All in all, it was a very typical Berlin night, it was still warm, the Berliners sat tightly packed in front of the bars and looked at the various forms of barricades that had been erected in front of their noses, barriers for the marathon, construction sites, security gates for the election parties - it was more difficult to get through from the west to Wilhelmstrasse than before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There people waited in front of the Willy-Brandt-Haus, the seat of the SPD, which had its headquarters illuminated in red from below so that it looked a bit like a Moldovan casino and everyone who stepped into this light shower looked like a devil. Inside, in front of a showcase with SPD stuffed bears, stood the Italian Labor Minister Andrea Orlando and looked at the display. It was 7 p.m., Söder spoke on the screens that broadcast the news,whose face was so reflected in the showcase that a new, improbable hybrid of the CSU boss and the SPD bear emerged.

The SPD is like Hogwarts

Niklas Maak

Editor in the features section.

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Orlando had come to see his colleague Hubertus Heil and was led through endless corridors (“it's like at Hogwarts”) into a room where “the Hubi” could not be found. Orlando waited there in silence and looked across a battlefield of crisp crumbs and Berliner Kindl bottles at the high-rise buildings opposite; this was also the day Berlin decided whether large real estate companies should be expropriated. A woman entered the room and asked if there was actually going to be dancing later, a man said, yes, yes, in the Hans-Jochen Vogel hall. - But is there any music at all? You weren't sure about that now. But Hubi was found and posed for a photo with his Italian colleague, who reappeared shortly afterwards in a restaurant down on the Spree.

At the tables there, it was discussed whether the green top would betray the will of their base, which is more closely related to the SPD, in exchange for ministerial posts and symbolic consolation such as speed limits, to bring a black and yellow government into office, or whether the FDP would retire from its social-liberal past greener form would revive. A couple of FDP district politicians celebrated at the next table, all of them young men who looked as if they had just taken fourth to tenth place in the Christian Lindner Lookalike Contest. One of them got up a little unsteadily and trundled over to the table of the Italian Minister of Labor. "Hello you sweets," he said and reached for the back of the chair of Orlando's companion to stabilize it. "Have you all voted F ... FDP?" The minister looked up from his mobile phone with interest. "We are from Italy",said Orlando's companion. "Italy," said the FDP man, rolling his eyes as if he wanted to flee over the burner at full throttle as soon as it turns green. "But if you ... so if you were to choose what ..."

Over a million voters are in favor of expropriations

The answer was lost in the news that the referendum was successful: 56.4 percent of Berliners had voted “yes”, more than a million voters.

In some counties, approval for expropriation of all real estate companies that own more than 3,000 apartments was more than 75 percent.

Was that the beginning of a new socialism that would bring investments and urgently needed new buildings to a standstill?

The election results of the left did not speak in favor of it.

Giffey, an opponent of expropriation, was ahead in the polls for the Berlin election, so the decision was made to see the referendum as a reminder for an industry that had squeezed its real estate as assets for too long.

Vonovia tenants report ancillary costs that suddenly rose by up to 600 percent, while investors could look forward to record profits; the thesis that the individual's pursuit of profit is always good for everyone has been disproved quite dramatically here. Perhaps the referendum was a necessary reminder that apartments are not assets, but places of fate, a livelihood like water that helps determine whether a life succeeds or not. At some point the minister left the restaurant and the last guests ran past the concrete frames of half-finished new buildings to the taxi. The number of building permits in Berlin has been falling since 2016, and what is being built often looks like you wish it hadn't been built. What was stated on an FDP poster also applies here: It cannot stay the way it is.