The Left Party's victory in Berlin's September 2025 election was built on a single, electrifying promise: implement the 2021 referendum in which 57.6% of Berliners voted to expropriate apartments from real estate companies owning more than 3,000 units. The target is roughly 240,000-270,000 units, concentrated in the hands of firms like Deutsche Wohnen, which alone holds 100,000 apartments in the city. The plan would push Berlin's public housing share from 25% to over 30%. The legal architecture rests on Articles 14 and 15 of the German Basic Law. Article 14 permits expropriation for the public good — routine for highway construction, untested for housing at this scale. Article 15 explicitly allows the socialization of land and means of production, but has never been invoked in the history of the Federal Republic. A 13-member expert commission convened by then-Mayor Franziska Giffey concluded in 2023 that expropriation was constitutional, though budget questions remained open. The CDU government that replaced the SPD-Green-Left coalition buried the commission's findings. Under Kai Wegner, Berlin drafted a socialization law that defined conditions for socialization while explicitly ruling out expropriation — a legal framework designed to be a dead letter. Meanwhile, it emerged that the Berlin CDU was receiving hundreds of thousands of euros in donations from property companies, a detail that tells you everything about which interests shaped that law. Chancellor Friedrich Merz responded to the Left's election win by pledging a federal law banning state-level expropriation of property, framing it as a message to international investors: "There is no expropriation of private property in Germany." But this threat stands on uncertain ground. Germany's Constitutional Court has previously ruled that the federal government cannot pass legislation solely to prevent a state from exercising its governing authority. Merz's move may be performative — a signal to capital markets rather than a legally viable blockade. Coalition talks will be the first real test. The Left Party's likeliest partners are the SPD and Greens, neither of which has shown appetite for a constitutional confrontation with the federal government over property rights. Even the Left Party acknowledges that expropriation would take years to implement and longer to affect rents. In the interim, it is proposing a rent cap as a faster lever. Public support has cooled noticeably. Despite the Left's win, only 37% of Berliners now support expropriation, down from 57.6% in 2021. This erosion matters: a second referendum — which the Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen campaign has threatened — would face a very different electorate. The gap between 2021's mandate and 2025's polling suggests that voter anger about housing costs can translate into referendum support without translating into sustained appetite for the specific remedy. The deeper structural question is whether Germany's constitutional framework permits large-scale socialization of private assets at the state level when the federal government actively opposes it. Article 15 exists. It has never been tested. Every major institutional actor — the federal government, real estate companies, and likely the European courts — has strong incentives to ensure it never is.
