The capital’s population has increased by nearly 15% since 2010, while construction has failed to keep pace. Asking rents reached €15.78 ($18.70) per square meter in 2025, more than double their 2012 level. Existing tenants often pay considerably less due to old contracts which fixed rents and rent increases at lower levels, creating a divided market in which anyone looking for a new apartment faces dramatically higher costs.
Die Linke understood the political opportunity better than its competitors. Housing and rents emerged as the most important issue for voters, and Eralp made them the centerpiece of her campaign.
Its proposed cure, however, is socialism in an unusually literal form.
Die Linke wants Berlin to take roughly 220,000 apartments belonging to large private landlords into public ownership, with compensation for their owners. The proposal follows the 2021 referendum in which a clear majority backed the socialization of housing owned by companies with more than 3,000 apartments.
Eralp wants Berlin to implement that decision. Under her proposal, the properties would be transferred to a public institution, with compensation financed through long-term bonds and serviced from rental income. Separately, Die Linke wants to inject €1.6bn ($1.9bn) a year into municipal housing companies to build 7,500 affordable apartments annually.
That helps explain the result. Berliners did not necessarily vote for every element of Die Linke’s economic program. But in a city where finding an affordable apartment has become a source of constant anxiety, they rewarded the party that made housing its defining issue.
Who Is Elif Eralp?
Born in Munich, Eralp is the daughter of Turkish socialist and trade-union activists who fled Turkey. She studied law and moved to Berlin after university. Before entering the state parliament, she worked for Die Linke’s Bundestag group as a legal-policy adviser. She now lives with her husband and two children in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.
Her election reveals how profoundly Berlin has changed. Die Linke, once heavily associated with older voters in the former East Germany, has become the party of young urban Berliners, many of them from migrant backgrounds.
According to infratest dimap, 43% of voters under 25 backed Die Linke, compared with 18% in 2023. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, its share reached 48%. The party also led among first-time voters with 38%, while 51% of women under 25 backed it. Among voters aged 60 and above, by contrast, the CDU remained strongest.
Eralp embodies another aspect of that transformation. Fluent in Turkish, she campaigned in one of Europe’s most ethnically diverse capitals, shaped by decades of mass immigration. Almost 42% of Berliners have a migration background, and previous polling suggests that parts of this electorate lean strongly to the left.
At the 2025 federal election, 29% of Muslim voters backed Die Linke and 28% the SPD, making them the two strongest parties among Muslim voters. Research has similarly found above-average support for the SPD and Die Linke among voters with Turkish roots.
The party also drew support from outside its existing camp. Infratest dimap estimates that Die Linke gained around 75,000 net votes from previous non-voters, as well as 57,000 from the Greens and 39,000 from the SPD. Its victory was therefore not simply a matter of mobilizing the faithful, but of assembling a new urban coalition.
The Controversies Behind the Victory
But Eralp’s victory comes with controversial baggage.
Die Linke’s Neukölln organization has repeatedly faced controversy over allegations of antisemitism and radical anti-Israel activism. Those concerns resurfaced immediately after the election.
Issa Remmo, a prominent member of Berlin’s well-known Remmo clan, appeared at Die Linke’s election celebration. The party said it was a public event and that he had not been invited. Eralp distanced herself from him, saying: “We have nothing to do with organized crime.”
Also present was pro-Palestinian activist Ibrahim Ibrahim. The organization Democ places Ibrahim in the milieu of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is designated as a terrorist organization by the EU. According to Democ, Ibrahim previously described the former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “martyr hero”.
Those controversies could matter in coalition negotiations. The Greens have already called on Die Linke to make an unequivocal commitment against antisemitism before any attempt by the parties to form a coalition government.
Much like Mamdani in New York, this victory reveals how mass migration has transformed politics in the big cities of the West. Migrant groups are happy to vote for radical redistribution, which they know will favor them. Meanwhile, increased competition for rents leaves many young professionals in a precarious position.
Berlin relies heavily on Germany’s fiscal equalization system. In 2025, it received €4.2bn ($4.8bn) through the fiscal equalization mechanism, more than any other German state, as well as €1.9bn ($2.2bn) in general supplementary federal grants. Die Linke’s plans may be popular with voters, but they rely on taking on huge debts when Berlin already fails to pay its way. Much like mass migration, the costs can only be shared out so much before they begin to bite everywhere.
