In Germany, electric heating for the house is very uncommon (in opposite to France, I think) for the reason that in Germany, electricity is rather expensive.
If I understand correctly from other comments below, Belgium seems to use this form of heating despite having some of the highest prices for electricity [0]. Is that the case?
And yes, it is expensive (for a 2 floor house with electric heating including water, total electricity was in the 3-4K Euros per year range). I assume there's no viable alternative for the particular buildings. Usually the rent is substantially lower for those houses (I lived in houses where the rent was lower than the nebenkosten+electricity for this exact reason).
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
You extrapolated from "common in my city" to "common in my country", and a fairly large one at that. That isn't contrasting anything; its just plain wrong.
The word you are looking for is subsidies.
Not every Latin-derived word also works in English. ;)
Most German houses run on "Fernwärme", a district heating system where the cities reuse the leftover heat energy from waste incineration plants or powerplants. Another major heating source is gas. Only a tiny minority in rural regions uses oil, and that’s pretty much it — electricity is pretty much never used at all.
Actually about 50 % of households use gas, about a quarter uses oil and the remaining quarter is Fernwärme, heat pump, solar etc.
Here it used to be common that there's a rather large water tank (1 cubic meter or even more) that is heated up during night time when electricity was cheaper, and then gives out the warmth during day. This is no longer a feasible use case because night time usage of electricity has gone up and night electricity is not cheaper.
Heat pumps (operating with drilled wells going 100 m deep) have become more common. The pumps take 400V 3-phase.
Air source electric heat pumps are on the rise, but it'll be decades before they catch up to gas.