Berlin did something on Sunday that the capital has never done before. The Die Linke party came first in the voting, with 25.7 percent, and its lead candidate says she will not enter a coalition unless it begins expropriating housing owned by large corporate landlords. Berliners already endorsed that idea in a non-binding referendum 5 years ago. In the northeast the same evening, the AfD took a state for the first time, and Friedrich Merz’s CDU fell below 5 percent. Two results, one grievance running under both. I want to stay on the Berlin half, because the Church has written at length about who a house is finally for, and most people who quote her on property have read half the file.
The News Story
Voters in two German states went to the polls on Sunday, September 20, 2026, and handed Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union defeats in both.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Alternative for Germany finished first with 38.3 percent of the party-list vote and 32 of the state parliament’s 71 seats, a gain of 18. The Social Democrats of Minister-President Manuela Schwesig took 35.5 percent and 29 seats. The CDU drew 4.9 percent, fell below the 5 percent threshold, and lost all 12 seats it had held. Reuters described the outcome as the party’s worst state election result since 1949, and CBS News and the Associated Press reported it as the CDU’s lowest showing in any German state since the Second World War. The Left and the Greens cleared the threshold with 6.5 and 5.7 percent, five seats each. The state returning officer recorded turnout near 76 percent.
In Berlin, Die Linke came first for the first time in the capital’s history, with 25.7 percent and 38 of 130 seats. The CDU dropped to 18.8 percent and 28 seats, a loss of 24. The AfD took 16.3 percent and 24 seats. The Greens won 14.3 percent and the Social Democrats 12.1 percent, well down from the 18.4 percent they recorded in 2023. Die Linke’s lead candidate, Elif Eralp, has said that beginning the expropriation of housing owned by large corporate landlords is her condition for entering any coalition, a step Berlin voters endorsed in a non-binding referendum in 2021. “In our city, love and justice have triumphed over hatred,” Eralp said Sunday night. SPD lead candidate Steffen Krach has refused that condition.
Merz called the northeastern result “a disaster” and said he would stay on as chancellor and continue his reform agenda. “What needs to be done now requires backbone, steadfastness, and patience,” he said, describing the reforms as “the antidote to the poison of authoritarianism.” AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told ZDF television that the statement was “more than feeble” and said Merz should resign. Merz, who is 70 and took office 16 months ago, canceled a planned trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Neither winning party has a route to governing alone. Germany’s mainstream parties hold to a “firewall” policy that rules out coalitions with the AfD, so its first place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania leaves it short of power, and Schwesig may seek a three-way arrangement with the Left and the Greens. In Berlin, Eralp needs the Social Democrats and the Greens, while the federal CDU bars cooperation with Die Linke.
Sunday’s votes followed the September 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won roughly 44 percent and came close to an outright majority. Early ARD exit polls put the AfD at 37 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Die Linke at 24.5 percent in Berlin, figures that both rose in the final counts. Germany’s next federal election is due in 2029. [1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
What Berlin Actually Voted For
Our analysis begins with the idea that will govern the next few weeks of German politics. Elif Eralp, whose party came first in the capital for the first time in its history, says that beginning the expropriation of housing held by large corporate landlords is her condition for entering any coalition. Steffen Krach, whose Social Democrats finished fifth with 12.1 percent, says no. She needs him and the Greens to govern at all.
The idea, one of the main focuses of her party. isn’t hers alone, either. Berliners voted for it in 2021, in a referendum that carried no legal force, and the city has spent the 5 years since declining to act on it. Sunday was the second time the capital said it out loud, and this time it arrived attached to 38 seats.
Catholics usually know one half of what the Church teaches here. The half we know is that she rejected socialism, in Leo XIII’s own words, as “emphatically unjust.” She did, and I’ll get there. The half we forget is the reason he gave.
Property Is An Instrument
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church opens its treatment of property with a claim about the earth: “God destined the earth, and all it contains for all men and all peoples so that all created things would be shared fairly by all mankind under the guidance of justice tempered by charity.” [2] That is the principle of the universal destination of goods. The Compendium calls the right to the common use of goods “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order” and “the characteristic principle of Christian social doctrine,” a natural right that holds “priority with regard to any human intervention concerning goods, to any legal system concerning the same, to any economic or social system or method.” [3]
Hold on to that word priority, then read what the Compendium says 4 paragraphs later, because it turns around and defends private ownership without blinking. Private property, it says, “is an essential element of an authentically social and democratic economic policy, and it is the guarantee of a correct social order.” Then the line the Berlin argument needs: the Church’s social doctrine “requires that ownership of goods be equally accessible to all,” so that “all may become, at least in some measure, owners,” and it “excludes recourse to forms of ‘common and promiscuous dominion.'” [4]
The Church holds two principles at once. Everybody owning something is the goal. Everybody owning everything in common is ruled out.
And the Compendium explains how those two fit. Christian tradition “has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and untouchable,” because the right to private property “is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.” Private property, whatever legal shape it takes, “is in its essence only an instrument for respecting the principle of the universal destination of goods; in the final analysis, therefore, it is not an end but a means.” [5]
An instrument gets judged by whether it works. That is the standard the Church hands you for a housing market, and it cuts both ways.
Why Leo XIII Said No, And What He Wanted Instead
Rerum Novarum does what most Catholic readers remember. Leo XIII looks at socialists “working on the poor man’s envy of the rich,” striving “to do away with private property,” contending that individual possessions “should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies.” His verdict is that the working man “would be among the first to suffer,” and that the proposals are “emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.” Later he is blunter still: “the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected.” [6]
So a Catholic in Berlin has his answer to the referendum as written. Housing taken from its present owners and administered by municipal bodies is the very thing Leo names and refuses.
Now the part that stays in the drawer. Leo’s case against expropriation is a case for ownership, and he means ownership by the man who has none. A workman paid enough to support his family, he writes, “will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income.” Those savings become property, and Leo wants the law helping: “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” His reason is a portrait of a city, uncomfortably close to this one. Civil change and revolution, he says, have divided cities “into two classes separated by a wide chasm.” On one side, “the party which holds power because it holds wealth.” On the other, “the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit and ever ready for disturbance.” Get working people a share in the land and “the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over.” [7]
Read Sunday’s election results through that paragraph. A capital where a quarter of the vote goes to a party promising to seize the housing stock, and a state where the AfD takes 38.3 percent while the governing party of the federal republic drops under 5, is a fair description of a multitude ever ready for disturbance. Leo XIII would have refused the remedy. He would have recognized the disturbance, and he wrote down in 1891 what produces it.
The Duty That Came With The Deed
This puts the argument back on the owners, where the Church is not gentle either.
The Compendium calls for “recognition of the social function of any form of private ownership,” and teaches that the universal destination of goods “entails obligations on how goods are to be used by their legitimate owners.” Owners “may not use their resources without considering the effects that this use will have,” and they carry a duty “not to let the goods in their possession go idle.” [8]
The Catechism says it in fewer words. The right to private property “does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial.” And political authority “has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good.” [9]
That last line carries weight in this story. A Catholic can oppose the Berlin referendum and still hold that a landlord answers for what he does with what he owns, and that regulating rents sits inside the state’s competence. The Church grants public authority real power over the use of property. What she withholds is the power to abolish the thing.
She also goes further about the person with nowhere to live. “There is no theft,” the Catechism says, “if consent can be presumed or if refusal is contrary to reason and the universal destination of goods. This is the case in obvious and urgent necessity when the only way to provide for immediate, essential needs (food, shelter, clothing . . .) is to put at one’s disposal and use the property of others.” [10] Shelter is on that list, under the seventh commandment. A family in real extremity commits no theft in taking what it needs to live. That sentence describes an emergency, and it tells you how seriously the Church takes a roof.
Leo XIV On Where The Poor Live
Our present Holy Father has written about this in terms that fit Berlin exactly. In Dilexi Te, his exhortation on love for the poor, Leo XIV names “one structural issue that cannot realistically be resolved from above and needs to be addressed as quickly as possible,” and identifies it as “the locations, neighborhoods, homes and cities where the poor live and spend their time.” [11] Resolved from above is precisely what an expropriation decree is. Change the name on the deed, leave the same families in the same flats paying rent to a different office, and the Pope has told you in advance how little that does.
He is equally clear that the pressure behind Sunday’s vote is real. “In Europe,” he writes, “more and more families find themselves unable to make it to the end of the month.” [12] A Berliner who voted for expropriation was voting about the end of the month. The Church’s quarrel is with the instrument. She has taken the grievance seriously since 1891.
What I’d Watch
Two things in the coming weeks, and neither of them is the coalition arithmetic.
Watch whether anyone at the table proposes something that makes Berliners owners. Leo XIII’s standard is a working family holding a deed in its own name. Cooperative ownership, tenant purchase, land released for building, credit that reaches ordinary wages: the Church has no preferred mechanism, and a very clear preferred result.
Then watch how the losing parties talk. A party that finished fifth in Berlin will be tempted to explain that the voters got it wrong. The Church’s account of property makes that explanation unavailable. When a quarter of a capital votes to take the houses back, the houses are worth looking at.
This story turns on the universal destination of goods: the earth was given to everyone, private property is the instrument for getting it into everyone’s hands, and an instrument is judged by whether it is working.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Footnotes
- “AfD wins German state as Merz’s conservatives suffer historic rout,” Reuters, September 21, 2026, cyprus-mail.com; “Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing,” Reuters, September 20, 2026, usnews.com; “Germany’s Merz defiant after historic state elections defeat, vows to press ahead with reforms,” CBS News / Associated Press, September 21, 2026, cbsnews.com; “German Chancellor Merz calls state election a ‘disaster’ for his party but vows to stay on,” BBC News, September 21, 2026, bbc.com; “Chancellor Merz calls Germany state elections results a ‘disaster,’ as far-right surge again,” CNN, September 20, 2026, cnn.com; “Is Germany’s leader Friedrich Merz doomed as far right wins again?,” CNN, September 21, 2026, cnn.com; “Anti-migrant AfD seeks to break Germany’s political ‘firewall’ in historic state election,” Fox News, September 20, 2026, foxnews.com; “Far left wins in Berlin, far right in Germany’s northeast vote: Exit polls,” Al Jazeera, September 20, 2026, aljazeera.com; Zachary Folk, “German Far-Right AfD’s Latest Win A ‘Disaster,’ Merz Says,” Forbes, September 20, 2026, forbes.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 171, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 172. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 176. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 177. ↩
- Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 1891), nos. 4, 15, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, nos. 46–47. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 178. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 2403, 2406, vatican.va. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2408, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, October 4, 2025), no. 96, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te, no. 12. ↩
Books Cited
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- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
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