by whataboutbob
Fri Sep 16th, 2005 at 11:27:41 AM EST
There's a story up now over at A Fistfull of Euros that is a recommended read, titled: Unwanted. Here's a piece of it:
There's nothing better for livening up all this dull, wonkish chatter about the German elections than a bit of CDU-bashing. So, how shall I bash them today? Oh, I know! How about this: they're a shower of xenophobe racists.
Yes, yes; not exactly news, is it? What is news, though, is that the Union appears to value xenophobia even more than it does winning elections.(...)
...a few years ago, the SPD/Green government modified the embarrassingly racialist citizenship law, ...and a fair few of these new Germans -- about 700,000 of them -- are entitled to vote this Sunday. They would never have become Germans at all, if the Union had been able to do anything about it. It's a no-brainer, isn't it, that German voters of Turkish descent are going to mark their ballot papers overwhelmingly in favour of the SPD?
It is. The Spiegel reports on a poll by Hürriyet that shows the following breakdown among Turkish-descended voters:
SPD 77.0%
Green 9.2%
Left Party 7.8%
CDU/CSU 4.8%
FDP 1.2%
(...)With relatively little effort, the Union could attract a lot of votes from Germans of Turkish extraction. Apparently, though, this number would be outweighed by the number of current Union voters who'd be angered to see their party treating these 700,000 like the German citizens they are.
Read the whole article, it's good. Do you think there will be a big turn-out of the Turkish-German vote? There might be motivation...
