Dear 20 Percent,
Right-wing and conservative German media went into Linke-bashing overdrive last week, hyperventilating about Berlin being transformed into an “Islamo-Socialist Caliphate” and so on. It’s all pretty infantile. Bavarian CSU bigwig Markus Söder called likely mayor Elif Eralp an “antisemite” on a TV chat show and Eralp is suing him for defamation. Meanwhile, Söder and several CDU state premiers have threatened to axe federal funding for Berlin should Eralp become mayor.
Not to say there aren’t things to be concerned about. Issa “The Godfather” Remmo and Ibrahim Ibrahim, a Palestinian activist associated with the PFLP, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU, waltzing into Die Linke’s Neukölln election party doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the broader public.
Letting these guys into the party was such an own goal and shows Die Linke needs to professionalise in a hurry if it wants to form a government and stay in power long enough to get anything done.
The conservative Axel Springer press (the same folks who just gave Palantir-psychopath Peter Thiel a fancy award) and others, predictably, smelled blood. I’m guessing their tabloid BILD has a team of 10 people investigating ways that Die Linke and Elif Eralp are too radical to run the city.
It will be interesting to see how the coalition talks with the Greens and SPD go — they’ll be using the antisemitism debate as leverage to pull Die Linke towards the centre. I predict Die Linke’s promise to socialise 240,000 flats owned by corporations could fizzle away in the process.
Meanwhile, a housing researcher made an interesting but unrealistic proposal: the federal government should just buy up a majority stake in Vonovia (Germany’s largest landlord) on the stock market and thereby gain control of its 470,000 flats across the country. According to the researcher behind the idea, it would be cheaper and on firmer legal ground than Die Linke’s plan to expropriate Vonovia’s property in Berlin.
We’ll keep you posted.
Maurice
🍻🧠 🏆 I’m doing my 20% Berlin pub quiz again on October 14th. Early Bird tickets on sale for a mere €3!
Legalise undocumented migrants?
The 40 migration and anti-racism initiatives behind the “Legalisierung Jetzt!” initiative have sent an open letter to Elif Eralp as well as Green and SPD politicians, demanding the legalisation of an estimated 60,000–100,000 undocumented migrants living in Berlin. Their demands include introducing a “City-ID” card, granting group residence permits, strengthening individual right-to-stay mechanisms, and abolishing mandatory reporting of undocumented people to immigration authorities. The campaigners say undocumented residents live in constant fear of police checks and deportation, and suffer from poor or no access to healthcare, education, housing, and work.
WG tut weh
A room in a shared flat (WG) in Berlin now costs €600 per month including utilities, according the Empirica research institute, making Berlin (along with Freiburg) the fifth most expensive college town in Germany — behind Munich (€790), Hamburg (€659), Cologne (€630), and Frankfurt am Main (€620). Flatshare rents have risen by €130 in five years, up from €470 in 2021, and by 94% since 2012. The cheapest university towns are Wolfsburg (€306) and Greifswald (€350). Sorry about the German headline.
Speaking of…
A law firm representing property listings site ImmoScout24 has written to the Berlin administration (Senat) objecting to Mietenscan, the city’s automated monthly analysis of rental listings. The lawyers argue that the state's use of ImmoScout24’s data is legally problematic and harms the company's reputation. In the scan's first run in June, 7,700 listings were scraped and assessed. Around 46% showed indications of possible violations of the rent brake or other regulations. Flagged landlords are receiving warning letters.
Easy Adriatic
While Ryanair has shown BER the middle finger, Easyjet will have more flights from Berlin from next summer, with an additional 14 flights per week. New routes will serve Slovenian capital Ljubljana and Italian coastal city Rimini. With 11 aircraft based at BER, Easyjet is now the largest airline at the airport.
Tesla pay up
Pay for employees at the Brandenburg Tesla plant is going up by 4-5% on October 1. According to RBB, the entry-level salary for a worker on the factory floor is €45,750, actually higher than union rates. About 12,000 work at the plant but it hopes to hire 3,500 people to bump production up to 7,500 cars per week, 1,000 more than currently. Elon Musk’s open support for the AfD and other polarising populist prats doesn’t seem to be scaring off customers.
🎭 Events this week, curated by The Next Day Berlin 🪩
🎺 MOP MOP ft. Anthony Joseph
Wednesday · 7:30 pm · Gretchen, Obentrautstraße 19-21, Kreuzberg · €27
Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph fronts Mop Mop’s blend of jazz and Afro-Caribbean funk, his voice and the horns trading the lead all night.
🧑🏾🩰Transkontinentale
Wednesday to Sunday · Humboldt Forum, Schloßplatz, Mitte · from €10
Five days of dance from four continents. Our highlights: Air Mass, Ai Weiwei’s stage design for Alfred Döblin’s 1924 novel; Perto de Nós, an emotional headphone walk, and the Afrobeat pulse of Lagos is a R.A.V.E.
🎞️ MUBI Fest Berlin
Friday to Sunday · silent green + Kino Arsenal · €11
Fatih Akin premieres his new movie Ghost Song (Sunday, 3:15 pm), Lukas Dhont talks after Coward premiere (Friday, 8 pm), and Murnau’s Faust runs to a new live score (Sunday, 7:30 pm).
🏳️⚧️ Historical City Walk: Trans* History under National Socialism
Sunday · 2 pm · meet at HKW, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Tiergarten · €3-10, 3 hrs
Three hours on foot through the trans lives the Nazi state tried to erase, built around the biography of Käte Rogalli, in English.
👯 Kinder Rave, Bossa FM
Sunday · 12-6 pm · Festsaal Kreuzberg, Am Flutgraben 3, Treptow · €16, kids 12-17 €8
A real rave scaled down for kids: proper sound system, real DJs, and a room where a five-year-old and a parent move to the same track.
For a weekly selection of art, music, food and other things worth leaving the house for, subscribe to The Next Day Berlin.
🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺
👴🏻As Merz scrambles for support, Germany’s identity crisis is laid bare
🤔 Germany’s Wadephul meets Russia’s Lavrov amid tensions over ‘escalation’
😟German town bans ‘stumbling stone’ memorials to Nazi victims
🛒Lidl on the island of the rich
👁️ Interior Minister and two opticians receive the Big Brother Awards
⚽ Klopp’s Germany team lose to Greece
Factoid
The temporary swimming pool in front of the Volksbühne theatre in Mitte closes for good on Thursday. Free swimming slots are booked out till then. Over two months, 20,000 people swam at the pool. The showers broke. Racist AfD (and some CDU folks) began frothing at the mouth about a harmless swim event for black youth which had to be cancelled because of security concerns. And the whole thing, naturally, went over cost. The bill for the project ended up at €410,000 instead of the budgeted €300,000. Worth it?
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The concept of just out right buying Vonovia has passed through my mind as well. You can buy the full company for just 15 billion on the stock market.
If I am to read Vonovia's balance sheet correctly (https://report.vonovia.com/2024/q4/en/balance-sheet) then Vonovia in 2024 owned roughly 80 billion of apartments and had debts of roughly 40 billion (62 billion in total liabilities but that includes things like taxes and equity owed to shareholders.)
When you look at their balance sheet vs the stock market capitalization of the company that's when you get hit with the full force realization of how much modern real estate finance is just made up. What's the true value of these flats anyway if you can just acquire them for 15 billion? (Keeping in mind that you also need to take on the 40 billion in debt, but then again, Vonovia only took on that debt to buy those flats from others well after their construction costs had already been paid off.)
We had a few years here in Berlin where apartment rents were rising, but the value of the buildings themselves was decreasing. Part of that occurred in the 2022-2023 period when over indebted large landlords had to put a bunch of buildings on the market because of the rise in interest rates, and so naturally the prices of the buildings dropped with all that supply, and yet the rents on the flats themselves were increasing.