European conservatives revert to type

By Claude Moraes MEP

Even by normal standards of blaming immigrants for a nation’s problems just before an election, the calculated outburst by Angela Merkel last week was astonishing.

With reference to Turkish guest workers invited to help rebuild West Germany in the 1950s and ’60s she said “we kidded ourselves for a while saying they won’t stay, sometime they will be gone, but this isn’t reality”. And on ‘multiculturalism’, a concept which hasn’t really ever troubled the German state, she pronounced it “an utter failure”.

At a time when Nicholas Sarkozy has forcibly removed Roma EU citizens to drive up his own flagging popularity, why should the speech by Germany’s Chancellor be considered unusual?

Firstly, because this is a subject usually left alone in German politics. Most of the people Merkel is talking about are the children and grandchildren of post war ‘guest workers’. But the recent best selling book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany is doing away with itself) a racist treatise by Thilo Sarrazin, a former German central banker, has lit the touch paper of attitudes which are nationally suppressed but locally widespread.

Yet Germany was rescued in its darkest economic recovery moments after the war partly by ‘guest workers’ from Turkey. During Germany’s consequent boom years, every effort was made by the West German state to encourage them to leave, but many stayed – with family reunification – and by the late 1980s around 7% of the West German population were from this group.

With the ‘guest worker’ tag increasingly seen as a humiliating, racially-based category, by 2000 children born to foreigners in Germany could obtain citizenship.

So white German attitudes to non-white or Muslim Germans are not in any way new. The poll conducted last month by the Fried rich Ebert foundation that concluded that 55% of Germans thought that Arabs were ‘unpleasant’ could have produced the same or worse result at any time since the war.

What is new is for the leader of Germany to alight on the subject for the first time in her many years at the top of German and international politics.

And so, as with Sarkozy, one can deduce that Merkel is suffering her worst ever poll ratings, a key election is due, and open discussion taking place on her replacement by the charismatic defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenburg.

Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, was one of the more thoughtful Conservative leaders to emerge in Europe. Even she has succumbed to what is now the easiest way to gain short term popularity.