In a city where housing costs have become the central anxiety of daily life, Berlin's Left Party won power on a promise made not just by politicians but by the people themselves — a 2021 referendum in which nearly three in five Berliners called for the expropriation of large property firms. Yet the distance between a democratic mandate and its legal execution is proving vast: federal opposition, constitutional ambiguity, and shifting public sentiment now stand between the election result and the transformation it seemed to authorize. What unfolds in Berlin is an old question wearing new clothe