Held hostage by the anti-Zionist base

Rapper with Russian hat: Dahabflex at the Berlin "Rave against the Zaun" in Görlitzer Park, 2025

The Left Party doesn't just have an anti-Semitism problem in parts. The balance of power in the party is shifting more and more in favor of anti-Zionist activists, most of whom have only joined the party in recent years.

The scandal was so foreseeable that it seemed intentional: The "socialist" rapper Dahabflex received great approval at a campaign rally of the Left Party district association in Berlin-Neukölln under the motto "Angry at Capitalism" with a song entitled "Stop the Genocide" with lines like "Yalla Yalla Intifada, West Bank, Palestine, Gaza" and "Death to the IDF". Not only the CDU, but also the Central Council of Jews and parts of the capital's press rightly saw this as a call for violence against Jews and therefore denied the party's ability to form a coalition. The Berlin top candidates of the Greens and the SPD, Werner Graf and Steffen Krach, have since expressed doubts that the Left Party could be an alliance partner. The Left Party's top candidate, Elif Eralp, who, according to surveys, had a good chance of becoming the city's first woman mayor, expressed her "horror" and condemned "the performance in Neukölln in the strongest possible terms." The Berlin co-state chairwoman Kerstin Wolter called for “consequences,” which, however, are unlikely to be seen in the current election campaign.

This is also due to the internal party weight of the Neukölln district association, which is based on “anti-Zionist” riots and has long been dominated by Trotskyist groups such as Marx 21 (formerly Linksruck) and other left-wing authoritarian forces. Its co-chair Jorinde Schulz also defended the rapper in the RBB. Those around the Neukölln Left, including the Trotskyist internet portal “Klasse gegen Klasse” (Class against Class), as well as the rapper himself, dismiss the accusation that the scandalized song lines call for deadly violence against Jews with the usual argument that the Intifada refers to the First Intifada of the 1980s, which was characterized by stone throwers and strikes, and not to the Second Intifada, which was characterized by suicide bombings in Israeli cafés and buses 2000. However, the song itself takes this to the point of absurdity, in which it speaks of "Palestine Intifada like the PFLP" and the "Leila Khaled Style" aimed at a militant of this group who was revered as a heroine: glorification of a terrorist group that was involved in the suicide attacks against Israeli civilians of the Second Intifada as well as in the anti-Semitic mass murder of October 7th.

The rapper's production is aimed primarily at the young activist scene around the left-wing authoritarian "red groups" such as Young Struggle or Rote Jugend.

The dispute over obvious anti-Semitism almost obscures the view of the rapper Dahabflex as a “total work of art”. He likes to present himself with a Russian fur hat with a red star on the front and all sorts of other insignia of “red” power. Sometimes he poses with a Mao T-shirt and raps about “prosperity like Deng Xiaoping,” but usually in front of USSR flags and symbols. He also released a song “USSR” (with a hard rolling “R”). He raps "what Adolf - I'm Josef Stalin" and the cover features two Ladas with today's Russian flag next to the Soviet flag. Jens Balzer suspects that behind such greetings to the Putin regime there was an aesthetic "cross-front that could bring certain circles of the Left Party back together with the BSW." However, this interpretation misses the actual problem of the Left Party.

The production by the rapper, who has already appeared several times at party events not only in Neukölln, but also at a "Rave Against the Zaun" in Görlitzer Park co-organized by the party, is aimed primarily at the young activist scene around the left-wing authoritarian "red groups" such as Young Struggle or Rote Jugend. This is also supported by the fact that he is photographed with groups of fit young men and alludes to the RAF in some songs. In the video for the new song »Mr. Burns" (the evil capitalist from the animated series "The Simpsons"), two hooded, muscular figures tie a man in a suit to a chair in a cellar hole and set up a camera in front of him, like in an RAF kidnapping video. Dahabflex raps the question of why Mr. Burns looks like Friedrich Merz.

When the Left Party invites Dahabflex to events, it does so because he is a kind of poster boy for the young protest scene with a passion for Palestine and sometimes with a penchant for militancy and proximity to left-wing authoritarian "red groups." He raps the kind of agitprop that was ordered - whether the song "Stop the Genocide" was agreed upon for the program or not, as Neukölln Left co-chairman Hermann Nehls claimed. The problem is by no means limited to the anti-Semitism of some notoriously anti-Zionist district associations in Berlin, individuals and the State Working Group (LAG) for Palestine Solidarity. The Left Party owes its recent successes and increases in membership not least to the influx from the anti-Zionist activist milieu, which was also clearly reflected at the Potsdam party conference in June.

This is particularly true in Berlin and has already led to a scandal at the 2024 state party conference over the clear designation of Islamist anti-Semitism in a key motion, which ultimately led to the resignation of a group of prominent former government members around Klaus Lederer and Elke Breitenbach. The Neukölln association, which was the driving force against the lead motion at the time, was able to significantly increase its political weight in the state party in the 2025 federal election through the direct mandate won by Ferat Koçak, which was not insignificantly due to the recruitment of numerous young grassroots activists for an intensive door-to-door election campaign. In Neukölln, however, there are only shifts in the balance of power and ideological differences between the left base and the party leadership that affect the entire party.

The Neukölln election campaign event with the rapper Dahabflex can be seen as a disruptive maneuver against Elif Eralp's election campaign and the Berlin party leadership that supports it.

Against this background, the Neukölln rage party can be seen as a demonstration of power and disruptive maneuvers against Elif Eralp's election campaign and the Berlin party leadership that supports it. The Tagesspiegel reported that this was being discussed internally within the Berlin Left Party: "Many agree that those responsible for this are about torpedoing the Left's possible participation in government." This is particularly clear in the reaction of the LAG Palestine Solidarity, which assured "our favorite Neukölln district association" its full solidarity on Instagram. The critical press reporting is an “intervention by the rich and powerful in this city” to discipline the Left Party. “The Left,” on the other hand, is “strong where it is oppositional, migrant, internationalist and anchored in social movements.” “Real power” is built in “companies, universities and schools”.

A week after Dahabflex's appearance, the left-wing youth group Solid Neukölln demonstrated what this looks like in practice by handing out stickers to students on the sidelines of a round of introductions for the constituency direct candidates in a Neukölln school showing a Palestine flag with the slogan "Organize Class War" and a cute, childishly styled cat cartoon character with a Kalashnikov in his arm - another provocation against pollution through pragmatism and compromises in government participation in the service of “revolutionary” purity.

The party leadership and Eralp are under pressure due to these disruptive maneuvers and are no longer able to get through to core issues such as rents and the dispute over the socialization of large housing construction groups. The Left Party had been leading in the election polls for weeks, but has now fallen behind the CDU. Eralp and the party leadership are in a dilemma that is difficult to resolve: if they take action against the anti-Zionist-anti-Semitic current in their party, they risk an open power struggle in the final phase of the election campaign and the loss of the support of significant parts of the activist party base. There are already complaints about a lack of support from the party leadership. If the state executive committee caps the dispute, it will continue to be held hostage by the Palestinian activist camp and also risk driving the Greens and the weakening SPD into a coalition with the CDU. According to the Tagesspiegel, the state leadership decided on the latter and stopped an initiative for a joint statement that was intended to clearly condemn the actions of the Neukölln association. If the Neukölln Left Party with its staunchly anti-Zionist mayoral candidate Ahmed Abed also wins the election for the local district council assembly, the development of the Berlin Left Party in the style of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France insoumise in France will hardly be able to be stopped.