BERLIN — The Green Party, one of Germany’s main political parties, has elected the son of Turkish immigrants to its top political post, the first time any party here has chosen a leader with an ethnic Turkish background.
The election of Cem Ozdemir, 42, on Saturday represents a major turning point not only for the opposition Greens, but also for the country as a whole. He was born in southern Germany of parents who came from Turkey to work as gastarbeiter, or guest workers, during the 1960s.
Even though more than 2.6 million Turks live in Germany, accounting for 3 percent of the population, few have managed to make it to the higher ranks of many professions, including politics and the civil service.
But with a conservative party’s choice of Angela Merkel to run as chancellor in 2005 — a successful gambit — and now an ethnic Turk at the helm of an influential party, it appears that German society is slowly breaking with the past, when women were inconspicuous and immigrants’ voices were seldom heard.
Mr. Ozdemir, a social scientist who went to college in Reutlingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, was elected as a Greens legislator to the lower house of the Bundestag, the German Parliament, in 1994. It was 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, Mr. 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.
“I want a society where everyone has an equal chance, regardless of where they come from,” Mr. Ozdemir said in his acceptance speech at the Greens’ congress in the central city of Erfurt. He won 79.2 percent of the votes and joined Claudia Roth as the co-leader of the Greens.
It is estimated that 660,000 Turks have taken up German citizenship since 1972, giving them a significant voice. According to the main political parties, more than half a million Turks were eligible to vote in the 2005 election; 75 percent voted for the Social Democrats, 9.2 percent for the Greens and less than 5 percent for the Christian Democrats.
With new leaders in place, the Green Party is now turning its attention to federal elections next September. Some analysts are asking whether the Greens, along with the pro-business Free Democrats, might win enough votes to become junior partners for Mrs. Merkel’s conservative bloc.
Such an idea was treated with ridicule until recently. But in February, the Christian Democrats chose to share power with the Greens in Hamburg. So far, the coalition, the first of its kind on the state level, has been working effectively, serving as a litmus test for other states.
Traditionally, the Greens have been allies of the Social Democrats. The party was the junior partner in the coalition led by ChancellorGerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, from 1998 to 2005.
That coalition was defeated by Mrs. Merkel’s conservative bloc, which was forced to band together with the Social Democrats because neither of the big parties was strong enough to establish a coalition with its preferred smaller partners.