Published in Newsroom.co.nz (Wellington), 3 November 2026
Last Wednesday, at 9.46am, an email reached the Berlin office of Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine. Elif Eralp, the left-wing politician most likely to become Berlin’s next mayor, will wish it had never been sent.
Attached was the transcript of an interview two Spiegel journalists had conducted with her two days earlier. German papers like to run interviews as a straight exchange of questions and answers. The journalists tidy the conversation and cut it to fit the page.
In return, interviewees may rewrite their answers, though never the questions. So, in Germany, unlike in New Zealand, what a politician says ‘on the record’ is usually not final.
Eralp’s team sent the transcript back with all their internal comments still in it. As Christoph Hickmann, one of the interviewers, later put it, they had “left the stage directions in”.
In the interview, Eralp had said that lines were crossed during her party’s election campaign. Did she mean Ibrahim Ibrahim, the journalists asked, a pro-Palestinian activist who had turned up at the party’s election night celebrations in the Berlin district of Neukölln? She said yes.
In the returned transcript, the question and answer were gone, replaced by a note from Eralp. “There is a PROBLEM,” it began, before explaining that neither her husband nor she wanted to name names, because “he is afraid of these people and so am I”.
She recalled that Berlin’s police had once advised her never to name organised crime figures. “Now it is about people with contacts to Hamas,” she wrote. “I cannot put myself and my family in danger for Der Spiegel.”
Der Spiegel, hardly a right-wing magazine, decided the public needed to know and put Eralp’s fear on its cover with the headline “Elif Eralp’s Fear”.
The affair is only the latest episode in the long decline of Germany’s capital, a city I have liked ever since my first visit in 1988, a year before the Wall came down. For a while, I even wanted to live there. It was Germany’s only real metropolis.
Flats were cheap, culture was everywhere, and there was history on every corner. It was the city of the 1998 film Run Lola Run and of New Year’s Eve parties for hundreds of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate.
The singer Axel Bosse, a few years younger than me, later captured that pull in Schönste Zeit (“The Best Time”), a wistful song about German teenagers in the 1990s for whom Berlin was as glamorous and distant as New York. When I hear it today, I still recognise the sentiment.
In 2003, Klaus Wowereit, then Berlin’s mayor, called the city “poor but sexy”. Berliners rather liked that. Two decades on, it is still poor but no longer sexy.
The cheap flats went first. Rents have climbed so far that, in September, Berliners handed victory in their state election to Die Linke, the Left party, which promises to expropriate big landlords. It won 25.7 percent of the vote.
Berlin is one of Germany’s 16 states, and its mayor heads a state government. Imagine Auckland’s mayor also running the police, the schools, and the prisons.
Now, I am all for localism, but even I would hesitate to hand Wayne Brown the police.
Eralp, who led Die Linke to that victory, would have a majority with the Greens and Social Democrats, and coalition talks begin this week. She is the daughter of Turkish trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup and has been dubbed Germany’s Mamdani, after New York’s left-wing mayor.
Her party descends from the Socialist Unity Party, which ruled East Germany and built the Wall. In Berlin it has remade itself as the party of young renters and immigrant neighbourhoods.
In 2024, two of the Die Linke’s former Berlin state ministers put a motion titled “Against all antisemitism” to their party conference. The party’s Palestine wing amended it so heavily that they withdrew it. Eleven days later, both had left the party.
Ibrahim, the activist from the election party, is 70. Berlin’s domestic intelligence service classifies the network he helps lead as an extremist umbrella for supporters of Hamas and another Palestinian group on the EU’s terror list.
He has hailed the late Yahya Sinwar, who planned Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, as a “martyr hero”. According to Der Spiegel, the authorities have no indication he has been involved in violence in Germany. He denies supporting terrorism.
After the election, Ibrahim said he was proud to have backed Die Linke. The party’s Berlin Palestine working group then posted a video declaring solidarity with “our comrade Ibrahim Ibrahim”.
So, Berlin’s would-be mayor is afraid of a man whom some in her own party call ‘comrade’.
The police advice Eralp remembered concerned Berlin’s crime clans; extended families that run parts of the city’s underworld. In 2017, two young men from one such clan broke into the Bode Museum and wheeled away a 100kg Canadian gold coin with the late Queen’s portrait on it. Both were jailed, but the coin was never found and has probably long since been melted into gold bars.
New Zealand’s election campaign has had its own rows over politicians photographed with Mongrel Mob members. Here, at least, the argument is about whether politicians should pose with gang members, not whether they dare to name them. But in Berlin, according to the investigative journalist Jörg Diehl, the police routinely advise candidates for mayor not to name organised crime figures.
I do not doubt that Eralp’s fear is genuine. She receives threats every day, her spokesman says.
On Saturday she addressed her party’s conference under police protection, despite her party’s election promise to move money from the police to social workers. Meanwhile, protesters outside chanted “Yalla Intifada”, a call for a Palestinian uprising.
Inside, she told delegates that precisely because she understood such fears, she would protect Berlin, and they gave her a standing ovation.
Every politician is afraid of something. The question is whether their fears drive their decisions. As mayor, even though Eralp would appoint the minister in charge of Berlin’s police, her fear led to her edit her interview.
Germany is now debating whether Eralp is too frightened to govern. I suspect that is the wrong question. A better one is whether anyone can govern a city in which the police advise politicians not to name criminals or terrorist sympathisers.
The federal government sits a few kilometres from Neukölln. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said little, and his Social Democratic deputy, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, has said even less. Their coalition is too fragile to risk a fight over Berlin.
Yet this is no provincial affair. Berlin is the capital of Europe’s largest economy.
And the woman likely to run it is too afraid for her family’s safety to name a 70-year-old activist. That tells you more about Germany today than any economic or social indicator could.
