Elif Eralp's Left Party on course for historic win in German capital
Exit polls put Die Linke at about 25.7% and set up coalition talks with the SPD and Greens as Elif Eralp seeks the mayoralty.
- On Sunday, Die Linke won the Berlin state election with 25.7 per cent of the vote, more than doubling its 2023 score and positioning lead candidate Elif Eralp, a 45-year-old daughter of Turkish asylum seekers, to become the capital's first left-wing mayor.
- Eralp's campaign centred on Berlin's housing crisis, where rents have soared 70 per cent over a decade; she pledged to expropriate more than 200,000 housing units from corporate landlords at around 60 per cent of market value, backed by a 2021 referendum where 58 per cent of voters supported nationalisation.
- Die Linke secured 38 of 130 seats, with the CDU at 28, AfD at 24, Greens at 22 and SPD at 18; a three-way coalition of Die Linke, Greens and SPD would hold 78 seats, well above the 66-seat majority threshold.
- Both the SPD and Greens signalled willingness to form a coalition, but conditioned talks on Die Linke addressing allegations of antisemitism, with SPD national co-leader Baerbel Bas saying it would be "very difficult" to work with a party "large parts of which act in an antisemitic way".
- Eralp faces pressure to convince coalition partners within weeks, as SPD lead candidate Steffen Krach opposes her housing expropriation plan, with the party estimating nationalisation would cost around €20 billion.
360 Articles
360 Articles
DECRYPTAGE - The political woman of the Die Linke party of Turkish origin is in a favorable position to run the city hall of the capital.
El Periódico
It was clear that Berlin, an atypical capital, was going to launch its own response from the ballot box, in front of the ultra-right rise and the erosion of the political center. It was done through Elif Eralp, a 45-year-old woman, daughter of Turkish political refugees and Left candidate Die Linke. Polls predicted a side by side in the struggle for Berlin City Hall in front of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Voters…
She wears bangs, tattoos, earrings, red lipstick, jeans, and sneakers. The radical left lawyer, the daughter of trade unionists who fled Turkey in 1980, won Berlin from the CDU.
The left-wing top candidate Elif Eralp colored Berlin dark red on election Sunday. However, the way to the mayoral office is by no means marked.
The next mayor of Berlin was able to convince voters with her history and programme.
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