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Red Flag over Berlinale 2025: An Embarrassing Festival of Self-Censorship

Feel bad about going to Berlinale this year? Maybe reading how terrible it was will help.

Nathaniel Flakin
28/02/2025

Last year’s Berlinale film festival was marked by scandal. After two co-directors of the documentary No Other Land, one Palestinian and one Israeli, gave short speeches calling for equality, they were denounced by German politicians for antisemitism. A Bundestag resolution called it one of the “big antisemitism scandals” in recent years (Elon Musk’s “Roman salute,” in contrast, barely got a peep).

I do not envy Tricia Tuttle, the new head of the Berlinale, who must try to navigate between the German state’s fanatical support for Israel’s far-right government and the international art scene’s generally liberal views. There were contradictory signs like an Instagram post, nine months too late, defending No Other Land, and an FAQ informing people that the so-called antisemitism resolution was mistaken and not legally binding.

Anodyne

The resulting festival was an embarrassing mess. Germany’s public broadcaster offered a slideshow of “stars speaking out politically” that looks like a competition for anodyne messages. “HUMANITY! LOVE! VOTE!” Why did no one think to bring a sign about “DEMOCRACY”?

The only person to make an actual political statement from the stage was Tilda Swinton, who defended boycotts of Israel at a press conference. The festival leadership, in contrast, highlighted a documentary about David Cunio, who had starred in a Berlinale film in 2013 and is currently a hostage in Gaza.

In other words, they know there is a war going on, and they have chosen to focus exclusively on the side backed by German imperialism. The only film from Palestine was about parkour in Gaza City. I heard one official on stage musing about a “place that no longer exists,” as if talking about Atlantis swallowed up by the sea.

Racism and Calling the Cops

It was up to a handful of brave artists to talk about politics. Jun Li, director of Queerpanorama, read out a statement by Erfan Shkarriz, who was boycotting the festival. Berlin cops opened a criminal investigation because of the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” which multiple German courts have declared to be legal.

That is Berlinale 2025: Inviting international artists and then sticking the cops on them.

At the premiere of a documentary about the dictatorship in Paraguay, editor Manuel Embalse, who is Jewish, gave a similar speech while wearing a keffiyeh. He ended with the same slogan, used around the world as a call for equality — it has never been, despite what German prosecutors think, a unique marker of one particular Palestinian faction.

Dirk Stettner, chair of the CDU in the Berlin parliament, called for cancelling the whole festival. This would be the next logical step: banning international artists from Germany.

While the films in competition seem to have been mostly forgettable, two spectacular documentaries allowed victims of German racism to tell their stories. Das Deutsche Volk portrays the families of the nine people murdered in Hanau five years ago. They are currently being attacked by local politicians for criticizing the state.

Die Müllner Briefe features a much older mass murder: the arson attacks that killed three people in Mölln in 1992. Thousands of letters were sent to the survivors, but shockingly, the city of Mölln locked these messages of solidarity away for 27 years. They are now being presented to the public.

Yet my favorite film at the festival, Hysteria, was a satire of the German anti-racist film genre. In a film-in-the-film, a Turkish-German director is trying to commemorate yet another racist murder — the 1993 arson attack in Solingen that took five immigrants’ lives. The filmmakers want to do everything right — but one of the refugees they hire as extras is upset to see a Quran was burned for a shoot. As everyone tries to act in a principled way, the situation gets increasingly tense and absurd. Different characters who are affected by German racism — the intern with a Turkish father, the wealthy director, the different refugees — argue about who benefits from white privilege and who is making art that assuages European guilt. A morally ambivalent, hilarious masterpiece!

Under the Radar

The closest thing to an impactful statement about Germany’s complicity in genocide might have come from Radu Jude, who won a silver bear for the screenplay of Kontinental ’25. A bailiff in Cluj, a city with Romanian, Hungarian, and German traditions, evicts a poor man from the cellar where he is just barely surviving. He kills himself, and she spends the rest of the film searching for relief from the overwhelming guilt, consulting her boss, husband, priest, former student, and many other weirdos.

Like in every Jude film, the focus is on the absurdity of everyday life. The constant and casual racism against the ethnic Hungarian protagonist from the Romanian majority is one example, matched by the casual racism of ethnic Hungarians, which is funny for viewers totally unfamiliar with the stereotypes. In reminding herself that she followed the rules, she does not absolve herself, and only highlights the cheap excuses people use to do inhumane things — “I was just doing what I was told!” — German officials should watch this.

As always, Berlinale was also full of bland Hollywood slop and failed projects that will rightly never see release. The political messages were still there, but they were much harder to find than in previous years. If you boycotted the festival, you didn’t miss much.

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 every Friday at The Left Berlin.

The German Greens: From Pacifist Roots to Militarism, Neoliberalism, and Greenwashing

A Party Transformed

Pepe T.
26/02/2025

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, founded in 1980 as a fusion of environmentalists, pacifists, and anti-nuclear activists, has long shed its radical origins. Once synonymous with grassroots democracy and peace, the Greens now embody a paradox: a party still branded as “center-left” and “green” by the German mainstream while blatantly championing militarism, neoliberal austerity, and policies starkly at odds with its founding principles.

Below are a few helpful reminders of past controversies and betrayals of principles

Militarism’s Early Roots: The Greens’ 1998 entry into federal government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) marked their first betrayal of pacifism. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer justified NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia as “humanitarian intervention,” setting a precedent for future pro-war stances. The party later backed the Afghanistan War, cementing its alignment with US-led militarism.
Neoliberalism and the Hartz IV Legacy: Partnering with the SPD, the Greens co-authored the Hartz IV reforms (Agenda 2010), which slashed welfare protections, imposed punitive sanctions on the unemployed, and normalized precarious labor. These policies exacerbated poverty and psychological distress, disproportionately harming marginalized groups, forcing them into working conditions that barely covered, if at all, basic human needs.
Scandals and Suppression: The Greens’ had early ties to pedophilia apologists (resurfacing in 2013) having members proposing the decriminalization of pedosexuality back then. And in a much more recent incident in 2023, they purged member Miriam Block, a Hamburg politician stripped of her roles for demanding an inquiry (introduced by Die Linke) into the unsolved NSU-linked murder of Süleyman Taşköprü, a request rejected by their coalition partner, the SPD — this highlights a pattern of prioritizing power over accountability and justice.

A review on recent events

The Greens have Unconditionally supported Israel’s War in Gaza. “No weapons and military equipment to warzones” was a heavily exhibited phrase printed largely on countless Green election posters displayed nationwide, which included an image of a white dove during their 2021 Bundestag election campaign.

After October 7, 2023, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Vice Chancellor and Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck rejected calls for a humanitarian ceasefire ( Gaza-Krieg: Bundesregierung weiterhin gegen Waffenstillstand) despite the fact that other fellow European foreign ministers (e.g. France and Ireland) and UN general secretary António Guterres called for one.

It was only after Palestinian deaths surpassed 32,000 in March 2024 that Baerbock first suggested the idea of a possible humanitarian pause to the fire. Germany remains meanwhile Israel’s second-largest arms supplier (€323 million in 2023), with the Greens, in possession of 2 key ministeries for the approval of arms exports (Habeck’s and Baerbock’s), authorizing exports despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes.

All of this unfolds as German exports account for 30% of Israel’s arms imports. This places it just behind the United States, which dominates with 69% of Israel’s military supplies — a staggering 99% combined total that underscores the West’s complicity in Israel’s military aggression.

Baerbock’s shameless and outrageous declaration at a Bundestag session on the 10th October 2024 announcing that “civilian sites lose protected status if abused” directly violates the Geneva Conventions. Habeck echoed debunked Israeli claims about Hamas using “human shields”, despite UN reports from March and November 2024 finding no evidence by reporting that “Israel does not provide substantial evidence nor could they independently verify those allegations”.

Habeck stated “…Hamas uses the (Gaza) population as hostages, even as human shields and hides behind them, kind of producing the images (of dead children) and civilian casualties themselves”. When questioned about the possibility of an ongoing genocide in Gaza perpetrated with German weapons and unconditional support Habeck said: “the naming of a genocide in Gaza is a complete contortion of victim and perpetrator…”. (l )

Never in its history has Germany exported so many weapons as during the current legislative period. In 2023 they increased the amount of arms exports to Israel tenfold compared to the year 2022. (Deutsche Rüstungsexporte nach Israel fast verzehnfacht | tagesschau.de) These 2023 exports were authorized as “urgent procedures”.

Fuelling the Ukraine-Russia War

The Greens spearheaded Germany’s U-turn on pacifist arms exports, flooding Ukraine with heavy weapons and backing a €100 billion military upgrade fund. Sven Giegold, a top Green official in Habeck’s ministry, even advocated arming “democratic” nations in conflicts — a far cry from their anti-war roots.

Germany and the EU’s failure to impose an early oil embargo on Russia, coupled with ineffective diplomacy and poorly timed sanctions, allowed the Ukraine war to escalate. This inaction marked one of two key breaches of the Greens’ campaign pledge to avoid arming conflict zones. Even within the SPD, critics warned that heavy weapons deliveries risked dangerous escalation. Yet under pressure from Kyiv and internal Green Party figures like Annalena Baerbock — who declared “We see terrible horrors every day” and insisted “now is not the time for excuses, but for creativity and pragmatism” — Germany pivoted to militarism.

Unlike the fierce internal dissent during the Greens’ 1999 support for NATO’s Yugoslavia bombing, the party’s pro-war consensus on Ukraine faced minimal to no resistance. Strikingly, Anton Hofreiter — once seen as the leader of the Greens’ anti-militarist “Fundi” faction — now echoed the “Realos” wing (led by Baerbock and Habeck), declaring “we have no other choice” to justify arming Ukraine. Hofreiter even invoked fear of a Russian invasion sparking World War III, a rhetoric diametrically opposed to the Greens’ pacifist roots. This shift underscores the party’s abandonment of its anti-war principles in favor of militarized Realpolitik and lobbying for the military industry. This can also be highlighted by the approval of a 100 billion Euro fund to swiftly upgrade the national military in June 2022.

Climate Protection Farce: Greenwashing

Their slogan “climate protection is human protection” during their electoral campaign is exposed as perhaps the biggest and worst lie and contradiction.

The 2023 eviction of Lützerath —a small village destroyed for RWE’s coal mine expansion in Green co-governed (with CDU) North Rhine-Westphalia exposed their environmental hypocrisy. While preaching for environment protection and renewable energies the Greens approved record fossil fuel projects alongside military exports, two of Germany’s and the world’s largest CO₂ sources.

Germany has committed to reducing national emissions by 65% below 1990 levels by 2030 and achieving climate neutrality by 2045, as outlined in its 2021 Climate Protection Act. As a signatory to the Paris Agreement since April 22, 2016, these pledges are not only central to its international reputation but also to the Greens’ electoral promises. Yet the party’s actions starkly contradict these goals. The violent eviction of the village of Lützerath in 2023 — aided by police using pepper spray and bulldozers — to expand RWE’s Garzweiler coal mine exemplifies this blatant hypocrisy. For a party ostensibly dedicated to environmentalism, facilitating fossil fuel extraction while partnering with one of Germany’s largest energy corporations represents a profound betrayal of its foundational principles.

The environmental devastation wrought by Israel’s assault on Gaza — partially financed by German arms exports — includes the destruction of 40% of cultivable farmland over 1 million olive trees razed, and widespread contamination of water, soil, and air from CO₂-intensive military strikes and illegal white phosphorus use. These actions have left 97% of Gaza’s water unfit for human consumption, with only 5% of water needs met by groundwater.

“Feminist Foreign Policy”

Baerbock’s self-proclaimed “feminist” branding collapsed amid Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe: 67% of casualties are women and children, 50,000 pregnant women endure unsafe births under deplorable human conditions, and 690,000 lack hygiene access. It is important to remind people of Baerbock’s dismissed ceasefire calls despite UN pleas, reducing her “feminism” to empty rhetoric.

Hypocrisy and Racism

Green Party co-chair Ricarda Lang targeted climate activist Greta Thunberg for her solidarity with Palestine, weaponizing the term “antisemitism” to accuse her of spreading “conspiracy tales” and exploiting climate activism to promote a “one-sided position on the Palestine-Israel conflict.” Lang even baselessly labeled Thunberg a “jew-hater”, a smear emblematic of the German political establishment’s conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

This kind of hypocrisy was further exposed during the Berlinale 2024 scandal, where Green Minister of state for culture Claudia Roth faced criticism for applauding the critically-acclaimed documentary “No Other Land” by Palestinian director Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. When pressed by CDU politicians, especially by Berlin Mayor Kai Wagner, Lang defensively claimed, “I was only clapping for the Israeli moviemaker,” completely sidelining Adra’s contribution and epitomizing the Greens’ racist, selective and hollow performative allyship.

Erosion of Rights and International Law: Contempt for Accountability

Despite the ICJ’s provisional ruling on Israel’s “plausible genocide” and ICC arrest warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now Israeli ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Baerbock initially ismissed these as “hypothetical.” This also despite the UN and the largest human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch having openly named and condemned apartheid, crimes against humanity and genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.

In 2024, the German government approved €160 million military exports to Israel, 31.2 of those additionally in December 2024 even as evidence of Israeli war crimes and mass civilian casualties in Gaza mounted. In a surreal twist, the Greens demanded a “written guarantee” from Israel that German weapons would not be used to violate international law—a performative gesture given Israel’s documented use of such arms in unlawful strikes. This attempt to “clean their conscience” (or rather wash their already crimson red bloody hands in advance) ignores overwhelming proof that German-supplied equipment has already facilitated repeated war crimes.

Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Green Bundestag Vice President) insisted Netanyahu should be “spoken to elsewhere,” mainly after 1:46:00) while ex-party chief Omid Nouripour and Cem Özdemir (Agriculture Minister) outright rejected the ICC’s legitimacy — a stark contrast to the latter’s pre-election claim in 2021 that “human rights aren’t tactical.”

Germany and the U.S. continue to supply 99% of Israel’s military imports. This unwavering support is enabled by the German Greens, who have endorsed arms exports to Israel without hesitation.

Hard Right-Wing Drift

Habeck’s “10-point security plan” shamelessly mirrors far-right CDU rhetoric (CDU’s 5-point plan), emphasizing deportations, biometric surveillance, and targeting “Islamists” while ignoring far-right violence, which is statistically significantly higher. The firing of Marjam Samadzade (Schleswig-Holstein integration official) in mid 2024 over a pro-Palestine social media “like” exemplifies the Greens’ authoritarian turn.

A Party Unmasked

The Greens have long abandoned their pacifist, environmentalist, and social justice roots to become architects of militarism, neoliberalism, and right-wing normalization. Their “green” label now masks carbon-intensive policies, unconditional support for apartheid, and complicity in war crimes. A vote for today’s Greens is a vote for a rebranded hard-right agenda — xenophobic, profit-driven, and drenched in hypocrisy, mockery of international law and violent genocide.

Urban Fibers

Circularity in fashion? Local clothing donations to global pollution

The Left Berlin

The studio Urban Fibers investigates and implements new paradigms for the production of sustainable and regenerative textiles. In collaboration with regional producers, they have been remanufacturing local cotton from discarded t-shirts, a valuable raw material, to produce upcycled yarns. Designed for the use in locally existing textile infrastructure of digital weaving, knitting and braiding machines, these yarns can replace virgin cotton up to 100%. The results are vibrant and sophisticated textiles that can be recycled again.

Every week, 15 million second-hand garments from the global North arrive in Accra (Ghana) to be sold at Kantamanto, a vital hub for circularity, reuse and repair. Despite the local efforts to bring these clothes back to life, 40% of them remain unsellable and are directly landfilled, polluting the waterways and the complete coastal line of Accra. To top an already unjust situation, in January 2025 a devastating fire destroyed Kantamanto and left more than 8.000 market workers without a livelihood. Urban Fibers is hosting an event on March 1st to fundraise for Kantamanto and to bring attention to the problem of waste colonialism.

Last year Urban Fibers spent two months working in Accra, Ghana, processing market discards from the global north to make upcycled products. They worked with a young Ghanaian team of designers who are making a living by using the imported waste as their material and diverting it from the landfill. Back in Berlin, Urban Fibers wants to share the story of your clothes with you. Let’s give voice to the people processing our waste behind the scenes of the fast fashion industry, one of the most polluting on earth. But also to illustrate how we are all intertwined in our fight for a more just and safer future.

At our fundraising event on 1st March, there will be a discussion with Circular Berlin about the wasteful textile industry. We will also connect live with The Or Foundation, the charity behind the fire relief fund, that has been supporting the community of Kantamanto and providing remediation efforts since 2011. They will update us about the state of rebuild and about the current challenges of the workers. There will also be Urban Fibers’ goodies on sale, interactive activities, food and drinks and a clothing exchange corner. We will end the event with live guitar music and a DJ set to keep our spirits high.

All proceeds from the event will go directly to the fire relief fund of the Or Foundation.

Fundraising event for the workers at Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana
Date: Saturday, 1st of March
Time: 16:00-23:00 h
Location: C*Space Berlin – Langhansstrasse 86, 13086 Berlin

Entrance to the event is free, donations for the fundraising will be collected at the door

Accessibility: The space is unfortunately not accessible on wheelchair

For any accessibility requests please contact hello@urbanfibers.org

Palestine Solidarity Cut from “Uncuttable” Demonstration

The Palestine Exception in German Solidarity Strikes Again. Statement by Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin and Internationalist Antiracists Against Cuts

The Left Berlin
25/02/2025

We condemn the racist behaviour against culture and social workers in solidarity with Palestine by the organizers and police at the Unkürzbar protest on February 22nd in Berlin.

The protest “Berlin ist unkürzbar – Umverteilung jetzt!” (Berlin is Uncuttable – Redistribution now!) was organized by the union ver.di Berlin against the Berlin Senate’s massive budget cuts in social work, culture, universities, mobility and environmental protection.

At the protest, many demonstrators drew a clear connection between the right-wing agenda of budget cuts, censorship around the genocide in Palestine, and police violence in Berlin. Neoliberal austerity politics go hand in hand with increased law enforcement spending, the securitization of civil society, and the disenfranchisement of the cultural sector—all methods of social control. It is no coincidence that Berlin claims to have no money for homeless shelters or queer art projects while simultaneously pouring tens of millions of Euros more into the police budget, which it then uses to harass those very demographics.

Solidarity with Palestine, mostly from racialized people, was present from the beginning of the demonstration with signs such as “Anti-racists against budget cuts” and “Defund police, fund people.” They were both systematically and individually targeted by the march organizers and police.

Louna Sbou, director of Oyoun, the first initiative to be defunded under CDU rule in Berlin—based on false antisemitism allegations—was scheduled to hold a speech. At the protest, she was asked about the contents of her speech. The organizers forbade her from using any Arabic words, thus perpetuating and normalizing racist police language bans, then banned her from using the German word “Widerstand”, meaning resistance, and finally abruptly banned her from speaking altogether, claiming they “couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t use the word ‘Widerstand’.” Ironically, Sbou’s contribution is something that the organisers considered ‘cuttable’, raising wider questions for the movement against these cuts: is it only White art and White culture, spoken in German or English, which we cannot bear to lose? Are those forms of cultural expression which challenge the norms and assumptions of dominant mechanisms of power unwelcome in this movement? Do we imagine culture to be something inherently political, or do we only resort to politics as a means to preserve apolitical culture?

From the beginning of the demonstration and even in negotiations beforehand, Palestinian solidarity activists tried to compromise with the ver.di leadership’s conditions for inclusion. These good-faith attempts were however met with persistent badgering by stewards imposing ever new, increasingly nonsensical and unjust demands. About midway through the march route, a large group of Palestine solidarity protesters, “Internationalist Antiracists Against Cuts,” was targeted by ver.di stewards, organizers, and police alike. A representative of Bündnis Unkürzbar claimed the Palestine “bloc” was “lacking in solidarity,” being “divisive,” and “infiltrating the protest.” Protest stewards, under the direction of ver.di leadership, physically kettled the pro-Palestine group, stopping them from continuing. This kettle was then directly handed over to police, who completely surrounded and isolated the Palestine solidarity protesters. Demonstrators were also called “terrorists” by individual demo participants, shown the middle finger by one steward and subjected to slurs by another, while the group in its entirety was repeatedly called a “black bloc” by an apparently colorblind organizer. The organizers claimed that all participants connecting budget cuts to any issue associated with Palestine (censorship, genocide, police violence) were violating the “consensus of the protest”—a document that was forced through by a small group of demo organisers, despite co-organisers repeatedly voicing concerns about targeted marginalisation against Palestinian protesters and their allies. This “consensus” document devotes almost of third of its entire length to policing expressions around Palestine/Israel.

Additional targeted infringements on speech, such as banning the word ‘Widerstand’, as it could be used interchangeably with ‘Intifada’, were made unilaterally during the protest by organizers. We strongly oppose both the suppression of Arabic and of the language of political resistance from this protest against attacks on culture. The repression of a language, the very medium through which much of living culture expresses itself, is a core feature of genocide. We therefore utterly reject the insinuation that speaking directly about genocide is irrelevant to a protest against attacks on culture from the state, especially when the very purpose of these repressive measures in Germany is to support the continuation of genocide in Palestine.

At the end, a group of around 100 pro-Palestine demonstrators was completely cordoned off by police and forbidden to join the final rally, with police claiming there was “no space” for them, despite this being an obvious lie. The police made up new restrictions specifically for these protesters, violently tried to confiscate a banner, and punched several people without warning directly in the face.

Two PoC were arrested while walking away at the end of the demonstration. One is an filmmaker visiting from Australia who received a prize at the Berlinale the night before, whom police falsely accused of a robbery that took place in December. The second person was arrested for allegedly chanting a chant that wasn’t even officially banned. He describes a traumatizing ordeal in the hands of the police: being denied medical care for hours, not being told where he was being taken, being told he would spend 48 hours in jail, and being locked in a bathroom at the detention center. He was furthermore refused information in English despite not speaking German, denied food for hours and the right to call a lawyer despite repeated requests, and treated disrespectfully and aggressively by medical staff in the detention center. Family members were wrongly told by the police that he had been brought to a hospital.

It seems many groups joining the protest recognized only THAT their funding is being cut, not WHY their funding is being cut. Drawing the explicit connections between the funding cuts and the draconian levels of censorship and repression amid increased police and weapons funding in Germany is not divisive, it is accurate. ver.di and Unkürzbar organizers enacted repressive politics against racialized people within their midst throughout the organizing process and finally handed the genocide-critical group over to the police, all while claiming themselves to be the victim. It was not those artists, cultural and social workers kettled by the police who were lacking solidarity, it was ver.di, Unkürzbar and all who stood by and watched as it happened!

We stand in solidarity with our colleagues and comrades who were mistreated and disrespected by ver.di, Bündnis Unkürzbar and the Berlin police. We thank those individuals, organisations, and rank-and-file members of ver.di who have stood in solidarity with us not just on Saturday but also beforehand. We call upon the main organisers of Unkürzbar and ver.di leadership to reflect on their stance and behaviour towards Palestinian solidarity groups within their ranks, to take accountability for these failings, and to engage in more constructive dialogue and practices moving forward. We remain resolute that we will not be silenced, cut, or excluded from this fight against the state’s attack on culture and social services in Berlin and beyond.

German election 2025: What went wrong?

A slight surge for die Linke cannot compensate for the CDU victory and the rising fascist threat

Phil Butland

The results of the German elections were shocking but not surprising. So unsurprising that I wrote this introductory sentence 2 months ago, when prospects looked even bleaker than they do now. At the time, support for Die Linke was hovering around 3% and it looked like the only vaguely left representation in parliament would be the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which had just voted alongside Friedrich Merz and the AfD for stricter migration controls.

I will go into the election results at the end of this article, but first I’d like to offer an analysis of how we got into this mess. How can it be, just over 3 years after we voted in an SPD-led government, that the right wing can be so dominant?

Record of the Scholz government

The election of September 2021 resulted in a “traffic light coalition”, named after the colours of the participating parties — red for the social democrats (SPD), yellow for the (neo)liberal (FDP), and green for Die Grüne. This brought an end to 16 years of Conservative-led governments.

One of the first acts of the new government was to double the military budget, ostensibly as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But this money has been increasingly used to provide Israel with weapons, against the will of 82% of the population.

In December 2024, the government passed “the highest sum that has ever been recorded” for Germany’s military budget. Over €20 billion was allocated to the army. SPD defence minister Boris Pistorius announced that he was intending to increase the size of the German army from 180,000 to 230,000.

The increase in military spending took place at a time of rising prices and job losses. This was palpable whenever you visited the supermarket. Partly as a result of the Russian embargo, the price of a bottle of cooking oil rose from around €1 to well over €5. Meanwhile rents were rising and people were finding it difficult to make ends meet.

One main beneficiary from the lack of trust in the 3 government parties was the “official” opposition, the CDU, who saw its support rise from a record low of 20% to 32%. At the same time, the increasingly fascist AfD doubled its support. This set the political tone, and all the major parties felt the need to make strident statements against refugees.

In October 2023, SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz was on the front page of Der Spiegel magazine saying “We have to deport more people and faster”. A month before, foreign secretary and co-leader of Die Grüne Annalena Baerbock, told the same magazine that she supported increased deportations.

A pre-election report in The Guardian argued: “most politicians have scrambled to ward off the rise of the far right with tough talk on migrants.” In fact, the acceptance by mainstream politicians of the far right’s talking points only helped consolidate the AfD — just as a similar strategy in France a generation earlier had enabled the rise of the fascist Front National (now Rassemblement National).

Economic crisis

Economist Michael Roberts reports: “the economy shrank in 2023 and again in 2024; it seems likely to stay in recession again this year. It adds up to the longest period of economic stagnation since the fall of Hitler in 1945.” Roberts attributes this slump in part to rising energy prices, due to the boycott of Russia, adding “the biggest drop came in the pandemic and profitability is now at an historic low.”

The IW Distribution Report also remarked: “While more than half of respondents in a survey in summer 2020 stated that they were getting along very well or well with their household income, only just under 38 percent of respondents in comparable surveys in 2023 and 2024 said the same.” This perception of poverty, argued the report, was highest among voters of the AfD and BSW.

In January 2025, 2.99 million people were registered unemployed, the highest figure since 2010. Between January 2021 and January 2025, prices rose by 20%. At the end of 2024, Volkswagen threatened to close 3 factories. Instead they sacked 35,000 people and suspended pay raises for 2 years.

Meanwhile in Berlin, the government announced a huge cuts package. This included a 12% cut to the cultural budget, €250 million cuts in education, and massive cuts in housing support. Berlin has a CDU mayor who governs with support of the SPD — maybe a sign of what will happen throughout Germany.

The coalition broke apart over different visions of how to save capitalism. The FDP insisted on maintaining the Schuldenbremse, the debt brake which limits public spending. When Christian Lindner announced a moratorium on social spending, Clemens Fuerst, president of the Institute for Economic Research praised the moratorium, resurrecting an old Nazi slogan “Kanone ohne Butter”, cannons without butter.

This was too much for the FDP’s coalition partners, and the government fell. But neither the SPD nor Die Grüne was prepared to cut the military budget or tax the super-rich. Instead, they assured us that money must be found elsewhere. At best, they were offering cannons and a little margarine.

Crisis of Die Linke

Meanwhile, Die Linke, the main party to the left of the SPD, was suffering an existential crisis. Riven by faction fights, it was unable to take a position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s response. Within the party, there were three main positions.

The first came from party members associated with the anti-war movement. While criticising the Russian invasion to a greater or lesser extent, they argued that sending German weapons to Ukraine would only escalate the situation. Money for weapons would be better spent on social spending.

A second faction argued that anti-imperialism also includes fighting Russian imperialism and believed (mistakenly in my opinion) that we could ask the German state to benevolently send weapons to Ukraine without imposing its own conditions. They therefore tacitly approved the increase in the war budget.

A third group consisted of the party right wing, which has always seen the main function of the party as taking part in governments. Due to the party’s relatively low level of support, this means making coalitions with the SPD and Die Grüne who explicitly make support for NATO a condition of any coalition.

The result was that Die Linke was unable to offer any leadership. Instead, it did what the party has often done of late. It said very little so as to try to contain a deep ideological dispute within the party. These tensions went much deeper than Ukraine. Die Linke, which was a party born out of social movements, has been absent from most relevant movements in recent years. A couple of months before the election, the party looked dead and buried.

Sahra Wagenknecht intervenes

The dithering of Die Linke created an opportunity for Sahra Wagenknecht, talk show favourite and someone who had been associated with the party’s left wing. In 2023, on the anniversary of the Russian invasion, Wagenknecht and leading feminist (and Islamophobe) Alice Schwarzer called an anti-war demo which attracted 50,000 people.

In January 2024, Wagenknecht and 9 other MPs broke from Die Linke to form the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). In the European elections a few months later, the BSW won 6.2% of the votes and 6 MEPs (Die Linke gained only 2.7%) Many voted BSW because it was the only party, with the exception of the AfD, with a clear anti-war position.

But the BSW has a darker side, which had already been shown in Wagenknecht’s book Die Selbstgerechten (the self-righteous) where she attacked “an increasingly small and peculiar minority” fighting for the rights of victims of racism, homophobia, and transphobia. She dismissed this fight as meaningless identity politics.

Following a knife attack in Solingen, Wagenknecht attacked “ten years of uncontrolled migration”, and suggested a 6-point plan focussed on more deportations. In her election campaign, she has insisted on calling herself a “left-wing conservative”, distancing herself from socialist ideas.

This found its low point in January 2025, when the BSW voted alongside the CDU and the AfD for laws restricting migration. Much ink was spilled about CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz breaking the Brandmauer (firewall), an agreement by mainstream parties not to cooperate with the AfD. But the BSW was just as guilty as the CDU, maybe more so.

AfD and Remigration

All this was happening while the AfD was consolidating itself as a fascist party. At the end of 2023, leading AfD members met with Nazis in Potsdam to discuss Remigration — the forced deportation of up to 15 million people. This would only be possible with extreme physical force, but remigration became a central part of the AfD’s electoral campaign.

Following an attack at Magdeburg Christmas market (by an AfD supporter), AfD leader Alice Weidel explicitly called for remigration, to enthusiastic chants from her supporters. Weidel has traditionally not been associated with the openly fascist wing of the party, but is coming increasingly close to them.

This January, a flyer was distributed at the AfD party conference, addressed to “passenger: illegal immigrant”: “The passenger is to board at ‘Gate AfD’ on 23 February, the day of the election, from ‘8 am to 6 pm’”. Two sentences at the bottom of the ‘ticket’ read: “Only remigration can save Germany”.

There were two responses to the AfD’s growing influence. Parliamentarians from nearly all parties doubled down on attacking migrants. But there was also a response on the streets. After the remigration conference was reported, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. In January this year, 15,000 took part in a blockade of the AfD party conference in Riesa. On the weekend of the elections, 100,000 demonstrated throughout Germany against the AfD.

The new anti-racist movement on the streets was reflected in the opinion polls in support for Die Linke. The leader of the parliamentary faction Heidi Reichinnek made a speech in the Bundestag in which she said “we are the Brandmauer”, and “we will take to the streets and to the ballot box”. Reichinnek concluded her speech by calling on people to take to the barricades. The speech got 6 million views on TikTok.

Support for Die Linke trebled, reaching 9% in one poll. Party membership rose to a record level with 18,000 new members won during the election campaign. A post-election report said that the party now has 95,112 members. The increased support does not resolve the party’s internal contradictions, but it does reflect that the polarisation in society is going to the Left as well as to the Right.

As support for Die Linke rose, the BSW slumped, maybe as retribution for voting with the AfD. Nonetheless, a number of people with migrant backgrounds who I spoke with before the election still said they would vote BSW as their position on Palestine seemed less terrible than most of the other parties.

The election results and what they mean

Die Linke finished with nearly 9%, winning more votes in Berlin than any other party (with 19.9%). In the working class district of Berlin-Neukölln, anti-racist activist Ferat Koçak won a direct mandate — the first direct mandate that Die Linke has ever won in West Germany. During the election, Ferat issued a leaflet in support of Palestine, and is a beacon of light in a troubled party. It remains to be seen how much he will be able to maintain his independence of thought and deed.

We can celebrate the demise of the neoliberal FDP — kicked out of parliament because they insisted on maintaining the debt brake and making us pay for their crisis. The Bundestag will be a better place without them. FDP leader and former finance minister Christian Lindner has now resigned. Good riddance.

Some leftists were troubled by the BSW’s failure to break into parliament. They have only themselves to blame. Their decision to vote with the AfD for a deportation bill that even the SPD, Die Grüne, and FDP could not support was punished by an electorate which still contains a large number of anti-racists.

The SPD received a record low vote of 16.5%. Although they have not sunk as their French sister party (the Parti Socialiste received 1.75% in 2022), social democracy in Germany is in deep crisis. Die Grüne’s vote went down by 3.6% but they were punished less than their coalition partners. Maybe they were saved by voters who hadn’t engaged with the parties’ track records but wanted to record a vote for the environment. The CDU gained 28.5%, a little lower than predicted, but enough to win comfortably.

The vote for the AfD was troubling. When the first predictions were announced at 6pm — based on what voters told the pollsters, the AfD vote lay under 20%. As the evening wore on, with figures based on how people really voted, this number increased. In the end they received a worrying 20.8% of the vote.

In East Germany, the AfD received over 30% in every state. They also made a dangerous breakthrough in the West, with over 20% in Rheinland-Pfalz and Saarland. Hamburg, which has recently seen several large anti-fascist demos, was the only state in which they received less than 15%.

What happens next?

CDU leader Friedrich Merz is not averse to joining with the AfD, but to do so would be political suicide. The large protests which followed the AfD-CDU cooperation on the deportation bill means that the parties are unlikely to form a government — this time round. A CDU-SPD coalition is possible, but may not survive a full parliamentary term. It could even be rejected by SPD members, desperate to stop the party’s freefall.

A long period of uncertainty is expected, in which the AfD will attempt to further build their fascist base. After the election, AfD’s Weidel said ominously: “Our hand remains outstretched to form a government.” She added that if the CDU chooses to govern with “left-wing parties”, “next time, we’ll come in first”. With over 100 hardcore Nazis already working in the Bundestag, this figure is set to grow.

The CDU has promised an Agenda 2035, whose name is reminiscent of the Agenda 2020 attacks on welfare made by Gerhard Schröder’s SPD government. This means further cuts, more war, and more redistribution of wealth towards the super-rich. The CDU election programme promises “a so-called ‘modernisation’ of working hours”. which promises more work for less pay.

And yet, the new government will face resistance. 2.5 million employees from the public sector union ver.di have already started warning strikes for an 8% pay rise. The large demonstrations against the AfD have also attacked the racist deportation plans of all the major parties. Germany is currently experiencing a lot of despair. But there is also anger and a desire for progressive change.

They can only subdue us if we stop resisting. There is a certain feeling of resignation in post-election Germany, but also a lot of anger. If we are going to fight back, socialist organisation is essential. This means a fight in the trade unions, a fight against war and genocide, and — most urgently — a fight against the AfD Nazis. It’s time to organise.