Housing, order and exhaustion are pulling some young Turkish Berliners toward the AfD

CORRECTIV approached 110 Turkish-origin Berliners in Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Wedding and Spandau; 25 agreed to extended street interviews. Of the 19 who disclosed their 2025 federal vote, eleven planned to switch parties, and nine of the 25 leaned toward the AfD. Six of the seven firm AfD voters had previously chosen the CDU or SPD.

This is explicitly not a representative survey. The refusals were numerous and sometimes hostile, and the sample cannot estimate support across Berlin’s Turkish community. Its value is explanatory: the interviews show how people with German passports and family histories of migration can interpret housing scarcity, rising prices, public disorder and administrative failure through an anti-immigration frame. One 30-year-old described a dilapidated room costing more than half her income and a viewing attended by over 110 people; she moved from the CDU to the AfD.

The same material pressure does not dictate one politics. Another interviewee blamed corporate landlords and moved from the SPD to Die Linke. A CDU voter switched to the SPD because he believed the right had replaced real migration problems with radical non-solutions.

The revealing tension is the belief among some AfD-curious respondents that exclusion will not reach them: they imagine a return to the orderly Germany their grandparents entered as guest workers, even though that country debated whether those families should remain. The portrait does not prove a demographic realignment. It shows how failure by mainstream parties to supply housing, competent services and a credible language for migration leaves sharply different movements competing to explain the same exhaustion.