The political crisis engulfing Berlin’s prospective mayor has escalated rapidly, with German authorities placing Die Linke lead candidate Elif Eralp under police protection for her own party congress.
The security detail follows the accidental leak of private messages in which Eralp conceded that she and her husband fear retribution from radical, Hamas-linked elements active in the city’s left-wing sphere.
According to reporting by Bild, which cited security sources, agencies stepped in after radical leftist and pro-Palestinian groupings called for street demonstrations directly outside the party’s state congress on October 31 at the Dong Xuan Center in the Lichtenberg district.
They accused the party leadership of joining a racist “hate campaign” against Palestinian activist Ibrahim Ibrahim.
“The racist hate campaign against the Palestinian community in Berlin is not going away. We are not being divided! Touch one, touch all!” a message from her internal opponents said.
“The leadership of the Left Party is bowing to this racist hate to come to power and throws practical anti-racism, Palestine solidarity and consistent rejection of genocide under the bus? Not with us!”
The gathering was convened for party delegates to vote on the exploratory coalition framework agreed with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, following Die Linke’s first-place finish in the September 20 state election.
According to preliminary results, the party took 25.7 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 18.8 per cent and Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 16.3 per cent.
The emergency protection arrangements cap 48 hours of political fallout in the German capital, sparked when Eralp’s team inadvertently returned internal editorial notes to Der Spiegel during draft reviews of an interview.
In those private annotations, Eralp asked for her answer about Ibrahim to be struck, asking staff: “Now we are talking about people with links to Hamas… what do we do now? Cancel the entire interview?”
“I cannot put myself and my family in danger for Der Spiegel,” she wrote, adding that she and her husband were “afraid of these people”.
On October 29 Eralp told the Berlin House of Representatives that “private, internal content” had been published and that she would not be intimidated.
The security threat crystallised when five groups — among them the Internationalist Alliance Berlin (Internationalistisches Bündnis Berlin), Die Linke’s own Berlin working group on Palestine solidarity, MeRA25 and Eyes4Palestine — announced protests outside the congress venue.
The radicals have rallied against coalition compromises negotiated by Eralp that explicitly reject anti-Semitism and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as mandatory prerequisites for entering government with the SPD and Greens.
The eight-point agreement the three parties signed before opening exploratory talks describes Israel’s right to exist as “non-negotiable” and rejects the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
Adding to the tension is the involvement of activist figures closely tied to the mobilising alliance.
The counter-demonstration has been called in support of Ibrahim, a 70-year-old pro-Palestinian organiser who publicly lauded deceased Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar as a martyr hero, according to the monitoring group democ.
Sinwar, seen as the architect of the October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the Israel-Hamas war, was killed by Israeli forces in October 2024.
Eralp’s leaked notes specifically referenced previous warnings from the Berlin State Criminal Police Office (LKA) regarding organised crime networks and individuals connected to Hamas, directly linking her private admissions of dread to the very elements now demonstrating against her.
The development has dealt a blow to Eralp’s standing as she attempts to finalise a three-way left-wing coalition to capture the Rotes Rathaus, the Red Town Hall that houses the city’s governing mayor.
A key point in the platform of Die Linke was the reduction of police and intelligence services.
Elif Eralp, the lead candidate of Germany’s left-wing Die Linke party seeking to become governing mayor of Berlin, has privately admitted that she and her husband fear individuals with links to the militant group Hamas, according to internal comments accidentally shared with Der…
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 29, 2026
