Steffen Krach wants to get started. “We want to close the gap to the CDU and the Left Party by June or July,” said the SPD’s top candidate for the election to the Berlin House of Representatives at the SPD parliamentary group’s retreat in Rostock. “Once we have achieved that, we will get the remaining percentage in the last few months.”
Brave words in the face of this Survey lullin which the Berlin Social Democrats have been stuck for months. Most recently they were only in fifth place behind the CDU, the Left Party, the Greens and the AfD. So there really is room for improvement. “We still have eight months,” Krach tells the group about the election campaign. “We all have it in our own hands.”
It is primarily social issues that the SPD wants to focus on in the next eight months until the election on September 20th. So topics with scope. One of these is strengthening care for the elderly. “We are facing a major challenge in nursing,” says Health and Care Senator Ina Czyborra and refers to the almost one million Berliners over 60 who have now reached senior age. “All previous forecasts regarding the need for care are exceeded by the actual figures.”
They recently show that care is an emotional topic rapidly increasing costs for inpatient carefor which an average of 3,200 euros must currently be paid per month. Above all, Czyborra wants to strengthen prevention. “We want people to be able to be independent at home for as long as possible,” says the senator. “Early support delays the entry into care.”
What sounds obvious is, however, still not legally protected in Berlin. The Federal Social Code stipulates that helping the elderly is not a voluntary task. The Berlin SPD now wants to create the same standards for implementation in the districts with a so-called elderly care structure law. The CDU has so far failed to pass the law as agreed in the coalition agreement.
District centers instead of neighborhood canteens
Now the SPD is increasing the pressure. The aim of the law, according to a resolution passed by the 36 MPs on Friday, is to “prevent loneliness and isolation” and “support a self-determined life in your own home”. Advice and support should be close to home, accessible at a low threshold and regardless of income or place of residence. The SPD is primarily focusing on the expansion of district centers and neighborhood clubs. There are currently 48 such centers.
“The issue has so far reached the public with neighborhood canteens and food for three euros,” says MP Dennis Buchner in the direction of the Left Party. Whose Top candidate Elif Eralp had demandedto set up a community canteen in every district. “We have to make the topic sexier,” says Buchner. Because district centers and neighborhood clubs are often overcrowded, we could also think about the multiple use of rooms, for example in compartment schools.
Old, but sexy. For the SPD, which has recently been badly hit, the old people’s care structure law, which has so far sounded less erotic, is also an attempt to sharpen its profile as a people’s party. “There is a longing for reason,” says parliamentary group leader Raed Saleh, also knowing that the top candidate has his back. Steffen Krach emphasizes: “The majority of Berliners don’t want shrill politics.”
We have to make the topic of elderly care sexier
Dennis Buchner, SPD
Not shrill, but sensible: the SPD also claims this in its rent policy. A socialization of living space like this Referendum to expropriate German housing and the Left Party, faction leader Raed Saleh continues to reject it. However, the instruments that the SPD pulled out of the box in Rostock show that the party has understood that it cannot get out of the polls by saying “business as usual”. Because the 2026 election campaign will also be a rent election campaign. In the last 15 years alone, asking rents have increased by 132 percent, it is calculated Tenants Associations managing director Wibke Werner to the comrades in Rostock.
From now on, the SPD wants to pursue a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, there should be a tightening of the Housing Security Act a social quota should be introduced. Private owners should have to rent some of their apartments to those entitled to WBS. Social housing could not only be created in new buildings, but also – subsequently – in existing buildings. The Left Party and the Greens have already proposed similar draft laws.
“We want to make the housing market social again through an order that ensures permanently affordable rents, limits speculation and guarantees investments in existing properties, climate protection and new buildings,” says a resolution passed on Saturday.
Mietendeckel reloaded
The toolbox that the SPD decided on at the weekend also includes a new push to cap rents. Unlike the rent cap imposed by Karlsruhe in 2021, this time the new initiative will be based on socialization paragraph 15 in the Basic Law. Already in the summer, MP Sebastian, who switched from the Left to the SPD Schluesselburg in an interview with the taz spoke of this paragraph as a “sleeping giant” that needed to be awakened.
In order to protect itself legally, the group has… Bielefeld legal scholar Simon Kempny A report has been commissioned, which should be available in the spring. Kempny, himself present in Rostock, is of the opinion that a federal state like Berlin can also apply Paragraph 15.
Almost combatively, Kempny encourages his comrades. “It takes a great deal of political courage to embark on this path,” he says. “If you try something, you can fail.” But not trying is not a solution either.
Finally, a third lever for regulation is a rent register, which Berlin is now set to introduce without corresponding federal regulations. This would mean that for the first time, data about each individual apartment, the rent amount and the owner could be collected and handed over directly to the public prosecutor’s office in the event of suspicion of rent usury. For Schlüsselburg, such a cadastre could be something like “a game changer,” as he emphasized at the meeting.
The MPs and their parliamentary group leader made a sincere effort at the weekend to point out the successes that the SPD has claimed since the repeat election in the black-red alliance. For example, the Faster Building Act, but also the new police law. For the Allotment Garden Area Protection Actwhich was fought over for a long time with the CDU, says Raed Saleh: “People are relieved.” And Saleh attests to Steffen Krach having a “gut feeling”. “Kai Wegner has no gut feeling,” says Saleh, alluding to the tennis affair surrounding the power outage in Steglitz-Zehlendorf.
The SPD’s gut feeling also includes revisiting an issue that has already been neglected – the equal representation of men and women in the Berlin House of Representatives. Corresponding laws in Brandenburg and Thuringia have been struck down by the courts. But now there is a new possibility with the reform of the electoral law in the Bundestag, it is said.
The SPD receives support from Silke Ruth Laskowski. The lawyer from the University of Kassel says that the right to vote is a “key to democracy”. Accordingly, women should be represented there according to the proportion of the population.
But in fact it is Proportion of women in the House of Representatives at less than 38 percent. While the Left and the Greens have already achieved parity, the SPD only has 44 percent. In the CDU, 25 percent of the representatives are women, in the AfD 13 percent.
“We are sorted, no one can do it better than us,” says SPD parliamentary group leader Raed Saleh at the end of his speech. “And we have the best candidate. Steffen Krach.”
But he still has to find his role. Is a boycott of the World Cup in the USA, which the SPD’s top candidate brings up at the end of his speech, actually one of the urgent problems facing Berliners?
But Krach also says: “We need less polarization and more problem solving.” It shouldn’t sound shrill, but somehow still sexy.