Who owns the city? Thoughts on Election Sunday

On today's election day in Berlin, I was thinking above all about all the people who were denied their basic right to vote. In addition to people without registered residence due to the precarious housing conditions in this gentrified city, this also includes people without German citizenship who are either still waiting for lengthy bureaucratic procedures or were not even allowed to apply for naturalization due to the lack of “economic independence”.
I was thinking about all those people who suffer from chronic illnesses such as Long Covid or ME/CFS and cannot vote themselves - and who do not receive sufficient support to apply for a postal vote or to be represented by proxy. To all those who have been legally deprived of their right to vote or who have never been allowed to vote due to a disability. And most of all, I thought about homeless people whose voting cards weren't even issued.

The taz article also shows that this is not a fringe phenomenon.Non-voters in Berlin: You have no choice", which responds to a current calculation by the Integration Media Service. According to this, almost 864,145 Berlin women of voting age were not allowed to vote in the election for the House of Representatives. This corresponds to 25.7 percent of all registered Berlin women over the age of 16 - i.e. more than a quarter of the people in this city.

Even if we are all sure that going to the ballot box does not end the inhumane system that has failed these very people, today they have been excluded from any democratic participation and co-determination.

It is particularly important to me at this point to draw attention to the situation of the people in the Hugo House. The occupation is one of the first in a long time to break the Berlin Line and not be evacuated after 24 hours. Since Tuesday evening, the residents have been holding out in the house and defending the home they have lived in for two years. In the first 48 hours, no food was even allowed to be brought into the house. Since then, every food handover has been accompanied by the police once a day because the local security company is blocking basic supplies and looking for countless flimsy reasons to portray the vigil supporters as dangerous.

The people in the house were also not allowed to give us supporters a power of attorney that would have allowed them to vote for them. But these brave people are not simply giving up their right to vote. They are a crucial part of the current fight for open spaces and the question of who owns the city. In addition, if they leave the house in the current situation, in which it can be assumed that the owner will barricade the house, they are at risk of becoming homeless again.
This is what happened to some of the people who can no longer go back into the house due to the blockade and have now been forced to sleep in the vigil camp in front of the Hugo House for over six days.

The unscrupulous behavior of a Viennese real estate investor provoked the price that both the residents in the house and the people in front of it pay.
But the city of Berlin and its parliamentary representatives also bear a decisive share of responsibility, as they - with the exception of Vasili Franco - stand idly by as this cold eviction attempt is carried out using the “starvation” method, without a legal title.

So my appeal is: Come by and show your solidarity with the people of Hugo Haus - people who are fighting for self-determination, autonomy and freedom by showing an alternative to the gentrification that is eating away at the soul of our city. The Hugo Haus is a place of utopia, community and lived anarchist practice.

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https://t.me/HUGOhausSchandfleck

Alerta, Alerta – Hugo House remains

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