Germany’s Left wing makes price of doner kebab a political hot potato

German Left-wingers have proposed subsidising the doner kebab, using billions of euros of state funds to fight the rising cost of the German staple.

The German Left Party, the successor of the ruling party in Soviet-era East Germany, wants to introduce a “doner price cap” worth almost €4 billion (£3.4 billion).

With the average doner kebab now costing about €7 in Berlin and with prices rising across Germany, the Left party want to use state funds to cap the price at under €5 (£4.20) using subsidised vouchers to make up the difference for distributors.

In a policy paper, Katherine Gebel, the party’s youth spokesman, wrote: “Every year 1.3 billion doner are eaten in Germany. If the state pays an additional €3 per doner, the price cap will cost almost €4 billion.”

The price of a doner has now become a symbol of the country’s cost of living crisis, with some warning that the dish could soon cost more than €10.

In 2023, Olaf Scholz was confronted by a voter demanding he “speak with Putin … I’m paying €8 for a doner”.

This has become something of a running gag in Germany’s normally staid politics, with the chancellor noting in a recent Instagram video “everywhere I go, mostly by young people, I get asked if there should be a price cap for doner kebabs”.

But he ruled out introducing such a policy with his trademark grin, saying “we live in a market economy, but thanks to the good work of the European Central Bank, young people can look forward to reduced inflation”.

The Green Party youth made a similar demand to the Left last week as part of their European election campaign, with Katharina Stolle, the group’s spokesman, explaining that “we won’t let some fly around the world in a private jet while others don’t even have a warm meal on the table”.

The doner kebab was supposedly invented in west Berlin in 1972 by Kadir Nurman, a Turkish immigrant, as a westernised version of traditional Turkish kebabs sold in bread.

The revolving meat snack plays an outsized role in the country’s political imagination, with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, recently being panned for taking a Berlin doner on a state visit to Ankara.