After the left-wing election victory in Berlin: Black and blue panic

We are lost. The turning point is imminent, the breaking of taboos, the end of democracy and the rule of law. Everything is doomed. If you listen to the Union and some conservative journalists, then this is not because right-wing extremists are occupying the highest offices in German states for the first time since 1945. Or that conservative politicians make their contribution. But because three democratic parties in Berlin have decided to negotiate a government alliance.

For too long, one of these parties has failed to deal consistently with anti-Semitic and terror-glorifying positions among its own people. Criticism of this is necessary. But what the Union is blowing out into the world every day has nothing to do with that. It is an increasingly disinhibited campaign - and in terms of content it can hardly be distinguished from the AfD.

A banner on the Junge Union's “Germany Day”: a person masked with a keffiyeh, a sticker with the name of Berlin's left-wing top candidate Elif Eralp - next to it the slogan: “Never again is now”.

CSU boss Markus Söder is calling for a “firewall to the left” and an “extremism clause” in the state financial equalization system - not least because of Berlin's plans to socialize large housing companies. Berlin must not “become a political experimentation ground for left-wing extremists and clan-criminal milieus,” says Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), hyperventilating, and sees the left-wing conspiracy not only at work in Germany: “Left-wing extremists and a migrant milieu” are also meeting on the streets during the protests in France, for an “armed fight against the free society and our way of life.”

And because the explorers want the right to vote for foreigners who have lived in the country for a long time, former CDU MEP Elmar Brok argues that the left is “creating its own electorate in order to create majorities in Germany with anti-Semitic slogans.”

Meanwhile, the Potsdam SME and Economic Union is posting a picture of Berlin's Red City Hall, complete with the hammer and sickle emblem and minaret towers, on Instagram. “'Jewish question' clarified, now expropriation takes place,” it says. “So the ‘fire wall’ came down!”

Despite all the hurdles, a red-green-red government in Berlin is becoming increasingly likely. And the closer it gets, the more radicalized the Union appears to be. A left-wing plan to Islamize the country and exchange the electorate through migration: Even the right-wing extremist - and deeply anti-Semitic - conspiracy narrative about the "great exchange" is now apparently completely normalized in part of the conservative milieu, be it at the Union, in the world or the FAZ.

Meanwhile, the plans of the negotiators it so reviled are much less radical than the Union. Socialization is, after all, explicitly provided for as a possibility in the German Basic Law and is therefore certainly not an attack on it. And there is at least local voting rights for non-EU citizens in a number of EU countries, without public order having collapsed there.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the Left, the Greens and the SPD have agreed on a common consensus and mechanisms. The left will have to prove whether that is enough and whether it really works in practice. She should be given the opportunity to do so.

The Union's doomsday warnings seem all the more bizarre when you consider that the Left Party sits and has sat in many a state government and even led that in Thuringia. It is precisely there that the party is now supporting the CDU-led minority government under Mario Voigt in order to support democratic conditions.

Conditions that are currently under attack in many places. If you think back to anti-migrant resolutions in the Bundestag with the help of the AfD, to the banishment of stumbling blocks together with right-wing extremists, to cooperation with the AfD at the Berlin district level or to the election of an AfD member as president of the state parliament, then it is striking who is regularly involved in this: the Union. The great danger here is that not only will a campaign go completely over the top - but that the ground will be prepared for a rapprochement that actually represents an attack on free society.