As Germany heads toward a snap election for its Lower House of Parliament on February 23, signs dotting the nation’s cities ask voters: Is your rent too high? The red and white placards belonging to Die Linke, Germany’s Left Party, speak to how a worsening housing crisis has become a battlefield in German and European politics. It is an issue politicians must meet with meaningful solutions or risk growing public anger over spiraling rents driving support of the already ascendant far right, according to experts.

“Rising rent prices at the neighborhood level in Germany increase support for radical right parties,” explains Thomas Kurer, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich and coauthor of a recent study on the relationship between rental market risk and support for Germany’s far right. That study found that the increasing cost of rent is driving support for the far right in a significant way: For every one euro per square meter increase in the price of rent in a given ZIP code, the probability that low-income tenants living in that ZIP code will support Germany’s Alternative for Germany party (AfD) rises by as many as 4 percentage points. AfD is an extreme right, neo-Nazi organization campaigning on a deeply socially conservative and anti-immigrant agenda.

The drive toward the right is strongest among long-term residents with lower incomes because they “often lack the financial buffer to protect themselves against displacement,” Kurer told Truthout. Just the threat of losing social or economic status can influence voters in powerful ways, as research on Donald Trump’s rise in the United States has also concluded. Similarly, Kurer said his findings in the German context show “that local housing cost pressures, much like job insecurity, can fuel political discontent and shape electoral outcomes.”

Rising rents have already played a role in elections across the European continent. The issue was a driving force behind the breakthrough success of Portugal’s far right Chega party in that nation’s March 2024 parliamentary elections. It was also a top concern for Dutch voters in November 2023, when the nationalist, far right Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats in the nation’s House of Representatives.

Shortages of affordable housing have also sparked protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland in recent years as prices spiral upwards. According to Eurostat, housing prices in the European Union (EU)

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