The Left Party won Berlin's September 20 election, and its top candidate Elif Eralp stands to become the city's first Left Party mayor. Preliminary coalition talks with the SPD and Greens are set for October 1. The question dominating the interregnum is not policy but identity: whether the Left Party harbors antisemitism that disqualifies it from power, or whether the charge itself is being weaponized to block a democratic outcome. The incidents are real. A rapper named Dahabflex performed antisemitic slogans at a Left Party campaign event. Ibrahim Ibrahim, a supporter of the EU-designated terrorist organization PFLP, appeared at the party's victory celebration. Left Party leaders at both federal and state levels have repeatedly distanced themselves from both episodes. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, led by president Josef Schuster, calls these disavowals lip service and has explicitly urged the SPD and Greens to refuse coalition with the election winner. The federal government has piled on with unusual force. Wolfram Weimer, the government commissioner for culture and media, accused the Left of "openly flaunting antisemitism" and called into question €2.9 billion ($3.3 billion) in cultural funding already agreed upon with Berlin's state government. Federal Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, CDU, posted an official ministry video titled "Antisemitism and Expropriations Threaten the Economy," conflating the party's stance on Israel with its housing nationalization plans. The Left Party is seeking an injunction to compel deletion of the video, calling it taxpayer-funded propaganda. The counter-narrative is equally organized. An open letter signed by 150 prominent Jews — including author Eva Menasse and former Einstein Forum director Susan Neiman — rejects the claim that the Left Party endangers Jewish life. The signatories argue that the AfD, which they describe as "in-parts openly fascistic," represents the true threat, and that "constant accusations of antisemitism against the Left are not only cynical political weaponization, but they also conflate nearly any criticism of Israel with antisemitism." The Left Party is the only parliamentary party opposing arms deliveries to Israel and has classified Israel's war in Gaza as genocide — a position shared by multiple human rights organizations and a UN commission. At a hastily convened party congress, Eralp threaded the needle with care: no calls for violence, no statements that frighten Jewish people from Left Party platforms, commitment to strengthening Berlin's Jewish community and ensuring Palestinian and Muslim people also feel safe. Outside the venue, about 20 Jewish supporters held a poster reading "Mazel Tov to the Left" in Hebrew and German. Scott Grabell, a New York-born artist, told DW: "Antisemitism is real — we know that. But three years of genocide are also real." The structural question beneath the noise is whether federal actors — a CDU economy minister, a non-partisan culture commissioner — can effectively veto a state-level democratic result by threatening funding and deploying official channels against a coalition partner. The €2.9 billion cultural funding threat is the sharpest instrument: it converts a values debate into a fiscal chokepoint. Whether coalition talks survive October 1 depends less on the Left Party's sincerity than on whether the SPD and Greens calculate that the cost of defying federal pressure exceeds the cost of ignoring voters. The 150-signatory letter and the federal pressure campaign represent two fundamentally different models of who gets to define antisemitism and who gets to wield the definition as a gatekeeping mechanism. Both sides claim to protect Jewish life. The policy stakes — housing nationalization, arms exports, cultural funding — suggest the antisemitism frame is load-bearing for interests that extend well beyond it.
