Socialism, anti-racism, and Palestine solidarity increasingly seen as criminal acts as Germany remilitarizes

By A. AL-MUHAJIR

Vanessa Emde is a member of Die Linke, Germany’s leftmost electoral, “democratic socialist” party. She is also the currently elected candidate for a seat in the Berlin House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus). In the Berlin state election of 20 September, she trounced her nearest rival, the Green Party candidate, with 46.2 percent of the vote to the Green’s 20.9 percent.

Representing the youthful left of the party and echoing its radical, socialist, and anti-Zionist politics, the 45-year-old Emde ran a campaign that emphasized popular economic issues, such as lower rents and the expropriation and socialization (Vergesellschaftung) of about 160,000 apartments owned by Berlin’s largest landlords. These slogans resonated widely in Emde’s district of Neukölln, a working-class district with many people with “migration backgrounds” (Migrationshintergrund) who are suffering under intense gentrification.

Emde also vocally campaigned in support of Palestine, denounced the Gaza genocide, and sharply criticized the German state’s blind support of Israel. Prominently wearing a kafiyyah on social media, she took aim at the German state’s Zionism and Staatsräson. As articulated by the former Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to the Knesset in 2008, Staatsräson refers to a solidarity with Israel that is non-negotiable, an immovable rock at the core of German politics.

In an unusual move, the leadership of the Berlin Linke is now seeking to exclude Emde from their parliamentary fraction. They assert that Emde broke party discipline by going against the party’s coalition agreement with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens to form a “red–red–green” government in Berlin. Why is the Linke, an allegedly socialist and internationalist party, doing this?

The direct path from electoralism to class collaboration

During the campaign, the Linke had no problem at all drawing on the enthusiasm of working-class and young Berliners who are not only fed up with high rents and energy prices but also with Germany’s support for Israel. According to polls, a large majority of Germans correctly regard Israel as the perpetrator of genocide in Gaza and want the German government to exert more pressure on Israel. Polls are also now consistently showing that a large majority of Germans hold negative views of Israel and that they reject the idea that Israel should be Germany’s “reason of state.” According to one reputable poll, 60 percent of Germans now also reject the rhetorical question, “Does Germany bear a special historical and moral responsibility for Israel’s security as a result of the Holocaust?”

In short, Israel’s reputation is in tatters with the German public. This is in sharp contrast to the German political parties, for whom the “reason of state” is non-negotiable. This includes the Linke, which in Berlin just signed off on an astonishing coalition agreement with the SPD and the Greens that sacrifices almost every socialist and internationalist principle that the party allegedly holds on the altar of bourgeois respectability politics. This includes concessions on “protecting Jewish life”—which, in Germany, often amounts to the state and accusing anyone critical of Zionism of being antisemitic; again affirming as “non-negotiable” Israel’s “right to exist,” and rejecting BDS.

In the run-up to the election, bourgeois parties including the Greens and the SPD, along with German state in the form of its antisemitism commissions, as well as prominent politicians have piled antisemitism accusations on anyone critical of Staatsräson. These accusations have targeted in particular the Linke, in a campaign clearly intended to force them to submit to the interests of German capital.

Emde, who during the campaign stated that “there is no right to exist for states—people have a right to exist” and has refused to take back this statement, became a convenient scapegoat for the reformist and compromised Linke leadership to show that they will be reliable coalition partners for the bourgeois parties. For the Linke leadership the main guiding principle seems to be, appeal to the left before the election and then throw them under the bus after it.

German remilitarization

The Linke’s concessions are not surprising. From a revolutionary socialist and Marxist materialist perspective, it is easy to recognize that a political party’s commitment to electoral success above all other questions of strategy and principle will directly lead to that party’s adaptation to bourgeois terms in any clash between class forces. On the cusp of securing even a modest amount of electoral “power,” the party will subordinate itself to pressure from capital rather than follow its socialist commitments to their logical end, a confrontation with capital.

Emde’s marginalization thus exemplifies the fatal weakness of electoral socialism, a vulnerability that becomes especially clear when seen from an international perspective: U.S. imperialism and Israeli colonialism run amok, far right forces on the march in Europe and particularly in Germany.

With Trump doing his best to undermine Europe’s traditional client status to U.S. imperialism, the question of European militarism has risen to the forefront of bourgeois politics on this side of the Atlantic. With Germany in the lead, there is now a concerted ruling-class initiative to remobilize politics, economy, and society on a war-footing. This is borne out both in official numbers and in daily lived experience here in Germany.

Germany’s federal draft budget for 2027 significantly increases military spending, in comparison to the 2026 budget, from 82.2 billion euros to 109.7 billion euros. The number goes up to almost 150 billion euros when “special” additions are included, such as a fund specifically set aside specifically for the war in Ukraine. There’s a simultaneous propaganda campaign to get a deeply skeptical public on board, especially the youth. Walk through a German city center or train station any day and you will encounter large ads for military recruitment prominently featuring images of German people of color in the uniform of the Bundeswehr, the German military (“POC” is a U.S.-American gloss on Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund, “people with migration backgrounds”, the usual German phrase).

Mood of resistance

The mood of Germans is increasingly critical of remilitarization and social cuts. Protests are nearly constant—every week there seem to be rallies all over Germany protesting government policies. The Schulstreik (school strike) movement, led and organized by high school and middle school kids, is a national network that leads monthly protests against the German military, conscription, and social cuts. A large protest I attended in Leipzig during the last weekend of September brought together unions from sectors such as health care, primary and secondary education, logistics, and immigrant worker networks. Speakers connected increased military spending to cuts in education, mental and physical healthcare, disability support, and neighborhood youth centers.

On Oct. 6 and again on Oct. 24, university student organizers and unionists brought together hundreds to a main plaza in Leipzig city center to protest the placement of a U.S.–Israeli weapons factory in Leipzig. On Oct. 10, tens of thousands of protesters from across Germany converged on Berlin as part of the international global day of action for Palestine. And looking ahead to Oct. 31, students inspired by the ongoing French youth revolts are organizing under the slogan “GenZ regelt das” (“GenZ takes care of it”) for a nationwide mass protest. These are just a few of the examples of the mood of workers, youth, and everyday people nationwide. The “GenZ regelt das” slogan captures this mood and offers a glimpse of how movements are trying to unite different struggles: “falling apart schools, conscription, exploding prices, university and social cuts, lurch to the right.”

Europe’s authoritarian turning point

Millions upon millions of working class and young people from Europe to India to Brazil and the U.S. are gaining confidence to challenge the ruling class, who benefit from these inhuman conditions. With young people in France leading the way, young people across Europe are in a mood to fight. This helps explain the attempt by the German state and its propagandists to criminalize resistance to German militarism, Zionism, and proxy wars. In turn, the shift to the far right that has been notable since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or what in Germany is called the Zeitwende, “the historical turning point,” reflects a larger shift to the right all over Europe.

A good example is the resolution against “Islamist Infiltration” passed by the European Parliament on 8 October. Drafted by the EU’s conservative block and supported by both its liberal and far-right parties, the resolution, as the German–Turkish journalist Hüseyin Doğru discusses in the left-wing daily junge Welt, is not only Islamophobic but seeks to criminalize the entire antiwar and anti-genocide movements on the continent.

The resolution builds on an existing EU security bureaucracy that emerged at the time of the Russian invasion with the expressed purpose of combatting “Foreign Information, Manipulation, and Interference,” or FIMI. FIMI targets not illegal acts but rather legal behaviors and “behavior patterns damaging to the European values and political processes.” All of these are organized around the neologism “hybrid war,” an ideological floating signifier that is currently fashionable within the ranks of the bourgeois press and among politicians.

The Islamic infiltration resolution alleges that Islamist groups might engage in “entryism” in welfare associations, youth organizations, universities, and other parts of civil society, to seize control of them to influence the politics of the EU. FIMI and the Infiltration resolution also target anti-racist organizations, since now the EU sees those organizations as especially open to “Israel hatred.”

The enemy within

“The threat,” writes Doğru, “no longer comes from a foreign power. The EU now looks for the enemy within.” One prominent example of a “behavior pattern” that can run afoul of FIMI and the Islamism resolution is what the bourgeois media call “hatred of Israel.” This, according to the resolution, is an indicator of “radicalization.” The line between what the drafters of the resolution call “legitimate” (and protected) criticism of Israel and antisemitism or radicalism remains unclear. “Are Europeans now duty-bound (verpflichtet) to love Israel?” asks Doğru.

The true interests being defended here are not “democracy” or political participation but the interests of capital. According to the EU Commission’s own numbers, the EU was Israel’s number one trading partner in 2024, with trade valued at 42.6 billion euros. Germany, in turn, is not only Europe’s leading economic power but also its most passionate supporter of Israel. This relationship goes back to the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany) in the early 1950s and was constitutive both of the West German and the Israeli states. German military and economic aid as well as political support of Israel not only helped launder the reputation of a West Germany that refused to hold former Nazis accountable but also allowed it seamless entry into the emerging U.S.-imperialist postwar order as a reliable bulwark of NATO and anticommunism.

West German anticommunism wasn’t just a vague threat. As Doğru discusses, the current iteration of European and, particularly, German, authoritarianism is reminiscent of the so-called Radicals Decree (Radikalenerlass) of 1972. Issued by the then SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt, the decree directed the Federal Republic’s Internal Security Services (Verfassungsschutz) to investigate around 3.5 million leftists in the public sector. The secret services targeted these workers simply because of their political opinions, not for anything they did. Many thousands were subjected to disciplinary hearings and up to 1500 workers were either fired or denied employment.   

We’ve already seen what this criminalization of solidarity looks like today, not only in the many instances of police brutality against Palestine solidarity protesters in Germany and relentless state attacks on intellectual freedom and freedom of expression, but also in the trial of the Ulm 5, Palestine solidarity activists currently sitting trial for belonging to a “criminal organization” because they broke into a building belonging to the Israel arms firm Elbit in the city of Ulm in western Germany.

“The EU’s authoritarian turning point shows how far liberal European values actually go,” writes Doğru. “Freedom of opinion and political participation are celebrated, until they go against capital and the states that serve it. Liberal democracies have always had a second set of rules behind the scenes (ein zweites Regelwerk in der Schublade) for strikers, communists, and the colonized.”

Socialism from below

Socialist activists in various organizations, along with activists in various anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist organizations, to whom this author has personally spoken, all recognize the flaw in the Linke’s approach. These critics include a significant number of the party’s left-wing and youth base. They all argue for a version of independent working-class socialism-from-below organization. What that organization looks like—whether a party, a party-like organization, or a united front of groups—is still an open question. But there is both a recognition and a rejection of German complicity in the genocide and a positive vision for what a comrade from the Linke called, in a conversation with me, a fighting party of the working class. This desire for an organized socialism from below is one of the hopeful signs in this time of right-wing menace. Should it expand into a mass phenomenon, it would begin to pose the question of power in one of the main bulwarks of international anti-socialist and capitalist power. It deserves our full internationalist and revolutionary socialist solidarity.

Photo: A march in solidarity with Palestine in Berlin, May 2021. (AFP)