David Broder’s read of Sunday’s Berlin state election is that Die Linke’s 26 percent — more than double its 2023 result, and better than every poll — is what happens when a left party stops treating multiethnic solidarity and the cost of living as separate projects. The campaign was about rent. Berliners voted in 2021 to renationalise the housing stock; the city government, a “red-red-green” coalition under a centrist SPD mayor, never honoured it. Die Linke said it would.

The numbers:

  • Die Linke 26 percent; CDU 19 (down 9); SPD 12 (down 6); AfD third on 16 (up 7).
  • 53 percent in Neukölln 2, a multiethnic district; 48 percent among 25-to-34-year-old Berliners.
  • All the softer-left parties combined still took only 52 percent of the vote.
  • The win came substantially from leftish voters crossing over from the Greens and SPD, plus first-time voters — not from a new majority.
  • Federal polling has the AfD near 30 percent, Die Linke around 12.

The housing history is the part worth keeping. West Berlin was cheap and the reunified capital had empty space, until public housing was sold off to private owners through the 1990s and 2000s with too little new build alongside it. Rents followed. The SPD has refused to implement the referendum result, and the federal coalition has floated banning such nationalisations outright — so even a Linke-led government would be fighting its own coalition partners.

Broder is careful about the antisemitism question, and this is where the piece earns its keep. A Green coleader ruled out governing with “antisemites from Neukölln” — a barely veiled attack on the district’s Turkish and Palestinian population, where Die Linke is strongest — and Germany’s Central Council of Jews warned against a Linke-led state government. The pretext was a rapper chanting “Yalla, yalla intifada” and “Death to the IDF” at a pre-election rally, which the mayoral candidate Elif Eralp herself criticised. Broder also notes the limits this imposes from the other direction: much of Die Linke makes only liberal-Zionist criticisms of Netanyahu and has punished members who expressed solidarity with Palestinian armed resistance. The cudgel works regardless.

Two cautions sit inside the article. Berlin is not Germany: in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a rural state, Die Linke actually lost votes to the SPD as the best-placed anti-AfD option, even as the AfD took 38 percent and Merz’s CDU fell below 5 percent and out of a state parliament for the first time in the Federal Republic’s history. And the AfD is deepening rather than just peaking — it was first among blue-collar Berlin voters on 30 percent, ahead of Die Linke’s 26, and turnout rose, which contradicts the comfortable story that the far right wins on apathy.

The American parallel is explicit: socialists have the same problem of winning the most Democratic urban districts and little else, which is the whole point of Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy tour. Broder’s conclusion is that beating the far right takes more than rallying every other party against it — it requires convincing millions of people that a practical socialist alternative is better. Rent is the one place where a Berlin-sized majority already agrees.