In December 1989 the SED voted down a motion to dissolve itself, and the commission that later audited its money recorded a deciding reason: its property. Every renaming since has left the legal person intact, so the claim that Die Linke is legally identical with the SED rests on the German state’s own findings. That identity makes the party answerable for a balance sheet, which it has already settled. It does not make it guilty of the deaths at the Wall, and the reason is German criminal law.
By Raphael Bauer36 min read
On 8 December 1989 the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the party that had ruled East Germany for forty years, opened an extraordinary congress in an East Berlin sports hall. At the end of the debate a delegate from a …
Berlin froze its rents in 2020, and in the weeks that followed the number of flats advertised fell by more than half. Catalonia capped its rents the same year, and researchers found no sign that supply shrank. Stockholm has held rents down since the war, and the average wait for a flat there is now nine years. The evidence says rent control works as designed, for the people it was designed for, and sends the bill to everyone who has not arrived yet.
By Raphael Bauer35 min read
The average tenant who got the keys to a rent-controlled flat in Stockholm last year had waited nine years for it. For a flat in the inner city the wait was twenty-one years. Nobody set out to build that. Sweden set out to build a system in …
.jpg){kind=link}