The office of a left-wing politician who’s poised to become Berlin’s mayor accidentally leaked text in which she expresses fear for her family’s safety after naming a supporter who’s accused of having ties to Palestinian terrorists, Der Spiegel reported on Thursday.
Elif Erlap, whose Die Linke Party emerged as the largest in last month’s elections in Berlin, wrote in a private correspondence with her spokesperson: “I cannot endanger myself and my family for Der Spiegel. What do we do now? Can we cancel the entire interview?”
The comment was about the paper’s insistence on publishing a reference by Erlap to an alleged supporter of Hamas and the PFLP Palestinian terrorist groups who had attended Die Linke party events, Ibrahim Ibrahim.
The head of the Berlin State Parliament faction of the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right party of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told Tagesspiegel in reaction to the affair that Die Linke’s prospective coalition partners on the left must end talks on forming a coalition with Die Linke.
“If the woman who’s supposed to govern Berlin shrinks from publicly naming terrorist sympathizers out of fear for herself and her family, while parts of her own party are making common cause with precisely these circles, then the reasonable members of the Greens and the SPD [the Social Democratic Party of Germany] must finally pull the emergency brake,” he said.
Erlap got to talking about Ibrahim during an interview that Erlap had given to Der Spiegel earlier this week. The journalist asked Erlap about allegations of antisemitism by some Die Linke supporters. She said the party was committed to fighting antisemitism, adding she “hadn’t anticipated that certain boundaries might be crossed at individual events.” The interviewer asked her if this was a reference to Ibrahim. She confirmed that it was.
Ibrahim has been described as a representative of PFLP, and who was photographed with Ferat Koçak, a Die Linke Bundestag member, and Vanessa Emde, a newly elected Berlin state lawmaker, at the party’s Neukölln election-night celebration on Sept. 20.
Der Spiegel gave the quotes from the interview to Erlap’s office for approval. Her office asked any reference to Ibrahim be removed. Der Spiegel, declined to comply.
The email from the spokesperson to Der Spiegel accidentally contained internal correspondence in which Erlap told the spokesperson that she regretted referencing Ibrahim, expressing a fear for her family’s safety in this context.
The Berlin State Criminal Police Office advised Erlap “never to mention specific names,” she told the spokesperson. This advice followed harassment of Erlap over allegations that her party had ties to crime bosses, but “Now it’s about people with ties to Hamas,” Erlap said in the internal correspondence, according to Der Spiegel.
Ibrahim Ibrahim is described by the monitoring organization Democ as a longtime PFLP activist and by the Values Initiative, a German Jewish advocacy organization, as a PFLP spokesperson. The PFLP, or Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a designated terrorist organization.
A few days after the Berlin state election, Ibrahim traveled to Istanbul to attend a conference with figures from Hamas, according to a Tagesspiegel report. Hamas is also recognized as a terrorist group in Germany, along with Hezbollah.
During a speech last year, Ibrahim called slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who oversaw Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, a “steadfast leader” and “martyred hero,” according to the Democ watchdog’s report on Ibrahim from that year. Ibrahim also said Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of Hezbollah, deserves “tremendous respect,” according to the 2025 report.
