“I Was Naive”: Ferat Koçak Reveals Full Communication With the Remmos
The Neukölln MP shared his Instagram and WhatsApp chats with Die Zeit, and has stepped back from the interior committee amid “attacks on my person.”
Ferat Koçak, the Die Linke parliamentarian for Neukölln, has been under fire since the election — and now, in the name of transparency, he's given a lengthy interview with Die Zeit, published yesterday, during which he shared printouts of all his chats with Firas Remmo. As anyone who's been even remotely following events will know by now, Firas is the son of organised crime figure Issa Remmo, who turned up in person at Die Linke's election watch party in Neukölln and helped kick off an almighty media storm.
The resulting press campaign has shown some of the worst tendencies of the German media, with lowlights ranging from attacks on election winner Elif Eralp over her past membership of a left-wing legal aid organisation to a Bild column addressed to newly elected Linke state MP Martha Kleedörfer, musing on whether young left-wing women are secretly drawn to "authoritarian gangster types." And while much of the reporting around Koçak has been "hurtful, discriminatory, and marked by insinuations" (as the politician put it on social media), the details are at once revealing, puzzling and frightening.