On election night, as the far right rose nationwide, Die Linke made crucial gains in the capital. But its supporters see the hard road ahead<\/p>\n
Will democracy still prevail in the west in a decade? It was certainly a question weighing on the minds of the hundreds of Die Linke supporters crammed into a former film studio overlooking Berlin\u2019s Tempelhof airport last weekend. They were gathered to listen to the results of Germany\u2019s election<\/a> \u2013 and their reactions were mixed. The far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) had just doubled its support in federal elections, securing a fifth of the vote, yet Die Linke came top in the capital, albeit with 21% of the vote. They cheered, hugged, kissed and cried.<\/p>\n We were in Neuk\u00f6lln, a diverse neighbourhood of south-eastern Berlin, and the triumphant candidate was Ferat Ko\u00e7ak<\/a>, a charismatic Kurdish-German leftist. His grassroots campaign knocked on every door in the district \u2013 not unusual in the UK and US, but a novelty in Germany. \u201cFor several years, the left has been in a kind of shocked paralysis about what to do with the rising right,\u201d explained 30-year-old activist Isabelle: grassroots campaigning, she believes, brought the left out of its bubble.<\/p>\n Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On election night, as the far right rose nationwide, Die Linke made crucial gains in the capital. But its supporters see the hard road ahead Will democracy still prevail in the west in a decade? It was certainly a question weighing on the minds of the hundreds of Die Linke supporters crammed into a former … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}