Claudia Tausend enters the forecourt of Pep. Quite a hustle and bustle, some come with bags from the shopping center in Neuperlach, others are on their way in. But Tausend has no eyes for it at this moment, she is focused on something else: the election poster stands. This time the Greens got hold of the place that they usually have, the CSU is already there, even the Corona denier splinter party Die Basis. And where is she, an SPD member of the Bundestag for the constituency here for eight years, and Munich party leader at that? Your helpers won’t have been too late, will you? But then the all-clear, SPD posters sighted, on the other side, it’s okay.
It is an afternoon at the end of July, city planning officer Elisabeth Merk has invited to a city walk, a few members of the city council are there, the chairman of the district committee, and from federal politics: Claudia Tausend. She stays in the background during this appointment, listening when it comes to how green Neuperlach is despite its more than 50,000 inhabitants, that there is some potential for densification and that the many small bridges can be better presented. “It’s nice to live in Neuperlach,” says Tausend, “the time when it was considered a satellite town is over.” The “relief city” Neuperlach, as it was officially called in the planning, was created from 1967 under Lord Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel, it is a monument to the SPD housing policy.
The Thousand MP tries to translate Vogel’s ideas into today’s federal politics. This can be seen in the most important function of the 57-year-olds in the Bundestag: deputy spokeswoman for the working group on construction, housing, urban development and municipalities in the SPD parliamentary group. As such, it had a main project in this legislative period: an amendment to the building code. “We worked on it for three years. I see it as a great success for the SPD that it still came,” said Tausend a few days after walking through Neuperlach, now in the city café on St.-Jakobs-Platz. She suggested the meeting point for a conversation. He is close to the party headquarters – the city district of Altstadt-Lehel also belongs to their constituency Munich-East, as well as Au-Haidhausen, Berg am Laim, Bogenhausen, Ramersdorf-Perlach and Trudering-Riem.
In the spring, on the home stretch of this grand coalition, the Bundestag passed the “Building Land Mobilization Act”; it has been in force since the end of June. Behind the word monster there are regulations that give a municipality with a tight housing market like Munich significantly more influence. The city can – if the Free State issues the necessary ordinances – prevent the conversion of rental apartments into owner-occupied apartments throughout the city. With a right of first refusal for residential buildings in maintenance statute areas, it no longer has to pay the often speculatively inflated price, but can limit the purchase price. And it can also stipulate the creation of subsidized living space in areas for which there are no development plans – including many inner-city quarters. “I always call it the Act on the Protection of Living Space and the Strengthening of Municipalities,” says Tausend. This name is much longer, but it makes it clear from a thousand perspectives what the law is about.
The SPD pushed it through against considerable opposition in the CDU / CSU parliamentary group. That was only possible, says Tausend, because Interior and Building Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) spoke out in favor of the law. One hears from her that she gives him great credit for that, “he knows the upheavals in Munich from his time as Prime Minister”. With the law, the federal government implemented “a clear work order from the Munich SPD,” says Tausend – even if she would have liked to negotiate a little more into it.
After the last federal election, the SPD argued for weeks about whether it should go into a coalition with the Union again, including in Munich. Claudia Tausend was part of the pro camp. “I have the urge to change something. And I’d rather do that in a government coalition than give Sunday speeches from within the opposition,” she explains. And she emphasizes that the SPD ministers Olaf Scholz and Hubertus Heil played a major role in ensuring that Germany has come through the Corona crisis without too much social hardship, she mentions the keywords short-time allowance and suspension of the obligation to file for bankruptcy. It is true that the SPD rose to 19 percent in two polls published this week. But there is no sign that the voters are lifting the party to old heights. So has it been of use to the party, or perhaps it has harmed it, to have joined the coalition? “I don’t know if the party was okay with it. But I know it was good for the country.” And the latest surveys make her optimistic: “The Chancellery is within reach for Olaf Scholz.”
Not only a thousand main political issue, housing, is classic for the SPD. Her biography also fits in perfectly with the party DNA: As a “working class child”, as she herself says, born in Vilsbiburg, moved from Lower Bavaria to Munich to study geography. After graduating, Tausend worked for the trade consultancy BBE. In 1990 she joined the party. From 1996 she was a city councilor in Munich for 17 years, the last seven years as deputy parliamentary group leader and planning spokeswoman. As early as the 2005 Bundestag election, SPD MP Fritz Schösser proposed to her successor in the east of Munich. At that time and in 2009, Tausend missed entry into the Bundestag, and in 2013 it went through the state list for the first time. This time, too, with tenth place on the list, she will almost certainly have another legislative period in Berlin. Tausend does not believe that she could take away the constituency, which has been in CSU hands since 1976, from her competitor Wolfgang Stefinger: “I don’t see any swing there.” Especially since the Greens, who send Vaniessa Rashid into the race in the east, have become the strongest party in Munich. In the 2017 election, Thousand received 21.2 percent of the first votes, and the SPD in its constituency received 16 percent of the second votes.
What is Tausend doing in the next legislature? She assumes that she will continue to take care of building and housing policy, “I don’t think there is much competition”. She sees energetic building renovation as a major topic, which is of enormous importance in terms of climate policy and will devour many billions of euros. The question of which of the costs is left to landlords and tenants becomes politically explosive. A second topic that the SPD has in its election program is the “rent moratorium”. Tausend puts her goal as follows: “We want to change the cap in such a way that rents can only be increased by a maximum of ten percent in five years.” So far it is 15 percent in three years. “When we’re back in government, I think it’s realistic that it will come.”