Growing up in East Berlin in the 1990s, Die Linke (or PDS, as it was known before) was omnipresent. Still the party’s most recognizable face, Gregor Gysi is still running and winning in my district (Treptow-Koepenick). I still get a sense of home and the past when I see him speak.
The complexities of the Wende / transition period after the Wall fell in 1989 found an important political outlay in the party, taking along (or trying to at least) a significant part of the East German population that found adjustment to the new system difficult.
Recently Die Linke has transformed itself into a more modern progressive party, increasing its appeal to younger generations. It thankfully saw a more national and populist wing under the leadership of Sarah Wagenknecht split from it ahead of the elections.
As a result, it staged a historic comeback from what seemed a certain sub-five percent vote to a respectable 8.8%. It also came in as the strongest party in Berlin.
It is good that their ideas, especially some of the more radical ones, will be represented in the German parliament and get some more airtime in the public discourse. Among these are that we should strive to live in a world without billionaires and that rents should be capped and housing socialized.
The first one ties into my long-standing interest in economic inequality and the influence Piketty’s Capital had on my thinking. It’s also an increasingly mainstream progressive left position globally, with Bernie Sanders perhaps being the most visible advocate of a more aggressive progressivity in wealth and income taxes in the US. Ironic that Trump appears to have borrowed some of the rhetoric given his flagging poll numbers (although the tax increase he has mulled for top brackets is by all means very small).
The second issue, housing, also reflects some of my prior more personal thinking around real estate. I think that the commercialization of housing is anathema to a just, increasingly urban future. It’s great to see Georgism making a quiet comeback. The debate about a more aggressive land value tax is worth having.
Die Linke actually have some hands-on experience in governing in German states, above all Berlin, and putting some of their housing policies into practice, or at least trying to.
Chief among these examples is the party’s solidarity with the Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen campaign, which I covered on this blog in 2019. They are also for a rent cap and more investment into social housing.
In my short educational quest around the elections I came across Radically Legal, a book by Joanna Kusiak, a Berliner with an academic background in law and an activist hat. It is eye-opening and empowering account of the campaign: When activism is combined with sharp legal skills, you have the entire real estate industry shivering.
Another was the sobering experience of Andrej Holm, a noted urban sociologist who was Die Linke’s state secretary for housing in the Berlin senate for a brief time in 2016, with his ideas grounded in thorough academic research and social activism.
Holm resigned from his post due to his prior “employment” by the East German Stasi as an 18-year old. The charges looked very cooked up and reminded me of other instances of blanket demonization of people with a professional background in the former East. It was also hard not to suspect some vested interests at play behind the scenes.
