Coming to reward them

Responding yeterday to “First they take Manhattan,” a reader writes from Berlin:

Regarding your short post on the Berlin elections, I email you a piece translated from German. This news site lends itself to translation well. I can turn on the translation in my Safari browser and the entire site gets translated. This is a great news source. It is Zionist, Atlanticist, and speaks the truth. They have good coverage of the antisemitic left.”

The site is Apollo News. It is freely accessible for readers who accept advertising. Readers can also activate the translation link on the home page on browsers other than Safari. I did it on Chrome. Here is an Apollo News story deriving from Sweden with a local Minnesota ring to it: “Money and pre-marked ballots: Somali man under suspicion of election fraud after entering parliament for the Left Party.”

Our Berlin correspondent forwarded me Jerome Wnuk’s Apollo News story “‘Progressive Alliance’: This is how Werner Graf serves the radical and anti-Semitic left” (“The Berlin Greens want to forge a red-green-red alliance after the election victory of the Left – although their own federal leadership excludes a government “dependent on anti-Semites from Neukölln.” For the Greens, Berlin is thus becoming a test of the test between bourgeois habitus and a radical left-wing coalition desire.”) As translated with a clunker or two, Wnuk reports:

At 6:00 p.m., the election party in Berlin-Kreuzberg will rage: The Left has clearly won the election to the Berlin House of Representatives. According to the preliminary results, the capital chose the party of top candidate Elif Eralp as the radiant election winner with 25.7 percent, according to the preliminary results, well ahead of the CDU (18.8 percent), the AfD (16.3 percent) and the Greens (14.3 percent). The previous coalition of CDU and SPD was voted out – the capital is apparently peasting on a left-wing Berlin.

Only a few days away, Werner Graf and his Berlin Greens are also celebrating a success: In Berlin-Schöneberg, the result of 14.3 percent is received positively. They lose 4.1 percentage points compared to the last election and have lost the connection to the left, especially among the young. Mathematically, however, every path leads to a government with the participation of the Greens. Either with the CDU and the SPD or with the left and the SPD.

The Berlin Greens under Graf become the kingmaker. And this fact puts the Greens as a whole party to the test: Because their Berlin state association makes no secret of it on election night, wh[at] it wants. “We now want to take responsibility and forge a progressive alliance for Berlin together with the SPD and the Left,” explain the state chairmen Nina Stahr and Philmon Ghirmai, when the result just lands fresh on the screens. The Green faction leader of Berlin, Bettina Jarasch, also becomes clear: “We have a preference for Red-Green-Red, i.e. for an alliance with the Left and the SPD.”

The Berlin Greens make it unmistakable: They want to govern with the Berlin Left and thus with the most radical left-wing association known to the political floor. Anti-Semitism failures, socialization fantasies, hatred of the police and the protection of the constitution – do the Berlin Greens carry this with them? The Greens as a party are facing a test…

Read the whole thing here.

Our Berlin correspondent subsequently forwarded the magazine Cicero’s interview with Martin Hikel of the SPD, the current mayor of the Berlin district of Neukölln: “You cannot govern with a party that has major anti-Semitic problems.” In the interview Hikel “sharply criticizes the Berlin SPD’s course.” Unfortunately, the interview with Hikel is behind the magazine’s paywall, but interested readers may want to pay the price to check it out. Short of that, I refer readers to the song by Leonard Cohen, who foresaw all.