D The wake-up call that tenant association manager Wibke Werner wanted to use to wake up the 36 members of the SPD parliamentary group was perhaps not necessary at all. The increase in asking rents in Berlin is 132 percent in 15 years. Is that an explosion or almost more? When rents are rising in the capital, sometimes even language cannot keep up with reality.
And politics usually lags behind like a dachshund anyway. But now the SPD parliamentary group has made a remarkable mark at its retreat in Rostock. And this opens the competition for the best policy against the skyrocketing rents with the Left Party.
There is no coalition without expropriation: The Left and its top candidate Elif Eralp decided early on. Maybe too early? What if a drastic regulation of rents in existing properties is possible without the socialization of large private corporations? And what if that might actually turn out to be significantly cheaper than an expropriation worth billions?
Questions like these will most likely arise at the start of the first explorations after the elections on September 20th. You don’t have to be a prophet, just look at Brandenburg.
It’s hard to imagine what will then be put to the test
In Potsdam, Finance Minister Robert Crumbach came around the corner with a new financial forecast at the beginning of the coalition negotiations between the SPD and CDU. There would be funding gaps of three billion euros in the budget for 2027 and 2028. A very bad start to a new government alliance. The collapsed SPD-BSW coalition had previously used up all reserves.
Cash collapse in Berlin too
In Berlin, too, there will be a collapse in the purse strings after the election. And, unsurprisingly, it will also show that there will no longer be any reserves. A left-wing Senate, regardless of leadership, will not be able to distribute money. He will have to save wherever he can.
It’s hard to imagine what will then be put to the test. Cold help? Research? Close the opera? No ecological conversion to a sponge city? Everything possible.
In such a situation, the Left Party in particular will have to explain how it intends to counter-finance the expropriation that has been declared a red line. It certainly won’t cost 40 billion, as SPD parliamentary group leader Raed Saleh claims. But even a burden of 10 to 17 billion, which a study by the Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Expropriate Initiative assumes, would be difficult to meet without making savings elsewhere.
It would probably cost significantly less not to expropriate the private companies but to put them on the chain. Social quota and rent register in a stricter housing security law, rent and profit caps based on socialization paragraph 15 of the Basic Law: Of course, the housing companies also have to be compensated for these interventions in the market. But significantly less than in the case of expropriation.
With the SPD’s serve there is now a second ball in the field. The left would be well advised not to knock him out again straight away. Unless the commitment to expropriation does not serve to regulate the housing market, but rather a completely different goal: not really wanting to govern and thereby take responsibility.