Antisemitism shadows Berlin coalition talks with the Left

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Can ‘Berlin’s Mamdani’ convince Jewish Berliners to trust the Left?

Concerns about antisemitism have emerged as a sticking point in coalition talks that could make Elif Eralp Berlin’s next mayor.

By MARC FELIX SERRAO

in Berlin

Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO

Getting into Gideon Joffe’s office takes some doing. Above the historic building in the heart of Berlin rises the golden dome of the New Synagogue, built in the 19th century. Out front, police officers ask who you are and where you’re headed. Past the first security door, your bag goes through a scanner. Then come more doors, all of them extra thick.

It’s not paranoia. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, antisemitism has surged across the Western world, according to a study by Tel Aviv University. Berlin — where senior Nazi officials gathered at a lakeside villa in 1942 to coordinate the murder of Europe’s Jews — is no exception.

Joffe, 54, who chairs the Jewish Community of Berlin, one of Germany’s largest, has grown used to a life under protection. For decades, such security has been a fact of Jewish life across Europe, with synagogues and schools fortified and, in many cities, guarded by armed police. But the situation has rarely been as bad as it is now, he tells me.

The Tel Aviv-born former businessman does not come across as a timid man: a firm handshake, a shirt straining at every seam and a deep and penetrating voice. Yet the mood at his conference table, where the community’s secretary general and its spokesperson also sit, is one of great concern.

The subject of that concern: The result of the recent Berlin election, in which the Left Party — a successor to the communist party that ruled East Germany until 1989 — came in first with 26% of the vote. It’s a record for the party in the capital, and more than double its previous result. Germany has been arguing about the consequences ever since.

Among the trio sitting at the table, the Left Party’s Berlin branch is seen as not just radically left-wing but also a hotbed of antisemitism. The party made opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza a central plank of its election campaign. While some Jews have declared their support for the Left, leading Jewish institutions have criticized it.

Elif Eralp, lead candidate of the far-left Die Linke, taking a selfie with a fan while campaigning in Marzahn district ahead of Berlin state elections on September 15, 2026 in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

At the center of the debate is Elif Eralp, the Left’s lead candidate in the Berlin election who has become the face of the party’s transformation. Under Eralp and a younger generation of activists, many with immigrant backgrounds in the Muslim world, the party has expanded well beyond its East German roots and built a new urban coalition around housing, inequality and opposition to the war in Gaza.

Eralp and other prominent Left officials concede there have been troubling incidents among their supporters, and have condemned them. At a party conference shortly after the election, Eralp pledged to “strengthen the diverse Jewish life in Berlin and combat antisemitism.”

It was an acknowledgment of an issue that has been central to her effort to become mayor. In Germany, a single party is rarely strong enough to rule alone; forming a government means weeks of haggling among parties that dislike each other to varying degrees. If Eralp is to govern, she will need to form a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats and the Greens. Among their demands: “combating antisemitism and protecting Jewish life,” according to a joint statement by the two parties .

“There needs to be a binding agreement that not only condemns antisemitism and affirms Israel’s right to exist, but also stipulates clear consequences for antisemitic incidents,” SPD state chair Steffen Krach told the German press agency dpa .

The Left’s new face

“Elif! Elif! Elif!” As the petite woman in the black bomber jacket enters the hall, her comrades rise from their chairs and chant her name in rhythm. “Elif for Berlin,” read the banners in big, bright red letters. Her first major appearance since the Sept. 20 election is in a small hall at the headquarters of Neues Deutschland, a newspaper that once served as the official mouthpiece of East Germany’s communist dictatorship.

Eralp — a 45-year-old lawyer, mother of two and the daughter of Turkish socialists who fled to Germany in 1980, the year of a military coup in Turkey — is the new star of Germany’s hard left. She has thrilled young women and Muslim voters in droves. Her plea for economic justice, especially on Berlin’s crowded housing market, is what won the election, say her supporters. Critics say her success mainly depended on mobilizing pro-Palestinian activists, including some sharply hostile to Israel.

Elif Eralp speaks to the media the day after state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on September 21, 2026 in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Eralp has been dubbed “Berlin’s Mamdani” by the press, and the comparison is more than cosmetic. Berlin’s Left borrowed from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s playbook, right down to the political strategist who helped engineer his success: Morris Katz, a 27-year-old consultant who helped steer Mamdani to victory and flew to Berlin to coach Eralp this spring.

“If a leftist can win in New York, then one can just as well win in Berlin,” Eralp said after Mamdani’s 2025 election.

Where Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, promised city-owned grocery stores, Eralp promises neighborhood canteens with meals from €3. She wants a rent cap for the Berlin’s publicly owned housing and the “socialization” of big corporate landlords, taking public control of more than 200,000 apartments — which a majority of Berliners backed in a 2021 referendum. Mamdani had his potholes; Eralp has Berlin’s “garbage chaos.” Both have proven that rent bills and trash cans can win big-city elections. And both have had to rebut the same accusation of antisemitism, either personally or within their ranks.

Mamdani — a fierce critic of Israel who has called for the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested — spent his campaign declining to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” while saying he doesn’t use it himself and that it pains him to be called an antisemite. He eventually said he would discourage use of the phrase.

Zohran Mamdani waves on stage at CultureCon 2026 in New York City on Oct. 03, 2026. | John Nacion/Getty Images

Since taking office, Mamdani has also sought to address the concerns of Jewish New Yorkers. In late September, he announced his city’s first municipal strategy to combat antisemitism, vowing that Jews in the city would be “safe and celebrated.”

Eralp, who like Mamdani calls herself a “democratic socialist,” faces similar skepticism from much of her city’s Jewish community. While international debate about antisemitism in the country has focused on the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, since the election in Berlin, the controversy has centered on the Left.

The party’s Berlin platform explicitly opposes antisemitism, but Eralp’s critics are not interested in what’s on paper. Instead, they point to an unofficial picture assembled from numerous examples: a campaign poster demanding “Freedom for Palestine”; the Berlin youth wing of the party that attributes a “colonial and racist character” to the “Israeli state project”; a rapper who shouted “Yalla yalla intifada” and “Death, death to the IDF” — Israel’s army — at a campaign event; and the appearance of a leading supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an EU- and U.S.-designated terrorist organization, at a Left victory party in Berlin.

Opposition to Israel’s policies in Gaza is not the same as antisemitism, and Eralp has condemned the appearances of the rapper and the PFLP supporter, blaming local party officials. But that hasn’t convinced her critics. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has dismissed her expressions of concern about antisemitism as “lip service.”

Balancing act

Nowhere in Berlin has the Left changed more than in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, a borough of about 267,000 people. For decades, it was a stronghold of the Green Party. This time the Left won 44% there, more than double its previous result. The local party used to be run by old-school socialists, many of them veterans of the Socialist Unity Party, or SED, which ruled East Germany as a one-party dictatorship until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Today, it is driven by young activists who have expanded the party’s base into immigrant communities, above all among young Muslims. For many of them, the principles that have guided German politics since the Holocaust — the duty to protect Jewish life and solidarity with Israel — carry little weight, and some reject them outright.

That leaves Eralp with a delicate balancing act: reassuring Jewish Berliners concerned about elements of her party while holding together the coalition that helped propel it to victory. In her first major speech after the election, she tried to do both.

The Left’s vision of an affordable and good life, she said to applause, had been stronger “than all attacks and stronger than the hatred.” She would not be showered with insults by the “most unpopular chancellor of all time” — a swipe at Merz — and other politicians in the federal government.

Israel supporters hold Israel national flag as people march to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Nakba on May 16, 2026 in Berlin, Germany. | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

These centrist politicians, Eralp continued, were dividing the country, cutting labor rights and pensions and adopting the anti-migrant positions of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party on track to secure its first state government after a breakthrough election last month . “While a fascist party in Saxony-Anhalt is on its way to power, these people seriously think they can stop a democratic party that stands for social justice, diversity and democracy with this smear campaign,” she said.

Next, Eralp presented an offer of reconciliation: The point was to “build bridges and bring people back together.” Then she offered a kind of self-criticism, but without getting specific. The Left, too, she said, must be clear “that there must never be calls for violence, and that statements that frighten Jewish people can never come from our platforms.”

Here, too, there was applause. But quite a few listeners had their arms folded. Some wore Palestinian scarves, known as keffiyehs, around their necks.

Eralp was not available after the party meeting, and her party’s co-chair, Ines Schwerdtner, declined an interview.

“Leave this country”

Michael Wolffsohn has grim advice for Jewish Berliners. The prominent historian and conservative commentator was born in Tel Aviv to a family of Jewish merchants from Berlin, who fled the Nazis for Palestine in 1939. As a boy, he came back with his parents to West Berlin.

In the magazine Cicero, Wolffsohn, 79, said what he would tell a young Jewish Berliner who asks whether to stay: with a heavy heart, “Leave this city and this country.” He himself, he added, was too old to uproot. Were he younger, he, too, would leave.

It is not hard to see why Berlin’s estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Jews are on edge. In the five years before the 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the resulting war in Gaza, RIAS Berlin, a watchdog that tracks antisemitic incidents in the city whether or not they are crimes, logged just under 1,000 a year. Last year it counted 2,197 . The police recorded an even steeper increase in crimes classified as antisemitic: from 381 in 2022 to 2,268 in 2025.

RIAS follows the definition of antisemitism laid out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, counting conduct ranging from insults and graffiti to statements at demonstrations. It says it did not simply count criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza or of the Israeli military as antisemitic, but did so when the situation in Gaza was used to disparage Jews collectively, justify violence against them or trivialize the Holocaust.

Some incidents were violent. RIAS recorded 39 physical attacks in Berlin last year, 16 of them in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. RIAS says multiple people who reported antisemitic incidents described becoming more cautious in daily life, including no longer openly wearing Jewish symbols after repeated harassment.

A volunteer attaches portraits of Israelis killed since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas at a commemorative installation in front of the Brandenburg Gate on the second anniversary of the attack on October 07, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Speaking to POLITICO on the phone, Wolffsohn details his concerns: “Elif Eralp is the party’s star. But there is a broad base, and that’s what matters.”

Is the Left fit to govern the capital? His answer is categorical: “Is such a party capable of fulfilling the elementary task of a state — protecting its citizens, and not only the Jewish ones, at home and abroad? My answer is: No, absolutely not. The Left does not disqualify itself through opinions but through its demonstrable activities.”

Wolffsohn says he wouldn’t take a coalition contract at its word. Or a potential agreement that would commit all partners to fight antisemitism. “Paper is patient,” he says, using a German proverb: Paper will accept anything written on it.

At the moment, there isn’t even paper. Berlin’s leaders of the Left, the Social Democrats and the Greens have been meeting over the past week in “constructive” preliminary talks. They are gathering for a third round Wednesday, but have not yet agreed on a common line on antisemitism.

The trust test

Joffe, the chair of Berlin’s Jewish Community, extends the blame for rising antisemitism to Germany’s mainstream parties, which he says failed to tackle the problem. “I don’t know a single Jewish community member who is sure that his children or grandchildren will still be living in Germany.” A 2024 survey of more than 2,500 Jews across Germany found that more than half considered it unsafe to live visibly as a Jew in their city, while three-quarters said they felt less safe since Oct. 7, 2023.

In his heavily secured office, Joffe says he understands why many people find Eralp likeable. “She’s nobody’s fool, and she knows how to express herself,” he tells me. “But the antisemitic spirits in her party — she probably won’t be able to get them back into the bottle.”

Joffe often pauses to choose his words carefully. “There have been many statements from the Left Party that have unsettled the Jewish community,” he says. “But I don’t want the issue of antisemitism alone to decide whether a coalition comes together in Berlin or not. Then conspiracy theories will just resurface that we Jews are so powerful we can even help decide who governs this city.”

His test for Eralp’s party is less about what the Left promises than about what happens in the capital in the coming years, especially in schools and kindergartens.

The Left’s Berlin platform promises to fight antisemitism “effectively,” but also warns against the “instrumentalization” of antisemitism allegations. Joffe worries that its broader law-and-order agenda — including proposals to reduce police staffing, curb police resources and loosen restrictions on masked protesters — would make it harder to contain antisemitic intimidation and violence.

RIAS recorded antisemitic incidents at a record 239 rallies and marches last year. That’s four or five a week. On Sept. 27, 2025, the Left was among the groups that called for a Gaza march that drew up to 100,000 people. RIAS documented antisemitic incidents at the march and rally that followed, including placards equating Israel’s war with the Holocaust and chants of “child murderers” — language the watchdog says either trivializes the Nazis’ industrial-scale murder of six million Jews or draws on the centuries-old antisemitic blood-libel trope.

To leave Joffe’s office, you walk back through the three security doors and past the police officers at the entrance.

“Our Jewish institutions are physically protected, but not defended against antisemitism,” he told me at the end of our conversation. “What do I mean by that? A cocoon was built around our kindergartens, schools and synagogues. But socially, nothing was defended.”

Eralp has promised to make Jewish life safer. Whether she can persuade people like Joffe that she means it — and can deliver — is another question.

Marc Felix Serrao is a Global Reporter with The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio .