Frankly ... integrated  Why is there no outcry?

Germany’s new cabinet was presented in December 2021. Conspicuously few members of the immigrant community were tapped to serve as ministers under Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Sineb El Masrar comments on what this says about Germany.

Germany elected a new federal government in September 2021. The ousting of the SPD-CDU/CSU (Social Democrats and conservatives) coalition government led by Angela Merkel – our first female chancellor, mind you – and her departure as head of government aren’t the only recent upheavals. The handover of power to the “traffic light” coalition (Social Democrats or SPD, red, Free Democratic Party or FDP, yellow and the Green party) also involves a passing of the baton in the Bundestag, which now has a higher percentage of immigrants among its ranks than ever before in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. And yet, while the immigrant community accounts for about 26 per cent of the country’s total population, only about 11.3 per cent of the Bundestag members have an immigrant background. And the only member of the new cabinet with a “migration background” is Green politician Cem Özdemir, the new Minister of Agriculture. Some are delighted while others are confused and wondering why there’s no outcry in our post-migrant society.

Getting more women into positions of responsibility was a rocky road and a long, hard struggle. First into official posts within the parties, then into government ministries. Some made it via quotas, others via targeted individual promotion. There are currently nine women and eight men in the cabinet, plus the chancellor himself. And then there are another two women: the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, whose family is from Iraq, and the Minister of State for Culture and Media, who’s from Bavaria. Another break with the practices of the past is that today's female appointees aren’t assigned to “women's posts and what not”, as Gerhard Schröder once commented, but to ministries that men of every party have always vied for. Take the foreign and interior ministries, for example: this is the first time they’ve been entrusted to women. Because that is often the heart of the matter. Are the women candidates really up to the challenges involved? Have they really got the necessary skills? Angela Merkel was underestimated for many years, as are so many hard-working descendants of immigrants.

Shining stars of representation

Cem Özdemir is an experienced politician and popular across party lines. For countless underrated first- and second-generation immigrants, he is a shining star in the “you-can-be-anything-you-like-in-this-country” sky, and yet he remains the only minister with an immigrant background. The mills of representation grind slowly in Germany. Party politics is a gruelling day-to-day business, and not everyone is prepared to stick it out all the way, whatever their background may be. Then again, some politicians managed to hold on to their office for many years.

Many German regions and towns have mayors or local politicians with an immigrant background. As members, they are participating in all parties across the political spectrum. One aspect of integration is that members of the majority population should feel duly represented by politicians from the minority immigrant community. And this is increasingly true wherever such politicians get elected to office. Several are now serving as mayors of their cities, like politician Belit Onay of the Green Party in Hanover or John Ehret, who’s regarded as Germany's first black mayor, in Mauer, Swabia, and CDU politician Ashok-Alexander Sridharan in Bonn. Social Democrat Karamba Diaby not only served as a consultant in Saxony-Anhalt’s labour ministry, but he was also elected to the Bundestag in eastern Germany.

So our immigration society is at once young and slow to change, old and progressive. We’re constantly in motion, and our political and social future is always on the move and unstoppable. We set the course together.
 

December 2021