Courage for the Future

Our Agenda for a Strong, Competitive, and Sustainable Berlin.

Under the heading “Courage for the Future,” the VBKI outlines its key expectations for Berlin’s state government in the run-up to the 2026 House of Representatives election. The focus is on how Berlin can better leverage its major strengths and translate them more quickly into concrete results.

The election platform brings together the positions and ideas of the VBKI and its committees on the key issues shaping the capital’s future. VBKI President Prof. Harald Christ sums up the organization’s vision:

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“Berlin is stronger, more innovative, and more international than it appears in some debates. This city has the substance, the talent, the scientific community, the businesses, and the international appeal to be one of Europe’s leading cities of the future. But Berlin is not yet harnessing this potential consistently enough. Our message is therefore this: Berlin must make decisions faster, invest more boldly, and implement changes more consistently. Having the courage to embrace the future means not merely managing opportunities, but seizing them.”

Prof. Harald Christ, VBKI President

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With our agenda, we are making a nonpartisan contribution to the debate and extending an offer of dialogue to any democratic coalition formed after the election. Four priorities are at the heart of our agenda: We want to strengthen growth and competitiveness, bring innovations to market more quickly, increase Berlin’s capacity for action and resilience, and confidently position the capital as an international metropolis. In doing so, we are focusing on three key areas for the future: housing and urban development, education and science, and the healthcare industry.

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Housing: Speeding Up New Construction
When it comes to housing, we are committed to faster planning and permitting processes, as well as an investment-friendly housing policy. Our goal is for planning and permitting processes to be completed, as a rule, within a maximum of two years. We believe that public ownership is the wrong approach: it does not create a single new apartment, ties up significant resources, and undermines the investor confidence that Berlin urgently needs.

Strengthening Education and Science
In the field of education, we call for measurable progress in educational quality, basic skills, and language support. A Berlin-wide education monitoring system and strengthened school leadership are intended to help improve quality in the long term.
At the same time, Berlin must continue to expand its universities and research institutions as a strategic competitive advantage. The backlog of renovations must be cleared, the transfer of scientific findings into practice must be accelerated, and the creation of spin-off companies must be facilitated. Artificial intelligence should be utilized much more extensively as a driver of productivity and innovation in education, science, public administration, and the economy.

The Healthcare Industry as an Industry of the Future
We view the healthcare industry as a strategic key market for the capital. Berlin boasts an exceptional concentration of university hospitals, research institutions, clinics, and companies in the biotech, medtech, and healthtech sectors. We must consistently harness this potential to develop Berlin into Europe’s healthcare capital by 2030. This requires faster translation of research into practice, better framework conditions for clinical trials, more scale-up capital, and a commitment to positioning Berlin as a leading hub for data-driven health innovation within the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

An Efficient Administration as the Key
For us, an administration capable of taking action is the fundamental prerequisite for accelerating progress in the capital. That is why we call for the consistent completion of administrative reform, the clear delineation of responsibilities between the state and the districts, the digitization of procedures, and more binding decision-making processes. Administration is a matter of location policy—it must enable innovation, investment, and growth.

Specifically, we are setting forth 10 key demands:

1. Speed up construction: Limit planning and permitting processes to a maximum of two years.

2. Build more instead of redistributing: Expropriation does not solve the housing shortage—it makes it worse.

3. Empowering the administration to act: Complete the reform; strengthen citywide governance.

4. Make Berlin resilient to crises: Eliminate the investment backlog, secure critical infrastructure, and prioritize internal security and the fight against right-wing and left-wing extremism.

5. Ensure the quality of education: Upgrade schools and provide them with resources tailored to their needs; strengthen school leadership; and introduce educational monitoring.

6. Turning Knowledge into Impact: Modernizing universities, accelerating knowledge transfer, and strengthening spin-offs.

7. Develop the healthcare industry as Berlin’s strategic flagship market.

8. Mobility without ideology: Intelligently connect all modes of transportation, improve public transit, and finally resolve its quality issues.

9. Attracting Talent to Berlin: Developing Berlin into an open, high-performing, and internationally recognized hub for talent.

10. Use major events such as the Olympics as projects for Berlin's future.

VBKI Election Agenda Berlin 2026

Our election platform was developed by drawing on the diverse membership of our association. All of the VBKI’s volunteer-led committees contributed to it. Entrepreneurs and experts from the fields of science, education, health, housing, mobility, culture, digitalization, and other areas shared their perspectives. | View now