It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Spain’s housing crisis takes centre stage ahead of snap election
Longstanding anger over unaffordable housing in Spain has become a central issue in next month’s general election, as rising rents, a shortage of public housing and a boom in tourist rentals put growing pressure on households.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Monday called a snap election for 29 November, after parliament rejected housing relief measures proposed by his minority government.
It came after tens of thousands of protesters marched in Madrid and other cities to demand affordable housing, galvanised by the forcible eviction of an elderly woman, who died in hospital this week.
Maricarmen Abascal, 87, was evicted on a stretcher on 23 September after the real estate firm that owned her Madrid apartment drastically hiked the rent.
By the time she died on Wednesday, she had become the symbol of a crisis that cuts across Spanish society – young and old, renters and buyers, workers and pensioners.
The uproar at her eviction triggered national demonstrations, with hundreds of people camping in central Madrid's Puerta del Sol square.
On Thursday, the square turned into an improvised memorial to Abascal.
Protesters in the square wept and embraced each other after learning the news. Hundreds marched towards parliament on Wednesday night, some calling the death a "murder".
A deal had been reached with the real estate firm allowing Abascal to return home at a lower rent, but she ultimately spent her final days in hospital.
"She didn't have to die this way. Maricarmen wanted to die in her house," said Valeria Racu, a spokeswoman for the Madrid Tenants' Union, which supported Abascal in her years-long legal battle against the company.
Unions have called for a national minute's silence at noon on Friday.
Chronic shortage
As in other European countries, housing has long been a major public concern in Spain, particularly for young adults. Priced out of the market, many live with their parents into their 30s and beyond.
Growth in housing prices has outstripped wages in recent years.
According to the latest figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE), the average gross monthly salary in Spain is around €2,460. Meanwhile, renting a 50-square-metre apartment in Madrid cost an average of €1,170 per month in September, according to real estate portal Idealista – around half of a normal income.
Meanwhile Spanish inflation hit 4.9 percent in September – its highest level since February 2023.
Many residents in popular destinations like Barcelona complain that short-term tourist accommodation is limiting supply and driving up prices.
Investment funds with large housing portfolios are also accused of acquiring properties and hiking rents to maximise profits.
A limited supply of public housing is another major factor.
Madrid has only around 10,000 social housing units for its 3.5 million inhabitants. Such is the demand for them that some public apartments are allocated by lottery.
A history of private home ownership partly explains the small public housing stock. Under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975, authorities encouraged people to buy.
But the model is breaking down, especially for the young. While almost three in four households own their main residence, more than half of under-30s rented in 2025, according to the INE.
Jorge Galindo, director of the Centre for Economic Policy at Esade business school, said the 2008 global financial crash was a turning point for the Spanish housing market. The bursting of a real estate bubble sparked the "collapse" of construction and "the destruction of a million jobs" in the sector, Galindo told French news agency AFP.
Since then, supply has fallen from around 260,000 new builds per year in the 1990s to 92,000 in 2025, he said.
The expert warned that the country of around 50 million people risked becoming "a society of inheritors" in which home ownership depends on parents passing property to their children.
Election pressure
Successive governments have struggled to resolve the problem, which will be a central debate of next month's snap election.
Last week, Sanchez's leftist coalition proposed a series of measures including more restrictions on evictions, a ban on the speculative purchase of homes and the automatic renewal of tenant contracts.
But the minority government failed to pass them in parliament, leading Sanchez to bring forward a vote originally scheduled for 2027.
Spain's main unions have called a general strike for 11 November to increase pressure on the government over housing, wages and the cost of living.
In 2023, Sanchez's government passed a law that provided for more social housing, the regulation of rents in areas under the greatest stress and punishments for owners who left their properties empty. But the law has not stopped prices spiralling.
Right-wingers say the leftist central government has been unable to tackle the crisis after eight years in power. The main opposition, the conservative Popular Party, advocates a building boom to make up the deficit between supply and demand.
Sanchez, who is trailing in most polls, has accused the Popular Party and far-right Vox of siding with speculators and large investment funds by voting down his housing measures.
For Galindo, the debate contains a "paradox".
"Those who suffer most from the housing crisis are those with the least weight at the ballot box: young people, who vote less, and immigrants."
Saturday, October 03, 2026
If AI Is Crashing, The Story Should Be Jail In, Not Bail Out – OpEd
The author treats Oracle’s selloff and Sam Altman’s uncertainty as a possible AI-bubble warning, and argues the real risk is a 2008-style bailout justified by a “second Great Depression” claim he calls false.
Predicted rescues include taxpayer stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX, below-market loans, extra contracts, and loan guarantees—sold as cost-free but, he says, transfers to owners who already fund both parties.
He wants the market to stop overbuilding data centers, and criminal liability for AI systems that break into other firms’ systems, not self-regulation or soft government oversight.
The end-of-the-week meltdown of Oracle, coupled with Sam Altman’s admission that his Open AI team has no idea what it’s doing, has many hoping that the AI bubble is about to burst. It’s too early to know whether we have yet seen the Bear Stearns moment of the AI bubble, but we should be on guard against another bad moment of the housing bubble: the bank bailouts.
To remind folks, when most of the major banks’ greed put them at the edge of bankruptcy as the housing bubble collapsed, the government rushed to the rescue with trillions of dollars of cash, loans, and guarantees. They justified this massive intervention with the Big Lie: if we didn’t save the banks, we would be hit by the Second Great Depression.
The Big Lie was solemnly repeated in both opinion and news pieces across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats, like soon-to-be President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pushed it as hard as then-President George W. Bush and his cabinet. Dissenting opinions were largely excluded from polite discussion.
To be clear, allowing the free market to work its magic and put most of our largest banks out of business, along with many smaller ones, would have made the recession worse. But it would have done more to reduce wealth inequality than twenty Piketty wealth taxes. (Everyone’s bank accounts were guaranteed by the FDIC, so all but the wealthy would still have full access to their money.) However, the idea that we would have faced a decade of double-digit unemployment without the bailouts was complete nonsense.
We know how to get out of a depression: you spend money. That’s what we did with World War II. We spent a ton of money, and the economy came roaring back. It’s true this was due to a huge war, but war does not have a magical impact on the economy. If we spent the same money ten years earlier on building up the nation’s housing and infrastructure, as well as our health care and education system, we would not have the first Great Depression.
In the crash of the housing bubble case, we could have spent big time on health care, childcare, and other needs, quickly boosting the economy back to full employment. We managed to do that just over a decade later in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the politicians, the big money folks, and the media were not going to allow reality into the discussion. They wanted the taxpayers to save their banks and the bloated financial industry. They were prepared to say whatever was necessary to accomplish this goal.
The Second Great Bailout?
This digression is useful because people should be aware of how reality can be tossed by the wayside when the rich and powerful demand something from the government. We can’t know yet whether the Oracle meltdown, and the AI leaders’ admission that they don’t know what they are doing, will be enough to force the big money actors in the stock market to look at arithmetic, but we can hope.
And if they do see reality, and the bubble begins to deflate, and the big AI companies head towards bankruptcy, we can predict what the politicians they bought will look to do: give them huge piles of taxpayer dollars. It wasn’t for nothing that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest showered Donald Trump with money. They also have many Democratic politicians on their gift list as well. So, we need to ask what the bailouts can look like.
The most obvious one is handing OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX huge piles of money with the idea that the government is getting a stake in these companies. The claim that this would be a good idea follows the illusion that the AI companies are about to make unbelievable profits. There is no reason to think this is the case, as many of us have been arguing, and the markets might now be realizing. This would just be giving massive sums of money to some of the richest and worst people on the planet.
The idea that a government stake will allow more effective control is almost as wrongheaded. Can anyone really believe that Donald Trump, with top-level appointees like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Sean Duffy, will assign serious people to oversee the government’s stake in AI companies?
The widely recognized safety concerns with AI (it’s smaller-level disasters, not human extinction) should best be dealt with as criminal matters. Instead of begging the AI companies to slow down, we should be demanding legal action that threatens the company’s money and possibly means jail time for top execs. It is illegal to break into another company’s website. And to be clear, it was done on purpose, since they designed AI systems which they did not understand. They don’t have to do this; they did it for profit.
And to be clear, breaking into websites in the past has been taken very seriously. The Justice Department prosecuted Aaron Swartz, a young computer whiz, threatening him with 35 years in prison. This eventually drove him to suicide. His crime was breaking into JSTOR, a system for academic publications, with the intention to make them freely available online. Compare that to Sam Altman hacking into possibly thousands of systems, with the goal of making himself a trillionaire.
If we can knock the straight handout idea off the table, the next possibility is loans. This gives the convenient line that “it doesn’t cost us anything; they will pay us back, with interest.” A first point should be clear: we will be giving loans at below the market rate, since if we weren’t, there would be no point. Giving hundreds of billions, or trillions, in loans at below-market rates could be a great deal of money.
The other point is that we can end up piling loans upon loans to keep the AI companies and the illusion alive. This is the old story of throwing good money after bad. If we have $500 billion that the government could lose in a bankruptcy, isn’t it worth coughing up another $50 or $60 billion to keep OpenAI or SpaceX alive? There will also be the temptation to throw these companies government contracts, where we overpay or pay for items that are not needed. (This is also true where the government has a stake.)
The other bailout route is guarantees. In this case, they can again use the line that it doesn’t cost us anything. This also is nonsense. There is a huge market for credit default swaps, which are essentially insurance that bonds are repaid. If we provide guarantees for hundreds of billions of dollars for loans to the AI companies and/or the hyperscalers, this could amount to a massive handout to the AI boys.
What we should really want is for the market to work its magic. If the demand for the frontier AI models doesn’t justify the trillions of dollars of investment currently scheduled, and/or the risks outweigh the benefits, we should stop it as soon as possible. The resources in building out the data centers can be better used elsewhere.
That’s what the market would be telling us in a meltdown. It would be a good idea to listen this time.
All that said, here are the numbers for the past week:
About Dean Baker Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. View all posts by Dean Baker →
When AI behaves like us, we still don’t think it is conscious
A new LMU study finds that people are reluctant to attribute consciousness to artificial intelligence, even when AI behaves exactly like a human.
Stories about AI systems deceiving users, cooperating with one another or pursuing their own goals increasingly invite us to talk about them as if they had minds of their own. But do people really believe that AI is conscious? A new LMU study suggests that they draw a surprisingly sharp line between intelligent behaviour and consciousness.
What level of consciousness do people attribute to AI?
The study, recently published in the journal Cognition, was led by Dr. Louis Longin from LMU’s Chair of Philosophy of Mind together with his colleagues Dr. Bahador Bahrami, Professor Ophelia Deroy and other collaborators. “Whereas previous studies have typically asked general questions about whether AI actually has mental states, our study is the first to directly compare how people attribute the same mental states to AI and humans behaving in exactly the same way, under identical circumstances,” says Longin.
“We may be using mental terms to refer to AI, but this may only be because we lack better words,” says Ophelia Deroy, philosopher and a senior author of the study. “After all, AI is trained to act and speak like a human, so these descriptions seem natural.”
The team ran experiments involving nearly 1,100 participants. Some of them read short scenarios in which artificial agents were more or less responsive to what was happening around them, for instance by reacting to sounds or the emotional states of others. A second group read the same scenarios, but with human protagonists. All the participants were then asked to rate how conscious or aware the relevant protagonist was of its surroundings.
Behaviour and choice of language: What influences the assessment of consciousness
The result of the experiments is that the more responsive the artificial intelligence or human in the text was to their surroundings, the more conscious and aware they were judged to be. But attributions of consciousness and awareness were remarkably different: Attributions of consciousness showed a clear gap between AI and humans, and even the most responsive AI was judged to be less conscious than the least responsive human. Attributions of awareness, by contrast, followed much the same pattern for AI and humans.
“There is a growing worry in public discussion that people will see AI behaving in a human-like way and start treating these systems as if they had human-like mental states,” says Longin, lead author of the study. “We found something much more nuanced: People are quite willing to say that an AI notices things and is aware of its surroundings. But they clearly draw a line when it comes to the term ‘consciousness’. People consistently attribute less consciousness to AI than humans – even when their behaviour is identical.” The word “conscious” may sometimes be used loosely to describe the behaviour that AI agents display, but the participants nevertheless maintained a clear distinction between humans and AI.
AI is perceived to be aware, but not conscious
According to the researchers, the contrast with the term “awareness” is equally revealing. Less-loaded, more technical terms like “awareness” are applied much more similarly to AI and humans; they seem to match more closely what an agent does and do not run into deep differences regarding subjective experiences.
“Our study teaches us lessons for how we communicate about AI,” says Bahador Bahrami, who is also a senior author of the study and an expert in social neuroscience. “Companies and journalists often reach for hyped descriptions of AI models, and credit them with intentions, plans, or even moral conscience and hesitation. What our study shows is that everyday judgements are much more discriminating: People do not simply put AI and humans on the same mental scale. But the boundary also depends on which terms we use. For more neutral descriptors such as ‘awareness’, the distinction can largely disappear. That makes our choice of language important.”
University of Phoenix has published a new white paper, Three Pillars for Embracing AI at University of Phoenix, by Christina Neider, Ed.D., and Marc Booker, Ph.D., outlining the University's institutional framework for integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) across academic programs, student learning experiences, and institutional processes, policies and workflows while helping prepare working adult learners for an AI-enabled workforce.
As generative AI continues to reshape workforce experiences across industries, the white paper examines the role higher education institutions can play in helping learners develop the knowledge, skills and judgment needed to use AI effectively and responsibly. Drawing on University of Phoenix's generative AI implementation work, authors Christina Neider, Ed.D., Vice Provost of Colleges, and Marc Booker, Ph.D., Vice Provost for Strategy, share a scalable, three-pillar framework for AI adoption aligned with workforce relevance and student success.
How the AI integration framework is organized
The University’s three pillar approach is informed by the human-centered Digital Education Council AI Literacy Framework and reflects the University's broader commitment to helping learners develop foundational AI knowledge, practical skills and responsible-use habits. The three pillars of AI integration are:
Embedding AI into programs and course content
Leveraging AI tools to enhance the learning experience
Weaving AI into processes, policies and workflows
Together, these pillars reflect an institution-wide approach to AI adoption designed to balance innovation, ethical use and learner outcomes.
“The rapid evolution of Generative AI is forcing institutions to transform in order to best support students,” said Dr. Booker. “The imperative with AI in higher education is to take a wholistic institutional approach that integrates thoughtfully across governance, tools, processes and curriculum. This framework helps organize that approach in a way that builds on policy to strengthen cross-departmental connections as well as operational and academic functions.”
How the framework is being implemented
Embedding AI into programs and course content
The authors note that learners increasingly need foundational AI knowledge, practical application skills and the ability to evaluate AI-generated content critically as AI tools become more integrated into professional environments. At the University, students all have access to a generative AI platform and an elective introductory GenAI course. In order to facilitate AI understanding across all programs and courses, University of Phoenix developed a set of brief, self-paced AI essentials modules, embedded in the learning management system, where students can take to help develop AI literacy and confidence. The Phoenix Success Series, the introductory course sequence for first-year students, will also introduce generative AI as a support tool for student learning in 2026. The University has also deployed an interactive tool for creating Socratic dialogues in five courses, reaching approximately 1,300 students across disciplines through scenario-based, faculty reviewed practice. More than 20 degree programs have been strategically selected for curriculum revisions, with at least two AI-integrated summative assessments planned in each by March 2027.
Leveraging AI tools to enhance the learning experience
The paper describes how AI tools have been implemented in thoughtful way to support students and faculty, focused on improving the learning experience by making it easier to navigate so students. These tools include use cases currently being piloted and available to users at every level, such as general AI assistance for students, academic services related questions in the classroom environment, faculty-specific AI assistance, and course-specific AI assistants supporting students with content and curriculum related inquiries connected to the course they are enrolled in.
This pillar also includes forms of AI-enabled support, from broad student-service assistance to course-connected academic help inside the learning environment.
Weaving AI into processes, policies and workflows
The paper emphasizes that meaningful AI implementation extends beyond students and includes faculty, staff, policies, training and operational practices that encourage responsible use.
The authors describe how the university is applying AI to improve both academic and business efficiencies, and how this pillar reflects the position that ethical AI use requires institutions to bring policy into practice. An established philosophy on generative AI in 2023, has informed the policy development, faculty guidance and creation of AI literacy resources designed to support responsible use across the institution. Further, the paper describes how its Center for AI Resources was foundational to this effort, and has resources designed for students, faculty and staff, with over 90,000 users to date.
The framework reflects the opportunity for institutions to help learners build AI-related skills that align with evolving employer expectations and workplace demands.
“Working adult learners need meaningful opportunities to practice, improve outcomes and understand the ethical considerations that accompany AI use,” said Dr. Neider. “AI literacy requires human judgement as well as practice. By embedding AI throughout the academic experience, we can help students develop the skills and responsible-use habits increasingly valued by employers.”
About the white paper
Three Pillars for Embracing AI at University of Phoenix is an institutional white paper by Christina Neider, Ed.D., and Marc Booker, Ph.D., describing the University’s generative AI implementation experience as a scalable model for higher education. The paper describes the University’s three-pillar approach, informed by the Digital Education Council AI Literacy Framework, to integrating AI across curriculum, learning experiences, policies and institutional processes, with a focus on responsible use and working adult learners.
University of Phoenix is Built for Real Life. 50 Years Strong. The University innovates to help working adults enhance their careers and develop skills in a rapidly changing world through flexible online learning, relevant courses, academic AI pillars, and skills-mapped curriculum for associate, bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. Active students and alumni have access to Career Services for Life® resources including career guidance and tools. For more information, visit phoenix.edu.
Visual illusion reveals what today’s AI vision is missing – York University study
Using a classic visual illusion, York University researchers identify a history-dependent computation present in primate vision that current AI models fail to reproduce
Our eyes do not always tell us exactly where things are – and that may be a feature of how biological vision works, rather than simply a flaw. A new study by York University researchers uses a common illusion to ask if artificial intelligence is meant to see more like us, should it make some of the same systematic perceptual “mistakes”?
For example, after staring at something moving steadily in one direction, a stationary object viewed immediately afterward can appear slightly displaced in the opposite direction. This well-known visual illusion, called a motion aftereffect, gives scientists an unusual window into the computations underlying perception: the image itself has not moved, but our experience of where it is has changed.
“Today’s AI vision systems are impressive, but they still do not always see the world the way we do. This study captures the promise of NeuroAI and what it can do when neuroscience and artificial intelligence are brought together. By using smart experiments to reveal the computations biological vision uses and AI still lacks, we can use those insights to build better, more brain-like artificial systems,” says senior author York Assistant Professor Kohitij Kar, the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience and a member of York’s Centre for Vision Research and Centre for Integrative and Applied Neuroscience.
Current AI vision systems can often determine where an object is accurately, but they generally do not reproduce the way recent visual experience can reshape that answer. In humans, staring at motion can make a subsequently viewed stationary object appear displaced even though its pixels have not moved. The researchers found a corresponding change in the primate visual cortex – but not in the AI models they tested.
To gain better insight into the issue, the researchers examined whether artificial neural network models capture the same history-dependent changes in spatial representations seen in biological vision, or whether their position representations primarily reflect the physical properties of the image. The researchers, including the paper’s first author and York graduate student Elizaveta Yakubovskaya, used precise measurements to find out where AI differs from biological vision and how that gap could be bridged.
“Combining recordings from primate visual cortex with human perception experiments, we used motion adaptation to induce a visual illusion and make a stationary object appear slightly shifted in position, then asked whether the brain and AI showed the same effect. Human observers reported the illusion, and neural representations of position in the primate inferior temporal (IT) cortex shifted in the same direction, even though the image itself had not changed,” says Yakubovskaya.
The researchers leveraged motion adaptation to show where perceived and pixel-based positions diverge, allowing them to test the behavioral relevance of IT codes. The findings not only further our understanding of IT’s role in spatial information encoding but provide a new benchmark to evaluate dynamic vision models.
“There is a growing question in AI about whether increasingly capable systems will become more like us or increasingly different from us,” says Kar of the Faculty of Science and a member of the York-led Connected Minds. “If we want AI that works with humans and understands the world in more human-compatible ways, we cannot focus only on whether it gets the right answer. We also need to understand the computations that produce human perception and behavior. Neuroscience gives us a way to discover those computations and, potentially, build them into AI,” adds Kar.
Yorkis a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for meaningful life and career paths. York's Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. York’s campus in Costa Rica offers students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs, while at the Markham Campus, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship and industry collaboration are built into every program. York’s new School of Medicine, the first Canadian medical school to focus on community-based primary health-care education, will welcome its first cohort in September 2028 (subject to accreditation). York was recently named one of Canada’s Greenest Employers for the 14th consecutive year. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.
The macaque IT cortex but not current artificial vision networks encode object position in perceptually aligned coordinates
Article Publication Date
2-Oct-2026
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Projections: Merz's conservatives set to crash out of state parliament
20.09.2026
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) are on the brink of crashing out of the parliament in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern after latest projections showed the party falling under the 5% threshold needed to win seats.
Broadcasters ZDF and ARD both projected the CDU to win 4.9%, down from 13.3% in the last election in 2021. The result would be a nightmare scenario for Merz, whose political future has been the source of intense speculation as his approval ratings have plummeted in recent months.
Long the largest party in post-war Germany, the CDU has never previously failed to hit the 5% threshold in any state, European or federal election. Its record low of 9% was set in Bremen in 1951.
Even with initial projections showing the party above the 5% mark, Merz called the situation in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern a "disaster," while continuing to insist on the need to implement his government's unpopular reform agenda.
But falling out of the state parliament would represent a massive shock for the chancellor's party, raising fresh doubts over Merz's position after the debacle in nearby Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago.
Sunday's election was won by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on around 38% of the vote, narrowly ahead of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) on 35.5%.
The CDU was not the only party hanging close to the 5% threshold: the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) was also on 4.9% in the latest projections, while the Greens were on around 5.5%.
The Left - which also defeated the CDU to win the state election in Berlin on Sunday - was on 6.5% according to the latest projections.
(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH
German far-right AfD wins second state election in major blow to Merz
21.09.2026, DPA
Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, its second state victory in just two weeks, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative party suffered its worst-ever showing in its 81-year history, according to preliminary results.
Merz's Christian Democrats (CDU) crashed out of the parliament in the north-eastern state with just 4.9% of the vote, down from 13.3% in the last election in 2021 and just short of the 5% threshold required to win seats.
The AfD earned around 38.2% of the vote, ahead of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) on 35.5%, according to the election commission.
The populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) also missed parliament, with 4.8%, while the Greens garnered 5.7% of the vote.
The Left - which also defeated the CDU to win the state election in Berlin on Sunday - was on 6.5%.
The result is a nightmare scenario for Merz, whose political future has been the source of intense speculation as his approval ratings have plummeted in recent months.
Long the largest party in post-war Germany, the CDU has never previously failed to hit the 5% threshold in any state, European or federal election. Its previous record low of 9% was set in Bremen in 1951.
Merz admitted the result was a "disaster" but insisted he would push forward with his government's unpopular economic and social reform package, signalling he does not intend to resign.
He conceded that it was not possible to "sugar-coat" Sunday's result, but vowed "to prepare our country for the future."
"What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness and patience. I will muster these qualities - as chairman of the CDU and, above all, as chancellor of our country."
Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD's candidate for state premier, hailed a "wonderful evening" on election night, saying his party would offer to hold talks with all other factions.
(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH
Tense Berlin election finale: who is to emerge strongest in the capital?
The Left and the CDU are vying for first place, with the AfD and the Greens trailing and the SPD suffering heavy losses. An overview of parties, leading candidates, key issues and possible coalitions.
On Sunday, Berliners will vote to elect a new state parliament, the Abgeordnetenhaus, alongside the regional vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The race is wide open: the Left party and the CDU are neck and neck in the latest polls, both at around 20-23%, with the AfD at 18% and the Greens at 16% close behind. The SPD, with 10-12%, is now clearly below its 2023 result.
That means it is also unclear what the political landscape will look like after the vote.
According to recent surveys, the current black-red coalition of the CDU and SPD would no longer have a majority. The CDU’s campaign has also shifted: instead of incumbent Governing Mayor Kai Wegner, finance and culture senator Stefan Evers is running as lead candidate. Wegner announced in the summer, after months of criticism of his handling of the January power outage, that he would not run again as the party’s frontrunner.
On policy, the CDU is focusing on law and order, a more capable state and economic growth. To that end, both the police and the judiciary are to be strengthened, approval procedures accelerated, and public administration digitised.
Based on current polls, several coalition options are on the table, including a government of the Left, Greens, and SPD, or a CDU-Green-SPD alliance. Whether such constellations materialise will also depend on which parties ultimately make it into the Abgeordnetenhaus.
In the latest ZDF projection (source in German) published on 11 September, the Left stands at 23%, the CDU at 21%, the AfD at 17%, the Greens at 16%, and the SPD at 10%. On that basis, both a Left-Green-SPD alliance and a CDU-Green-SPD coalition would have a numerical majority. The current BerlinTREND (source in German) survey by Infratest dimap paints a similar picture: the Left at 21%, CDU at 20%, AfD at 18%, Greens at 16%, and SPD at 12%.
SPD fighting to stay in government
The Social Democrats have now slipped to between 10 and 12% in the polls. In 2023, they were still at 18.4%. Their lead candidate is Berlin SPD co-chair Steffen Krach from Lower Saxony, who is under investigation by the Hanover public prosecutor over allegations linked to a donation of 9,900 euros to the Berlin SPD. Krach rejects the accusations and is continuing his campaign under the slogan "Wieder Berlin" – "Berlin again" – despite them.
Substantively, the SPD, like most other parties, is focusing on affordable housing, investment and a functioning infrastructure. In its manifesto, it promises 100,000 new homes over the next legislative period and aims to increase the share of social housing in new-build projects from 30% to 50%. It also plans to invest in roads and bridges, schools, hospitals, and public transport.
Rents, housing shortages and new-build projects are among the top issues in Berlin’s 2026 election campaign Copyright AP. All rights reserved.
Affordable housing is also a central campaign issue for the other parties. According to Berlin’s Senate Department for Urban Development, Building and Housing, more than 100,000 new homes are missing in the capital. On top of that comes demand for additional housing for the roughly 200,000 people expected to move to Berlin by 2040. This translates into an average need for around 20,000 new homes per year in the coming years.
The CDU is relying above all on faster construction and more homeownership. The Greens place greater emphasis on housing oriented towards the common good. The Left, by contrast, is calling for large housing portfolios to be brought into public ownership. The AfD and FDP reject this approach and likewise want to prioritise private construction and less regulation.
The Left eyes the Red Town Hall
The Left has gained significant support since the 2023 election. At the time, it stood at 12.2%; in current polls, it is around 21-23% and is now one of the two strongest parties in the race.
Lead candidate Elif Eralp is campaigning primarily on rents and social policy. The Left is calling, among other things, for the socialisation of large housing stocks and stronger tenant protections. In public transport, social benefits and climate policy, the party also wants the state to play a bigger role.
Campaign poster of the Left’s lead candidate, Elif Eralp Euronews
The Berlin Left’s campaign is, however, overshadowed by a debate over how the party deals with antisemitism and the Middle East conflict. One trigger was a performance by rapper Dahabflex at a campaign event organised by the Neukölln district branch of the Left at the end of August, where he chanted "Yalla Yalla Intifada, Westbank, Palestine, Gaza" and "Death to the IDF" (death to the Israeli armed forces).
CDU lead candidate Evers accused Eralp of not acting decisively enough against antisemitic tendencies in her party. Eralp rejects that and stresses her commitment to combating antisemitism and protecting Jewish life. The Berlin Left has also adopted its own guidelines on dealing with antisemitism and says it wants to protect Jewish life in the city. As T-Online reports, the party’s Berlin executive invited the Neukölln district spokespeople to an extraordinary meeting at which "a unanimous decision was taken that Dahabflex’s performance was a mistake and that we reject all forms of violence", according to Eralp.
AfD also on course to double its vote in Berlin?
The AfD has also made strong gains in Berlin. In the 2023 repeat election, it took 9.1%; it now stands at 17-18% in most polls. In the latest BerlinTREND survey by Infratest dimap, it reached 18%, making it the third-strongest force behind the Left and the CDU. Compared with 2023, it has almost doubled its share of the vote.
AfD lead candidate Kristin Brinker Euronews
The party is once again led by Kristin Brinker, who is running as the AfD's top candidate for the third time. As with the Greens, however, Brinker is not widely known. In the current Infratest dimap poll (source in German), around two-thirds of respondents say they do not know Brinker, or do not know her well enough to judge her. The picture is similar to the Greens’ Werner Graf.
In the campaign, the AfD is focusing above all on migration and internal security. The party wants a halt to the admission of asylum seekers in Berlin and the "immediate deportation of all of the up to 20,000 people in Berlin who are required to leave the country".
For subsidised and state-owned housing, the AfD wants to allocate it using a points system so that it primarily benefits Berliners who have lived in the city for a long time and work in "system-relevant professions" such as the police, fire service, health care, or refuse collection. Otherwise, building should be encouraged by scrapping the property transfer tax or speeding up planning approvals.
Despite its high poll ratings, the party remains excluded from any role in government: CDU, SPD, Greens and Left all rule out forming a coalition with the AfD.
Will the Greens be the kingmakers?
The Greens are currently polling at around 16
5, clearly below their 2023 result of 18.4%. Nevertheless, they could play a crucial role in forming a government: both a Left-Green-SPD alliance and a CDU-Green-SPD coalition would have a mathematical majority in current projections.
Lead candidate Werner Graf is trying to present the Greens in a less confrontational way during the campaign. He wants to avoid the major rows of recent years, such as the dispute over Friedrichstrasse. Graf himself told rbb that the Greens "have learned from that". Instead of sharply polarising demands, he is adopting a more pragmatic tone and presenting himself as someone who can bring different parties together.
In the election arena, shortly before polling day, both the Left's lead candidate, Eralp, and the SPD frontrunner, Krach, explicitly courted cooperation with the Greens. Graf signalled openness to an alliance and called for a "progressive government". He rules out any cooperation with the AfD.
Volt, FDP and BSW battling to enter parliament
Alongside the larger parties, Volt, the FDP and the BSW are also competing to enter the Abgeordnetenhaus. For all three, the five% threshold is the decisive hurdle. Volt is standing in a Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus election for the first time and is focusing above all on digitalisation, administrative reform and faster housing construction.
The FDP wants to return to the state parliament with its lead candidate, Christoph Meyer, and is campaigning for less regulation, more private investment, and homeownership. In the final stretch, Meyer is also backed by party chairman Wolfgang Kubicki, who has appeared with him in Berlin on several occasions.
Campaign posters for BSW, Volt and the FDP in Berlin Euronews
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) is polling at 3-4% and therefore has to fight to clear the threshold for the Abgeordnetenhaus. The party is running in a Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus election for the first time and is led by Alexander King and Michael Lüders.
In this campaign, foreign and peace policies are playing an unusually prominent role for a state election. King is calling for an end to sanctions against Russia and for negotiations with Moscow. BSW also wants to improve relations with Russia and is targeting Russian-speaking Berliners. The party, moreover, wants to prevent the Russian House on Friedrichstrasse, operated by Russia, from being closed.
Vandalism: campaign posters damaged
During the current election campaign in Berlin, the police have recorded more than 1,300 incidents of damaged campaign posters between 2 August and 16 September.
Election posters in Berlin: AfD posters particularly often affected by vandalism Euronews
Posters belonging to the AfD are particularly frequently affected, according to Bild, which asked the Berlin police for figures: across the city, 801 cases of criminal damage to AfD posters have been recorded so far. Next come the CDU with 148 cases, independent candidates or lists with 102, the Left with 95, the SPD with 88, Alliance 90/The Greens with 37, the FDP with 30, BSW with 16, Volt with 13 and the ÖDP with two cases.
INTERVIEW
As far right gains ground in Germany, Berlin election tests Europe's centre
Berliners go to the polls on Sunday to elect the city-state’s parliament and district councils, in a vote taking place just two weeks after the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured a historic victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The implications could extend beyond Germany.
The AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, falling three seats short of an absolute majority in the state parliament.
The result has intensified debate about the strength of the democratic centre in Germany and beyond.
The AfD has received support from figures associated with United States President Donald Trump, including alt-right billionaire Elon Musk, while also positioning itself alongside Hungary’s former leader Viktor Orban and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Against this backdrop, what does the AfD’s breakthrough mean for Germany, Europe and the future of the political right?
RFI spoke to Bernd Hüttemann, secretary-general of the German chapter of the European Movement, a non-partisan civil society organisation that promotes European integration.
RFI: Berlin’s elections are taking place shortly after the AfD’s historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt. What does that result mean for German politics?
Bernd Hüttemann: It is something very dark, because it has really started a new era in Germany. For the first time, there is a right-wing extremist party that could potentially take power at state level.
Saxony-Anhalt is a small state, but the Länder [federal states] are powerful in Germany. They are responsible for areas such as education, policing, security and a large part of public administration. So the result will change things at that level.
It will not necessarily change the balance of power at federal level, because Saxony-Anhalt has relatively few votes in the Bundesrat [upper house of the German parliament]. But if the democratic majority becomes nervous and starts following extremist ideas, that can become very dangerous.
AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund speaks in front of a poster reading "It starts here" at a rally after the Saxony-Anhalt regional elections in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, 6 September 2026. @ AP Photo/Matthias Schrader
RFI: If you look at the map of the 2025 election results, it appears that AfD is most popular in former East Germany. How do you explain people who lived under an authoritarian communist system now voting for an extreme-right party?
BH: There was always an East-West divide. As a young West German in the 1980s, I saw a great deal of propaganda saying that East Germans were different from us. They were portrayed as living under a very bad social system and an undemocratic regime.
After the Berlin Wall came down, the divide became more complicated. Around one-third of East Germans moved to the West, particularly young people, women, skilled workers and liberal-minded citizens.
At the same time, many West Germans moved east and took senior positions. Judges, professors and many other professionals came from the West. It is not pleasant for people in the east to feel that there is a ruling class imposed from outside.
East German workers build up a section of the Berlin wall, on 15 August 1961. @ AFP
That does not mean that all of these voters are anti-democratic. But many people have little experience of taking social responsibility outside the state. They do not want to join political parties or associations. They simply want an easier life, especially after the hardship they experienced before the Wall fell.
So this is not only about an East-West divide. It is about whether authoritarian ideas can find fertile ground. That is certainly more likely in eastern Germany.
RFI: Do you believe Germany’s political diversity can act as a safeguard?
BH: Yes. Germany is a very diverse country. It contains Catholic, Protestant, atheist, Muslim and East German traditions, among many others. Its political system is also complex: it is federal, decentralised and based on cooperation with many social forces.
That makes Germany complicated and slow, but it also makes it more resilient. I would not be excessively concerned. The important thing now is for democratic movements and parties to stay together.
RFI: How much influence do Trump-style populist politics and US-based propaganda have on the AfD and German politics more broadly?
BH: The AfD has a problem here. Particularly in eastern Germany, there is not a strong appetite for American influence. On the other hand, the party has very few friends. It has Vladimir Putin. Viktor Orban congratulated the party. There are links with MAGA supporters and with Elon Musk.
The party’s psychology is perhaps this: nobody likes us, the public rejects us and everybody is trying to exclude us. So we align ourselves with people who are even more extreme.
But it could backfire. People in western Germany, as well as many liberals in the east, do not necessarily like this association.
US billionaire Elon Musk attends the AfD's election campaign kickoff in Halle via video link, on 25 January 2025. @ AP - Sebastian Willnow
RFI: Marine Le Pen is leading polls ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election. Could the AfD’s breakthrough influence the discourse here?
BH: The fear of Germany that existed during my childhood is not as widespread as it once was. But now there is a kind of flashback. People are asking: Germany was one of the most liberal countries in Europe in recent decades, including on issues such as refugees. Is it now showing its ugly face again?
That may also explain Marine Le Pen’s efforts to distance herself strategically from the AfD in the European Parliament. There was a well-known meeting in Paris with Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, where Weidel reportedly entered through a back door to avoid being photographed with Le Pen.
If France, a proud nation, moves towards the right, it will want to draw a clear line between itself and German extremism.
But that is not good for Europe, because we do not need a return to nationalism. We do not need national answers to nationalist movements in Germany. We need European answers – particularly when it comes to war, China and the United States. Europe has to remain united, and it is also developing closer links with Canada.
