Die Linke’s victory in Berlin marks a historic humiliation for the CDU. After three election defeats in just two weeks, Friedrich Merz looks increasingly isolated – and his party appears to be discussing its future without him.
The far left is dancing in Berlin. The late Erich Honecker, long-time leader of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), would have relished this particular historical irony: 36 years after German reunification and the collapse of his socialist East German regime, the SED he once led – the party that built the Berlin Wall and presided over the deaths along it – is now poised to take back Berlin’s city hall.
Younger Berliners are probably no longer even aware of the historical echo. The party changed its name so many times over the years that, for many today, Die Linke is no longer associated with the ideological legacy that for so long divided this city into two halves, two worldviews and two economic systems.
Celebrating alongside Die Linke that evening were others in the city drawn above all to the party’s openness to migrant communities and the Palestinian cause. During the campaign, it had openly courted precisely these constituencies with “Free Palestine” election posters in four different languages and appearances by its lead candidate on the Arabic broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Die Linke campaigned in Berlin with “Freedom for Palestine!” posters in Arabic, Turkish, English and German.
In Berlin, Die Linke drew in not only communists and Stalinists with fantasies of expropriation, but also the city’s Islamists and antisemites.
Here, too, history offers a parallel. As far back as the 1970s, East Germany and its ruling SED harbored supporters of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and sympathizers of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). A shared hatred of Israel has endured across the decades, into 2026.
Just how closely Berlin’s Left collaborates with dubious actors was plain to see on election night.
Issa Remmo appeared at no fewer than two parties in Berlin, the city with Germany’s worst clan-crime problem. He is regarded as the head of the Lebanese-origin Remmo clan and is the father of at least 13 children. Numerous family members are serious criminals and have been involved in high-profile thefts, including the break-in at Dresden’s Green Vault and the jewel theft there.
On Sunday evening, Remmo posed at a Die Linke event, flashing the victory sign.
Further photographs widely circulated on social media show Die Linke Bundestag member Ferat Kocak alongside Ibrahim Ibrahim. Kocak himself is among the party’s most radical voices on Palestine. Ibrahim, meanwhile, heads the “United Palestinian National Committee”, a platform for supporters of the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas and the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization PFLP, which is classified as extremist by the EU, the US and Germany’s domestic intelligence service.
Ibrahim is also well known for his admiration of armed Palestinian resistance. Among other things, he praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and a “martyr hero”.
What Die Linke’s victory will mean for the city’s crime rate, for further radicalization among Berlin’s growing Muslim population and for the work of police officers who have to investigate the very people described above every day is almost impossible to imagine.
Berlin police officers have for years struggled with a lack of political backing, possible infiltration by clan members and staff shortages.
A city that is already profoundly dysfunctional is now getting a leadership that sees the police as the enemy, wants to expropriate large property owners and struggles to distance itself from Islamists and criminals.
In the city where the Holocaust was planned, where visibly Jewish people are already unsafe, where Jewish children are bullied out of schools and where every Jewish institution has to be guarded against attacks around the clock, a leadership is now coming to power that takes an openly antisemitic stance.
Berlin has fallen, and Merz is falling with his party.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which until now controlled city hall under Kai Wegner, went into the election five years ago on a law-and-order platform, only to do the opposite once the votes were counted and govern from the left alongside left-wing partners.
It is a pattern that has become familiar within the CDU and is costing the party votes to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) every day in other German states as well.
The German capital is now paying the highest price for this kind of betrayal of voters. The fringes on both left and right are gaining ground, while the CDU, which likes to call itself the center, is slipping out of reach of power.
Just how thoroughly the party has marginalized itself became clear shortly after midnight, when it was confirmed that the CDU had failed even to enter the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania after falling below the 5% threshold.
The party of German reunification has been shut out altogether in an eastern German state, while the AfD has won 38% of the vote there, making it the strongest party in a third state.
Merz Stands Alone
Even as the radical left was still reveling in victory, Friedrich Merz stepped alone before the press at the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, the CDU’s headquarters in Berlin, to deliver a brief statement seemingly intended above all to reassure himself and the world that he was still chancellor.
Even voices within the party that had until then been well disposed toward him expressed dismay on social media at the performance of a chancellor who appears to have drifted ever further from political reality.
After the CDU had suffered three crushing election defeats in the space of just two weeks, this, at the very latest, might have been the moment for Merz to change course. Instead, he began by pointing to CDU successes in other states, reaffirmed his claim to leadership and once again invoked the need for precisely those reforms for which he can no longer count on his coalition partner, the SPD, and can barely muster support within his own party.
In his professorial tone, Merz declared: “The reforms must come.” They were, he said, a means of countering the rise of the fringes and radicals. He went so far as to say these reforms were “the means of countering the authoritarian poison that, through the fascination with authoritarianism, is penetrating ever deeper into our society”.
With this rather cryptic wording, he not only accused AfD voters of radicalism but also suggested that they were fascinated by authoritarian ideas that were poisoning society.
No one in his own ranks now seems able to get through to Merz and explain that precisely this kind of voter-bashing has not halved the AfD, as he once promised, but doubled it.
Political observers on Sunday evening were therefore struck not only by what was said, but also by what was left unsaid – and by those who failed to appear.
Everything pointed to a party leaving its leader to weather the storm alone.
Normally, on election nights in Germany, the party’s general secretary appears before the press after the first results are announced to assess the situation and establish the line for what comes next.
On Sunday, Merz was determined to address the press himself. His newly appointed general secretary, Franziska Hoppermann, had already appeared overwhelmed by the election defeat in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier.
Merz took matters into his own hands – and ended up standing alone there too.
Although the entire party presidium was sitting two floors above him in the same building, including powerful serving state premiers and regional party leaders, apparently no one wanted to come downstairs and stand beside a dead man walking who once again had an electoral disaster to spin.
Merz did not look like a man ruling alone. He looked like a man left alone.
Later that evening, all the CDU’s state leaders met at the Rhineland-Palatinate state representation in Berlin – without their federal chancellor.
They now appear to be discussing the future of the party without him.
These men, after all, want to keep governing in their own states. North Rhine-Westphalia has an election coming in spring 2027, and its premier, Hendrik Wüst, is one of those who still harbors ambitions for the chancellery.
He can ill afford to lose an election because of a negative trend for the CDU in Berlin. Nor can he afford a chancellor who is governing against his own people like a driver heading the wrong way into oncoming traffic.
Will Friedrich Merz be replaced, forced to resign or challenged in a constructive vote of no confidence?
One thing was clear: everyone had been waiting for Sunday’s elections to be over. Any internal power struggle within the party would only have made the results they already feared even worse.
Now, however, the party’s survival is at stake.
Simply replacing the man at the top will not be enough. The CDU needs a new narrative and allies who do not constantly veer left and block every reform.
The fight over the CDU’s direction now seems to be the real obstacle to deciding when to show Merz the door. Whoever comes after him will have to do more than revive the CDU. He will also have to offer a new political vision for Germany.
So far, not a single convincing candidate has emerged.
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