‘Berlin is more East than West’, said Thilo Sarrazin. A member of the centre-left SPD, in 2010 he published Germany Abolishes Itself, a book which warned about the impact of mass immigration. It sold over one million copies in a year but it went down less well with his own party, which tried to kick him out for writing the book. In 2020, after three attempts, the party finally succeeded, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Over the course of those ten years, the SPD’s grasp on Berlin, which they had ruled since reunification, slipped away from them, as mass immigration not only changed the country but also its politics.
Berlin has a reputation for being left-wing, yet it now has a CDU mayor, and in last week’s federal election the hard-right AfD won several districts. Strikingly, the party did best in former communist East Berlin areas: Pankow, Lichtenberg, Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Köpenick all turned blue.
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