Berlin elections 2026

Die Linke won 25.7% in Berlin, roughly doubling its 2023 vote. The SPD fell to 12.1%, the Greens to 14.3% and the CDU to 18.8%, while the AfD rose to 16.3%. So the story here is that both Die Linke and the AfD gained substantially while the traditional parties of the broad political centre lost ground.

Now it isn't difficult to understand why Die Linke did so well. Berlin has a genuine and measurable housing crisis. The city's own estimate says another 211,000 homes will be needed between 2026 and 2040. Die Linke made housing the centre of its campaign and was clearly seen as the strongest party on the issue, particularly among younger voters. Its proposed solutions include much more public housing, stronger rent controls and the socialisation of large private housing companies, meaning compulsory transfer into public ownership with compensation. Building new affordable public housing actually increases supply, but purchasing existing apartments would cost many billions in compensation and raises an obvious opportunity-cost question: how many new apartments, schools or transport projects could be built with the same money? Interestingly, although 57.6% backed socialisation in the 2021 referendum, only 37% supported it in the latest polling and 51% opposed it. So the election result shouldn't be read as blanket approval for every part of Die Linke's programme.

Both Die Linke and the SPD support stronger tenant protection, more social housing, progressive taxation and a strong welfare state, but their underlying philosophies differ. The SPD remains fundamentally social democratic: regulate capitalism and use a mixed economy to serve social goals. Die Linke comes from a democratic-socialist tradition and is much more willing to take essential goods and services out of private markets altogether. Their differences become larger still at federal level, particularly on defence, Ukraine and immigration: The SPD supports higher defence spending and continued military assistance to Ukraine, whereas Die Linke opposes further military build-up and weapons deliveries to war zones; on immigration, Die Linke favours much broader residence rights and opposes deportations.

Berlin is young, urban and renter-heavy. The election results there follow a broader pattern we've seen elsewhere. Increasing numbers of voters are abandoning mainstream parties they associate with failing to solve problems they experience directly, and turning instead to parties promising much more substantial change. And it isn't as though Berliners haven't tried the established parties first. Over the past 15 years they have repeatedly elected governments led by the SPD and, more recently, the CDU, while the housing crisis has continued to get worse. (To be fair, Die Linke itself was also in government from 2016 to 2023, so it cannot entirely claim outsider status either.) There's no surprise here really. This is what happens when obvious problems remain unresolved through successive governments and are just left to fester. Voters will start looking elsewhere for solutions. Whether the alternatives they now choose can actually deliver the changes they expect is a different kettle of fish.

(Sources: official Berlin election results; Berlin Senate housing planning; Infratest dimap/ARD, September 2026.)

The dragon in my garage (peer pressure edition)

Suppose I tell you there is a dragon living in my garage.

Naturally, you ask to see it.

Fair enough.

I open the garage door.

Inside are some cardboard boxes, a bicycle I have been meaning to repair since approximately the late Pleistocene, a lawnmower, several objects whose original purpose has been lost to history, and absolutely no visible dragon.

“Ah,” I say. “Of course you can’t see it. The dragon is invisible. Should have mentioned that.”

Right.

You think about this for a moment and suggest scattering flour over the floor. If the dragon is there, surely it will leave footprints.

“No. It floats above the ground.”

Very well.

You suggest bringing in an infrared camera. Dragons are creatures traditionally associated with fire, so it ought to give off some heat.

“This one doesn’t.”

“Well,” you say, “perhaps we could spray a fine mist of paint into the garage and reveal its outline?”

“Nooo. The paint passes straight through it.”

Every test you propose is followed by a new property of the dragon explaining why that particular test cannot possibly work.

“I see that you are still skeptical,” I say, disappointed.

The next day I bring twenty people to the garage. Some of them are your friends and family.

“Look,” I tell you. “All of these people believe the dragon is real. Do you believe me now?”

One of them looks genuinely puzzled by your hesitation.

“Millions of people believe in dragons like this,” she says. “Do you seriously think all those people could be wrong?”

A respected older member of the community steps forward.

“My belief in the dragon has given my life meaning,” they tell you sincerely.

Another person explains that the dragon helped her through the most difficult period of her life.

Someone else tells you that his grandmother believed in the dragon, and she was the kindest person he ever knew.

A fourth informs you that some extremely clever philosophers have also believed in dragons.

“Could we perhaps devise some kind of test to make sure...?” you say.

There is a small silence.

“You still don’t believe us?” someone asks.

Then a member of your own family, obviously embarrassed by you and hurt by your stubbornness, asks:

“Why are you the only one who cannot accept what everyone else believes is there?”

You mumble that you do not doubt anyone’s sincerity, but twenty people repeating a claim do not necessarily constitute twenty independent pieces of evidence.

Twenty people independently seeing a dragon would certainly be interesting. But if the twenty people learned about the dragon from the same tradition, heard the same stories, rely on one another’s testimony, and none of them can actually detect the dragon either, then their agreement is not twenty independent observations. It may simply be the same claim echoed twenty times over.

You say that their belief in the dragon may comfort them, inspire them, make them kinder, give structure to their lives, connect them to their parents and grandparents, or provide an answer to the rather unsettling business of finding oneself briefly alive in an enormous universe without an instruction manual.

All of that is interesting, and some of it is certainly beautiful.

But sincerity, comfort, tradition, intelligence, and a room full of people agreeing with one another are not enough to establish that the dragon is actually there.

So you return, somewhat tediously, to the original question:

“What observation could distinguish between these two possibilities?

1) There is an invisible, floating, heatless, intangible dragon in the garage.
or
2) There is actually no dragon in the garage.”

You continue, unabated:

“Because if no conceivable observation could distinguish one possibility from the other, and every failed attempt to detect the dragon can simply be accommodated by inventing another property of the dragon, then we have reached a peculiar situation. The claim has been constructed so that nothing we observe can count against it. There is no longer any obvious way to test whether it is true.”

By now nobody is particularly happy with you.

You have, after all, been invited to contemplate the remarkable properties of a dragon, and somehow you have managed to turn a beautiful evening into a boring seminar on epistemology. Boo to you.

You notice that everyone is now rather uncomfortable with your presence.

You think that, in the end, perhaps you have not learned very much about dragons, but you have certainly learned quite a lot about human beings.

You have dinner alone that evening. The others may have escaped your incessant questioning, but the questions, annoyingly, have followed you home.

* No dragons were harmed while writing this piece.

* Carl Sagan's "The Dragon in My Garage" is a famous thought experiment from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World that illustrates the burden of proof and why untestable claims are meaningless.

Sachsen-Anhalt 2026 election results

The result in Sachsen-Anhalt is historic. The last ARD projection I saw put the AfD at 44.0%, CDU 17.5%, SPD 9.2%, Greens 8.9%, Linke 8.6% and BSW 5.1%. The AfD has more than doubled its 2021 result, while the CDU has roughly halved its support. The AfD remains short of an absolute majority, so governing is another question.

Its programme calls for “remigration”, more deportations, compulsory work for asylum seekers, tighter benefits, stronger policing and citizen patrols. It wants more selection and discipline in schools, less inclusion, separate classes for some refugee children, and greater emphasis on traditional German culture.

The AfD also proposes defunding equality, integration, gender and some democracy programmes, and rolling back wind power while preserving coal and reviving nuclear energy. It combines cultural nationalism with economic populism, promising family benefits and free school meals despite an estimated annual financing gap of at least €2.2 billion.

On Europe, it wants a “Europe of nations”, rejects further transfers of sovereignty and debt mutualisation, and says Germany should be prepared to leave the Euro. Some currents openly question EU membership.

On Ukraine, it rejects sustained German support, opposes sending long-range weapons and calls for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, rewarding Russian aggression and weakening Kyiv. It wants sanctions against Russia ended, economic relations restored and a pragmatic partnership revived, while often blaming Washington, Brussels or Berlin for the confrontation. It also wants Ukraine permanently out of the EU and out on NATO.

Continued growth of the AfD would risk conflict with the Bundesbank, German industry, financial markets, European partners and the legal foundations of the European Union.

Why did almost half the electorate in Sachsen-Anhalt vote for it? Migration, crime, schools, economic stagnation and rejection of the federal government all played a role, shaped by eastern Germany’s history.

Reunification brought freedom and material improvement, but also industrial collapse, unemployment, westward migration, demographic decline and the replacement of eastern elites by western ones. Many feel ignored, abandoned and looked down upon. Eastern Germans remain underrepresented in senior institutions; in Sachsen-Anhalt, 73% said in 2024 that they are still treated as “second-class citizens”, while only 16% in a 2026 poll had strong confidence in the state’s basic functions. The AfD has capitalized on concerns about migration, energy, insecurity, Berlin politics and decisions made elsewhere.

As a state government, the AfD could redirect school curricula and funding, change administrative priorities, strengthen police and deportation infrastructure, withdraw discretionary funding from NGOs and cultural projects, and begin leaving broadcasting treaties. But it cannot rewrite Federal asylum or citizenship law, dictate foreign policy, abolish constitutional rights, overturn EU law or dismiss career civil servants. Foreign policy, defence, sanctions and monetary policy remain Federal or European matters. Still, the AfD will use its influence to slow down or disrupt Federal legislation. Almost all other political parties still reject cooperation.

It would be a mistake to treat 44% of the voters in Sachsen-Anhalt as stupid, racist or morally contaminated. The “Brandmauer” will not restore trust. Parties must credibly address migration control, public order, infrastructure, schools, rising energy costs and eastern representation, acknowledge failures and offer believable liberal democratic solutions. They must also explain clearly that undermining the Euro threatens prosperity, abandoning Ukraine emboldens Russia, ending sanctions increases dependence on Moscow, and weakening Europe damages Germany and its allies during very dangerous times. They must also force the AfD to confront arithmetic: which promises are constitutional, who pays the €2.2 billion, where will workers come from, and what would weaker European integration and abandoning Ukraine mean for German jobs, security and global influence?

At 44%, moral quarantine has largely exhausted itself. The answer is more competent government, universal rules and empirical scrutiny. It is not about more lectures on morality, but about acknowledging the problems, offering believable solutions and rebuilding trust.

AfD promises are pipe dreams. Reality may eventually collapse them, but not before they cause real damage.

Life, the Universe and Everything (4)

This is the fourth in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

In the previous essay, we moved from life that responds, to systems that bind the world, to experience that may eventually feel like something. We distinguished responsiveness from consciousness, and consciousness from sentience. The next question is agency: how information about the world, and in richer cases experience of it, comes to guide action.

An agent is a system that uses information to guide action in relation to its own condition, its surroundings, and possible future states. At its thinnest, agency is self-relevant action. A living system acts in ways tied to its own maintenance. The world is no longer just happening to the system. It is being used by the system.

Agency becomes richer when action becomes flexible. The system learns from what happened before, adjusts to present conditions, and behaves differently when circumstances change. A conscious being may have experience without much abstract reasoning. A non-conscious system may perform difficult calculations without anyone being home inside. Intelligence, in the sense we are considering here, is the capacity to use information to adapt action to changing conditions. It is agency made flexible.

The intelligent agent does not encounter the world as a neutral catalogue of facts, but as a world of relevance: danger, shelter, food, obstacle, companion. Things matter because they open or close possibilities for action. The world becomes not only what exists, but what can be done with what exists.

To act intelligently, a system must allow possible futures to influence present action. It does not need language or abstract thought for this, but it does need some way to connect action with consequence. The future enters the present as expectation.

Memory gives agency depth, because the past can become part of present action. Attention gives agency focus, because no system can use everything the world offers at once. Learning gives agency flexibility, because the world has the inconsiderate habit of changing.

More complex forms of agency often involve some kind of self-model. This means that the system tracks itself as the thing acting: its condition, limits, capacities, and possible actions. The self is a practical structure that helps an organism coordinate perception, memory, action, and consequence around its own continued existence. A simple organism may have only a minimal boundary between inside and outside, but a more complex animal may have body awareness, memory, expectation, and social recognition. In humans, the self becomes elaborate enough to include identity, ambition, shame, and hope.

A richer self-model can deepen agency. A being that models itself as the one acting can compare possible actions and select among them. At greater levels of complexity, an agent can also evaluate some of its own habits and, through reflection and practice, alter which responses become more likely in the future. This does not require us to solve the ancient problem of free will. For the cases we are considering, flexible choice among possible actions is enough. For now, we can simply say that intelligent agency involves flexible action guided by memory, prediction, and self-relevance.

This naturalistic account also helps explain why intelligence takes many forms. Different environments reward different capacities. Predators, prey, tool-users, and social animals all face different problems. Intelligence is not a single ladder. It is always intelligence for something, somewhere, under particular pressures.

Human intelligence is not detached from this broader pattern. We are agents with memory, prediction, self-models, and flexible action. Our particular kind of intelligence was also shaped by social life. We became human among other humans, and other agents are among the most complicated things any mind can encounter.

A social world is made of intentions, threats, promises, loyalties, and expectations. To live among agents, a mind must model not only what things are, but what others may know, want, remember, or do. This may be one of the great engines of intelligence. A solitary practical problem can be difficult, but dealing with another flexible mind is a challenge on a whole new level.

And perhaps here we can see the first outline of culture. Once agents communicate, imitate, teach, and remember together, intelligence begins to escape the limits of the individual. Knowledge can accumulate. Tools can improve. Stories can preserve experience beyond a single lifetime. Minds become unbound from time and can begin to shape other minds. But we’ll leave that for later.

For now, the important threshold is agency. Responsiveness means that a system is affected by conditions. Life uses information to maintain itself. Agency is that self-relevant regulation expressed through action. World-binding integrates information into a perspective. Where experience exists, it can further shape action. Intelligence develops when action becomes flexible, predictive, and adaptive.

The ethical picture also becomes deeper now. A sentient being can suffer, but an agent can also be confined, manipulated, deceived, or stripped of meaningful possibilities. Harm is not only pain. For more complex agents, harm can also be the narrowing of a life.

This is why practical freedom is important, though we are not yet arguing ethics. Practical freedom is the space in which agency can operate. Greater agency creates additional ways in which a being can be harmed when its possibilities are narrowed. Of course not all agents, be they biological or artificial, are morally identical. But once agency exists, we must also consider what kinds of lives beings are capable of pursuing, and what it means to prevent them from doing so.

When we are specifically thinking about an artificial system, it may already process information, select actions, learn from feedback, and operate in complex environments. That does not automatically prove consciousness or sentience, nor does it by itself confer moral status. But if an artificial system were to bind information into experience, develop memory, model itself as the agent of its own actions, form preferences, and suffer from the frustration or destruction of its possibilities, then dismissing it merely because it is artificial would become harder to defend. The substrate, once again, is not the point. It is the organization that matters.

So the chain has moved one more link. Matter may become organized complexity. Organized complexity may become life. Life may bind the world. World-binding may become experience. Experience may guide action. Flexible action, shaped by memory and prediction, is the beginning of intelligence. And as we have seen here, intelligence does not always remain trapped inside individual beings. It can disperse. Once agents communicate, teach, imitate, and build shared worlds, something new happens. Intelligence becomes collective. Which brings us to culture.