Category: Germany

By PATRICK MCGROARTY And BERND RADOWITZ

BERLIN—Guido Westerwelle, the embattled head of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner, defended his leadership and party Thursday, saying the Free Democrats had helped spur the country’s economic recovery and acted as a bulwark against the leftward drift of German politics.

Mr. Westerwelle, who serves as foreign minister and vice chancellor under Ms. Merkel, has drawn harsh criticism from within the pro-business Free Democratic Party and increasingly dire approval ratings after failing to follow through on a tax-cut pledge and other campaign promises.

The Free Democrats’ plight has also become a headache for Ms. Merkel ahead of a string of regional elections in coming months. A collapse in support for the party could shift control of key states. Such an outcome would give the opposition a wider majority in Germany’s upper house, which represents the country’s 16 states, further hobbling the Ms. Merkel’s legislative agenda and weakening her coalition’s credibility.

“Even Hercules couldn’t turn everything around in a week. But we’ve made a start,” Mr. Westerwelle said at a party conference in Stuttgart. “Germany is doing better than it was before the election…and the (Free Democrats) have done our part.”

Critics have often branded Mr. Westerwelle as arrogant and out of touch, and reaction to the speech suggested he hadn’t done as much as his allies had hoped to improve his image.

“No self-criticism, no new ideas, no new vision,” wrote Roland Nelles, Berlin bureau chief for the news website Spiegel Online, in a commentary posted after the speech. “This was the old Westerwelle: ‘Everyone’s a fool except for me.’ ”

A weekly poll released Wednesday by Stern magazine showed support for the Free Democrats at just 4%, below the 5% threshold required to hold seats in parliament and a shadow of the nearly 15% showing that brought the pro-business party to power in national elections in September 2009. Mr. Westerwelle’s personal approval ratings are equally dire: He garnered a 29% approval rating, a personal low that put him last on the list of politicians respondents were asked to rate.

The Free Democrats spent decades as kingmakers to successive coalition governments before a decisive victory for left-leaning parties in 1998 pushed them into more than a decade of outspoken opposition to the initiatives of center-left and then grand coalition governments.

This was the climate in which Mr. Westerwelle became the youngest person ever to lead his party in 2001. Now 49 years old, he helped convert a deep current of voter dissatisfaction into a record showing for the Free Democrats in the 2009 election, but has since struggled to steer the party from a decade of adversarial rhetoric back toward their traditional role as consensus-builders.

“Naturally, 11 years heading in the wrong direction can’t be forgotten in a year,” Mr. Westerwelle said Thursday of the country’s politics while the Free Democrats were out of power. “But we’ve started to make political change.”

A key stumbling bloc has been the party’s campaign promise to lower taxes. Ms. Merkel put the agreement on hold last spring, as the government became preoccupied by the euro-zone debt crisis and made plans to set an example for the bloc’s weaker members by slashing its budget over the next three years. But key FDP leaders like Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle continued to call for tax cuts, opening the party to critiques that they were inflexible and lacked new ideas.

Mr. Westerwelle addressed the tax dispute carefully Thursday, saying the government would simplify the tax system in 2011 and would pursue tax cuts “if there is room for further tax relief through our consolidation policies, through good economic development.”

Ms. Merkel has had her own tough balancing act to perform since winning re-election in 2009, as Germany’s duty to address debt crises in Greece and Ireland ran up against domestic reluctance to pay for other governments’ fiscal sins. Lately, though, her standing among German voters has improved.

In this week’s Stern poll, respondents delivered Ms. Merkel a 59% approval rating, and support for her Christian Democratic Party and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, is stable at 34% even as the Free Democrats’ free fall has put them at a disadvantage against a likely alliance of left-leaning parties. A coalition of the Green Party and the Social Democrats would secure 44% of the vote in an election held now, according to Stern.

“The weakness of its coalition partner isn’t pretty for the chancellor,” says Oskar Niedermayer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.

The real test will come this spring in a series of regional elections, particularly in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. Plans to redevelop the main train station in Stuttgart, the state capital, have sparked a political crisis that threatens six decades of conservative leadership. A recent poll for the first time showed a majority for a potential coalition led by the Green Party.

In Stuttgart Thursday, where protesters unfurled a banner opposing the train-station project from a balcony as he began his speech, Mr. Westerwelle portrayed the FDP as the main impediment to a slew of victories by left-leaning governments at the state level, and eventually to a national regime change. “We need to fight, if Germany isn’t to be left over to the left,” he said.

Write to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@dowjones.com and Bernd Radowitz atbernd.radowitz@dowjones.com

online.wsj.com, JANUARY 7, 2011

FULYA ÖZERKAN
ANKARA/BERLIN – Hürriyet Daily News

The son of Turkish parents who migrated to Germany in the 1960s, Aydın Bilge grew up caught between two worlds. Raised by his grandmother in Turkey, Bilge moved to Germany once his parents had become financially stable enough to send for him.

“It was hard for me to adapt to Germany. I was subjected to xenophobia here,” he told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review. But when Bilge, who described himself as “both Turkish and German,” traveled to Turkey in 2005 to search for his identity, he did not receive a much warmer welcome. He had married a Turkish woman, but his mother-in-law did not approve of him because he was “Almancı” (a Turk who works in Germany).

“I was seen differently just because I was dressed differently and wore earrings. I returned to Germany. I lost my happy marriage,” Bilge said.

This sense of belonging to nowhere, of struggling with a double identity that sometimes feels like a lack of one at all, haunts many Turkish-Germans, particularly members of the second generation of Turks living in Germany, the most sizeable Turkish migrant group in Europe. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of mass immigration of Turkish workers, mostly from rural areas, to meet the additional labor demand during the economic restructuring of Germany known as the “economic miracle.”

Nearly half a century after West Germany signed a bilateral recruitment agreement with Turkey in 1961 to create a formal guest-worker program, many Turks still feel labeled due to their cultural background in Germany, where they are the subjects of ongoing integration debates.

The meaning of integration and an integrated immigrant are not easy to define, however. One official explained integration as speaking the language, having the ability to participate in education, social life and the job market and accepting German laws and basic values. “We are not talking about assimilation,” the official said. “But there are certain basics that immigrants should comply with.”

Even the word “integration” is enough to rile some members of the Turkish community. “People are telling us about integration. What does it mean? What do they expect us? Shall I go out in the street and shout ‘I am German’?” said Dursun Şahin, the vice president of the Turkish-German Businessmen’s Association.

“Integration is not a one-way street. We are coming from a different culture. If they want to send the Turks back, then they should not talk about integration,” he said. “Next year will be the 50th anniversary of Turks living in Germany. We have been paying taxes for 50 years.”

Some Turkish immigrants say they are discriminated against in German society because of their backgrounds and names, even if they speak very good German and dress like everyone else. “Many Turkish-origin people are sending out CVs for jobs but although they meet the required qualifications, they are not called for interviews. It has been discovered that their CVs were not even looked at by German employers because of their Turkish names,” said İlknur Gümüş from the Intercultural Center for Counseling and Meeting in Berlin.

Debates over integration

“One out of four people in Germany has a migration background,” said Barbara John, a lecturer at Humboldt University in Berlin. “The door for guest workers opened in 1955. It was assumed they would come and stay for two years and then go, but that was not the case.”

The assumption that Turkish migrants would work in Germany temporarily and then return to Turkey was also shared by the guest workers themselves, who centered their life plans around their eventual return. A recent study carried out by the Istanbul-based Koç University’s migration department revealed that second-generation Turks were affected personally and emotionally by their families’ plans to return.

“The return orientation of the ‘guest worker’ generation had consequences not only for the persons directly concerned but also for their families and especially for their children, the so-called 1.5 and second generations,” the study read.

Today immigrant groups in Germany are mostly associated with debates over integration, a policy prioritized by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. Saying language is the primary obstacle before foreigners’ integration, German officials have allocated 10 percent of Germany’s GDP to education in 2011, versus a global average of 4.9 percent, and migrants will benefit from the increase significantly. Since 2005, the German government has spent a total of 1 billion euros on education but lingered below the global average each year.

“We have done a lot for the integration of foreigners. A comprehensive effort began a few years ago,” said one German official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are late but not too late. I would have preferred earlier, of course.”

The integration debate was rekindled recently when a former member of the German Central Bank, Thilo Sarrazin, wrote a book saying foreigners – especially Muslims – were coming to Germany to take advantage of the German welfare system. Sarrazin’s book, which is on its way to being the most successful political book in the country since World War II, is seen as “very insulting,” “humiliating” and “biased” among German government circles, but it has at least brought the issue of integration back to the agenda again.

One immigrant’s story

Aydın Bilge’s story is in many ways a typical one. His family migrated to Germany in the 1960s as part of the guest-worker program, but since his parents did not speak any German, his mother did not want to give birth in a German hospital and instead returned to Turkey in her ninth month of pregnancy. When Bilge was three weeks old, his parents left him in Turkey, in the care of his grandmother. Speaking about the identity problems he faced after his parents brought him back to Germany, Bilge said there were no incentives at that time for immigrants to learn the language or integrate socially. He said he also holds the Turkish government responsible for not defending the rights of the Turkish community in Germany. “But I don’t blame anybody,” he said. “I have a problem with my own identity. I’ve been suffering for 30 years.”

Germany’s integration paradox

As the German government keeps the integration issue high on the agenda and generates policies to avoid the creation of parallel societies, or “ghettos,” German society is growing more xenophobic, making it harder to accept differences.

The bad consequences of migration were related to bad management of the issue, according to Professor Ahmet İçduygu, director of the Migration Research Program at Istanbul’s Koç University, who claimed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States marked a breaking point that encouraged the return of assimilation policies amid rising Islamophobia not only in Germany but across Europe.

“In this new century, there has been a return to old policies. German laws are becoming conservative; they include culture and language tests and do not allow double citizenship,” he said. “But you cannot ignore the realities of life. People communicate, which is different from the past. Assimilation is no longer easy.”

German officials admit integration is a two-way street, meaning that while Turks try to adapt themselves to German rules and laws, German society should also show more readiness to accept differences.

“We will not make concession on our culture. Integration does not mean assimilation. We do not want to get assimilated,” said Aydın Bilge, a member of the second generation of Turks living in Germany. “The Germans should also move closer to us and explore our culture. We need to find a middle road. In the end we are all in the same boat.”

Reporting from Munich, Germany — Eleven years of trying to fit in have yet to pay off for Yazay Eminaga.

He has learned German. He has German friends. Soon he’ll earn his doctorate in engineering from a highly rated university in Munich.

But his buddies still rib him for being “a killjoy” because, as a Muslim, he won’t eat pork or drink beer at parties. No landlord in downtown Munich seems willing to rent a nice apartment to a 31-year-old single Turkish man.

via After decades, German Turks still feel like outsiders – latimes.com.