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Red Flag: Die Linke And War Credits

Socialists have always said: not one cent for militarism. It’s a betrayal that ministers from Die Linke voted for the German government’s trillion-euro rearmament


02/04/2025

On March 18, Germany’s Bundestag (parliament) held its first-ever trillion-euro-session. The emerging Grand Coalition of CDU and SPD, with the support of the Greens, got the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. Three days later, the Bundesrat (federal chamber), also approved the measure by a two-thirds majority.

The changes will keep the constitutional “debt brake” in place, which has mandated austerity since 2009. Except now, military spending will be exempted.

There are no concrete numbers, but a trillion euros for the military in the next decade is being discussed. The CDU wants to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on what they call “defense” — that would be roughly 150 billion euros per year, or three times the current level.

Die Linke

In the Bundestag, Die Linke voted against the constitutional amendments. Yet in the Bundesrat, where CDU, SPD, and Greens do not hold two thirds of seats, Die Linke voted in favor. The Left Party has ministers in the coalition governments in Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and they could have forced these governments to abstain. This is exactly what the hypo-neoliberal FDP and the social-chauvinist BSW did in their state governments. Yet these “left” ministers argued that since the military spending was coupled with a one-time fund of 500 billion euros for infrastructure, they needed to vote in favor.

This is an open betrayal of Die Linke’s program, principles, and structures, but it will have no consequences. Some members of the youth organization have demanded that the ministers resign. But party co-chair Inés Schwedtner, lead candidate Heidi Reichinnek, and other leaders replied that this difference of opinion should only be discussed internally.

In an interview with the German edition of Jacobin, Reichinnek said: “We always get attacked for supposedly not supporting the Bundeswehr,” the German army. “That is total nonsense. Of course we want the Bundeswehr to be well armed as a defensive army.”

This is a radical misunderstanding of what the German army is for. It has never been about defending the people living inside the country’s borders — it’s a capitalist army fighting for the interests of German corporations. Overtly capitalist politicians understand this much better than the ostensibly socialist Reichinnek. Former defense minister Peter Struck of the SPD once stated that “Germany’s freedom is defended on the Hindu Kush,” i.e. in Afghanistan. In the same vein, former federal president Horst Kohler of the CDU said: “In an emergency, military action is necessary to protect our interests, for example free trade routes.”

That is why German socialists going back to Wilhelm Liebknecht have stood firm: not one person and not one cent for militarism!

Echoes of 1914

The vote on March 18 was all about preparing for future wars. Yet it had strange echoes of the past.

Inside the Bundestag, members of Sahra Wagenknecht’s party BSW held up signs: “1914 and 2025: No to war credits!” (The person who demanded the signs be taken down was Die Linke’s Petra Pau, Bundestag Vice President and a fanatical supporter of Israel’s far-right government.)

This was in reference to the great betrayal of August 4, 1914. On that day the Reichstag, the German parliament at that time, was called together to vote on war credits. The Kaiser had already declared war, but still needed money to pay for it.

Many expected the largest party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), to vote “Nein.” In the previous week, the SPD had mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers against the threat of war. Party founders Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel were still famous for opposing war in the same chamber 40 years before. Even Rosa Luxemburg, a sharp critic of the SPD’s bureaucratic deformation, thought in the worst case they might abstain.

Yet when party co-chair Hugo Haase got up to speak for the parliamentary group, he surprised his own rank and file: “In the hour of danger, we socialists will not abandon the fatherland.” Every single SPD representative voted in favor. They had fallen for the argument that Germany was simply defending itself from attack.

At an internal meeting the previous day, 14 MPs had voted no, including Haase. Yet they submitted to the long-established “faction discipline” and went with the majority.

It was only on December 2 of that year, when the government needed more money to continue the slaughter, that one member of the Reichstag broke with his party and voted no. Karl Liebknecht declared that this was no defensive war. “It is an imperialist war, a war for the capitalist control of the world market.” By the following March, a second MP joined him.

As the First World War dragged on, resistance grew inside Germany. Working-class women rioted at butter shops. Munitions workers went on strike. Soldiers and sailors began to organize. Eventually, there were public demonstrations despite the state of siege.

The very first demonstration took place on March 18, 1915 in front of the Reichstag. Several hundred, perhaps up to a thousand women gathered on the grass for International Women’s Day (before it was moved to March 8). They were there to cheer for Liebknecht, who had announced he would be voting against the third round of war credits two days later. After the women were dispersed by police, they regrouped several times in different parts of Berlin to continue the protest.

Resistance Today

By an astounding coincidence, exactly 110 years to the day later, in the exact same spot in front of what is now the Bundestag, once again 500 people were protesting against militarism. Following a call from Klasse Gegen Klasse, an alliance of several dozen left-wing groups organized the rally, including Migrantifa, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the MLPD.

With this new wave of militarism, the propaganda about “national defense” appears to be working for now, with about 70 percent of people in Germany approving of rearmament in surveys. Yet as the enormous costs of militarism build up, working people will start to wonder: why are we tightening our belts when arms manufacturers are uncorking champagne? Even a small protest can help channel tomorrow’s discontent.

In this context, Die Linke — with tens of thousands of fresh members after a dynamic election campaign — needs to campaign against militarism. A first step would be the immediate expulsion of the ministers who voted for war credits. Unfortunately, Die Linke has not organized any real protests yet, besides a quick photo op in front of the Reichstag on the morning of the vote. Only a handful of members, including the legendary Ferat Koçak, joined the protest in the early evening.

Leftists need to campaign against imperialist war, especially when it’s in the name of “defense.” It’s a terrible sign that Die Linke’s main star Gregor Gysi argued that everyone from conservatives to leftists, both chambers of commerce and workers’ unions, need to work together to “defend our democracy and freedom.” This is almost word-for-word what Haase argued in 1914. Then as now, it’s a slippery slope towards “socialist” support for imperialist slaughter.

These are historic times, with the German bourgeoisie launching its biggest rearmament program since the Nazi era. The growth of imperialist contradictions is slowly pushing the world towards a horrific conflagration. The lesson of the First World War is that only the working class, in alliance with all oppressed people, can stop the capitalists’ wars to control the world. We need a broad left-wing movement that is uncompromising in its opposition to imperialism and militarism. For this, we need to fight against the leaders of Die Linke who are open to giving the German army trillions in exchange for a pittance to repair bridges.

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears on Friday at The Left Berlin.

Which way now for the Global South?

Forging a path beyond Trumpian caprice

The infamous tech venture-capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, aiming to strengthen their ties to the US government, organised their American Dynamism summit last week. US Vice-President JD Vance was one of the speakers invited to the summit, which was meant to support companies and firms focusing on the American national interest. His speech — an incisive reflection on America’s role in the global economy — was particularly interesting in how brutally honest it was. Trying to pin down the cause of the malaise in the American economy, Vance pointed out how the global division of labour, separating the “making of things” from “the design of things” have given the countries engaged in manufacturing a growing technological and innovative edge over the US, as they rapidly improved their own ability to design the things they were making. Countries that were meant to trail the US on the value chain are rapidly overtaking the US, threatening American hegemony and competitiveness in doing so. Vance was very open about the fact that he was talking about China — perhaps the only country to emerge as a serious geopolitical rival since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Trump 2.0 thus clearly implies the end of business as usual for the United States. This is bound to impact the entire world, with this impact possibly felt most strongly in the countries of the Global South. The South, freed from the fetters of European and Japanese colonialism in the twentieth century, saw the birth of countless post-colonial nation-states, each attempting to assert whatever degree of agency they had finally won. This agency brought in decades of hotly contested ideologies and debates, all attempting to answer a question that was of particular importance to the people living in these countries: how do we catch up to the Global North? The answers to this question were always conditioned by the reality of the post-colonial world, one whose institutions were still dominated by the countries of the Global North — particularly the United States of America. To attempt to answer this question today, in light of contemporary geopolitical realities, it is worth revisiting some of these early debates.

***

An early bourgeois framing attempting to illuminate a path forward for the South was modernisation theory. Popularised by Walt Rostow’s Non-Communist Manifesto, modernisation theory posited that the Global South was simply the mirror image of the Global North, in an earlier stage of development. All that these countries needed to do to become mass-consumption societies was replicate Northern institutions (free markets, liberal democracy, and the like), in order to follow the same developmental trajectories that the North once did. The drive to modernise the Global South also spurred on early foreign direct investment (FDI) programmes, in an attempt to provide capital for these productive transformations.

Modernisation theory stood in direct contrast to a wide school of theories that had been emerging in the global South in the late and post-colonial period. A particularly relevant umbrella of ideas was the tradition of dependency theory. Originating in Latin America, drawing inspiration from radical currents in Africa and India, dependency theory’s central claim argued for the existence of, to quote Theotônio dos Santos, a “situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected”. Dependency theorists held that the underdevelopment of the Global South was a consequence of the development of the North, for a number of reasons. These reasons included Raúl Prebisch’s falling terms of trade for Southern economies that relied on exporting resources and importing finished goods; Arghiri Emmanuel’s description of unequal exchange, the North’s ability to acquire slightly less productive Southern labour for much cheaper; Samin Amin’s descriptions of the five monopolies the global North held, over technology, finance, resource access, media, and weapons of mass destruction; and many others.

Dependency theory was a bit of a broad church, since it was an attempt to describe the mechanisms inhibiting Southern development, rather than to set out a clear program of political praxis. Theorists disagreed on whether growth through trade with the Global North was possible at all, alongside the mechanisms themselves, and their individual importance. Critically, they disagreed on the role that domestic capitalists should play. There was general agreement that under global capitalism, domestic capitalists tended to form a comprador class, shuffling profits upwards to the Northern bourgeoisie (see, for instance, the relationship between Bangladeshi mill owners and H&M). Many programs emerging from this tradition unfortunately saw this relationship of dependency as the central problem with capitalist relations. A particularly popular policy that emerged from these more centrist strands of dependency theory was that of import-substitute industrialisation (ISI), which aimed to shut out foreign imports and develop a competitive domestic capitalism. 

This led to considerable apologia for capitalist relations in general, with a number of Southern governments developing close ties to domestic capital while trying to control their comprador tendencies. Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso — an early dependency theory veteran — ended up privatising a wide variety of public services, in an effort to increase Brazilian productivity, and fix the country’s trade deficit with the United States. The Indian National Congress under the Nehru-Gandhi family was more extreme, practically sealing the country’s economy off to the outside world, and sparking a profoundly exploitative nexus between the state and industrial capital through a restrictive bureaucratic regime, dubbed the License Raj.

ISI ran into a number of problems, such as crises of insufficient domestic demand that could propel the growth engine indefinitely under market mechanisms. Particularly when contrasted with Latin America and India, the Taiwanese and South Korean (and, decades later, Chinese) economies showed rapid economic growth. This seemed to validate the market-optimistic claim — integrating the Global South into the global networks of trade and finance and using comparative advantages to acquire foreign currency and spur local production appeared to actually work and deliver solid economic growth. This was even true (in patches) in Latin America, amidst the brief periods of flirtation with domestic production for export. It was especially true in India, where the economic liberalisation of 1991 seemed to deliver a good two decades of unprecedented economic growth. And where integration into the world market somehow failed to result in miraculous growth (as in Egypt and Pakistan), apologists would often blame differences in “cultural values”, spurring on a whole series of orientalist headlines stuffed with “untranslatable” snippets of Confucian wisdom.

More pragmatic analyses of these economic booms held that while export-driven growth was indeed possible, it also required the highly specific combination of conditions found in East Asia at the time — conditions such as highly favourable terms of trade (in part due to efforts to keep communism at bay) allowing them to run massive trade deficits, and extraordinarily hands-on developmental states. Yet, despite the absence of this favourable environment in Latin America, most of Africa, and India, ISI’s relevance was rapidly dying (and spawning colossal domestic wealth inequality as it faded away). For a while, we did indeed appear to be approaching some sort of incredibly grim end of history.

***

Today, amidst the backdrop of the New Cold War, many of us on the left find ourselves enamoured by the meteoric growth that we have witnessed in China over the past few decades. Under Deng Xiaoping, the PRC ended up liberalising its economy, taking advantage of rising rural productivity, low urban wages, highly structured and regimented dormitory labour, and export-driven growth. This model, beginning first in Special Economic Zones like Shenzhen and then spreading outwards, ended up pulling  swathes of China’s population out of poverty and into world-class cities with incredibly functional housing and infrastructure. This was accomplished through a highly decentralised state machinery capable of reacting to local demand and through a formidable range of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Witnessing this from outside China — from a world whose forces of production either ended up moving to China, switching to producing weapons, or simply never existed in the first place — sparks understandable envy. In Germany, we are forced to watch Deutsche Bahn gradually fall apart while the government pumps infinite money into Rheinmetall instead. The upshot is that the Chinese economic model has gained considerable legitimacy as the way forward.

That this is also a legitimisation of “neoliberalism”, the global macroeconomic structure that birthed modern China, is a spot of irony that eludes many. For what these sections of the left are ignoring or dismissing is the absolutely brutal expropriation and exploitation that Chinese labour has been subjected to. Advocating for a replication of this model is equivalent to saying that workers in the global South must today suffer, and remain ever-ready to serve the interests of capital in factory-adjacent dormitories, alienated from their families in the countryside, working twelve-hour shifts manufacturing inane trinkets for Americans to buy off Etsy — all in the hopes that their children might be able to live a better life. Both liberals and Marxists are guilty of this — by focusing solely on the structural brilliance of the Chinese model, labour is left entirely out of the picture (unsurprisingly, this desire to erase the agency of labour tends to be rather strong amongst the middle classes). What this boils down to, ultimately, is the received wisdom of stageism that many on the left today subscribe to today — the idea that the more agrarian, feudal parts of the world must first pass through a brutal industrial capitalism, before they can transition to socialism.

Thankfully, we need no longer tire ourselves out with these tedious internal debates. China’s days of being upheld as an example of how free trade can bring development to the Global South have come to a rapid, definitive end — since China is now seen explicitly as a unique threat to the very same order that spawned its dominance. Vance’s incredibly lucid speech has made one thing clear as day — the Global North is only interested in development in the Global South as long as the South remains subordinate. Should they choose to do something to alter the terms of their relationship to the North, the American tolerance for the current economic order will come to a rapid end. 

The Americans seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the capitalist separation of planning and execution, if organised along the lines of nation-states, could end up becoming a strategic disaster for them. If Donald Trump and his band of merry men have their way, it might mean the complete death of post-Fordism — the economic system that we live under, where increasingly complex, flexible, globally coordinated supply chains hoover up surplus-value where they can find it, all to produce and sell infinite diverse commodities to a worldwide labour aristocracy. The political economy of such a project might just involve embracing the end of gratuitous commodity consumption for American workers, in an effort to bring back domestic production — a truly unprecedented ideology that can only be described as some kind of bizarre MAGA degrowth. Importantly, it also involves abandoning all efforts to modernise production in the South and instead relies on using raw force to pummel the South into submission, and to comply with American demands where necessary.

***

What is the path forward for the Global South? How do we find a growth model that retains the dignity of labour, safeguards our natural environment, remains cognisant of planetary constraints, and manages to coordinate commodity production and distribution across massive geographies?

Perhaps it is high time we resurrected some of dependency theory’s scattered legacies, particularly those of one of its most revolutionary, insightful thinkers — the late Samir Amin. More practically, the need of the hour is to build closer ties across the Global South, with comprehensive programs emphasising resource-sharing, de-dollarisation, military & security guarantees, and a commitment to the abolition of intellectual property. It is essential that the South act as a unified voice to ensure that the North’s capacity to absorb value through its many monopolies sees constant challenge. 

Going down this path once again, we must also remember that this salvation will not lie in the beatification of domestic capitalism, however third-worldist it might come across in rhetoric or action. As a mode of production, capitalism is intrinsically riddled with crisis, terminal or otherwise; any future program must be a genuine socialist model that refuses to cede ground to capital, domestic or otherwise. What the political economy of this program should look like is a question that needs to be approached with genuine intellectual curiosity. The answer does not lie in socialism with Chinese characteristics — a model that is effectively dead, thanks to both industrial overcapacity and American withdrawal. Nor does it lie in the legacy of the Soviet Union — a model that rapidly industrialised one of Europe’s most backward countries, but ended up brutalising its own peasantry to do so, before ultimately falling captive to an inept centralised bureaucracy. 

The seeds for a socialist future should centre the needs and the agency of labour, particularly today, when the forces of production have developed to the point that the brutal exploitation of the working class is no longer necessary. For inspiration, we should instead attempt to compose the fragments of intelligent, meaningful praxis that we see all over the world — from struggles against displacement in India, to the landless workers’ movement in Brazil, to ideas of worker self-management in Yugoslavia, to the emancipatory use of technology to coordinate production that Allende’s Chile briefly flirted with — into a cohesive whole.

To borrow an expression from a recent Perry Anderson piece, the need of the hour is idées-forces — of revolutionary positive visions for the future that can acquire “overwhelming force as mobilizing ideologies” for when major crisis emerges, as it eventually inevitably will.

Familien für Palästina

Families for Palestine

Familien für Palästina is a collective of people united by our commitment to fight for a free Palestine. Besides that, care work is a common fact of our lives – whether it is care for children or for others in our community. Our notion of families includes single-parent-families, human-animal bonds and queer people. It is also aspirational: We strive towards a world where colonial and imperialist border regimes, prisons and capitalism no longer determine how we organize our intimate relations, our livelihoods and our communities.

We are a mixed group – Palestinians and non-Palestinians. We recognize that the struggle for a free Palestine overlaps with the struggle against structural racism and imperialism everywhere. Many of us have also been active in different movements and communities for many years and have experiences with migrant, anti-racist, refugee, queer, Mad/psych survivor and intersectional feminist struggles.

We started out by going to protests together. We try to make protest spaces welcoming to children when we can. All children are our children. We believe that fostering multigenerational community strengthens the Palestine movement as a whole. That is as much about including young ones and their caregivers as it is about honoring the experiences, lessons and sacrifices of the older generations.

We practice mutual aid. We work closely with Infinity Team in Gaza, a group who came together to provide basic necessities (hygiene, food, water) and financial support among the displaced people. They also organize educational and emotional support activities for children. We are full of admiration for the creativity and determination they have shown to provide some relief in the most difficult situations. Being in direct contact with them is nourishing us to practice hope and not succumb to despair. The money that we raise at our events supports their work. We have organized several fundraisers with different thematic focuses, always offering activities for children as well as youth and adults. Our fundraisers are very successful thanks to a network of collaborators and supporters, especially Food4Palestine.

We have collaborated with many other organizations in Berlin as well: the Internationalist Queer Pride Berlin, pa_allies, Palinale, HeArt of Gaza exhibitions, Frauen Machen Druck, Al Festival, Gaza Komitee and Görli Winter Market among others.

We also organize political education for children and families in our communities, because our schools and the vast majority of German media convey dehumanizing and racist ideas about Palestine. Our community’s children – whether they are Palestinian, Muslim, Black, Jewish, … —  are growing up with the knowledge that Palestine is a rich culture with a long history, and that fighting for Palestine is an urgent cry of justice. The Palestinian resistance is an inspiration for all of us.

News from Berlin and Germany, 2nd April 2025

Weekly news round-up from Berlin and Germany

NEWS FROM BERLIN

Berlin MPs want rapid partnership with Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is to become Berlin’s 19th twin city. All parliamentary groups spoke in favour of this at the most recent session of the state parliament. The CDU and the SPD had tabled a motion calling on the Senate to press ahead with talks already underway. For many MPs, this is not going fast enough. Jian Omar (Green Party) called for words to be followed by actions and communicated to Kai Wegner (CDU) that town twinning was not a ‘trophy colleting’. In the past, the Senate had often announced partnerships without bringing them to life. Source: tagesspiel

“Pain grip”: climate activist wins legal dispute against Berlin police

Berlin police officers unjustly used the so-called “pain grip” (schmerzgriff) on a climate activist during a sit-in blockade. This was decided by the Berlin Administrative Court. The presiding judge Wilfried Peters explained the decision, considering the behaviour of the police officersas disproportionate. The plaintiff Lars Ritter had taken part in a sit-in blockade by the “Last Generation” climate group on 20 April 2023. The court said that the police officers could have simply carried him off the road and that he was not expected to resist. The police intervention was filmed at the time and video clips were published on the internet. Source: tagesspiel

Employees of Charité subsidiary CFM go on indefinite strike on Wednesday

CFM employees no longer want to be the “piggy bank of the Charité”, going on indefinite strike from Wednesday. This was announced by trade union ver.di. The CFM (Charité Facility Management) is responsible for patient transport, cleaning, catering and technology, among other things. Ver.di demands the pay of the CFM employees to be harmonised with that of Charité staff, stating additionally that they works under significantly worse conditions. The employees of the Charité subsidiary had gone on warning strike several times in recent weeks. The indefinite strike will begin with the early shift this Wednesday. The union is expecting restrictions in patient care. Source: rbb

 

NEWS FROM GERMANY

Expatriation because of anti-Semitism?

The coalition negotiations between the CDU/CSU and SPD are said to have repeatedly led to heated arguments. Particularly in dealing with migration and integration issues, the negotiating partners’ positions were apparently very far apart. Dirk Wiese (SPD), himself part of the “Home Affairs, Law, Migration and Integration” working group, affirmed the SPD had managed to ensure that the possibility of dual citizenship remained in place. This topic has generated many discussions. In future, being identified as a “terrorist supporter” or “anti-Semite” might be enough to revoke a German passport. But how are these terms even defined? Source: dw

Racism in Germany: the norm, not the exception

In Germany, more than half of Black people and Muslims have experienced discrimination, according to a new study by the National Discrimination and Racism Monitor. In one of the most comprehensive data surveys on racism and discrimination in Germany, researcher surveyed almost 10,000 people across the country. The results of the latest report from March 2025 show that those who are seen by others as being immigrants or Muslims are most affected — regardless of whether they actually are or not. “Experiences of discrimination do not happen randomly,” said Aylin Mengi, co-author of the study. Source: dw

Anti-Palestinian repression in German companies: the case of Zalando

On December 5, 2024 the labour court in Berlin (Arbeitsgericht Berlin) settled the case of Mohamad S. supported by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC). Mohamad is marketing professional and was working at Zalando SE in Berlin as a Senior Media Testing manager but received a termination of his contract following his expression of solidarity with Palestine. Before his dismissal, Mohamad suffered moral harassment and was also repeatedly pressured to resign from the company. When the attempts to push him out of the company failed, he finally received a termination letter in June 2024 and decided to file a lawsuit. Furthermore, Mohamad filed an anti-discrimination complaint case. Source: ELSC

Egyptian in Göttingen has no right to naturalisation

Göttingen rejected the application for naturalisation of an Egyptian, because the Ministry of the Interior of Lower Saxony had expressed security concerns, pointing out that, according to information from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the applicant had been active for several years in communities and organisations with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The plaintiff did not accept the decision and took the matter to court. He stated he avoided any group which opposed the basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany. The applicant travelled to Germany in 2000 to study, followed a few months later by his family. Source: hna

Lauterbach wants to equip healthcare system for “military conflicts”

Federal Health Minister KarlLauterbach (SPD) wants to better equip the German healthcare system against crises and military conflicts, according to the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. He expects a draft bill to be presented in the summer. Lauterbach added: “We also need a turning point for the healthcare system. Especially as Germany could become a hub for the care of injured and wounded people from other countries in the event of an alliance.” The Association of Democratic Doctors stated that the organisation would oppose “further militarisation of the healthcare system with a loud no”. Source: Ärzteblatt

Cannabis could be banned in Germany again

A year after the start of the partial legalisation of cannabis in Germany, its withdrawal is apparently still an issue in the coalition negotiations between the CDU/CSU and SPD. The Bavarian CSU in particular is piling on the pressure to abolish that partial legalisation of cannabis: “We want to reverse the traffic light government’s mistake and ban cannabis again,” Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told the newspaper “Augsburger Allgemeine”. The state of Bavaria is currently the only federal state without any legal cannabis cultivation outside of private residences. Source: mdr

Political Deportations of EU Citizens in Germany

Statement by the Irish Bloc Berlin


01/04/2025

Four activists – two Irish citizens, one Polish citizen and one US citizen – have been ordered to leave Germany by April 21, 2025 with one reason: protesting Germany’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine. Berlin’s Interior Ministry has issued deportation orders based on accusations of “antisemitism” and support for “terrorist organisations” – claims entirely without evidence or legal basis. None of the four have a criminal record.

Even Berlin’s immigration office (LEA) initially rejected the orders, recognising they lacked legal grounds, but was pressured into compliance by the Interior Ministry, as evidenced by email threads obtained by the activists’ legal defence team. The deportation orders were ultimately signed by LEA Director Engelhard Mazanke.

This unprecedented move is part of a frightening broader crackdown. Since October 2023, Germany has frozen asylum claims from Gaza, despite German courts acknowledging that life in Gaza is under direct threat. At the same time, racist media coverage manufactures consent for deportations targeting Palestinians and other racialised communities.

From mass arrests and bogus charges to the use of migration law to bypass the courts, Germany is ramping up its efforts to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Now, it has escalated by revoking one student visa and three EU citizens’ right to freedom of movement. This mirrors tactics used by the Trump administration, but similar repression now threatens activists in Greece too – the normalisation of the disregard for fundamental rights is an existential threat to the EU as a whole.

These deportations are a political attack on an entire movement. By removing these activists, Germany is targeting the broader community – especially Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims – who dare to speak out.

The deportation letters cite Germany’s Staatsräson, a doctrine that demands unconditional support for Israel. That doctrine is now being used to justify repression, whitewash war crimes, and silence criticism of a 77-year campaign of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and the current mass slaughter, displacement, and starvation of Palestinians.

The Irish Bloc stands in full solidarity with the four facing deportation. We reject this misuse of the law, denounce Germany’s complicity in genocide, support all asylum seekers and victims of Germany’s racist immigration policy who have had their residencies revoked for activism and advocacy, and support the fight to overturn these orders in the courts.

From Gaza to Berlin, the struggle continues. No deportation can stop this movement.

🇮🇪Saoirse don Phalaistín🇵🇸

  • @IrishBlocBerlin

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