“Maischberger” on Wednesday evening was about the coalition talks in Berlin and the crisis in the federal government. “Ms Giffey, this election in Berlin didn’t end well for you personally,” Maischberger opened the conversation with the SPD politician.
"You weren't on the list, you missed the direct mandate. That actually means you're out. Have you somehow come to terms with that yet?" – “I would have liked it differently, but that's the way it is in a democracy: you run and you can lose,” answers Giffey and reiterates her negative stance towards a red-green-red coalition in the capital. She would like her party to “focus more strongly on a democratic center again”.
She demands that the Social Democrats in Berlin “draw a line” if “the relationship of possible coalition partners to anti-Semitism, organized crime, the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has not been clarified.” Giffey is one of the more than 1,000 signatories of an SPD call against the Left's participation in government in Berlin.
“The left has tripled in size in a very short period of time”
As governing mayor, Giffey herself led a red-green-red alliance in 2021. But she herself says that the Left has changed: "The Left had around 7,000 members in 2021, now there are 19,500. They have almost tripled in size in a very, very short time." Giffey sees a significant part of this new following as politically involved in the Gaza-Israel conflict. In her opinion, the left's election campaign focused heavily on support for Gaza and criticism of Israel. This means that votes were won “very massively” in Berlin districts with a large Palestinian population.
Giffey puts the question of the left's political reliability at the center of the conversation. She doubts that election winner Elif Eralp will be able to assert herself against anti-Semitic positions among the Berlin Left: "She's actually a really nice, friendly person and she's certainly driven by a good motivation to really do something good in the city. But the question is: who's behind it?"
Maischberger confronts Giffey with the question of the SPD's political responsibility for developments in Berlin. “How did it come to this?” She points out that the Social Democrats shaped and ruled the capital for decades - Giffey herself was the district mayor of Neukölln. Against this background, she questions whether it is not also a failure of the SPD that political forces today have become so extremist that even the left-wing top candidate Elif Eralp says she is afraid.
Giffey rejects the accusation of political failure and points to her experiences as Neukölln district mayor and previous operations against organized crime. "It's like cops and robbers. Sometimes one wins, sometimes the others win. But we must never stop fighting back." On the other hand, she criticizes the lack of consistency in the fight against crime and calls for more support for the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The SPD politician also considers cooperation with the Left Party at the federal level to be “not realistic”. When she sees how "we discuss topics such as security and defense policy, the question of whether the Bundeswehr is allowed to report on its work in schools? These are all major points of contention," says Giffey.
Giffey rejects speculation about his own ambitions for the SPD party chairmanship. “That’s not an issue for me.” Instead, she wants a membership decision on the political direction of the Berlin SPD. “I would like us to make a well-founded, basic decision in Berlin about the direction in which the capital is heading.”
