Expropriate the big landlords:  Berliners Vote to Take Big Landlords into Public Ownership

Politicians will try to ignore the clear cut vote on the referendum, but the movement is preparing to organize against that response 

By Nelli Tügel, Berlin

On 26 September, 1,035,950 voters in Berlin agreed to take the big landlords into public ownership, by a vote of 59 per cent vs 38 per cent . The huge success of the referendum in Germany’s capital was a result of years of organizing and struggle  by the housing movement. Politicians are threatening to ignore the result but the movement knew from the start that this vote would only be one step in the overall  struggle to win affordable housing for all.

The initiative to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen (which was founded in 1998 by Germany’s largest private bank, Deutsche Bank) and other large landlords started in 2018 with the aim of socializing the holdings of large real estate groups with over 3,000 apartments in Berlin. The initiative specified that these properties should be democratically managed through public ownership, including the participation of apartment staff,  tenants and broader society. It also would prohibit the reprivatisation of these units and limit the level of compensation payments to the affected housing corporations and their stockholders. 

Berlin has a complicated referendum process. As a first step, more than 77,000 signatures were collected in 2019. A Social Democratic minister in Berlin’s government delayed the whole process by an entire year before granting approval for the second stage of the referendum. Signatures then had to be collected again. This time more than 175,000 voters, corresponding to seven percent of Berlin’s eligible voters, were collected. After achieving that success, the initiative was placed on the ballot for all voters to decide.

Privatizations of Homes – by the Left!

Ironically, a large part of the Deutsche Wohnen portfolio comes from the privatization of the former public housing group, GSW. These privatizations were implemented by the Berlin coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a predecessor of today’s Left Party (Die LINKE), then called PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, or Party of Democratic Socialism). This “left” government sold around 70,000 apartments to private investors in 2004 for 401 million Euro. In 2010 the company that owned those homes was listed on the stock exchange and in 2013 it was taken over by a large real estate company and landlord, Deutsche Wohnen. 

The initiative “Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen” (“Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and the like”)  demands the  transfer of at least 240,000 apartments back into public ownership using Article 15 of Germany’s Basic Law (its Constitution), which enables socialization through transfer into common ownership. This section of the basic law was written into the constitution in 1949 as a concession to the left and the socialist mood in broad layers of society – but had never been used until now. (It’s a different process from using eminent domain, or nationalizing for infrastructure projects.)

The corporate media fumed after the referendum, with the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine writing that the vote endangered the ‘social market economy’, the German term for what they claim to be a tamer more social capitalism. The daily newspaper Welt acknowledged that ‘obviously not just deluded radicals’ voted for the expropriation and had to admit that the initiative managed to establish a ‘broad societal consensus. 

A Campaign Rooted in Previous Struggles

Berlin has seen sharp increases in rents over the last decade. Especially in the course of the financial crisis, Berlin, with its low housing prices by international standards, became the object of financial speculation. This also affected apartment blocks formerly built as social housing. 

Berlin already had a lively housing movement in the 1980s, including  a lot of squatting and tenant organizing. Over the last ten years, a new wellspring of bottom-up tenant organizing against large scale landlords developed. Tenants in big building blocks confronted with neglect and rising costs learned to stand and fight together.

Yet for many activists, these struggles – often focused on a particular apartment complex – dealt only with the symptoms of the problem, not its root cause: housing as a commodity in the hands of financial speculators. From the conclusions drawn through these individual struggles and with support from the radical left the idea of a referendum received more and more support. In the campaign, the experience of many activists came together. For example, a key organizer of the hospital workers’ union ver.di at the university clinic Charité, who fought for better staffing and wages, played a key role in the battle alongside activists involved in a left electoral challenge in 2006. 

Organizing skills developed in the labor movement were implemented to not just mobilize people, but also organise activists into small groups in every “Kiez”, (a Berlin term for a housing block or neighborhood quarter.)

Yet all political parties except Die LINKE (the left party) opposed the referendum. The conservative CDU, the liberal FDP, and the social democratic SPD mobilized against it. The SPD argued that they have better alternatives, and stated they won’t implement the expropriation. The Green Party’s top candidate for the Berlin regional parliament elections said in the run up to the referendum she would vote for it, but not implement it, and instead would use it to pressure the real estate industry for a better deal. But Die LINKE supported it and a substantial number of its members got actively involved in the campaign. 

Major trade unions like IG Metall (the union of workers in car, machinery, steel and other industries), as well as Germany’s largest public sector union, ver.di, expressed their  support for the referendum. (They did not do much more than post a statement, though their support was still important in winning  the campaign.)

One of the first successes of the campaign was a cap on rents implemented by the SPD-led government in the regional state of Berlin in January 2020. Under pressure by the housing movement and in desperate search for arguments not to support the expropriations, the SPD agreed to a measure that included strict rent control over rent increases and a maximum rent that in some cases forced landlords to reduce rents. But in March 2021, the national Supreme Court invalidated that law. Though a blow to the overall movement at the time, it also invalidated the so-called “better alternatives” promoted by the SPD to shield the big landlords from the referendum. 

Some Secrets of Success

Bringing together the experience of tenant, labor and political struggles and key activists with roots in certain neighborhoods and networks was one part of the success. Another important part was clearly naming your enemy. Giving the referendum a name targeting the biggest landlord in Berlin, Deutsche Wohnen, helped tremendously. Many people in Berlin really hated them.

Equally important was the exact language and structure of the referendum itself: 

• The call for expropriation was radical enough that people understood that this was a fundamental change that went to the root of the problem and could have a big, lasting impact.
• The call was framed in a way that assured people that it could succeed. The fact that expropriation could be implemented through reliance on Germany’s Basic Law resulted in a successful appeal to several different audiences that made the struggle realistically winnable. 
• It was clear from the start that this campaign could not be won with just promises, from politicians or other models of representation where a few people fight on behalf of others. This was, from the start, an organizing campaign. Door knocking was a technique that wasn’t used much in Germany over the last few decades but was rediscovered in this campaign, as new activists got educated in canvassing. Questions to people at the doors about electoral support were always connected with the suggestion of getting themselves involved in grassroots organizing. 

A Success, but Not Yet Victory

Due to the complications of the laws on referendums in Berlin, it is still up to Berlin’s next government to implement the result of the referendum. Since the election in September, the SPD, Greens and Die LINKE have been discussing whether to continue their regional coalition government. This would make the SPD,  which opposed the referendum from the start, again the main force in the regional government in Berlin.. The new mayor in Berlin, the SPD’s Franziska Giffey, has already declared that the question of expropriating private properties is a red line she will not cross.     

Clearly pressure from below will need to be ramped up again. There are a few hundred activists at the core of this campaign and several thousand around them worked consciously to build it. Can they pull it off again? Discussions in the movement reflect this increasing pressure and raise the larger question of whether this coalition of radical left activists and a broader layer of the working class will last.

This would be the first time in a long time that a movement from below would be able to deliver visible improvements in the lives of the wider working class. In fact it would be the first time in decades that the left could successfully question the role of private property and go on the offense against it. If the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen referendum is ultimately successful, it will help change the balance of forces, and not just in Berlin. If successful, the question of expropriating large scale private property, nationalizations and socializations can be raised much more easily in many other cities in Germany and around the world plagued with rising rents and the lack of affordable housing. This can spill over to other parts of the economy, especially areas of human needs like health care or transportation.

But if it fails to be enforced, there will be a price to pay for social movements in the whole of Germany.

Nelli Tügel works as a journalist and is a supporter of “Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen”.