When the Left celebrated their election victory in Berlin last Sunday, clan bosses and extremists also celebrated. Were these uninvited guests with whom the party actually has nothing to do? Or was it an indication of which forces might now be brought to power in Berlin?
Let's stay with election evening first: At the Left Party in Neukölln, Issa Remmo is happy about the Left's good result. He is the head of a Berlin clan that is notorious for theft, blackmail and bodily harm and even murder. It was his nephews who stole the jewels from the Green Vault in Dresden and the gold coin from the Bode Museum in Berlin.
This gangster happily posed for the “Berliner Morgenpost” at the election party and was quoted as saying that he felt supported by a party for the first time. Apparently it takes a while before Remmo catches the eye of the organizers and is complimented out. Remmo was not invited, explains Elif Eralp afterwards, who now wants to become the first left-wing governing mayor. “We have nothing to do with organized crime.”
The Remmos tell a different story. Firas Remmo is one of the sons of the clan boss. He likes to show on his Instagram page how he drives around in big cars or cuddles with tigers. But above all he likes to celebrate his father, “a legend”, “number one”, the “Lion King”.
The day after the election, Firas Remmo then shares an old chat history with the left-wing Bundestag member Ferat Koçak. The two of them familiarly address each other as “brother” and send hearts. Koçak asks him to send “respectful greetings” to his father.
He later sent him a video of his Bundestag speech with the headline: “Hysterical ongoing debate: CLANS”. In it, Koçak says: "If you're talking about clans, then you're talking about my neighbors in Neukölln, about people who have lived here for years and are at home here, who you suspect simply because of their last name."
The MP asks Firas Remmo to distribute this video: “Tell all your people to share this, please.” “Gladly, brother,” replies Remmo, who probably can’t imagine better publicity for his clan.
While the CDU promised during the election campaign to take action against clan crime, the Left countered: it was all racism. The party has been campaigning for years to end the raids, and it also wants to cut police numbers and abolish the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. A program like a gift for a man like Issa Remmo.
Ferat Koçak has already spent a lot of energy on the issue in the Berlin House of Representatives. He made several detailed inquiries about operations against clan crime: where and when and how exactly the raids and house searches take place.
The Remmos now remind MP Koçak of the common goal. “We are part of something big,” writes Firas Remmo. “We’re not here just to be there.” And: “We are a team.”
Ralph Ghadban calls this a “typical mafia gesture”. “When they realized that the left was distancing themselves from them, they threatened: Hey, we helped you!”
The political scientist and Islamic scholar Ghadban has been observing the clans in Berlin for longer than anyone else. He once came to Berlin from Lebanon himself, and later organized help for the arriving civil war refugees. These included the large families who still make Berlin unsafe today.
Ghadban has studied their history closely, from Anatolia to Lebanon to Germany. He can explain why the semi-nomadic way of life gave rise to the blood feud and under what precarious conditions the stateless people were already living in Lebanon.
In Berlin they were again only tolerated and were not allowed to go to school or work. “I saw this criminality arise before my eyes,” recalls Ghadban. “I warned back then, but no one wanted to see it.” Over the centuries, these people who have not been accepted anywhere have learned: family is the only thing that counts. They had nothing to expect from the state. So they made him their prey.
Only when the problem became obvious did politicians take on clan crime. Now Ghadban fears that the left will destroy this development. "Who would restrict the police in such a situation? They must be crazy," says the political scientist, who is himself under police protection because of massive threats.
The Left has created a climate in Berlin in which not only crime but also Islamism is trivialized, if not romanticized, in the name of the anti-racist struggle.
This activism took on a whole new dimension on October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered, tortured and abducted Israeli families in their sleep. These massacres, of all things, became something of a political awakening experience for the left.
So again on election evening: Not only Issa Remmo, but also a certain Ibrahim Ibrahim is celebrating at the Neukölln election party. He represents the “United Palestinian National Committee”, in which supporters of the terrorist organizations Hamas and PFLP have been mobilizing together against Israel in Berlin since October 7th.
Ibrahim Ibrahim has organized a number of Palestine demonstrations in Berlin, where he gives lengthy speeches in Arabic in which, for example, he honors the Hamas boss and mastermind of the massacres, Yahya Sinwar, as a “martyr hero”.
Unlike Remmo, he was apparently not an unwanted guest at the party. He has been allowed to appear on the left several times. That evening he takes selfies with Bundestag member Koçak and the newly elected Berlin MP Vanessa Emde. The National Committee published the photos on Tiktok along with a congratulatory letter: “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with DIE LINKE.”
Deputy Koçak, who has contacts with the criminal and extremist milieu, has since withdrawn. For the time being, he no longer wants to take part in the meetings of the Interior Committee in the Bundestag. But what does that mean? Will he be expelled from the parliamentary group or will he remain in the Bundestag?
In any case, Koçak is not an isolated backbencher and is anything but unknown to the leading candidate Elif Eralp. The two of them founded a migrant network within the Left together in 2019. The images from election evening illustrate the closeness. When the first forecasts arrive, Eralp, federal chairwoman Ines Schwerdtner and, right next to them, Koçak are cheering in the Kreuzberg ballroom.
Within the Left, no one doubts Eralp's clear commitments against anti-Semitism and Islamism. Eralp comes from a left-wing family in Turkey; her family history is opposed to any Islamism. But can she get the extremist forces in her party under control? Or is that not possible at all - because the Left owes its electoral success to precisely these forces?
The Berlin journalist and Islam expert Sineb El Masrar is convinced that the Gaza war was more important for many left-wing voters than the question of expropriations. In the last election, the Left finally made the socialization of real estate companies a central issue. There was no great success at that time. It wasn't until October 7th that the tide turned. “What 2015 was for the AfD, October 7th became for the Left,” says El Masrar.
On the day of the massacres, Berlin celebrated with sweets. Afterwards, the Gaza War regularly brought masses of people into the streets shouting their hatred of Israel. The left discovered the mobilization potential for itself. And thus became the party par excellence for Arab-Muslim voters. While it reached 25.7 percent overall last weekend, it won an absolute majority among Muslims: 51 percent of Muslim Berliners voted for the Left, according to an analysis by the Elections research group.
The election campaign was tailored precisely to this group of voters. The left called for an end to the “genocide” on posters, as if such questions were within the power of a city parliament. The candidates spoke directly to voters in Arabic in their videos. Martha Kleedörfer, wearing an Arabic scarf, explained that Gaza was in her constituency. Vanessa Emde denied Israel's right to exist in her campaign speeches. Basem Said called for an “election intifada”.
In general, the Left Association in Neukölln: Just four weeks ago, Dahabflex shouted “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to IDF” into the microphone, i.e. death to the Israeli armed forces. Elif Eralp then demanded consequences. But there wasn't. Instead, the Neukölln Left leader stood in front of the RBB camera and said that the Israeli army was responsible for the genocide.
The outgoing mayor of Neukölln from the SPD, Martin Hikel, has been watching all this with great surprise for a long time. He can still remember the old-style leftists with whom he sat in the Neukölln district assembly. “Nobody would have thought of putting Islamism or crime into perspective.”
Hikel is quite disillusioned. All he can actually do is advise his party against forming a coalition with this party. “I have no confidence that Elif Eralp will get these anti-Semitic attacks under control.”
One might get the impression that these failures were accepted because everyone benefits from success. The small “State Working Group Shalom” speaks of a conscious “realignment of our state association” for a younger, more activist audience. She was unable to counteract the “aggressive anti-Zionist mobilization,” as she herself states on her website. “Increasing membership numbers and survey results seem to confirm the strategy,” writes the group in dismay.
In France there is “Islamogauchisme”, an alliance of leftists and Islamists. Does the left rely on this formula? In any case, the ideological closeness is not new. Palestine solidarity has been building identity for decades; the anti-imperialist struggle has been revitalized by postcolonial theory.
