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The latest round of German state election results are in, with great gains for the left-wing parties and the AfD, and a crisis of confidence for the center-right CDU, which had its worst election results in modern German history.
After the AfD’s historic win in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, all eyes turned to the state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, which were held yesterday. In Berlin, the CDU dropped from the largest to second-largest party, which will push it out of government. This result was not unexpected: the Left, Greens, and SPD had won enough seats to form a left-wing coalition government in the 2021 Berlin election, and the CDU only snuck into power after those results were overturned due to election irregularities. The Left, led by Turkish dual-citizen Elif Eralp, saw the greatest gains, at 26% of the vote, while the AfD also did quite respectably, at 16%. The CDU, Greens, and SPD all lost seats, but the Left, Greens, and SPD will be able to easily form a coalition government.
(Incidentally, for anyone who was hoping that the AfD would do better in Berlin, the city’s demographics makes that almost impossible. “As of December 2025, about 42.3% registered residents of Berlin had a migration background, compared with 29.9% in 2015. Out of that, 976,419 residents (24.9%) were foreign nationals and 678,774 (17.3%) were German citizens with a migration background.” (Wikipedia) Even if the AfD were to somehow convince every single ethnic German in the city to oust the Ausländer, ethnic Germans will soon be a minority in their own capital city.)
Yesterday’s real electoral drama wasn’t in Berlin, however, but in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the CDU failed to overcome the five percent hurdle and so won zero seats in parliament. This is the first time that the CDU/CSU has failed to receive any seats in a state or federal election. The AfD, on the other hand, surpassed all recent polls, gaining 38% of the vote and 32/71 seats. Of course, this will still result in a left-wing government, as all of the remaining seats were won by the Left, Greens, and SPD.
One thing I can’t quite understand is where all of the CDU voters went. Looking at opinion polls in the run-up to the election, the AfD was at a stable ~35% of the vote for the past year, while the CDU dropped from 13% to ultimately less than 5%. Did the center-right CDU voters mostly switch to the center-left SPD? This is what seems to have happened, but I have no real insight as to why, except that no one seems to like the CDU these days. If any of our resident Germans can chime in, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts.
Two more CW aspects of the win of the Linke are accusations of antisemitism and the push to nationalize tenements.
Per claude (I have checked the sources in German, fair summary IMO):
Personally, I think that this is overblown. Calls for Intifada are most certainly not helpful for improving the ME situation. I am less convinced that they are clearly antisemitic, which I would define as hostility towards Jews due to their ethnicity. "Death to the IDF" is notably different from "death to the Jewish population of New York". Even opposing the existence of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate is not necessarily antisemitic, though most of the violent Palestinian groups revel in antisemitism.
I am sure that there are Ukrainians which are celebrating every killed Russian soldier. Again, I can understand where they are coming from, but still find it in poor taste and not particularly conductive to any worthwhile long term goals. Why should we tolerate them celebrating but not extend the same tolerance to the Palestinians in the West Bank?
Rappers are obviously going to say things for pure shock value. In retrospect, it might have been politically savvy not to invite that particular one. It generates a lot of publicity for the local candidate, but will expose their platform to predictable attacks.
Overall, this has me updating towards "Jewish organizations are instrumentalizing accusations of antisemitism to marginalize criticism of Israel".
I think there was a plebiscite on nationalizing the big companies holding tenements in Berlin a few years ago, and the Linke is campaigning for putting that into action. The idea is to make a law which will force these companies to sell their properties in Berlin to the city at a price they would not accept otherwise.
As a Georgist, I don't think this is the right way to do things (a land value tax capturing 100% of the gains would be the standard solution), but I am also not sure it is clearly bad? Land supply is perfectly inelastic, society gains nothing by people investing in it speculatively. Establishing "we will nationalize your land when we feel like it" should make a dent in the earning projection of a lot over the next 100 years, which might make housing more affordable. (Though NIMBYism and overregulation are separate issues which would need to be tackled, but the price of land is at least one obstacle.)
More generally, capitalism tends to run towards outcomes where their is a lot of value created (as opposed to competing systems), but that value ends up in the hands of the few. Because the utility people gain from their net worth only increases logarithmically (or so), thus gentle redistributive efforts might increase the utility sum.
Obviously this has the CDU even more excited than some rapper singing about Intifada. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Blackrock) wants to make a law against nationalizations, but it is unclear if the federal government is even allowed to do that on constitutional grounds.
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