While the Berlin state government, a coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD), plans to tighten the city’s police and domestic intelligence laws, accusations have emerged of questionable public funding practices in the cultural sector. The CDU-led state culture ministry is said to have awarded large sums to certain party-aligned projects, favouring Zionist lobby organisations.
The funds are said to have been allocated at the personal request of CDU state politicians Christian Goiny and Dirk Stettner. Responsibility for these “free-hand” funding decisions lies with former culture senator (state minister) Joe Chialo (CDU), who held the post until early May, and his successor, the non-partisan but CDU-aligned Sarah Wedl-Wilson.
The Greens and the Left Party now accuse the CDU and the state government of embezzling public funds and are angrily calling for a parliamentary inquiry. Green Party leaders Bettina Jarasch and Werner Graf criticised the purely party-political allocation of public resources, while several Left Party spokespeople such as Manuela Schmidt and Anne Helm complained that the Culture Senate (state ministry) was distributing funds “according to the CDU’s whims” and “in a feudal manner.” They demanded “immediate clarification and consequences.”
However, the scandal goes far beyond allegations of “cronyism”: as it turns out, the Senate’s cultural budget has been used to finance the most despicable war propaganda.
One example is the exhibition “We Will Dance Again,” devoted to the attack on the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023. High-ranking CDU politicians—Berlin’s Mayor Kai Wegner, Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer and Federal Education Minister Karin Prien—acted as patrons.
At the exhibition, the Israeli fascist and settler Elkana Federman was celebrated as a “hero of October 7.” Federman is a member of the far-right group Tzav 9, which has been sanctioned by both the EU and the United States for serious human rights violations.
On October 7, 2025, Bundestag (federal parliament) President Julia Klöckner (CDU) personally opened the exhibition. Even the SPD-aligned weekly Die Zeit cautiously remarked that the evening of the second anniversary of the Gaza war might have been an occasion to “also commemorate the civilian victims in Gaza.”
While public funds flow into Zionist projects and are used for war propaganda under the false label of “combating antisemitism,” the Berlin Senate (state executive) is simultaneously hacking away at education and culture, which are quite literally being cut to pieces.
This year alone, the Senate has slashed €130 million from the total culture budget. Severe cuts have also been made to the healthcare sector and public infrastructure, all justified with the claim that “there is no money.”
For war propaganda, beefing up the police and surveillance, however, there is more than enough money! This is the government’s response to the growing popular opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, ensuring that defending the Zionist regime remains a matter of “German state policy.”
Two years ago—reacting to October 7, 2023—the Berlin state government created a €20 million special budget for 2024–2025, which it cynically described as funding “projects against antisemitism and to promote interreligious dialogue.”
Amidst the slashing of other budgets, the Left Party and the Greens only criticised the implementation of the special funding. But both parties are fully aligned with the state government when it comes to defending “German state policy,” which means unconditional support for the state of Israel, the Netanyahu government and its genocide of the Palestinians.
There were apparently no clear rules at all for the allocation of funds from this special budget. In May 2024, the two Green Party politicians Sebastian Walter (budget spokesperson) and Susanna Kahlefeld (religion policy spokesperson) expressed outrage that “not a single euro has gone to projects against antisemitism” in the previous six months.
In 2025, under pressure from the CDU state parliamentary group, the special budget was topped up with an additional €3.4 million funding package for “projects of special political significance.” The 18 selected organisations that benefited were handpicked by CDU politicians Goiny and Stettner, and by September 2025 were able to access most of the total, roughly €2.65 million.
The single highest amount—€750,000—went to First Music Production GmbH & Co. KG for the already mentioned “We Will Dance Again (The Nova Exhibition).” In total, €1.383 million was approved—by far the largest individual allocation from this fund.
A prominent face of the exhibition is Zionist activist Dr. Melody Sucharewicz, who served as host of the exhibition and organiser of the associated commemorative event. But who is Dr Sucharewicz?
The Israeli “consultant on political communication and strategy” had already written a hate-filled commentary in the weekly Jüdische Allgemeine on January 18, 2024, denouncing critics of Netanyahu’s policies (and indirectly the judges of the International Court of Justice) as “useful idiots” of Hamas and praising the Israeli military in grotesque terms. In a March commentary in the same newspaper, Sucharewicz smeared UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese as a “rabid antisemite.” It is beyond doubt that Sucharewicz is being promoted precisely because of her aggressive defence and support of Israel.
CDU MP Goiny claimed on Facebook that, as a parliamentarian, he had the right to “make such decisions.” He is now under investigation by the public prosecutor’s office on suspicion of embezzlement of public funds.
Responding on Facebook to the accusations by the Left Party and the Greens that proper budgetary rules and oversight had been suspended, Goiny claimed that these were “attempts to hinder the fight against antisemitism—not only from the Left Party and Greens, but also within the administration.” This statement is doubly repugnant.
For Goiny, the “fight against antisemitism” is synonymous with the fight against any criticism of Israel and of German support for the genocide in Gaza. And this position is supported by every party represented in the Berlin House of Representatives (state assembly). Since October 7, they have responded to the mass protests against the genocide of Palestinians by slandering them as antisemitic.
In doing so, they endorse and justify the brutal arrest of activists and demonstrators and administrative and police intimidation of Arab and Palestinian pupils and students, as well as bans, searches and surveillance of pro-Palestine activists, and much more.
This also applies to the Left Party, which from 2016 to 2023 held the culture portfolio in the state government under Klaus Lederer. Even then, Lederer turned the concept of “antisemitism” into a weapon against critics of Israel’s murderous policies.
In January 2024, the “anti-discrimination clause” was introduced, stating that the Cultural Senate’s funding “must not benefit organisations classified as extremist and/or terrorist.” Since then, critics, pro-Palestinian activists, and artists have been systematically silenced and—where possible—financially destroyed, as in the case of the former Oyoun cultural centre. The Left Party has been an important pillar of the state in this process.
Left Party cultural policy spokesperson Manuela Schmidt emphasised the party’s agreement with the CDU on this issue. Responding to Goiny’s accusation that the Left Party and Greens were blocking “antisemitic struggles,” Schmidt wrote on the Left Party’s website: “It was and is important and right that the state of Berlin support projects against antisemitism with millions in additional funding.” After October 7, 2023, “this was exactly the signal that was needed to show that ‘Never Again is Now!’ must find its expression in political action.”
To this day, the Israeli government continues its genocide—already having killed well over 100,000 Palestinians, many of them children—in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. But none of this has altered the Left Party’s position. Its occasional lip service to Palestinian suffering is little more than a half-hearted attempt to steer growing public opposition into harmless channels.
The Berlin Left Party’s state conference last weekend once again made this clear. The party leadership, which claims to oppose “antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism,” refused to take a clear stand against the crimes of the Israeli government or the suppression of pro-Palestinian opposition.
The pro-Palestinian Left—organised in the “State Working Group for Palestinian Solidarity”—had put forward its own entirely toothless demands beforehand. They called for clearly designating the Gaza conflict as genocide and expressing solidarity with the pro-Palestinian BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction). They then withdrew these demands at the conference, with their best-known representative, Ellen Brombacher, justifying this by citing the need for “party unity above doctrinal purity on the Middle East question.”
The working class must not leave the fight against genocide and war to the Left Party. Wherever it exercises government responsibility, it supports or organises cuts in every socially significant area and endorses the rearmament and war plans of the federal government.