Germany's Left Party faces antisemitism scrutiny after Berlin election victory

On September 20, Berlin voted for change. The Left Party, a socialist force that has never before led a German state capital, won the election with enough support to shape the city's future. Their top candidate, Elif Eralp, stands on the threshold of becoming Berlin's first Left Party mayor—if the math works. But the path forward is narrowing, tangled in a question that has split the Jewish community itself: whether the party can be trusted with power.

Coalition talks with the Social Democrats and the Greens are set to begin October 1. Both parties have signaled they might work with the Left, but only if certain conditions are met. The condition that matters most, in the eyes of many establishment figures, is a clear, binding commitment to root out antisemitism from within the party's own ranks. That commitment is precisely what the Left Party says it has already made—and precisely what some of Germany's most prominent Jewish leaders say they do not believe.

The skepticism has a recent source. During the campaign, a rapper named Dahabflex performed at a Left Party event and used language widely understood as antisemitic. Then, at the party's election night celebration, Ibrahim Ibrahim appeared on stage. Ibrahim is known as a supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organization the European Union classifies as terrorist. The Left Party's leadership, at both federal and state levels, moved quickly to distance itself from both incidents. The statements came, they said, because these things should never have happened. But Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, read those denunciations as theater. In a statement released two days after the election, he wrote that the Left Party had forfeited any credibility on antisemitism—that the problem ran through the party like a seam, tolerated and unchecked. He urged the SPD and Greens to refuse coalition talks altogether.

The pressure intensified from the federal government. Wolfram Weimer, the government's commissioner for culture and media, accused the Left of openly displaying antisemitism and suggested that €2.9 billion in agreed-upon funding for Berlin's cultural institutions over the next decade should be reconsidered. Katherina Reiche, the federal economy minister from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, posted a video to her ministry's official Instagram account titled "Antisemitism and Expropriations Threaten the Economy," linking the Left Party's antisemitism to its plans to seize large private housing companies. She described the party as one that "openly embraces antisemitism" and "welcomes organized crime." The Left Party responded by seeking a court order to force Reiche to delete the video, arguing she was using taxpayer resources to wage a political campaign.

But the story fractured there. One hundred and fifty prominent Jews—writers, scholars, activists, people with standing in German cultural and intellectual life—signed an open letter in defense of the Left Party. Among them were the author Eva Menasse and Susan Neiman, former director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. They wrote that they were rejecting the claim that the Left poses the greatest danger to Jewish safety in Germany, not because they minimized antisemitism, but because they took the threat to Jewish life seriously enough to name what they saw as the real danger: the Alternative for Germany, the far-right AfD, which they described as "in parts openly fascistic" and marching toward power. The letter argued that accusations against the Left had become a form of political weaponization, and that conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism had become a way to silence legitimate debate. The Left Party, they noted, is the only party in the German parliament that opposes arms shipments to Israel in response to the Gaza war—a position the party adopted after classifying Israel's military operations as genocide, a classification that human rights organizations and a UN commission have also made, though the Israeli government invokes its right to self-defense.

At an emergency party congress, Elif Eralp, the woman who might soon lead Berlin, tried to thread the needle. She said the party had a duty to build bridges between communities, to bring people together. She said there must be no calls for violence from the Left's platforms, no statements that frighten Jewish people. She promised to strengthen Berlin's diverse Jewish community and combat antisemitism. And she said the same must be true for Palestinians and Muslims. Outside the building where she spoke, about twenty Jewish supporters of the Left Party stood with a poster in Hebrew and German: "Mazel Tov to the Left." One of them was Scott Grabell, an artist from New York. "Antisemitism is real," he told reporters. "But three years of genocide are also real. Illegal occupation, forced destruction and displacement in the West Bank—that's real too." He said he was there to show that Jewish life in Germany is not monolithic, that some Jews see the Left Party's progressive agenda as worth supporting, and that the diversity of Jewish opinion deserved to be heard.

The coalition talks will begin in days. The Left Party has won an election. The question now is whether the party can convince enough of Germany's political establishment—and enough of the Jewish community—that it can govern responsibly. The answer will shape not just Berlin's next government, but the contours of how Germany debates Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and the meaning of safety itself.