The politics of fear suddenly feels very real to Berliners.

Elif Eralp, the Left Party’s candidate for mayor, won Berlin’s city state election in September. She is now in negotiations to form Berlin’s government. Yet despite her prospective power, she lives in fear of some of her own pro-Palestine supporters.

We know this thanks to a mistake by her press team. An interview transcript containing her internal annotations was accidentally sent to Der Spiegel, along with the authorised version. In the margins, Eralp reminded her staff that she had been advised against naming names in public, and noted that her husband, too, was afraid. ‘What do we do now? Cancel the whole interview?’, she wrote. ‘I should never have agreed to this interview.’

The question that so agitated her concerned Ibrahim Ibrahim, a well-known Palestinian activist who has organised many of Berlin’s anti-Israel demonstrations. He supports the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), whose members took part in the massacre of October 7, and which the EU has designated a terrorist organisation. He has also called former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a ‘martyr-hero’. Yet none of this stopped Ibrahim from being filmed arm-in-arm with leading Left Party figures at their September election celebration.

We owe it to the journalists at Der Spiegel that Eralp’s notes are now public and her hypocrisy duly exposed. After the election, when the Left Party emerged as the strongest force in Berlin with 25.7 per cent of the vote, it portrayed Ibrahim as the victim of a smear campaign. In Junge Welt, a daily newspaper close to the Left Party, Ibrahim was given space to present himself as innocence personified. ‘I am a German citizen of Palestinian origin. Both aspects are part of my identity.’ His attendance at the Left Party’s post-election celebration and his vote, he wrote, reflected his ‘personal convictions and democratic rights’.

The Greens and the Social Democrats played along. They treated a few general statements from Eralp, such as her wish for ‘Jewish life to be visible’ in Berlin, as good enough. Both are eager to form a coalition with Eralp’s Left Party and have promised to deliver the votes she needs in Berlin’s House of Representatives, which elects the mayor.

There can be no doubt about what Eralp as mayor would mean for Berlin: a new stage in the creeping submission of its leadership to Islamist and anti-Zionist forces. In November 2024, Berlin’s police chief made headlines when she said: ‘There are parts of Berlin where I would advise people wearing a kippah, or who are openly gay or lesbian, to be more alert. In certain districts there is a majority of Arabs who sympathise with terror groups and hate Jews.’ Two years later, Eralp, the person aspiring to the leadership of Berlin and authority over its police, is too frightened to name those who pose a threat to gay and Jewish people.

It is hard not to see how her bid for the mayoralty could drive Berlin deeper into crisis, much like a city slipping into the grip of the mafia. What better way to embolden radical elements than to let the world know that you are terrified of them?

Eralp, like others in her party, has also advocated further admission programmes for refugees from Gaza, which her potential coalition partners support. The preliminary coalition agreement states: ‘Within the scope of our jurisdiction, we explicitly advocate for granting active and passive voting rights, at both the municipal and state levels, to all individuals who have resided in Germany for five years.’ This looks like a shameless attempt to expand the Left Party’s Islamist voter base even further.

Berlin has long been praised as a city of freedom and tolerance, and there is much in it worth defending. We must start with free speech, and with our right to oppose and criticise the Islamo-left, which, out of cowardice, opportunism or plain moral confusion, has played the game of empowering tyrants.

To that end, we invite everyone who cares about free speech, in Berlin and beyond, to join the Battle of Ideas Berlin on 28 November, with over 40 speakers and 11 panels, including ‘Free Speech Emergency: How Do We Fight Back?’. Find the full programme and get tickets here.