Young Berliners vote overwhelmingly for socialist Left Party

The emphatic victory for the Left Party in last Sunday's state election in Berlin may not have been quite so emphatic if it hadn't been for a significant new rule: This was the first state election in the German capital's history where the voting age had been lowered from 18 to 16.

The actual change was relatively small: It only added around 55,000 voters to the city's electorate of 2.5 million, but it was massively significant to young people themselves: "Of course we talk a lot about politics at school or among our friends," 17-year-old Cecilia told DW's Franziska Wüst on the street outside her school in Berlin on Monday. "We're all very politically engaged; we go to a lot of demos."

That spirit of protest appears to have been reflected in young Berliners' voting habits. While the official exit poll statistics from infratest-dimap don't isolate under-18s, the age-group breakdowns suggest that the Left Party's voters (some 1 in 4 of Berlin voters) skew young. Some 43% of 16-24-year-olds voted for the socialist party — a huge 25-point leap on the last state election in 2023.

That makes sense to 17-year-old Liska, who voted for the socialists: "The Left Party did appeal to me, especially because of the social issues — getting prices down, making rents more affordable." Rents in Berlin are indeed rising at a massive pace — by some 7% in the last two years alone — and first-time tenants are likely to be the hardest hit. Polls also showed that by far the biggest proportion of Berlin voters — 37% — thought that the Left Party was the most likely to create affordable housing.

本文の著作権はDeutsche Welleにあります。