Eralp’s housing agenda draws Merz opposition
Eralp launched her election bid last autumn with the blunt statement: “People like me are actually not supposed to become mayor in this country.” After Die Linke’s first-place finish in last weekend’s Berlin city-state election, the 45-year-old lawyer is poised to head a coalition government in the German capital and become the city’s first mayor of Turkish origin.
With about 26% of the vote, Die Linke not only outperformed the centre-left Social Democrats, whose presence has dominated Berlin politics for decades, and the Greens but also finished well ahead of the Christian Democratic Union, the conservative party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which had previously held the mayoral position. Die Linke’s result helped propel the party from the political doldrums to the brink of leading a Berlin coalition government for the first time.
At her victory celebration on Sunday night, Eralp told supporters: “In our city, love and justice won over hate … this signal goes out into the world.” According to The Guardian, the “hate” reference was pointed at the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which the newspaper described as “far-right” and which was celebrating a first-place finish in another regional election. Even in liberal Berlin, The Guardian wrote, “the populist party made considerable gains.”
Eralp’s housing agenda has emerged as the central policy question of her prospective mayorship. During her nomination speech, she said: “I’m running so that our city becomes affordable again, so that real estate speculators don’t decide what happens to our city, but rather we do together.” She has pledged to expropriate more than 200,000 Berlin flats from corporate landlords — a policy some commentators have labelled “socialism on speed.” Merz said the policy would have “calamitous effects” on the economy and announced that he would push for legislation to prevent her plans. Eralp has pledged to plough on.
Berlin’s housing market, once described by a former mayor as “poor but sexy” for its low cost of living, has seen rents soar in recent years. Eralp, chosen in particular by the young — 47% of whom voted for her — identified sky-high rents as a defining social issue of the campaign and mobilised thousands of otherwise non-voters through door-to-door campaigning and social media. “This city belongs to all of us, not to the speculators,” she said in her nomination speech. She has promised to be “a mayor for all Berliners.”
Eralp’s coalition path remains complicated. It is not a given that Die Linke will take control of Berlin’s towering Rotes Rathaus, or red city hall, named after its red brick and not its association with leftwing politics. The Social Democrats and Greens, her most likely partners, have said they need urgent clarification on allegations that Die Linke has failed to tackle antisemitism within its ranks and has courted support from criminal gangs before agreeing to coalition terms. Die Linke’s leadership has denied the accusations while vowing to clamp down on any antisemitism in its ranks. On Tuesday, the party announced that one of its Berlin MPs, who is alleged to have connections both to criminal gangs and a terrorist-related, pro-Hamas organisation, would “suspend his parliamentary duties until further notice.”
On Monday, Eralp sought to reassure critics, stating: “Any form of glorification or trivialisation of violence or terror is completely out of the question. I stand by that, and for me the promise of protection applies unequivocally to Jewish people just as it does to Muslims, Christians and all people in our city.”
The comparison to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, is more than rhetorical. One of Mamdani’s advisers was summoned to Berlin to help Eralp weeks before the poll, and Eralp’s campaign was modelled on that of the veteran US Senator Bernie Sanders.
Eralp’s personal trajectory shaped her politics. Unlike most Turkish migrants to Germany, who arrived as guest workers from eastern Anatolia, her parents Hülya and Selçuk, a doctor, were Istanbul trade unionists and socialists imprisoned after a military coup for their political beliefs. Her mother, a well-known feminist in Turkey, was released only because she was heavily pregnant with Elif; the family fled to Germany, where Eralp was born in Munich in 1981. The family experienced a complicated asylum process that included 15 years of struggle before Hülya’s qualifications as a trainer for nurses were recognised in Germany, which Eralp has said helped shape her view of the world. She recalls how her parents often put up asylum seekers in their home over many years.
“I’ve experienced a lot about what it means when authorities make decisions you don’t understand. I’ve also felt racism and discrimination first-hand, so my life story has a lot to do with where I’ve ended up now,” she has said.
At the age of 10, Eralp founded a conservation club with friends in her parents’ garage, and later she went into the anti-nuclear movement. She studied law at the University of Hamburg and moved to Berlin for practical legal training, working first in Die Linke’s parliamentary group before moving to the Berlin state parliament. She has said she was inspired to join the party in 2017 in direct response to AfD’s entry into the Bundestag for the first time, and in 2019 she co-founded Links*kanax, an alliance of Die Linke members and supporters with refugee and migrant backgrounds that aimed to increase the visibility of the migrant-progressive voice within the party and beyond.
She now lives with her husband and two children in a rental flat in Kreuzberg, the south-central Berlin district that is home to one of Germany’s liveliest Turkish communities and where much of her campaigning was conducted in Turkish. Her children attend a state school in her kiez, or neighbourhood, and she has kept her family “away from the cameras for their own safety,” she said.
Recalling her childhood ambition, Eralp has said she wanted at age 12 to become “a human rights lawyer to fight against all these injustices I’d seen.” Now, she has said, “I’m doing what I set out to do, not in a courtroom, but in the political sphere.”