Meet Elif Eralp:
She’s a Turkish-German lawyer who has served in the Berlin House of Representatives for Die Linke (the Left Party) since 2021. She was Die Linke’s lead candidate in the latest Berlin elections, which her party won with a sensational 25.7% of the vote. Thus Eralp is on track to become the next Governing Mayor of Berlin, in a coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens. That’s bad not only because Eralp and her party have a lot of nutty ideas, but also because they’re in bed with a lot of shady people.
I wrote about the crazy Berlin Linke chapter back in September. The party received help from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign advisers and (superficially anyway) they look like the latest instantiation of a newer, urbanite democratic socialism. They ran on a promise to make Berlin rents affordable, among other things with an unworkable scheme to expropriate thousands of flats from major landlord corporations like Vonovia. Yet they also advocated abundant additional cookery. They want to replace policing with “social work” in the crime-ridden German capital and they want to downgrade the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution from a domestic intelligence agency to a defanged “extremism” monitor. If you’re thinking that these sound like the kinds of things a party under the sway of criminal organisations and foreign agents would advocate, you would be on to something.
Last week, a strange clerical error provided direct insight into Eralp’s state of mind and the mood in her office as she angles to become Berlin’s next mayor. This error revealed that Eralp lives in fear for her own safety and the safety of her family. She is particularly terrified of the migrant criminals and activists who have infiltrated her party – in one case so terrified, she fears even to mention the man’s name.
If nothing changes, this terrified woman will soon be overseeing security in Germany’s capital and largest city.
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