany’s capitalist state is how we will get left-wing policies in Berlin.
Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.
