Berlin Voted to Expropriate the Landlords. Twice. Merz Wants to Make Sure It Never Happens Again.

In September 2021, 57.6 percent of Berliners who cast a valid ballot voted yes on a referendum to expropriate housing stock from corporate landlords holding more than 3,000 units — Vonovia and its former rival Deutsche Wohnen chief among them. The Senate sat on it for years, appointed a commission, produced a report, and did nothing. Last week, Berliners answered a second time, at the ballot box: Die Linke, running on a platform to actually implement that 2021 mandate, won the Abgeordnetenhaus election with 25.7 percent of the vote — up from 12.2 percent in the 2023 repeat election, more than doubling its share and finishing seven points ahead of the CDU. The message, delivered twice now through the only two mechanisms the state offers ordinary people to register their will, could not be clearer. Berlin's answer to the housing crisis is chancellor Friedrich Merz's cue to write a federal law making sure the answer never counts.

Merz didn't wait for coalition talks to even start. Within a day of the result he confirmed his government is drafting federal legislation to bar states from socializing large private rental portfolios at all — killing not just what Die Linke's Elif Eralp is trying to build in Berlin, but the constitutional tool, Article 15 of the Basic Law, that made the 2021 referendum possible in the first place. His stated reasoning wasn't really about Berlin. It was about "sending a clear signal to international investors that there is no expropriation of private property in Germany." Read that sentence again: the chancellor of a country where rent has outpaced wages for a decade is moving federal law specifically to reassure the asset managers who own that shortage, not the tenants living inside it.

This is what liberal democracy's guardrails actually do when the demos votes the wrong way twice. Nobody in Berlin was unclear about what they were voting for. The Vonovia-Deutsche Wohnen merger that consolidated over 565,000 units under one shareholder base was not a secret. The referendum passed with a bigger margin than most German coalition governments manage to assemble a majority. And the response from federal power is to preempt the state's competence before a single unit changes hands, using exactly the emergency tone — "signal to investors," "protecting private property" — that governments reach for when the actual argument (tenants shouldn't get their apartments back from finance capital) sounds indefensible said plainly.

None of this is unique to Berlin. It's the standard playbook whenever the electoral system produces an outcome finance doesn't like: don't contest the vote, neutralize the institution that lets it matter. Missouri Republicans lost a gerrymander fight in the Supreme Court this month and kept building the next fifty maps regardless of the ruling — a story we covered days ago. This is the housing-policy mirror image: win the vote, win the election, and watch the ruling party at the federal level move to make sure the win produces nothing. The tool changes — courts here, a Bundesgesetz there — but the structure is the same: local majorities get to vote, capital gets to override.

What actually stops it isn't a better legal brief for Article 15, though Eralp's coalition will need one. It's the same 350,000 signatures and marching feet that forced the 2021 referendum onto the ballot in the first place, repeated at whatever scale a federal expropriation-ban fight demands. Merz is betting Berliners will treat a chancellor's press conference as the final word on a fight they've already won twice. Nothing in either of those wins suggests he's right.

Sources

Berliner Zeitung: Merz kündigt Bundesgesetz gegen Enteignungen an

Tagesspiegel: Newsblog zur Berlin-Wahl

ZDFheute: Was die Linke plant

Tagesschau: ARD-Prognose zur Berlin-Wahl

Wikipedia: Volksentscheid „Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen" 2021