The Social Democratic Minister for Building intends to allow the intelligence service to screen homebuyers for political attitudes. Entirely without them having broken the law.
On 2 April, Germany’s Minister for Building, Verena Hubertz (SPD), presented a 174-page legislative proposal with the innocuous title “Modernisation of urban planning and land-use planning legislation”. Embedded among paragraphs on digitalisation and environmental assessments lay a provision that critics are already calling an “attitude TÜV” for homebuyers.
The core of the proposal is simple: German municipalities are to be granted a right of first refusal for properties if they suspect that the purchaser is engaged in “activities directed against the free democratic basic order”.
In order to determine this, municipalities are to be permitted to obtain information about potential homebuyers from the Verfassungsschutz—the German domestic intelligence service—and from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
It is not long since the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was found to be in a “fundamental tendency to be in conflict with the constitution”, according to the intelligence service.
The most striking aspect: the purchaser need not have broken any law. The legislative text specifies that the activities in question “do not necessarily have to be militant, aggressive, or unlawful”. Suspicion suffices.
A political intelligence service as arbiter
The Verfassungsschutz is not an ordinary police body. It is a purely political intelligence service operating directly under the Ministry of the Interior—that is, under the political leadership of the government. It is the same service that the SPD has repeatedly used in attempts to label the country’s largest opposition party, AfD, as “hostile to the constitution”.
Critics point to the obvious conflict of interest: the governing party controls the intelligence service, which determines who holds the “wrong” attitudes, and this assessment may then be used to prevent political opponents from purchasing property.
Characteristically, the ministry’s own press release did not mention the provision by a single word. It was discovered deep within the 174-page document by the news outlet Nius, which first reported on the matter.
The legislative proposal presents itself as an instrument against right-wing extremist settlement strategies and mentions well-known examples such as the neo-Nazi milieu in Dortmund-Dorstfeld and the village of Jamel in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, critics point out that the formulations are so broad that they may extend far beyond actual neo-Nazis.
– Unconstitutional extremism
AfD’s spokesperson for building policy, Marc Bernhard, calls the plans “unconstitutional extremism from the SPD”. Commentators in German media have drawn parallels to the original attempt to ban the party NPD, which collapsed when it became apparent that the Verfassungsschutz’s own informants had infiltrated the party so thoroughly that it was impossible to distinguish the party’s own positions from those of the state.
According to the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, critics refer to the proposal as a “Gesinnungs-TÜV”—an attitude control modelled on the mandatory technical inspection that German cars must undergo.
The legislative proposal is currently under inter-ministerial consideration, with a decision planned at the end of May 2026. It remains to be seen whether CDU, which is the SPD’s coalition partner in government, will support a legislative proposal that could potentially be used to deny voters of the country’s largest opposition party the right to purchase housing.