Berlin celebrates political star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Breaking away from the USA? The idols of the left still come from there. Berlin is celebrating political star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But she also brought an unpleasant message.

It's off to a great start. Namely, with Berlin state politician Franziska Giffey on stage in front of almost 1,200 people, fussing with the dress of New York world leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Giffey has brought her guest a small Berlin bear, blue with a pink ribbon, "as a kind of Glücksbringer." Blue is the color of the Democrats in the USA, Giffey says, and as for pink, well, she should think of women. Then she promptly ties the bear on Ocasio-Cortez.

Welcome to the auditorium of the Technical University of Berlin, welcome to "A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," or AOC. She's so famous that her name has long since become a globally recognized abbreviation. AOC was recently at the Munich Security Conference, and the New York Times clocked her, as if we were at the Olympics, to count the seconds it took Ocasio-Cortez to answer a tricky foreign policy question about Taiwan (reportedly twenty). Yes, that's how significant she's become, no longer just the rising star of the left in the US, but, according to rumors, even a potential presidential candidate. She's the woman who might just stop Donald Trump (and JD Vance) and save American democracy.

All of this now resonates throughout this evening at Berlin University. We won't learn anything new today about Ocasio-Cortez's presidential ambitions. But we will learn quite a bit about why she serves as a role model for so many on the German left, what these leftists want to learn from Ocasio-Cortez – and which of her pieces of advice they'd rather not hear.

"Your presence here is important," Franziska Giffey declared at the beginning. And a woman in the second row nudged her companion in the side: "Now we're going to get a little bit of Hope, aren't we?" Hope, that was the slogan of Barack Obama, the last, and even greater, American savior figure, whom the Germans (and especially) liked to emulate. More than 200,000 Berliners crowded in front of the Victory Column during his visit in 2008. Back then, Obama - and perhaps this was to his advantage - wasn't even president yet, but a promise.

AOC represents a new promise, albeit only for a smaller, more left-leaning segment of the political spectrum. This evening, under the gracious and helpful moderation of SPD Member of Parliament Isabel Cademartori, she demonstrates why.

Ocasio-Cortez recounts her story once more. She tells of her origins, her Puerto Rican family from the Bronx, the early death of her father, and how she returned home from university to support her family as a waitress. She describes how she first became involved in her neighborhood, then in Bernie Sanders' campaign, and finally, in 2018, against all odds and one of the most influential Democratic politicians, won first the primary and then a seat in the House of Representatives. A political tale from the so-called land of opportunity, and as a German, one is tempted to think: Something like that would be impossible here, in the land of endless local party meetings.

But wait, Ocasio-Cortez interjects: "The most consequential decision of all is to resist cynicism. That's the very material successful political movements are made of." The moderator asks for her advice to young people who want to get involved. "There are no actions too small, no commitment or networking too insignificant," Ocasio-Cortez replies. "We are all just drops that together make an ocean." Such pathos simply wouldn't fit into any local German party branch.

Ocasio-Cortez also finds kind, even rousing, words for the much-maligned German healthcare system: Universal health insurance in this country is "a sign of recognition for the universality of human dignity," she says. And surely it's no coincidence that it was established in many European countries after the barbaric experience of the Second World War. One might be tempted to briefly salvage the honor of old Bismarck, who introduced statutory health insurance in Prussia as early as 1883. Even if, from an American perspective, these are probably just historical footnotes, unnecessary for the left-wing, class-conscious populism with which Ocasio-Cortez hopes to win back Trump voters. But tonight, it might be important after all.

Because here in Berlin, the question is ultimately what aspects of AOC's populism could be brought across the Atlantic to Germany and translated – and how. And for that, these small and large differences do indeed matter. For universal healthcare, which Ocasio-Cortez fights for in the US and is therefore demonized as a communist, none of the AOC fans applaud here, where it's commonplace. Here, it's simply taken for granted.

Not only old transatlanticists, but also young leftists repeatedly and strangely mimic American dynamics, as if they had no rhythm of their own, no reality of their own. For example, police violence exists in Germany too, but thankfully the incidents here are several notches away from the structural violence of the US police – and yet a segment of the German left all too readily joins in the "Abolish the Police" slogans from overseas. What might seem appropriate over there appears inappropriate here. Such dynamics can only be explained by the fact that even many left-wing Germans subscribe to a vulgar transatlanticism: They can turn up their noses at "the Americans," but are ultimately doomed to copy them.

Ocasio-Cortez's copying extends even to her choice of clothing. In 2021, she appeared at the Met Gala, the annual celebrity showcase in New York, wearing a dress with the words "Tax the rich" written on it in blood-red paint. Last week, Austrian Green Party politician Lena Schilling appeared at the Vienna Opera Ball wearing the same slogan. Perhaps the true hegemony of the USA is revealed in this: that even when Europe actually wants to break free politically from the United States, it still believes it can find its political recipes and symbols there.

What people apparently prefer not to emulate is a willingness to form painful coalitions. Franziska Giffey is booed by part of the audience at the beginning because she spoke out against the Gaza protests, even at the Technical University. During the Q&A session, a young man asks Ocasio-Cortez how he is supposed to work with the SPD "if they aren't doing enough against the CDU and similar forces." Ocasio-Cortez takes a breath.

“I was treated terribly by my party at first,” she says, “but we all have to take some blows.” It’s tough when the very people you depend on as political partners are the ones who put you down. “But we have to learn how to resolve conflicts and how to stick together despite those conflicts,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “We have to be able to be very angry with each other and still know who the real enemy is.” At that, part of the room applauds loudly - but the other part adds fuel to the fire.

How can she even appear alongside SPD politicians, especially now that the Left Party in Berlin has a real chance of defeating the SPD, someone asks. After all, the Social Democrats, by approving arms deliveries to Israel, are complicit in an Israeli genocide in Gaza. And so Ocasio-Cortez suddenly finds herself in the Berlin state election campaign, and if she weren't so professional and friendly, one might get the impression that she's a bit annoyed by the squabbles here: She's meeting with the Left Party tomorrow, she explains, almost briskly, and anyway: "We have to work in alliances, we have to work in alliances; if we go our separate ways, we will lose!"

The two-party system in the US forces Ocasio-Cortez to form alliances even with those supposedly elitist Democrats against whom she originally ran. And in a country governed by Trump, one's priorities are simply, by necessity, clearer than in a Berlin under Kai Wegner and Franziska Giffey.

But what, despite these differences, holds together the international left, which Ocasio-Cortez herself is speaking about this evening? The struggle against high rents, the cost of living, and inequality certainly works in Berlin just as it does in the Bronx. The situation isn't the same, but the pattern is. The left is classically Marxist in its resistance to "the isolation and destruction of our communities that capitalism aims for," as Ocasio-Cortez puts it. "It is okay to be angry about capitalism," was the famous phrase once attributed to her mentor, Bernie Sanders.

Ocasio-Cortez herself could also be a common denominator for many, especially young, leftists. Several in the audience explained that they had entered politics because of her and were now running for office in Berlin. So perhaps AOC fans could soon be sitting in district assemblies in Steglitz-Zehlendorf and Pankow, and elsewhere, if they aren't already there.