German Greens Pick Ethnic Turk to Lead

One of the greatest racial issues in Europe is the position of Turkish immigrants in Germany, Because of citizenship laws, it is quite possible for a child born in Germany of parents born in Germany to be denied German citizenship. People of Turkish descent make up 3% of the German population but may not be considered Germans. Yet, the Green Party's new leader is Cem Ozdemir, 42, born in southern Germany of parents who had come from Turkey to work as "Gastarbeiter," guest workers. It's not quite an Obama moment, but it is a step on the same road.

The International Herald Tribune reported, “Ozdemir, a social scientist who studied at the Lutheran College for Social Sciences in Reutlingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, was elected as a Greens legislator to the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, in 1994, the first time anyone with a Turkish background had won such a mandate. He moved to the European Parliament in 2004 after he was forced to give up his parliamentary seat for using his publicly paid airline miles for private use. With his comeback to domestic politics over the weekend, Ozdemir - who is married, has one child and speaks German with a slight southwestern accent - joins a handful of ethnic Turks in the Greens, the Social Democrats and the new populist Left Party who want to make the parties more representative of the ethnic composition of the German population.

It shouldn't be a big deal. A patriotic German regardless of ancestry should be able to lead any party, any business or any union. Yet big deal it is. It suggests that Germany is coming to grips with the idea of being a multi-ethnic nation. The nightmare of Nazism is 6 decades old, and Mr. Ozdemir's rise is the end of whatever remained of it.

Will Mr. Ozdemir ever be Chancellor? Will he be the German Obama? Probably not. The Greens are a minor party,good for maybe 10% of the vote in a general election, but they aren't going to ever be top dog in a coalition, let alone win a majority. But that is not because its leader is an ethnic Turk.

Mr. Ozdemir is under no delusions about his future. “We have a lot of work to do before one day it no longer matters if someone has ancestors from Kazakhstan, from Anatolia, or whether they fought the Romans in the battle of the Teutoburg Forrest,” Mr. Özdemir told Süddeutsche Zeitung on Monday. “Germany is still a developing country as far as having an open society goes.” However, developing means progressing, and that is a good thing.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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