As Germany heads toward a snap election for its Lower House of Parliament on February 23, signs dotting the nation’s cities ask voters: Is your rent too high? The red and white placards belonging to Die Linke, Germany’s Left Party, speak to how a worsening housing crisis has become a battlefield in German and European politics. It is an issue politicians must meet with meaningful solutions or risk growing public anger over spiraling rents driving support of the already ascendant far right, according to experts.
“Rising rent prices at the neighborhood level in Germany increase support for radical right parties,” explains Thomas Kurer, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich and coauthor of a recent study on the relationship between rental market risk and support for Germany’s far right. That study found that the increasing cost of rent is driving support for the far right in a significant way: For every one euro per square meter increase in the price of rent in a given ZIP code, the probability that low-income tenants living in that ZIP code will support Germany’s Alternative for Germany party (AfD) rises by as many as 4 percentage points. AfD is an extreme right, neo-Nazi organization campaigning on a deeply socially conservative and anti-immigrant agenda.
The drive toward the right is strongest among long-term residents with lower incomes because they “often lack the financial buffer to protect themselves against displacement,” Kurer told Truthout. Just the threat of losing social or economic status can influence voters in powerful ways, as research on Donald Trump’s rise in the United States has also concluded. Similarly, Kurer said his findings in the German context show “that local housing cost pressures, much like job insecurity, can fuel political discontent and shape electoral outcomes.”
Rising rents have already played a role in elections across the European continent. The issue was a driving force behind the breakthrough success of Portugal’s far right Chega party in that nation’s March 2024 parliamentary elections. It was also a top concern for Dutch voters in November 2023, when the nationalist, far right Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats in the nation’s House of Representatives.
Shortages of affordable housing have also sparked protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland in recent years as prices spiral upwards. According to Eurostat, housing prices in the European Union (EU) jumped more than 54 percent from 2010 to 2024. Rents rose 26 percent over the same period. As a result, the proportion of employed young people living with their parents in the EU has risen sharply, and in some European nations, more than a fifth of households spend 40 percent or more of their net income on housing.
“The cost-of-living problem, and housing being a big part of that, has been opportunistically used by more right-wing forces, but without them actually proposing any concrete solutions,” Sorcha Edwards, secretary general of the nonprofit organization Housing Europe, told Truthout.
Edwards told Truthout that rents in Europe have risen in recent decades as governments have withdrawn from regulating the market, “leading to an over-reliance on just simple supply and demand.” The explosion of short-term rentals via platforms such as Airbnb worsened long-term housing shortages, often in cities’ most livable districts near public transportation, green spaces, and other amenities. Construction of new homes across Europe has not kept up with demand, and complex ownership arrangements or planning regimes in many countries make it difficult to transform existing buildings or derelict sites. Recently, rising costs of energy and construction materials, especially following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, have lengthened build times.
Political parties across the spectrum have been too slow to respond and offer solutions as the housing crisis worsens. “Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen a turnaround to a certain extent, and we’ve seen a clear jump in the recognition that this problem has gotten out of hand,” Edwards told Truthout. “But we have a lot of catching up to do because we’ve taken our hands off the wheel for some time.”
The cost-of-living problem has been opportunistically used by more right-wing forces, but without them actually proposing any concrete solutions.
Far right parties stand to gain from the threat of rising rents even if they do not offer solutions because status threat tends to move voters toward political actors who promise to disrupt the status quo, according to research. “We find that people exposed to profound economic risks do not necessarily turn to left-wing parties in search of economic policy solutions,” explained Kurer and his coauthors in their recent paper. “Instead, the grievances that result from status threat translate into support of the populist and nativist appeal of the radical right.”
Germany and the far right AfD are no exception. “Rents are just going up, up, up. It’s a phenomenon people are experiencing throughout the country,” said Lara Eckstein, a Berlin-based organizer with Mietendeckel Jetzt! (Rent Cap Now!). A recent analysis from online real estate marketplace ImmoScout24 determined that asking prices on rental properties have increased by as much as 30 percent in major German cities in the last two years alone. On average, tenants in Germany now spend more than a quarter of their net income on housing — one of the highest proportions in the EU. Germany also has the highest proportion of tenants among EU nations, with more than half the population living in rented housing.
Eckstein told Truthout that Germany’s center right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and AfD “have zero solutions to the rent crisis, but they are really mixing the immigration issue with the housing crisis in a dangerous way.” Both parties want stricter immigration controls, and Eckstein said they weaponize the cost-of-living crisis to garner support for those aims. “It’s as if they’re like, ‘Let’s kick out all the immigrants, and then we’ll have more flats for the Germans,’” said Eckstein. “But, of course, it’s not the people who are looking for an apartment that raise the prices; it’s the real estate companies.”
The CDU and AfD look poised to earn the largest vote shares in the coming election, which follows the collapse of the current coalition government last November. AfD has also capitalized on anger and disillusionment to see significant gains in recent state elections, including securing the most votes in Thuringia last September. That marked the first time the far right had won a state election in Germany since the Nazi era.
While Germany’s right-wing parties are on the rise, there are signs that the opposition is beginning to recognize and take steps to connect with voters on the issue of housing. The Left Party’s red and white campaign ads calling out increasing rent costs point to this recognition. The party has made the issue central to its platform, even demanding a nationwide rent cap. Almost three-quarters of respondents to a December 2024 survey said they supported a nationwide rent cap, and the Left Party has risen in polling since announcing it would pursue the policy. The party is expected to secure enough votes to win seats as one of the smallest minorities in the German Parliament.
Organizers and experts told Truthout that the Left Party’s willingness to talk about housing is a step in the right direction, and organizing around the issue of rising rents could offer a bulwark against the ascendant right wing. “The political conversation should not be like ‘Germans against immigrants,’” said Eckstein. “It should be all the working people who are struggling to pay rent against these huge companies who are making money from our need to have a place to live.” In contrast to AfD and CDU’s calls for stricter immigration controls, the Left Party’s platform calls for liberalizing visa policies, expanding resources for asylum seekers and abolishing the EU’s border policing agency to create a “democratic and social immigration society that places human dignity at its center.”
Joanna Kusiak, a researcher at Cambridge University and author of Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future, said the success of a nonbinding referendum campaign to expropriate corporate landlords in Berlin shows how organizing around housing can bring people together behind progressive solutions. The Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.) initiative, or DWE, was launched in 2018, and organizers succeeded in bringing it to a vote three years later. Almost 60 percent of voters supported the referendum. “It was something that took this anger and transformed it into a deeply pro-systemic project of transforming and creating a new housing system,” Kusiak told Truthout.
Yet, since the referendum passed, the government has refused to implement its mandate. DWE is now working on a second referendum campaign, this time legally binding.
Referring to the shifting political landscape in Germany, with right-wing parties now instrumentalizing the housing crisis to pursue their anti-immigrant agendas, Kusiak said: “The issue can either unite people, or it can divide them. What it surely does is it makes people angry, and the question is what happens with that anger.”
For Eckstein, who worked on the first DWE referendum campaign and now knocks on doors to organize Berliners behind a nationwide rent cap, the answer to channeling people’s anger is simple: “We encourage people to talk to their neighbors, talk about their common problems and common goals,” she said. “Because when your rent goes up, and you feel lonely and isolated, you are more receptive to far right fascist propaganda. But when you have the experience of having an impact and feeling like you are not alone, the effect also works the other way around.”
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