An MP from Germany’s Left Party posted a controversial video on Instagram over the weekend in which she uses profanity against Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump, mainstream media, and people who disagree with her.
“Fuck the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. Free the occupied lands of Palestine. Fuck the war criminals Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Fuck the mainstream media and anyone who disagrees with us,” said 33-year-old Cansın Köktürk, a Bundestag lawmaker from North Rhine-Westphalia and the Left Party’s social-policy spokesperson.
“It’s free Palestine until our very last breath or until Palestine is free, whichever one comes first,” she added before ending with, “Assalamu alaikum.”
During the video, she is shown walking through Bochum.
The post appeared as the Left Party, the Social Democrats and the Greens hold exploratory talks on a possible coalition in Berlin after the Sept. 20 state election.
Handling of antisemitism and Israel policy has been a point of friction in those discussions, according to reports from German newspaper Tagesspiegel. Several Left Party members of the Berlin state legislature have been associated with sharp anti-Israel positions.
Köktürk was fined €2,000 in September after repeated interruptions in the Bundestag. During a speech by Alternative for Germany (AfD) lawmaker René Springer, she shouted, “That is racist shit.” After Vice President Andrea Lindholz of the Christian Social Union (CSU) called her to order, Köktürk said, “Now you are protecting the fascists.”
Lindholz issued further calls to order; the fine followed because Köktürk had accumulated three within three sitting weeks.
Köktürk later wrote on Instagram that she was resisting “the normalization of racist and misanthropic content of the AfD in the German parliament” and that “no one can intimidate me or silence me with capitalist threats of fines.” She said she was collecting the penalties “as a migrant woman” and launched a fundraiser, with proceeds directed to the rescue group Sea-Watch.
Köktürk, a social worker born in Hattingen to Turkish parents, entered the Bundestag in 2025 via the Left Party’s North Rhine-Westphalia list after earlier membership in the Greens.
