The apartment question tends to affect everyone. Therefore, it must also be fought together, as here on a demonstration by the “Berlin Alliance for displacement and rental craze”.
Photo: dpa
“Wouldn’t it be more sustainable to make apartment owners independent of dependent tenants?” Perhaps such a question would be suspected by Christian Lindner or from Friedrich Merz’s environment. But she came from ND author Frank Jöricke. His article “The Forgotten Middle State” in “Nd.Diewoche” on May 23 is an Elog on private property that ends with the maxim: “As long as communism is waiting for and private property has not disappeared, only one thing helps: to become a owner.”
This not only drives people a communist, but every solidarity awareness. It is not for nothing that the ideologues of capitalism – from Ayn Rand to Margret Thatcher to the anarchocapitalist Javier Milei in Argentina – followed the not so new credo to turn tenants from tenants. This was also true in times of the Franco regime in Spain. The tenants, who, according to Jöricke, are only waiting to “get away from the dependency on their familyers”, then came under the knute of the banks, who demand the rates for the mortgages every month. In the financial crisis 15 years ago, thousands of these owners lost their apartments in Spain. They were forced and still sat on the debt mountain.
The still existing platform of the mortgage victims emerged from their ranks. They occupy empty apartments and fight against the ideology of property that Jöricke recommends the left as a recipe for success – a further adaptation of left -wing politics to the supposedly invincible capitalism. There are enough deterrent examples not only in Spain and Great Britain. As part of the “Living in the Crisis” event series, the Berlin tenants had invited active tenants from different countries in Europe and other continents that fight against a conservative ownership policy. They reported exactly that ideology of alleged liberation from the constraints of the tenancy, which also spreads Jöricke without irony.
Many of the tenant activists even looked at Germany with a little melancholy because the proportion of apartment owners is much lower than in many neighboring European countries. There are particularly many tenants in metropolises like Berlin. This is exactly what it has to be defended. “We should proudly demand our rights as tenants and in no way give up this status,” explains sociologist Matthias Coers, who made the film “Rentbellen” more than ten years ago. He gave the many rebellious tenants who not only want to fight for their rights in Berlin and do not simply want to be driven out for the professional interests of housing groups. This is the real alternative for the frustrated tenants listed by Jöricke. However, this solidarity is only possible if the ideology of the supposedly liberating home ownership is given a clear cancellation.