Die Linke's Berlin Win Shows the Left Must Offer 'Freedom to Stay' Rather Than Fight Within Liberalism's Script
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/eva-von-redecker. "A leftwing victory in Berlin shows people want freedom, and liberals cannot deliver it | Eva von Redecker | The Guardian." September 29, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author argues that mainstream liberal ideas of freedom—centered on personal property and individual rights—can't solve big problems like inequality and climate change, and that both the far right and the political center have responded to this failure in unhealthy ways: the right offers people a fantasy of 'owning' their nation, gender roles, and culture, while the center panics and turns on the left with exaggerated accusations. She argues that Die Linke's win in Berlin, built on the concrete promise of letting people stay in their homes and city, shows a better path forward: the left wins not by playing by liberalism's rules, but by offering people a vivid, tangible sense of freedom that liberalism can't provide.
Conclusion
The left cannot defeat the far right by operating within the liberal framework of individual, property-based freedom; instead it must win by articulating a compelling alternative concept of freedom—the concrete 'freedom to stay' in one's home, neighborhood, and city—as Die Linke did in Berlin and Mamdani did in New York.
Premises
- Liberalism's core notion of freedom is individual and modeled on property ownership (self-ownership extended to relations with others), which the state adjudicates.
- This liberal freedom cannot adequately govern structural crises like economic inequality and ecological collapse, because addressing them requires limiting the freedom/property of the privileged in favor of future or distant others.
- Because collective self-rule and solidarity are absent, policies addressing these crises are experienced as pure sacrifice by the privileged, rather than as freedom-preserving trade-offs.
- This void is filled by the political right, which offers 'phantom possession'—treating gender roles, nation, and traditional order as things to possessively own—exemplified by AfD rhetoric like 'take back your country' and 'great replacement' myth.
- Under pressure from the far right's rise and its own inability to govern the future, the political center abandons its own egalitarian principles, exemplified by 'paternalistic philosemitism' that treats memory culture as private property and casts left-wing/pro-Palestinian actors as 'plunderers.'
- This explains why moral-panic smear campaigns against Die Linke (antisemitism accusations from a leaked chat and a rapper's performance) gained traction while the AfD's simultaneous electoral gains were normalized.
- Die Linke's Berlin victory was driven by a positive freedom claim—freedom to stay in one's home/city via housing socialization—that resonated with voters more than abstract liberal rights, showing a viable model for left success elsewhere (including in rural areas and for migrant communities facing deportation).
Assumptions
- Liberal individual freedom is fundamentally reducible to a property/ownership model and cannot be reformulated to include collective or ecological considerations.
- The primary explanation for centrist and right-wing backlash against Die Linke is this crisis of liberal freedom, rather than genuine concerns about antisemitism or policy specifics.
- Popular political success is best explained by which 'freedom' narrative resonates emotionally, rather than by economic interests, media dynamics, or coalition politics.
- The concept of 'phantom possession' meaningfully unifies disparate right-wing and centrist behaviors (nationalism, gender traditionalism, memory-culture politics) under one framework.
- Socializing housing stock constitutes a coherent and scalable model of 'freedom to stay' applicable to ecological crisis and migrant protection more broadly.
- The antisemitism accusations against Die Linke were substantially unfounded or exaggerated, based on 'one leaked chat and one rapper's performance.'