AA photo.
Elif Eralp, a politician of Turkish origin, led Germany’s Left Party to victory in Berlin’s Sept. 20 state election, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives suffered setbacks in both states that voted.
Provisional results gave Die Linke 25.7 percent in Berlin, more than doubling its share from 2023.
Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) finished second with 18.8 percent.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 16.3 percent, followed by the Greens with 14.3 percent and the Social Democrats (SPD) with 12.1 percent.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance fell below the 5 percent parliamentary threshold with 4.7 percent.
“We made history, friends,” Eralp told supporters in Turkish during her victory speech.
The 45-year-old lawyer campaigned on affordable housing and rising rents.
She will need coalition partners and the support of the state parliament to become Berlin’s governing mayor.
An alliance with the Greens and SPD would give her party a majority.
The outgoing CDU-SPD coalition lost its parliamentary majority.
Eralp worked as a legal policy adviser to the Left Party’s Bundestag group from 2010 to 2021 before entering Berlin’s state parliament.
She is also deputy leader of the party’s Berlin branch.
In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD won 38.2 percent, ahead of the SPD’s 35.5 percent.
The CDU received 4.9 percent, failing to enter a state parliament for the first time.
The AfD fell short of an outright majority, and the other parties ruled out governing with it.
The incumbent SPD-Left coalition also lost its majority, but could retain power by bringing in the Greens.
“We cannot gloss over the result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It is a disaster,” Merz said after the first projections were released.
He nevertheless pledged to remain in office and pursue his reform agenda.
He described the CDU’s Berlin performance as a “decent result,” citing the difficult circumstances of its campaign.
The losses followed the AfD’s Sept. 6 victory in Saxony-Anhalt, which had already prompted calls from within the CDU for Merz to step down.
The chancellor has also canceled a planned trip to New York for the U.N. General Assembly.
