Rent cap: Left-wing politician Heidi Reichinnek embarrasses herself on Lanz

Telepolis Rent cap: Left-wing politician Heidi Reichinnek embarrasses herself on Lanz Bernd Müller • 4 days • 4 minutes read Left-wing politicians are calling for a nationwide rent cap. But can they explain it? Markus Lanz's appearance showed: Not everyone can. What exactly went wrong with Heidi Reichinnek? Commentary. When I think about left-wing politics at night, I lose sleep – not because it's so successful, but because any coherent concept seems to be lacking. This became clear once again on Markus Lanz when he cross-examined Germany's supposedly most popular politician, Heidi Reichinnek, co-leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag. Left-wing politician fails to explain rent cap The discussion about a nationwide rent cap turned into a disaster for Reichinnek. She couldn't answer the simplest but fundamental questions about the housing market, such as how high returns are on the housing market or what proportion of small private landlords are. Reichinnek cited "migraines" as the reason for her apparent ignorance, but Lanz refused to accept this. Conservative commentators subsequently reacted with malice and ridicule, and more and more videos from the conservative and right-wing spectrums, poking fun at Reichinnek's failures, accumulated on YouTube. Reichinnek continued Susanne Hennig-Wellsow's line on Markus Lanz. Like Reichinnek, Hennig-Wellsow was a Left Party politician who received little attention in the country until she threw a bouquet of flowers at the feet of FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich after his election as Minister-President of Thuringia. Freshly elected co-chair of the Left Party, she then shone with her ignorance of German foreign missions in an interview with Thilo Jung in 2021. Both politicians were unable to explain their party's central demands. Hennig-Wellsow failed to explain the demand for a halt to German foreign missions. Reichinnek was unable to explain a central demand from her party's most recent election platform. The Left Party demands: a nationwide rent cap as a solution? It states, for example: We demand a nationwide rent cap! Our goal: not only to slow the explosion in rents, but to stop and reverse it. In tense housing markets, particularly high rents must be reduced. As an immediate measure, rent increases must be banned nationwide for the next six years. Only non-profit landlords who have previously charged very low rents may increase them slightly to cover costs. Rent prices, which have skyrocketed in recent years, primarily in major cities, are a recognized problem. Also, the fact that they exacerbate social problems further. The Left Party would have to prove – at least theoretically – whether a nationwide rent cap could solve the problem. But this is where a weakness of today's left-wing parties lies: Compared to their ideological predecessors, they seem barely able to formulate their concepts and theories. Who rents in Germany? Small landlords dominate the market Markus Lanz therefore had an easy time pointing out that a large proportion of landlords are people who have worked hard and saved for a house in order to rent out their living space as retirement security. Reichinnek could have read about this beforehand. "Professional commercial providers manage 9.1 million apartments in Germany. This corresponds to a market share of 36 percent of the rental housing stock," according to the Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW). Private small landlords, in contrast, make up the rest. The proportion of profit-oriented landlords like Vonovia, against whom the left-wing parties are fighting with their class-struggle rhetoric, is even smaller. Municipal and cooperative landlords, which are to be strengthened, also count among the "professional commercial providers." If a nationwide rent cap were introduced, the housing shortage in German cities would likely not be alleviated unless new construction is significantly accelerated.