How do you stop the rise of the far right? Build houses 

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Tomas Santillan makes his living as a florist but as he lives in Dublin, he has what feels like a second (unpaid) profession — flat hunting.

Because the Irish capital’s affordable housing stock has failed to grow with its population, demand has led residential rental prices to more than double since 2013. Santillan said that reality had made securing accommodation an “extremely hard and tiring” process that requires prospective tenants to “be on the lookout constantly.”

“If you manage to actually get a response from an agent or landlord and arrange to view a flat, it’s often with 50 other people, and you have to show up with cash for the deposit because most places get rented on the spot,” he said.

“Prices and quality are ridiculous: People pay high rents for rooms shared with six or more people, and I’ve even had friends paying for shared beds.”

The situation in Dublin is hardly unique in Europe.

Over the past decade, average rents across the bloc have increased by 19 percent while house prices have shot up by 47 percent. Even in seemingly prosperous countries like Germany, one out of every five households now spends 40 percent of its disposable income on housing.

Difficulties related to housing are fuelling protests across Europe, with thousands taking to the streets in Lisbon, Amsterdam and Milan in recent months. That anger has been seized upon by far-right groups in places like Dublin, where authorities say that last November’s anti-immigrant riots were partially motivated by claims that scarce council flats were being given to foreigners.

Now, the EU’s mainstream political parties are seeking to reclaim housing as a key political issue — one which they can use to stave off the right-wing and Euroskeptic parties that are set to surge in June’s European Parliament election. Some politicians increasingly see the housing crisis as an issue that can help mobilize moderate, middle-class voters. They also see migration as a topic that may rile electors and one that ultimately only serves to reinforce the likes of the pro-Kremlin Identity and Democracy group, which is home to the likes of France’s National Rally, Italy’s League, and the Alternative for Germany.

“We have to really take up the concerns of our citizens,” Nicolas Schmit, the European jobs and social rights commissioner — who will be the lead candidate for the socialists in the EU election — told POLITICO. “Europe should be involved in solving this housing crisis.”

Mismanagement, not foreigners, is the problem

During a debate in the Irish parliament, People Before Profit-Solidarity party lawmaker Mick Barry argued the social upheaval in the city would only be solved by tackling the underlying issues. “You cannot pepper spray alienation, you cannot baton charge anger at social inequality, you cannot taser the housing crisis,” he said.

Sorcha Edwards, secretary-general of Housing Europe, which represents public, cooperative and social housing providers, said that the far right’s allegation that undocumented immigrants were responsible for the bloc’s housing shortage was untrue.

“You have to have legal residency to opt for public housing in all EU states and private housing prices are not being driven by the demand of low-income foreigners,” she explained. “The housing shortage is due to a basic factor: Public authorities stopped building several decades ago and abdicated their responsibility to private real estate and construction firms.”

Edwards pointed out that countries like the Netherlands went 12 years without having a dedicated housing minister, and that EU housing ministers stopped meeting in 2013 and only resumed holding coordination sessions under the French Council Presidency in 2022.

“We’re paying the price for the absence of policy.”

The recent national election in the Netherlands, in which the governing conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) campaigned on migration but failed to win over voters who backed the far-right Freedom Party en masse, appears to back this theory.

Former Dutch foreign minister and liberal party leader Sigrid Kaag said that during the Dutch election campaign, centrists should have focused on homes instead of migrants.

“Some parties wanted to talk about migration,” she said. “But if you look at the polls, what citizens found important, it was first health care, second housing and third climate and migration.”

The EU’s Housing Deal?

This week mainstream parties are launching their bid to make housing a banner issue with two manifestos: The Belgian Presidency of the European Council’s Brussels Declaration and the Housing Europe Manifesto, which is set to be presented in Parliament on Thursday.

In both documents, mayors from all of Europe’s major cities, as well as regional presidents, national ministers and MEPs demand the Parliament and Commission that are formed after June’s election make housing the signature issue of the next legislature, much like climate dominated the current one.

Brussels Region Urbanism Secretary Ans Persoons, a social democrat who is one of the Brussels Declaration’s signatories, said that housing is “no longer just a problem for low-income residents, but rather one that affects middle class and essential workers like teachers, police officers, service sector workers can no longer afford to rent or buy houses.”

“We currently have 50,000 people on the waiting list for social housing in Brussels, and the situation is just as bad or worse in places like Paris and Amsterdam,” she said. “The EU has been able to propose legislation and provide funding to address major crises like Covid and energy prices: Housing is no less serious an issue.”

Green MEP Kim Van Sparrentak, who is presenting the Housing Europe manifesto in the Parliament along with Renew MEP Barry Andrews and the European People’s Party’s Dennis Radtke, also urged EU action to tackle a crisis that is the “number one concern” of voters in places like her home country of the Netherlands.

“People are postponing major life events, have to commute longer to work or education, and are facing more precarious housing situations,” she said, noting that she had been forced to move from Amsterdam to Rotterdam because she could no longer afford to live in the Dutch capital.

“Progressive parties need to put the everyday needs of people front and center … By connecting the systemic change we want to see, for our planet, the economy and the people … I believe we will have a strong appeal to voters.”

Show us the money

Housing is not a competence of the EU, but Housing Europe’s Edwards said there’s plenty the bloc’s institutions can do to help tackle the crisis. For starters, she called for an EU taskforce on housing, with a Commission vice-president appointed to lead a team that would coordinate housing policy and tackle the issue at a bloc-wide level.

Brussels’ Persoons argued a major funding scheme like the bloc’s Next Generation EU economic recovery package, which was used to build public housing and carry out energy-efficient renovations of existing residential buildings in Spain and Portugal, was “essential.”

Talk of allocating new money to housing is likely to raise eyebrows in Brussels, but Persoons pointed out that the EU’s emissions-reduction goals will require green renovations that are already set to impose a heavy cost on public authorities and private residents.

“We’ve committed to a Green Deal with requirements that come at a price that not everyone is going to be able to pay,” she said. “The EU has to ensure those revamps don’t increase social inequality, so what we need is a housing deal with investments and financing for new and existing homes, to ensure no one is left behind.”

Persoons is not alone in asking for more cash: France’s secretary of state for European affairs, Laurence Boone, has similarly said the next European Commission will have to provide more funds for renovations if the bloc is to meet its climate goals and suggested a third of the EU’s funds for cohesion funds should be earmarked for this purpose.

For her part, Dutch MEP Van Sparrentak said that new legislation was also needed to take on speculative investments by international funds, which she argued could be done with mandatory transparency rule for real-estate ownership and transactions.

But she stressed that the EU needed to use its rules for banking and finance, as well as state aid rules, to reshape the bloc’s housing market and policies.

According to a diplomat granted anonymity to speak freely, while it seems increasingly likely that housing will be on the radar of the next Commission, there is concern that Brussels will to struggle to respond to the crisis. The lack of affordable housing may be pan-European problem, but it is shaped by local conditions: The factors driving up rental and home prices in Portugal are not the same as those having an impact in the Netherlands.

Regardless, Van Sparrentak said it was time for the EU to do its part in tackling the issue.

“The housing crisis is huge across the Union,” she said. “If we’re not going to act stronger on the social dimension, we risk losing people’s trust in the EU.”