Former Green stronghold: Berlin-Kreuzberg now pink

They are the big losers of the election: In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, none of the five green candidates won the direct mandate. Instead, the inner city district, which only has five constituencies instead of six, is now colored pink on the election result maps and is firmly in the hands of the left. This is extremely bitter for the Greens: they are losing in their core district of Berlin - and in some cases by a huge margin.

Valgolio Damiano from the Left received 39.1 percent in constituency 5, almost twice as many votes as the former Green parliamentary group leader Antje Kapek, who only received 19.5 percent of the first votes. Kapek told the taz that she did not expect that she was so clearly behind the current elected official Damiano: “We are very shocked and sad.” Many good colleagues no longer came to the House of Representatives. She herself is in 11th place on the green state list and will therefore still enter parliament.

Katrin Schmidberger, a long-time and respected specialist politician for rents and housing, is one of the colleagues who is being kicked out. She lost relatively narrowly in constituency 2: with 33.5 percent, she was less than 4 percentage points behind Michael Efler from the Left, who received 37.1 percent of the vote.

The shock of this was written all over Schmidberger's face on election evening. "We Greens have said most clearly that we want a progressive government, that red-green-red is our project and the city needs it. It hurts," she said at the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Greens' election party. The Greens were wiped out between the Left and the CDU. “Unfortunately, people didn’t vote strategically.” Their goal is still to send the CDU out of the Red City Hall. “We expect the left to deliver now.”

The Greens had aggressively campaigned for the first votes in their “traditional” district, since in some constituencies the respective Left and SPD candidates were secured via state and district lists anyway.

Enad Altaweel is also extremely disappointed. In constituency 3, he and his team campaigned at almost 20,000 doors. In potential analyzes there seemed to be a neck-and-neck race with the left-wing candidate and a victory seemed entirely possible. He lost to the state chairwoman of the Left, Kerstin Wolter-Ehling. At least, like Schmidberger, he can boast a respectable success: Altaweel got 28.1 percent of the first votes, Wolter-Ehling got 42.2 percent. When it came to second votes, the Left was well ahead of the Greens with 47 percent, who only achieved 21.7 percent.

The best first vote result in Berlin was achieved by Left Party leading candidate Elif Eralp with 50.4 percent in Kreuzberg constituency 1 - where the taz house is also located. She prevailed against Kübra Beydaș, who was only able to get 17.2 percent of the first votes for the Greens.