Berlin – Tomorrow will be voted. It’s about every vote. Bad headlines don’t come off well. The Bild newspaper headlines: “SPD leader Esken disgusts pensioners (77)“. What happened? A Berlin pensioner who lives on a small pension is annoyed by the plans of the SPD to cap the rent and to transfer part of the CO2 surcharge to landlords. His name: Conny. Conny himself was a comrade for years, as he says, but he left the SPD out of frustration at the coalition with the Left Party. Since then he has been annoyed that small landlords are treated so badly by the SPD. “Hello Ms. Esken,” he writes on Twitter. “As a pensioner, I have a pension of 980 euros, plus an apartment in Berlin that I rent to Senate employees for 540 euros – I need around 1500 euros to live!” But a lot of the story doesn’t quite fit together.
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Esken answers a little awkwardly. “The rent moratorium limits the increase in rent to the level of inflation – that should continue to be enough to survive,” writes Esken.
The picture claims to have spoken to the Berlin pensioner. He is said to have explained his desperate situation in broad Berlinerisch, the identity of the pensioner is known to the picture according to his own statements. The focus and the alternative media portal Tichys insight took up the process. But who is Conny, a pensioner anyway? And why does his story of small landlords fit so well into the current election campaign, in which the real estate industry repeatedly refers to small private landlords when it comes to regulating the rental market?
Conny is modest compared to the picture. Before the Berlin rent cap was collected by the Federal Constitutional Court, its tenants are said to have even offered to waive the rent difference to the contractual rent and to pay the full rent. Conny refused this. In his tweets, however, the story sounds a little different and far less harmonious.
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Much doesn’t fit together at the pensioner Conny: He always gives his age differently. Sometimes he is 71, sometimes 73, the Bild newspaper gives his age as 77. “I don’t want to go into debt at the age of 77,” she quotes him.
