Die Linke, Germany's democratic-socialist party, won Berlin's state election on September 20, 2026, with 25.5% of the vote — its best-ever result in the capital and enough to make it, for the first time in its history, the strongest party in the city's parliament. Within hours, Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the result "deeply concerns" him, citing campaign-stage chants calling for the deaths of Israeli soldiers, and declared the party has "no credibility whatsoever" fighting antisemitism it "tolerates and freely allows within its ranks."
For anyone who lived through British politics between 2015 and 2020, the shape of that sentence should feel uncomfortably familiar.
What the EHRC Actually Found on Labour
In October 2020, Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission published its formal investigation into antisemitism within the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. It found the party had committed unlawful harassment and had politically interfered in antisemitism complaints on multiple occasions — 23 separate instances of inappropriate political interference by party staff, according to the commission's lead investigator. Its conclusion was blunt: at best, Labour "did not do enough to prevent antisemitism, and at worst, could be seen to accept it," describing "a clear breakdown of trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community." Labour was issued a legally enforceable unlawful act notice and required to draft a compliance action plan.
The Berlin Version, Compressed Into One Night
What took Labour roughly five years to fully surface — and a legal investigation to formally establish — landed on Die Linke within a single election night. Compounding Schuster's statement, Issa Remmo, head of a well-known Berlin organised-crime clan, attended two separate Die Linke victory parties, accompanied by a man German reporting (Tagesspiegel, and the research group democ) identified as a leading domestic supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who had previously called slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a "martyr hero." Die Linke's Berlin co-chair said the party did not know who the man was and had not vetted its own guest list — an explanation that will sound familiar to anyone who followed Labour's own repeated claims, later contradicted by the EHRC's findings, that isolated incidents did not reflect systemic failure.
“At best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism, and at worst, could be seen to accept it.”
— EHRC, Investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party, October 2020
Where the Comparison Breaks Down
The parallel is not exact, and British readers should resist collapsing it into one. Labour's crisis was investigated and adjudicated by a statutory equalities body with legal powers; nothing equivalent exists, or has been triggered, for Die Linke. The specific allegations differ too: Labour's crisis centred on internal complaint-handling and a pattern of individual disciplinary failures over years, while Die Linke's immediate problem is more acute and event-specific — a single election-night guest list and a pattern of campaign-rally rhetoric that Schuster says has recurred. Die Linke, unlike Corbyn-era Labour, is not disputing the facts of what happened at its party; it is disputing whether it bears responsibility for who showed up.
What the two cases share is the underlying political mechanic: a resurgent party of the left, riding genuine domestic grievances — austerity and housing costs in Labour's case, Berlin's rent crisis in Die Linke's — that finds its moment of triumph immediately complicated by unresolved questions about where it draws its lines on Israel, antisemitism, and who it allows into its coalition. Corbyn's Labour never fully answered that question before losing power in 2019. Whether Die Linke can answer it faster, with Berlin's government now potentially in its hands, will shape how the SPD and Greens approach coalition talks in the coming weeks.
