Of course the Berlin Die Linke is antisemitic. That’s the point. 

To succeed, every populist party must name a clear enemy. For far-right parties, like Germany’s Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD), it’s migrants. According to the AfD, migration is the cause of crime, violence, social decay, and economic stagnation. The identification of a simple enemy and oversimplified, unrealistic solution – foreigners out! – is incredibly appealing, and has made the AfD Germany’s most popular party. According to a June 2026 study from the Freie Universitat Berlin, a hardline anti-migrant stance – far more than any conservative economic or educational program – is the meeting point for various types of AfD supporters.

For the Berlin far-left, this meeting point is hatred of Israel. In the grand tradition of its predecessor, as a successor of the Soviet party that ruled the German Democratic Republic, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), Die Linke presents Israel, or Zionism, as the ultimate enemy of progressive, emancipatory politics. It is a tactical inheritance. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union weaponized anti-Zionism to target Jewish people, masking ancient prejudices and stereotypes behind the acceptable vocabulary of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Soviet state propaganda re-cast Jewish identity as inherently linked to global finance, espionage, and bourgeois subversion. Especially following the Six Day War, Israel was branded not merely as a state with flawed policies, but as an illegitimate, artificial outpost of Western colonialism – backed by American capitalism – that needed to be dismantled.

In the last few weeks, Die Linke party members and newly elected Berlin representatives have, to list a few: publicly supported Hamas’ October 7 massacre against “Israel’s colonial regime” (Hannah Bruns); said that “there is no right to exist” for Israel (Vanessa Emde); said “Gaza is in my constituency,” after previously blocking a party resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist and calling for the removal of the Israeli flag from outside Berlin’s City Hall, arguing that it is insulting to Palestinians (Martha Kleedörfer.) Party activists called the Die Linke victory on September 20 – where it garnered an overwhelming 25% of the vote – an “election intifada,” as prominent criminal clan leader Issa Remmo and PFLP-linked Palestinian activist Ibrahim Ibrahim attended the election party. Weeks earlier, a Die Linke campaign party performance featured rapper Dahabflex who sang “yalla yalla intifada, do it like the PFLP” and “death to the IDF.” The party’s mayoral candidate, Elif Eralp, along with other more moderate members, have denounced these incidents as unrepresentative of the party, which, they claim, remains committed to protecting Jewish life and affirming Israel’s right to exist. They blame the orgy of antisemitism in the party on its Neukölln branch, and assert that the phenomenon is isolated.

But GDR-style antisemitism – framed as anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascism, wrapped into one – is the core of the Berlin Die Linke’s appeal, and the central engine of recent growth for the party. Between late 2021 and early 2024, Die Linke came close to federal political extinction. In the 2021 federal election, Die Linke’s national vote share plummeted to 4.9%, falling below the 5% electoral threshold. It only managed to stay in the Bundestag because it won three direct local mandates, which disappeared in January 2024 when the party’s highly influential former parliamentary leader, Sahra Wagenknecht, officially split from Die Linke to form her own party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). By late 2024, it had all but disappeared from state parliaments. Then, the German government collapsed, and new elections were held in February 2025, where Die Linke staged a remarkable comeback, garnering 8.8% of the federal vote. Its strategy – which it intensified and refined in the lead up to the Berlin elections – mirrored the playbook of the AfD, using aggressive social media campaigns – led by federal co-leader and avid TikToker Heidi Reichinek – and grassroots canvassing to stoke anxiety and channel anger against incompetent political “elites.” But, while the AfD labels immigrants as all-purpose culprits, Die Linke’s chosen enemy of progress is Israel.

Hatred of Israel – another brand of antisemitism – has long been the glue that holds many disparate groups together. For Die Linke, it is the keystone for its Berlin electorate, particularly in neighborhoods like Neukölln and Kreuzberg, which comprise of educated, upper-middle-class Germans as well as more conservative migrant communities. The party bridges a progressive left-wing establishment and a traditional Muslim voter base through opposition to Israel: the former views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a rigid, Western academic binary of “oppressor versus oppressed,” and sees attacking Israel as a moral duty to combat global imperialism, while the latter holds religious and nationalist anti-Israel views. As seen in the direct mandates won by radical figures like Ferat Koçak – who stepped down shortly after the Berlin election because of alleged connections to organized crime and supporters of Palestinian terror – Die Linke has actively courted an electorate that holds virtually no progressive views on issues of gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, or secularism. As a self-styled force for anti-Zionist resistance, the party has created a shared ecosystem where bourgeois self-righteousness comfortably coexists with fundamentalism. The election-night statements and the presence of figures linked to extremist networks has shown that this strategy has become the foundation of the party’s urban coalition.

Those that dismiss the Berlin Die Linke’s antisemitism as a nasty distraction from the party’s grand plans to reduce rent and provide more social benefits for Berliners ignore the vast distance between the party’s promises and Berlin’s economic reality. Those who claim that the party champions the working class miss the fact that it has actively abandoned the German working class for segments of the population more responsive to its populist messaging: namely, progressive academic elites and specific segments of the migrant population passionate about opposing Israel. They also ignore its parliamentary history, which includes such episodes as Die Linke federal parliamentarian Christine Buchholtz declaring herself on the side of Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, or the participation of two Die Linke parliament members on the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza in 2010, who later claimed to be “survivors of the Israeli massacre.” 

The incredible success of both the AfD and, recently, Die Linke – which rely heavily on oversimplified, provocative, and populist messaging, and attract an overwhelmingly young voter base – represents the decay of professional politics and further decline into the “Trumpification” and “Mamdanification” of politics on the right and left respectively. Both parties have sapped the more centrist CDU, SPD and Greens of significant voter support, to the point that the CDU, for the first time in state history, did not reach the electoral threshold in the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania, while the SPD got a pitiful 12% of the vote in Berlin, a former stronghold.

The AfD is, of course, worse than Die Linke, writ broadly. Not for nothing have all other German political parties sworn to boycott it through a “Brandmauer” (firewall) policy. The AfD is not just openly racist, ignorant, and superficial – it is also blatantly anti-democratic. Meanwhile, Die Linke has already governed in coalitions in several German states without issue. It even governed Berlin for several long stretches between 2001 and 2023. But the party’s distinct shift to radical anti-Zionism in the lead up to the federal and Berlin elections – which has led to the departure of several prominent members such as former party leader Klaus Lederer and Brandenburg Antisemitism Commissioner Andreas Büttner – is no accident. It’s a clear a strategy to boost cultural appeal and broaden its voter base, and, as the recent elections demonstrated – it works. In Berlin, Die Linke’s antisemitism is not marginal. It’s the point.