The Federal Constitutional Court has stopped the Berlin rent cap.
Citizens should be careful before the general election.
Because the Greens, the Left and the SPD will not let the Karlsruhe judgment dissuade them from their plans to reorganize society.
A comment by Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
Berlin's rent cap got what it deserves: a third-class funeral by the Federal Constitutional Court.
The attempt of the red-red-green city government to subject the housing industry to a state price dictation and thus to the laws of the GDR was an economic donkey and legal audacity.
The Senate now has both in writing.
The stupid are the tenants who have been caught in the wrong game between the Greens, the Left and the SPD.
You are now threatened with high back payments.
But for more than a year, those looking for a home have been suffering from the consequences of the rent cap, which is actually deeply antisocial.
The queues for viewing apartments became longer and longer because private owners in particular preferred to sell their property rather than rent it for less than it was worth.
In order to create acceptance for the lid, Red-Red-Green had pretended that it was primarily against unscrupulous corporations.
In fact, it hit private owners much harder who had invested their savings in home ownership in order to use the proceeds to cover part of their pensions.
With the government-enforced lowering of rents, the bill suddenly no longer worked out for them.
The fact remains that if you want to create affordable living space, you have to build, accelerate approval procedures and lower expensive requirements.
In any case, the misery of the tenants cannot be magically removed with class struggle slogans.
But maybe that is the way to win elections?
The nationwide rent cap, for the introduction of which the SPD, the Greens and the Left were already in the starting blocks, is off the table.
The reactions to the ruling from Karlsruhe already show it: Before the federal election, Baerbock, Scholz & Co. will blind the stressed tenants with a veritable firework of promises according to the motto “now all the more”.
That alone is not the problem.
What is worse is that, as in Berlin, they are ready to go to the limits of the constitutionally protected property system and beyond for their fantasia.