Throw enough mud, and see what sticks

On the 20th of September, the Berlin Left Party decisively won the elections for the city-state’s parliament and received a clear mandate to form the city’s next government with its leading candidate, Elif Eralp, as the next governing mayor.

The mandate is undeniable: the outgoing governing parties of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) suffered massive losses. CDU landed a distant second and SPD was electorally demolished. Even the opposition centre-left Greens saw their long-standing constituencies switching to the Left Party, either out of conviction or because they wanted to ensure that the next government will have a left-wing orientation. During the campaigning period, the Berlin Greens also made it very clear that their preference is a left-wing coalition.

The numbers are clear: a coalition of the Left, Greens and Social Democrats has a comfortable majority of 60% and, more importantly, a high degree of political cohesion that the outgoing “grand coalition” of CDU and SPD lacked. This grand coalition is now in the minority. Even if the Greens join them, they only reach the thinnest of majorities with 52% and with even less cohesion than before.

As soon as the exit polls came in, Germany’s conservative political reflexes kicked into high gear to discredit the Left Party and to apply pressure on the Greens and the Social Democrats to instead back a continuation of the failed Christian Democrat mayorship in the city.

In this smear campaign, so many lines were crossed that it’s hard to reconcile this with what is supposed to be a functioning liberal democracy:

Unabashed xenophobic reaction

Elif Eralp is a German woman of Turkish descent. Her parents were left-wing trade unionists who sought political asylum in Germany after the military coup of 1980 in Turkey. Elif herself is a lawyer specialising in immigration and asylum law. That biographical fact alone placed her under pre-emptive suspicion.

As the vote count was underway, the conservatives were scandalised by the fact that working-class neighbourhoods voted for the Left Party and for Elif. Their shock was all the more amplified when they realised working-class and plurality-migrant neighbourhoods overlap heavily.

Someone acting in good faith wouldn’t find it hard to connect the dots: people with migration history in Germany, regardless of having German citizenship or not, and no matter whether they migrated themselves or if they were born in Germany to migrant parents face significantly more precarious economic and employment realities. Voting for the political party that has been actively re-inventing and positioning itself as the workers and trade unionists party of Berlin is the most predictable thing ever. Class-conscious workers, with a migration background or not, vote for the party that best represents the interests of their class.

The conservatives were scandalised to discover that workers vote like workers.

Not for the conservatives though. The legitimacy of Elif’s mandate to govern is questioned as “foreigners voting for foreigners”, with statements like “the first clearly ethnically determined election in Germany”, as a federal MP for the designated extremist-right AfD remarked.

Heaven forbid the success of the Left Party means that there’s a desire for left-wing politics and an end to perpetual austerity. No, it must be the damn foreigners taking over the land for nefarious, probably religious, reasons. And it also cannot possibly be that “foreigners” (who, again, often are German citizens who never lived outside Germany) have the ability to engage with politics on political terms instead of ethnic terms.

Lest we forget: only Germans can vote for the state parliament elections. Nearly a quarter of us Berliners do not have a vote in who leads our city because we are not German citizens. But for the conservatives, even the Germans who have the wrong kind of name or a problematic skin colour are second-class voters whose wishes shouldn’t count the same as those of “real Germans”.

Desperate smear campaigns

Not a day has passed since the election without the Christian Democrats, a significant part of the Social Democrats and some Greens, as well as the media that is aligned with them, trying to flood the public conversation with non-stories that aim to trigger an emotional reaction and to make the coalition formation awkward. The impetus for writing this entry is the latest “accusation” against Elif Eralp for having belonged to a “left-extremist organisation” in the past. This organisation is Rote Hilfe e.V., an NGO offering legal support to left-wing activists who face prosecution, and her passive membership was publicly disclosed ever since she took political office as a state MP.

A left-wing lawyer once belonged to a left-wing legal aid NGO. This is the scandal.

Now, my understanding of a liberal democratic order includes the commitment that everyone has the right to an effective legal defence against any accusations mounted against them. Even the most appalling criminals have the right to legal representation in this country, and rightly so. I find it completely normal and unremarkable that a left-wing lawyer was at one point connected to a left-wing legal support NGO. Presented this way, I think that most Germans would also consider this a non-story. But a provocative headline like “Eralp was a member of a far-left association” is not news, it’s a targeted campaign.

Make the economy scream

That was the directive Nixon gave when ordering the CIA and co. to destroy Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist coalition government in Chile in 1970.

If you cannot win the city, make the city ungovernable.

It didn’t take long for the CDU to rediscover this, admittedly very effective, weapon against any government that doesn’t include them. Bavarian premier Söder and other premiers from CDU-led German states are threatening to go against the constitutional arrangement which sees that all German states act in financial solidarity to each other, as well as the separate agreement related to the financing of Berlin as the federal capital.

With intra-country fiscal solidarity threatened to be cut off, and because the controversial German “debt brake” already heavily restricts the federal and state governments from borrowing, a future Berlin government would have next to no room to finance any of its priorities, save for some limited local taxing powers.

The CDU’s capture and monopolisation of all the levers of economic policy are a masterclass in political cynicism. Only CDU can disengage the debt brake when they are in power, to finance their priorities.

Why bother winning elections, when you can simply make sure that your opponents won’t be able to govern even if they win decisively?

The uniquely German lack of nuance around Israel/Palestine

The Left Party has been the only major party in Germany which broke ranks with what we foreigners see as an inexplicable unwillingness to separate the ethnic and religious identity of Jewish people from Israeli nationalism.

It’s not news that the accusation of Jew-hatred is cynically abused by non-Jewish Germans in order to silence any criticism coming from Germans (including Jewish Germans) and non-Germans towards Germany’s financial and material support to the territorial expansionism and the humanitarian catastrophe the nationalists in the Israeli government are pursuing in Gaza and the West Bank.

Predictably, the Left Party and Elif Eralp have been besieged with baseless accusations of antisemitism since their election victory, which in Germany carry a heavy stigma and can close real doors for anyone falsely labelled as such. Indeed, enormous pressure is applied on Greens and Social Democrats to not form a coalition with “antisemites” and instead support the CDU candidate as the next governing mayor.

In this, Jewish Berliners are turned into a means to an end, not seen as autonomous political agents, but as the ball in the game of CDU staying in power despite its decisive electoral defeat. This is a distraction from the very real, very problematic issue of antisemitism in Germany, which yes, also exists within leftist circles.

The outlook

For me, the parliamentary politics arena was always a legitimate stage for working-class power, but never the primary one. As a trade unionist, I do truly wish that a government that is more sympathetic to workers’ demands is in power. Harm reduction is a sensible strategy. But governing always comes with systemic restrictions about what is possible. Right now, it looks very likely that the Left Party might not be able to put together a coalition due to the closing of ranks among the anti-worker forces across the other political parties. But even if they manage to find their path to a majority, Germany’s federal system and the constitutional constraints that hard-code conservative political preferences into nearly immutable law leave me very little reason to expect that a significant political transformation is possible.

I still think that as active trade unionists, we must defend the potential for a left-wing government in our city. But not for a moment should we slow down our efforts for nurturing worker power from below, in the workplaces and in the neighbourhoods. Whatever they try to take away from us by “reforms” in the social law, we can and must win back through collective bargaining.