SOCIALISTS GOTTA SOCIALIZE: The Far-Left Wins Berlin’s Election on the Promise of Seizing Private Apartments.

The rising cost of housing in Berlin was a central issue in the campaign, which the Left proposes to fix with a mix of public housing construction, rent controls, and, most radically, expropriation of 220,000 housing units currently owned by large real estate companies.

Expropriation “serves the purpose of being able to regulate rents, which we can’t currently do with private owners,” Eralp told the Russian-German magazine Wir. “This takes these apartments out of speculation and out of the possibility of profiting from the housing shortage.”

Eralp has framed this plan as implementing the will of Berlin voters, 59 percent of whom approved an advisory referendum in 2021 calling for the seizure of a quarter of a million apartments owned by large landlords.

This being Germany, maybe someday they’ll get to take their socialism national.