The Left | Ferat Koçak: Made mistakes, but not criminal

Bundestag member Ferat Koçak (left) speaks in parliament. Photo: dpa/Elisa Schu Bundestag member Ferat Koçak (Left) is giving up his seat on the Parliament's Interior Committee. He is drawing conclusions from a debate about him, which was partly “hurtful, discriminatory and characterized by insinuations”. Koçak assures: "I am neither a criminal nor do I support organized crime." On the contrary, he is committed to ensuring that his constituency, the Berlin district of Neukölln, is safe for everyone.

After the Left's victory in the Berlin House of Representatives election on September 20th, Koçak was denied contact with the Remmo family. Members of this family broke into the Bode Museum in Berlin and the Green Vault in Dresden. According to his own account, Koçak stumbled into something out of ignorance and naivety. He had asked to donate cell phones to anti-fascists. A Remmo son offered him one. It was only when Koçak picked up the phone and saw his father that he realized who he was dealing with. The MP did not accept an invitation to a wedding, but also did not draw a clear enough line between them.

By "fully disclosing" the communication, he made it clear that he neither granted the Remmos any advantages nor received any advantages from them, explained Koçak. He presented the text messages exchanged to the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” and described the course of the personal meeting. In this context, Koçak admits: "I made a mistake." His behavior raises questions and does not live up to his standards. “I draw conclusions from this.” The work of the left-wing faction in the Interior Committee should be unencumbered.

The CDU and others had used the Koçak case to portray it as a security risk if Elif Eralp (Left) were to become Governing Mayor of Berlin. "The Berlin police are too good for a clan mayor," the "Bild" newspaper quoted Baden-Württemberg's Interior Minister Manuel Hagel (CDU) as saying. As with the accusation that the Left was anti-Semitic, Eralp was not personally guilty of anything. But she is accused of allegedly not doing anything.

Now, however, first the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" reported on Tuesday and then other media that Eralp had been a passive, i.e. paying, member of the Red Aid since she studied law in Hamburg until 2025. The Red Aid is accused of providing lawyers for left-wing radical defendants. Although there is a right to a defense attorney, membership in Red Aid is repeatedly exploited by politicians. In 2007, the then Juso chairwoman Franziska Drohsel came under pressure and resigned. Norbert Müller (left) was accused of this in 2012 when he ran for the Bundestag and then again in 2013 when he moved up to the Brandenburg state parliament. The fact that the Red Aid was stigmatized by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as “left-wing extremist” says “nothing about those being observed, but rather about the observers,” Müller responded at the time.

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