Trash has suddenly become a political issue. In the closing weeks of Berlin’s election campaign, the CDU, SPD, Die Linke, and the Greens all seized on it—and the differences between them were instructive. A city’s garbage, it turns out, can sustain an entire philosophy of government.

The CDU struck a moderately authoritarian note. It treated waste as something troublesome people produce, rather than something political and economic systems permit: the same moral logic by which Friedrich Merz turns poverty and social distress into personal failure. Stefan Evers’s slogan—“Every beginning has something ‘clean’ within it” (Jedem Anfang wohnt ein ‘sauber’ inne), a domesticated Hermann Hesse—was accompanied by the familiar arsenal of crisis conservatism: more inspections, higher fines, additional “waste watchers.” Alongside a 50-cent monthly rise in household refuse fees, Evers proposed compelling welfare recipients to clean the city.

The SPD, too, made trash one of its campaign themes, along with rents and families. “Playgrounds without syringes,” its posters promised; also “Primary schools without mobile phones” and “Construction sites are for building, not stalling.” As a party of social order, the SPD cast litter as the neglect of public space. But its finger-wagging appeals never quite became a politics.

Die Linke went further. “End the trash chaos. Die Linke cleans up!” read its slogan. A five-point plan and a neighborhood cleanup in Wedding connected litter to rent, work, and social inequality. Canvassers reported that garbage and housing costs were the issues residents raised most often; clean neighborhoods, the party argued, were “a question of respect” for people already burdened by hard work and high rents. Here trash became a vehicle for systemic criticism—and potentially for systemic change. It can mark contempt, when neglect is allowed to deepen social divisions; but it can also become emancipatory, when people organize around the question of who owns the street, the neighborhood, the city.