German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/38, pp.
3750-3751.
Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.
The rents are quite high and the trust in the government quite
low. A half year of the Ampel
government has sufficed to basically destroy many people’s dream of home
ownership [eigenen vier Wällen]. In
January you of the government, without any forewarning, simply stopped the KfW
promotion a week before the official end and thereby stole home ownership from
many thousands of families, people who already paid many tens of thousands of
euros for architectural plans, energy advisors, purchase of a site, building
permits, real estate transfer taxes, notary services, etc., and relied on your
promotion promises.
Many of these people now stand there with many thousands of
euros in debts on account of this government, without hope of being able to
afford their home, and those of them who could afford to alter the building
plan and energy planning for many thousands of additional euros so that they
correspond to your new promotion program are now finally on ruined ground – in that
you have stopped your new promotion promises after just three hours without any
forewarning. You have thus ruined within the briefest time the dream of home
ownership for many people.
Now it happens that you of the Union, who in the previous
government co-produced this entire disaster, allegedly want to enable the dream
of home ownership. It is nice that for this you have apparently read the AfD
motion from the year 2018 and copied out much of what is right. What you then
rejected as a government, you now thus apparently want to implement yourselves.
Yet your hypocrisy goes even further. Since naturally it is
right that the real estate transfer tax, as demanded by us for years, needs to
be lowered, quite especially for young families; it was nevertheless exactly
you of the Union who have ever further driven the real estate transfer tax to
the heights. Thus the Union-led government under Helmut Kohl already in 1997
raised the real estate transfer tax from 2.0 percent to 3.5 percent. It was the
Union-led government under Angela Merkel which enabled the Federal States to
independently further increase the real estate tax, and the increases have
naturally arrived by return mail.
Especially embarrassing – I need also say – for your motion
is in fact however that the CDU-governed States of Nordrhein-Westfalen and
Schleswig-Holstein today have the highest real estate transfer tax in Germany,
namely 6.5 percent.
If you thus really wanted to relieve the people, then you
would have had 16 years time for that – for 16 years, nothing was done. In the States
governed by you, you could still immediately act and reduce the real estate
transfer tax to 3.5 percent, In that you have not done that is seen that your
motion acts as nothing other than a cheap show window motion without any
substance.
The German Bundesbank states that the greatest hindrance for
home ownership is the high real estate transfer taxes in Germany. The high
level of these is the direct consequence of the Union’s policy in the last
years. The CDU is thus the greatest hindrance for the dream of home ownership
in Germany.
This is also quite clearly and distinctly seen in regards
the housing construction costs. In 16 Merkel years, the costs of housing
construction have just exploded as a result of countless, complicated
construction rules and energy guidelines. Expensive heating installations,
extreme protective glazing, dubious insulation regulations have let loose a
regulatory insulation madness. Over 500 billion euros of polystyrene was stuck
to German houses without that, as stated by the German Economic Institute,
having had any use. If the Union in its motion now wants to ostensibly reduce their
own introduced cost-driving requirements, then that is nothing but a barefaced
mockery.
The fact is that a newly built square meter of housing space
in Germany today costs on the average 3,400 euros, the entirety of that leads
to a net rent [Kaltmiete] of 13.50
euros at a minimum. And that can plainly 80 percent of the people in our
country not afford.
Germany thus not without reason brings up the rear in Europe
in regards to the housing ownership quota. The German Bundesbank clearly states
that the housing policy of the government is responsible for that our housing
ownership quota is the lowest in all of Europe, namely just 45 percent, while
the European average is clearly over 70 percent.
We want to make Germany, from a country of renters, into a
country of owners, and we therefore demand:
First. All cost-driving construction rules need to be
reduced to a bearable standard and cost drivers eliminated.
Second. The abolition of the real property tax. This would
be an immediate relief for each household in our country of from 400 to 500
euros per year.
Third. A general reduction of the real estate sales tax to
3.5 percent.
Fourth. A complete riddance of the real estate transfer tax
for the first home for one’s own use.
Stephan Brandner (AfD): A very good idea!
Dear colleagues of the CDU, it simply makes much more sense
to vote for the same motions of the AfD, instead of first rejecting them and
then re-introducing them as a plagiarism.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
