Monday, February 24
Election Results: Germany shifts right, Berlin votes left
And that’s it: Germany’s most closely watched election in recent memory is over. Despite the conservative CDU winning the largest share of the vote nationwide with 28.5 percent and the far-right AfD coming in second with 20.8 percent, Berlin offered a bright ray of hope on an otherwise gloomy day for progressive politics.
Ferat Kocak in Neukölln, Ines Schwerter in Lichtenberg, Pascal Meiser in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, and Die Linke veteran Gregor Gysi—now the oldest member of the Bundestag—won direct mandates in Berlin as The Left emerged as the city’s strongest political force. This result is all the more striking given that, ahead of the vote, CDU candidate and soon-to-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared in his final major campaign speech, “The Left is over.” Not in Berlin, it seems.
Berlin’s electoral map was split five ways. Die Linke won the most direct seats (four), while the CDU and Greens tied with three each. The SPD and AfD each secured one seat, with the far-right party winning in Marzahn-Hellersdorf and the center-left party taking Spandau. Some races were nail-biters—none more so than in Tempelhof-Schöneberg, where Green candidate Moritz Hamburger edged out his CDU opponent by just 61 votes.
The sense that the stakes were high in this election was reflected in the historically high turnout: 82.5 percent of eligible voters exercised their democratic right on Sunday.
But the biggest story of Election Day in Berlin was surely Ferat Kocak’s landslide victory in Neukölln. Not only did he win decisively with 30 percent of the vote compared to his closest rival’s 19.7 percent, but he also made history as the first Die Linke candidate to ever win a direct mandate in the former West.
