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Red Flag: Power outage in Berlin — was this far-left terrorism?

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at the sabotage action claimed by the Volcano Group.

Nathaniel Flakin
07/01/2026

As I write these lines, tens of thousands of Berlin households are without electricity. In the early hours of Saturday, a power cable over the Teltow canal—leading from the combined heat and power plant Lichterfelde to the small garden colony Zukunft—was blown up. The attack didn’t just knock out lights and communications for people in Zehlendorf, Dahlem, and other neighborhoods. Without electricity, most heating systems don’t work—during the coldest week of the year. Nursing homes are running with emergency generators, while many residents have been put in school gymnasiums.

The first thing we should ask: Why will it take until Thursday to repair basic infrastructure? Why couldn’t people without power be moved into hotels? The Senate announced a cumbersome program for residents to book hotel rooms for 70 euros a night—and after criticism, announced that this will be reimbursed at some point. Obviously, it is the people most in need of help who don’t benefit from this kind of expensive bureaucratic nightmare.

The real story here is German austerity: as they spend hundreds of billions on new weapons, the ruling class is letting infrastructure decay. Across the country, all kinds of pipes and cables are decades past their lifespans, and exposed to vandalism—look at these fiberglass cables next to train tracks, for example. Personnel for repairs has been cut to the bone for efficiency. If anyone is responsible for the power outage, it is the government.

Obviously left-wing extremists?

On Sunday at noon, Berlin’s far-right mayor Kai Wegner proclaimed that this was “obviously left-wing extremists”—the next day at a press conference he added: “this must be called terrorism.”

At 14:01 on Sunday, a “Volcano Group” published a letter claiming responsibility on the left-wing portal Indymedia: “Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual work,” they wrote, describing the sabotage, primarily directed at “owners of villas in these neighborhoods,” as an “act of self-defense” against fossil fuel companies and the “imperial mode of living.”

Was this a left-wing group? As of yet, Berlin police have presented zero evidence. Berlin has seen numerous sabotage actions claimed by a Vulkangruppe going all the way back to 2011—the name was originally in reference to Icelandic volcanoes whose eruptions suspended European air travel. As recently as 2024, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on an electricity pylon leading to the Tesla factory.

While the statement uses phrases from the German autonomist scene, we know that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has written and published texts just like this: officers signed articles as “the two from the Muppet Show” in underground left-wing magazines in their pursuit of the “militant group” in the mid-2000s. Looking at the enormous resources the state mobilized to pursue the old mg, it is astounding that we have no information about the Volcano Group after almost 15 years. If it is indeed a left-wing group, it is just as astounding that they have no periphery at all—not a single left-wing sympathizer defending their actions.

Some people have pointed to perplexing spelling and syntax in the German text. Why is the U.S. vice president’s name spelled “Vans” (instead of Vance), while Berlin’s vice mayor is “Giffay” (instead of Giffey)? If the Volcano Group is unsurpassed in precision strikes, such misspellings pose a conundrum. Could this be a product of transliterating to Russian and back? There are numerous strange formulations that ring of AI—no German speaker refers to wealthy countries as “Metropolenländer,” for example. An SPD politician has also wondered about the “insider information” that the attackers have used—these are not anarchists setting random transformers on fire.

It’s certainly possible that a conspiracy is afoot. There have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. People on social media are pointing to parliamentary inquiries by the AfD about the electricity network in south-west Berlin. Finally, someone claiming to be the Volcano Group of 2011 published a statement on Indymedia condemning the attack in Lichterfelde.

Nonsensical

But it’s also possible that the Volcano Group is a genuine left-wing group. There is a section of the climate movement that calls for sabotaging the infrastructure of fossil capital: Andreas Malm made a very popular book and a motion picture about how to blow up pipelines.

Tadzio Müller, Berlin’s most eccentric climate activist, did not condone this attack, but told the taz newspaper that similar actions “could be necessary and legitimate under certain circumstances” as long as they did not endanger human lives.

Yet even the most successful sabotage—an ideal job that somehow manages to be extremely disruptive without endangering or even inconveniencing normal people—is never politically useful for the Left. Our project is one of universal human self-emancipation: billions of people will have to struggle to break the power of the capitalists and reorganize the planet.

Such a mass struggle cannot be replaced by clandestine groups. From the Russian Narodniks to the West German RAF, guerrilleros might believe that armed actions will electrify and inspire the otherwise passive masses. But after several centuries of attempts, we can say that this “propaganda of the deed” has failed.

It is workers—the billions of people who keep all of society running—who have the power to shut down fossil capital. Even mass sabotage events like those of Ende Gelände, where thousands of activists occupied coal mines and power plants, were not able to replace the potential of just a handful of workers going on strike.

At the moment, we don’t have enough information to say who is responsible for the power outage—it could be state agents but also extremely confused lefties. Back in 2017, I described attacks against train infrastructure, in protest against the G20 summit, as “the most nonsensical action of the year.” If we want direct action to stop the direction of our planet, there is no other way than organizing workers.

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.

13 January 1898: Emile Zola publishes J’Accuse

This week in working class history

Phil Butland

In December 1894, French army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of espionage. The prosecution based their case on a single document—the borderau—which contained apparent proof that Dreyfus had sent military secrets to the German embassy. Even though the borderau was not even written in his handwriting, Dreyfus was Jewish, which was seen by many as proof of his guilt. He was sentenced to imprisonment in a stone hut on Devil’s Island in South America.

Three years after Dreyfus’s conviction, author Émile Zola took action. Zola was one of the world’s most translated authors—best known to socialists for Germinal, his novel about a miners’ strike. On January 13th 1898, Zola penned a 4,000 word open letter to the French president published in L’Aurore, a Parisian daily paper. It sold 300,000 copies. The article, titled J’Accuse, accused leading politicians and army leaders of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Zola was not afraid to name the names of the people responsible.

Zola intended to be prosecuted for libel as a result of his letter, so that more facts about Dreyfus’s case would become public. The French establishment reacted quickly, fining Zola 3,000 Francs, sentencing him to a one year imprisonment, and withdrawing his Legion d’Honneur title. Despite this, documents confirming Dreyfus’s innocence remained hidden from the public eye. Zola fled to England until the French president pardoned Dreyfus the following year, albeit with his guilty verdict sustained.

Jules Guesde, a former associate of Karl Marx, argued that the affair was merely a conflict within the ruling class and that the French Left should not support any faction of an army that had recently crushed the Paris Commune—an army in which Dreyfus himself had served as an officer. But French socialist leader Jean Jaurès was a passionate supporter of Dreyfus, as was Rosa Luxemburg, who argued: “The principle of class struggle imposes the active intervention of the proletariat in all the political and social conflicts of any importance that take place inside the bourgeoisie.”

A vast campaign by the League for the Rights of Man organised a mass petition and held public meetings throughout France. In 1906, it finally overturned Dreyfus’s conviction. The Dreyfus Affair has a number of lessons for us today: from the way in which our rulers use racist (in this case antisemitic) attacks to divide us, the need for unity of all victims of capitalism, and the knowledge that while talented individuals like Zola can make important contributions, it is mass action that brings change.

US attack on Venezuela prompt calls for respect for international law

Interview: with Patrick Bond by Oliver Dickson, South African Broadcasting Corporation

Phil Butland
06/01/2026

Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. We have asked him to share some thoughts on the US attack on Venezuela.

The US attack on Venezuela is not unprecedented but nonetheless extraordinary. What do you project the immediate implications of it to be?

Well, it’s an indication that Donald Trump is starting 2026 as the maximum bully. And I think we’re going to see him gain confidence for his neoconservative militaristic side, and he will also threaten the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama and maybe Denmark, in terms of control of Greenland.

So we’re now in a very lawless, wild-west period in the Western Hemisphere that follows the national security report of Marco Rubio, which basically says, “the Western Hemisphere is ours”. The old 1823 Monroe Doctrine – claiming that the US will control that area – is now being called the Donroe (Donald Donroe Trump) Doctrine. And that is something I think the world must wake up to and say, “no you can’t do that”.

America’s NATO partners were quiet when America did this in Iraq and once again in Syria. And of course we saw what they did in Libya with the regime change of Gaddafi. What does the world stand to lose this time around if they once again turn a blind eye?

Donald Trump will be empowered to continue with his regime change agenda. He will probably feel the need to do that in the period between now and November, when he will face tough elections for his members of Congress: the House of Representatives all turn over, plus a third of the Senate. We can often see these sorts of interventions as a distraction, as a way of exerting power abroad when things are going badly at home. And I think that’s probably part of the calculation this year.

The other aspect is the hypocrisy of the G7. There’s a G6 which is Europe, Canada and Japan, and Donald Trump has broken free. He did not come to the G20 here in Johannesburg, and he also dropped out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – which means the US is violating the world’s responsibility to cut emissions. He also quit the World Health Organization, which throws pandemic preparedness into question.

In the first sixth months of 2025, Elon Musk, our South African born-and-raised ally of Trump, cut USAID, which operated as the main agency for overseas development, healthcare, climate support, food and emergency aid. A report in the Lancet says that means 14 million lives will be threatened by 2030.

What more? Bombing Iran in June. Supporting the genocide in Gaza by giving Benjamin Netanyahu free reign, as he just did this last week. It is really time to ask what can be done now, to say this rogue activity must be stopped. On trade, we saw divisions, and only one country stood up to him on the tariffs. That was China, who said, “we’ll put sanctions on you with the rare earth minerals”.

I think that was a signal that, actually, Trump can be forced to back down. The Houthis forced his Navy out of the Red Sea in May by virtue of their drones, and being able to shoot down US drones. And I think there are moments where you see some resistance. We all have to remember what his own vice president JD Vance said: Donald Trump could be the next Adolf Hitler. When he said that, just before the 2016 election, we didn’t really know Trump. Well, now we do, and I think we do have to worry that there is an expansive, arrogant, and, as our foreign minister says, “white supremacist” point of view, that led him into this attack on Venezuela, which I think the world now must stand up against.

What we learn from Syria, Iraq and Libya to an extent is that often an invasion of a country leads to insurgencies on the ground. And regularly that leads to protracted wars, which forms the pretext of America’s continued “war on terror”. Do you anticipate that would happen in this instance as well?

Well, just add Afghanistan. That was the crucial insurgency, with the Taliban coming back and in 2021 Joe Biden – Trump’s predecessor – actually felt the need to pull out US troops. So it can be done. Iraq has not gone well. The US lost quite a few troops there when they invaded in 2003.

The vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, is a loyalist and coming out of the Chavez tradition, the left. But according to Marco Rubio, he talked to her and said, “she’s willing to do business”. Interestingly, Trump said that the popular middle-class leadership, including the Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado, isn’t ready to take over. Edmundo Gonzalez was the candidate against Maduro in 2024.

At that point, Maduro didn’t really prove that he’d won the election. He just said he’d won. They never released the ballots and therefore he lost the support of, for example, Lula in Brazil, or Mexico’s president at the time Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or president Gustavo Petro in Colombia. The left didn’t hold together to support him.

Cuba’s very weak. Nicaragua was extremely weak, and no longer really a left government. And I think the potential for resistance remains the biggest question, because Maduro was captured and is no longer in Venezuela, unlike in 2002 where Chavez – having been captured and taken away – was returned to power after the masses of the people came back during that coup attempt.

About a decade ago I was a TeleSUR columnist, so I kept in touch, and I’ve been to Venezuela. But if the US invades again, I don’t think that that sort of mass popular support for Maduro can be counted on anymore. I think it’s going to be up to all the rest of us to protest at US embassies and consulates, and start sanctions. Those would be the ways forward if the Venezuelan people call on us, because they feel that the US will really clamp down on any dissent there.

I want to ask about Russia, China, and Iran as well, because they also have economic interests tied to the fortunes of Venezuela and its political stability, for which Nicolas Maduro was an important interlocutor. Do you anticipate that they would throw their support behind Delcy Rodriguez, as she assumes a head of state position?

Probably they’ll make continuing objections, and there may be a debate in the UN Security Council, and probably the US will just veto, and that’ll be that. We’ve seen once before, a coup within the BRICS countries – before Iran joined – that was an internal coup against the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. That was in 2016, and there was a lot of discussion then about the potential for the BRICS to say, “we won’t deal with the new president of Brazil”. But they never did. Nor did they react to Trump’s bombing of Iran last year.

That’s the biggest dilemma for the BRICS: they talk left, they walk right. They don’t really do very much to change the status quo. So I doubt we’ll see China, Russia, or Iran standing up. In fact, Iran is probably hunkering down because again, Trump has essentially said, Yeah, Israel, you can go and bomb them. We can take out the Iranians. The popular unrest there now is maybe giving them some sort of excuse.

The pretext that Donald Trump relied on to invade Venezuela seems to have shifted over time. The indictment that came out of the United States District Court’s Southern District of New York reads as follows: “Nicholas Maduro, the defendant, is at the forefront of that corruption and has partnered with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States. Since his early days in the Venezuelan government, Maduro Moros has tarnished every public office he has held.”

I want to pause there. He’s allegedly running a narco state and facilitating the transportation and distribution of cocaine in the US. Then he is presiding over an illegitimate government that he had rigged elections. How much truth is there to any of that?

The main thing is, you can’t trust the US. They claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and they arranged an invasion in 2003 and went looking for them. They never found them and never really came to grips with that.

The New York Southern District Court began that indictment back in March 2000. So this is now nearly six years in which we’ve heard the allegation, but we haven’t seen any proof. We just saw a few dozen small speedboats being bombed, and 115 deaths on the same grounds. But no proof. We do know – and DEA statements confirm – that the fentanyl and cocaine isn’t coming from Venezuela. The cocaine is mostly from Colombia, fentanyl from China.

Trump says that they’re killing 300,000 Americans a year and that’s the justification for self-defense, and therefore not needing to go to Congress to approve this attack. But I think when all’s said and done, these claims have no evidence and from what we’ve heard Maduro just hasn’t the history of such drug trafficking.

The other big question: is Maduro’s 2024 electoral victory genuine? And if it’s not (and I would say it probably wasn’t) – he hasn’t released the votes properly – then do you just kidnap him? Obviously not. Even if you disagree with Maduro, I think that’s the position that most people take.

Is he a dictator?

I think so. He inherited the Chavista tradition, which was a genuine left popular tradition, maybe you could say a benign dictatorship. I witnessed him there, and met him, and found that this was a very popular effort.

I think Maduro lost a lot of that popularity over time, and he then partly imposed neoliberal – that is more pro-corporate – policies over the period. So there became a left opposition to Maduro. But certainly all of the leftists that I’ve known, and I’ve tapped into their statements, are against this US invasion. I think that’s a crucial point.

Sovereignty is absolutely critical here, no matter whether Maduro was someone who played all sorts of games with his own society, and stole that election.

The other crucial thing is that Donald Trump is really doing this for the oil. I think that point can never be underestimated. That was the same for Iraq in 2003. It’s always the question, what does the US military-industrial complex – and now Trump’s very good friends in the oil companies – get out of it?

America will effectively now be selling oil to the rest of the world that it does not own. It will reap the economic benefit of selling this oil to the people that are already buying oil from Venezuela. This is a point of inflection in the moral question of the international order that Russia, China, Brazil and all these countries will have to face. Do we support an American imperialist industrial military complex system where they’re allowed to sell oil that they ultimately do not own? And if they answer that question in the positive, it means that they embolden and empower the US. But if they answer that question negatively, it means that they have to stand up to the US. Which way is that scale likely to tip?

It’s so vital to think about what you could do, as a backlash against US power. For example, Tesla and X, both owned by Elon Musk, have been subject to boycotts. And that means our homeboy Elon Musk lost a quarter of his net worth in the first few months of 2025 when he was deep in this administration. Could one do that more generally? Could one have boycotts against Trump and his full set of operations? Many of the countries we’ve seen are scared, and they’ve been divided and conquered over the past year.

But I think the basic question for oil is what happens if Trump says Okay, there’s about 800,000 barrels a day coming from Venezuela – and he wants to increase that. The Saudis are about 6 million barrels a day. The US has about 4 million. The Chinese have been buying much of that oil. Would they say, “no, we’re not going to be dealing with the stolen property”? This remains to be seen.

I suspect that they may find that they can get their oil elsewhere in the world markets. Iran still has a very strong supply of oil also that goes to China, particularly because Russia still has big surpluses. So there might be some way in which we see a sort of configuration of the West maybe against the BRICS axis. Thus far, they’ve actually worked relatively well together: imperial power and subimperial connectivity.

But that may change because of the extraordinary arrogance of Donald Trump. Especially if he goes further – Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, maybe Greenland – and he does consolidate a sort of western hemispheric power. That’s an invitation to China invading Taiwan, and Russia continuing to expand its borders.

There’s an interesting response from the French government, which says: “The military operation that led to the capture of Nicholas Maduro violates the principle of not resorting to force that underpins international law. France reiterates that no lasting political solution can be imposed from the outside and that only sovereign people can decide their future”.

They are perhaps the first western nation to outrightly condemn the US here. But it’s also interesting to note France has oil interests in Mozambique, potentially South Africa if what’s happening in the Orange Basin goes ahead to an extent, and Angola. But very importantly, in Guyana, a neighbor of Venezuela. Is this the sort of response you would have expected from the French nation? And would they potentially be a lot more emboldened to support Venezuela?

There’s always a temptation, especially if you’re European, especially if you’re French, to condemn the Yankees. That’s easy. In fact, they did so in the Iraq invasion. Not only the French: the Germans as well. They were against Bush and Blair, at the time, invading Iraq in 2003. But they didn’t do anything.

Indeed we’ve seen Trump demand that the NATO powers – especially Germany and Britain and France – increase their spending, to up to 5% of their GDP, on military. And the way things are going, unfortunately, these are fairly weak governments in Europe and they’re probably going to go along with it. They may, you know, bark a little bit. But Trump will pet them and they’ll do what he wants.

This is a shortened transcript of two interviews given to SABC News, lightly edited for clarity. You can view them hereand here.

Can Die Linke be saved from itself?

In 2025, tens of thousands of pro-Palestine activists joined Die Linke, hoping to change the party’s direction. What chance do they have of winning?

Phil Butland

On 22nd November, Ramsis Kilani’s expulsion from Die Linke was confirmed following a kangaroo court in Karl Liebknecht Haus. The following weekend, in the same building, the party’s BAG Palästinasolidarität (national working group for Palestine solidarity) was formed. There are few better examples of a dissonance between party leadership and base.

This is not the first time that our website has covered Die Linke and Palestine. I have written several articles on the subject, and we published an important statement by The Left Berlin in November 2024. More recently, both Nathaniel Flakin and Pepe T. each provided a list of the party’s many crimes and betrayals around the subject of basic rights for Palestinians.

Show a list like this to the people now organising for Palestine within Die Linke, and they’ll agree with you. They know better than most how the party has time and again betrayed Palestinians. ‘That’s not the point,’ they say, ‘Others have just interpreted Die Linke. The point is to change it.’ This article aims to look at why Die Linke has taken the positions it has, and how much change is actually possible.

The betrayal is still going on

In order to recognise the scale of the problem, it is worth looking at some of the more recent betrayals. Ramsis’s was not an isolated case. Four days before his hearing, Berlin Insoumise (BI) was due to have a meeting in Karl Liebknecht Haus with Member of European Parliament Emma Fourreau, who had been on the Gaza Flotilla. The room booking was cancelled by Die Linke just a few hours before the event was due to start. The cancellation came directly from Matthias Höhn, who was once an MP and national party chair.

Raul Zelik reported a similar experience in November. He wanted to organise a book presentation of Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone’s The Radical Jewish Tradition. He was told that the room, which is partly owned by Die Linke, would only be made available if Donny and Janey signed a statement that they ‘do not question Israel’s right to exist, nor oppose a Two State Solution’—something that they were not prepared to do. Not for the first time, the German Left was denying Jews a space to talk.

And then there’s the expulsion that didn’t happen. Andreas Büttner supports withdrawing finances for UNRWA, and posted that: ‘The recognition of a Palestinian state would be the worst step that one could take.’ While the Berlin police were repeatedly using excessive violence against pro-Palestine demonstrators, Büttner tweeted: ‘I wish I were a policeman @polizeiberlin. Thanks to all colleagues for your deployment today in Berlin and everywhere in Germany.’

The party ignored calls by some party members for Büttner’s expulsion. The message was clear—active support for genocide is perfectly compatible with being a member of Die Linke. Defending the rights of Palestinians is not.

The last gasp of the old guard?

Many Die Linke activists are appalled by Ramsis’s expulsion. But, they say, things are changing. Encouraged by insurgent electoral campaigns, like that of Ferat Kocak in Neukölln, Die Linke doubled its membership in 2025. Many of the tens of thousands of new members are actively pro-Palestine and insist on their voice being heard.

On 10th May, Die Linke’s national conference voted for a motion that rejected the notorious IHRA definition of antisemitism, which falsely equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and replaced it with the Jerusalem Declaration. On 21st June, when 30,000 demonstrated for Gaza in Berlin, there was the biggest Die Linke bloc I’d seen, not just on a Palestine demo but on pretty much any demo in the past few years.

In September, four Die Linke MPs were thrown out of the Bundestag for holding up a Palestine flag. Later that month, the party co-organised the largest demonstration for Palestine in German history. On that demo, party co-chair Ines Schwerdtner said: ‘We are standing here for the whole party when we say: we have been silent for too long. I have been silent for too long. It is a genocide! We must stop the delivery of weapons.’

Schwerdtner’s change of heart was the result of pressure from new members, who are serious about fighting for Palestine. They argue that party decisions are currently being made by older, more conservative members. This will change after the next set of internal elections. I fully support the newly formed BAG Palästinasolidarität, but here I believe that they are being naive. Forgive me for saying that I’ve heard it all before.

What is the point of Die Linke?

Much of Die Linke’s cowardice has been ascribed to its role as a reformist party—its raison d’être is to chase votes. Rather than try to convince people through principled arguments, it says what it thinks people want to hear. There is something in this, but vote chasing alone does not explain Ramsis’s expulsion. With a clear majority of Germans opposing weapon deliveries to Israel, expelling a well-known Palestinian activist could cost the party both votes and activists.

But Die Linke is not just chasing votes. It is also chasing respectability. Unless there is a major shift in election results, Die Linke will only get into government as the junior partner of a government led by the SPD or the Greens. And each of these neoliberal warmongering parties places clear conditions on who they deem to be an ‘acceptable’ coalition partner.

The main sticking block used to be NATO. Programmatically, Die Linke has always been against NATO, but whenever elections come closer, pragmatism takes over. I remember a rally shortly before the 2021 national elections, when party leader Janine Wissler—a former revolutionary socialist—insisted that NATO would be no barrier to the party joining a coalition. This was just one more principle that could be ditched for the right price.

German Staatsräson is the latest principle that the party leadership is prepared to throw overboard. For the last 3½ years, a majority of Die Linke leadership has been on the left wing of the party. Most of these leaders have been fairly good on Palestine, but they have been almost unanimous in their silence as the party has supported pro-Israel demos and expelled members like Ramsis.

Unity at all costs?

The new insurgents are clearly not the same as the old leadership, which loyally supports Israel. In contrast, the party’s left talks about a dual strategy of combining elections and social movements. Yet it has always ended up tolerating right-wing attacks in the name of party unity. Good activists who support Palestinian rights end up providing cover for those who don’t.

Around the time of Ramsis’s expulsion, I interviewed Kostis from Die Linke Berlin working group for Palestine solidarity. The group had approached The Left Berlin and asked to explain why they had withdrawn two motions at a party conference. One motion named what was happening in Gaza as a genocide, and the other supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Kostis explained that withdrawing the motions in the name of party unity was ‘a strategic compromise … if we had not participated in these negotiations, the discussion would have been between the leadership and the right-wing factions of the party, meaning the document would have been even worse.’ In other words, by avoiding a difficult discussion, left-wing activists preserved party unity.

I recently spoke to Martha Kleedörfer, chair of Die Linke Berlin-Mitte and an old friend. I know that Martha is serious about supporting Palestinians. She too defended withdrawing the motions in order to reach people who are not yet convinced. It is not clear to me how avoiding a debate is able to convince anyone.

How do ideas change?

We can see a strategy here, which has elsewhere been described as the resolutionary road to socialism. It sees political argument as being an incremental fight. First you win over the people nearest you, without saying anything that might scare the horses. This strategy also sees the main place for such discussions as being in respectable political organisations like Die Linke.

But what can change Die Linke leadership is not reasoned argument, but pressure from below. In an interview that was supposed to promote the demo on the 27th September, Die Linke Party Secretary Janis Ehling explained why the party had finally come out in support for Palestinian rights: ‘What has changed is the mood in society. Public opinion about this war has massively shifted.’ In other words, Die Linke sees their job as not to form public opinion, but to follow it.

This explains Ines Schwerdtner’s mea culpa. She recognised a growing movement that she couldn’t control, and so tried to rush to its head. Under pressure from party activists to deliver something, she produced the minimum possible.

We saw this one month after her speech, when the party’s youth wing passed a resolution, ‘Never again be silent about a genocide’, which attacked ‘the colonial and racist character of the Israeli state project.’ Schwerdtner, and co-leader Jan van Aken issued their own statement, saying ‘a one-sided perspective of Israel and Palestine brings no-one in the region anything’, and: ‘in the party leadership, there is a very broad unity that the contents of the adopted resolution are not compatible with the positions of Die Linke.’ The only lessons that they had learned about Palestine were entirely opportunistic.

In September 2026, there will be elections in Berlin. Die Linke has a serious chance of providing Berlin’s mayor. Not just that, for the first time ever, the candidate, Elif Eralp, comes from the left of the party. Like all sensible people, I hope that Elif succeeds. But her campaign will be accompanied by a massive crackdown on talking about Palestine for the ‘sake of party unity’.

An International phenomenon

The German ruling class has invested money, armaments and its reputation on uncritical support for Israel. Breaking from this requires challenging this consensus, not accommodating to it. And yet recent history has shown an international Left that is more suited to trying to do a deal with capitalism.

Following the 2008 crisis, the Left enjoyed brief victories followed by ‘necessary compromises’. In 2015, Coalition of the Radical Left – Progressive Alliance (SYRIZA) won the Greek elections on the back of a mass movement. SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras ignored that movement and imposed the European Central Bank’s bailout programme. More radical SYRIZA members, like Stathis Kouvelakis proposed a strategy of ‘seizing power by elections, but combining this with social mobilisations,’ but following the elections, these mobilisations were limited.

A few years later, Podemos emerged from the radical 15M movement in Spain, promising a new type of politics. As 15M lost influence, Podemos brought in two social democrats to draft an economic programme based on ‘short-term pragmatic proposals’. By 2016, party leader Pablo Iglesias could say: ‘things are changed from within institutions… That idiocy that we used to say when we were on the extreme left, that things are changed in the street and not in the institutions, is a lie.’

And then there is the recent victory of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to become New York mayor—a victory that was every bit as impressive as those of SYRIZA and Podemos, not least because Mamdani has held the line on Palestine. And yet, like Tsipras and Iglesias before him, Mamdani has seen the need to compromise—appointing Jessica Tisch, who the Wall Street Journal describes as a ‘law and order police chief’. It is true that Tisch must now report to the deputy mayor rather than the mayor, but Mamdani was under no obligation to keep her at all.

Faced with genuinely progressive party-based movements, the radical Left can make two mistakes. The first mistake would be to pretend that these movements are irrelevant. It is profoundly important that members of Die Linke are finally mobilising for Palestine and holding their leaders to account. I would urge all party members to get involved in the BAG Palästinasolidarität.

But the other mistake would be to expect a struggle to come from organisations that are institutionally committed to German Staatsräson. I agree with my comrades in Die Linke that we must organise to effect change, but unlike them, I believe that any fundamental change in their party first requires a change in German society, and that this change will come from outside.

It is great that Die Linke co-organised the demonstration on 27th September, but this was the result of pressure from below. As the Berlin elections come closer, party leaders will inevitably dismiss opposition to genocide as a luxury and a distraction. Together with comrades both inside and outside Die Linke, I look forward to fighting to ensure that we never stop speaking about Palestine.

Photo Gallery: Hands Off Venezuela – 3 January 2026

Outside the US Embassy, Brandenburger Tor

Dave Gilchrist
04/01/2026

All photos: Dave Gilchrist