Elif Eralp, the lawyer of Turkish origin who has elevated The Left in Berlin by promising expropriations

BarcelonaOne of the headlines of this Sunday's election night in the city-state of Berlin is the triumph, for the first time, of the post-communists. The Left (Die Linke) goes on to lead the political space of the institutional left in the German capital and, for the first time since reunification, obtains more support than the social democrats, who finish last in the distribution of seats, and also surpasses the Greens. This political triumph, which contrasts with the global rise of the far-right, has a proper name: Elif Eralp, the party's candidate for mayor.

With a speech based on social justice in which she often speaks of prioritizing "the interests of the people of Berlin, without dividing them according to their origin", Eralp, 45, has established herself as a battering ram against the city's elites and the reactionary wave. The campaign and the tone of several interventions recall the member of the New York City Council, Zohran Mamdani. In fact, she herself has cited him several times as a personal political reference.

Born in Berlin, she is a lawyer specializing in civil rights and also an activist. Her mother arrived in the German capital already pregnant with her in 1980, fleeing together with her husband from the military coup in Turkey led by the army. Now, in a general context of hostility towards migrants and descendants of immigrants, she is expected to become the first German-Turkish mayor of the city.

During the campaign, Eralp has focused a good part of her rallies and public appearances on proposals to address the housing crisis that, like many European cities, Berlin is also going through, despite the fact that rent prices are capped throughout Germany. One of her star proposals that she has repeated during the electoral campaign includes a measure that is not unknown to Berliners, even though it has never been implemented.

In 2021, residents of the German capital voted in a non-binding referendum in favor of expropriating properties from companies and investment funds that own more than 3,000 homes. 56.4% of Berliners supported buying 240,000 homes with public funds and creating a housing company to manage the rents. But although a commission of experts from the city-state concluded that it is legally viable, this measure has never been implemented, and Eralp has pledged to carry it forward.

Among some sectors, however, she is criticized—both her and Die Linke as a whole—for having a position that is sometimes too unclear on a particularly sensitive issue in the country: the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Eralp openly defends Israel's "right to exist," and has often distanced herself from the more pro-Palestinian sectors of the party. In fact, during the campaign, she has avoided this issue whenever she could. One of the reasons, according to several analysts, is that a defense of Palestine that might be read in Germany as excessively fierce could make future pacts difficult with the SPD and the Greens, with whom she aspires to govern and who have often leveled accusations of antisemitism at Eralp's party when it has defended pro-Palestinian positions.

One in two young people voted for her

The Palestinian question is one of the points where some tensions that she has maintained with the most radical sectors of the party are most visible, both with young militants and with some members of the leadership. These are frictions that Eralp has known how to overcome and that evidence the centrist role she occupies within the formation, far from the most radical sectors.

Despite the divergences with some youth sectors of the formation, Eralp has been able to connect with and convince the youngest Berliners: 42% of voters between 16 and 24 years old have opted for the post-communist rooted formation, and among citizens aged 25 to 34, the percentage rises almost to 50%.