Berlin anti-AfD protest: Antifascist groups also target SPD and CDU

Queer activism is also under attack in Marzahn-Hellersdorf Photo: Florian Boillot

Interview by Timm Kühn

On Friday, the AfD launches its election campaign for Marzahn-Hellersdorf. Antifas are countering with a concert – and also declaring war on the SPD and CDU.

taz: Ms. Warkentin, you have been active against neo-Nazis in Marzahn-Hellersdorf for years. What role do the right-wingers play in the district?

Mika Warkentin: The AfD received the highest approval here in the last elections across Berlin, 31 percent of the second votes in the last federal election. Gottfried Curio won the only direct mandate in Berlin here in 2025, and in the last state election, the two only AfD direct mandates also came from here. Many of the young Nazis from groups like "Deutsche Jugend Voran" and the old Nazis from III. Weg are up to their mischief here. Just this week, there was an arson attack on a refugee shelter here. What can I say? The situation is shitty.

taz: On Friday, the AfD launches its election campaign in Marzahn-Hellersdorf with a rally at Forum Marzahn. What is the AfD planning?

Warkentin: AfD rallies are pretty boring. They are not participatory events for citizens – there's one person who speaks, the others listen, and then they leave. What's dangerous is how they will again spread their nationalist propaganda on stage to push through tax cuts for the rich. You can also see this well in the AfD's handling of the referendum to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen. Over 55 percent in the district voted for it, the AfD is naturally against it. We want to make it clear that the AfD has no viable solutions for social inequality, quite the opposite.

taz: At the counter-protest, which you are organizing with other antifascist initiatives from the neighborhood, you will also voice clear criticism of the austerity policy. Why?

Warkentin: Our goal is to improve the living conditions of our neighbors and ourselves. You can see the current attacks on the welfare state by the governments at the federal and Berlin levels: it's all about rearmament and social cuts. Refugees are supposed to receive only bread, water, and soap. When we call in sick, we are accused of being lazy. The poor are begrudged even the dirt under their fingernails, so that former Blackrock supervisory board chairman Friedrich Merz can give gifts to the rich. We organize ourselves in the neighborhood against this, against the neo-Nazis, but also against the bourgeois politics that make life increasingly precarious for many people in Marzahn-Hellersdorf.

taz: Despite all the criticism of the cuts, don't you need broad alliances extending into bourgeois politics to fight the right-wing extremists?

Warkentin: We are not friends of the current government and no longer have any trust in any supposed firewall. It has become more than clear in recent years that it doesn't hold. In our local antifascist work, there is no relying on the bourgeois parties; instead, the problems are brushed aside and we are called troublemakers. They cut funding for our youth clubs, queer projects, and women's shelters – and then after the terrible attack on the CSD, they stand up and say it's an "attack on our values"? That's a mockery given the policies they implement.

taz: What are your plans?

Mika Warkentin grew up in East Germany and has been active in feminist contexts for years. She is part of "M6 Antifa," a queer-feminist antifa group from Marzahn-Hellersdorf. She does not want her real name to appear in the newspaper.