Özdemir dismisses ’Obama’ comparison

Agence France-Presse

The first ethnic minority head of a German party dismissed comparisons with Barack Obama as his Greens wrapped up an annual conference Sunday with fighting talk ahead of elections next year.

"The comparison (with the US president-elect) is inappropriate," Cem Özdemir told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview after his nomination on Saturday as co-chairman of the opposition Greens.

"It is enough for me to be the Özdemir of the Greens. What is exciting about Obama is that he is just as black as he is white ... this connection is important to me. I am a German of Turkish origin," he said.

"I wish that one day it will not matter whether you come from (Turkey) or whether your forefathers battled against the Romans in the Teutonic Forest massacre," he said. "Your origin should not be an indicator of whether you are doing your bit for Germany."

The side-burned 42-year-old, born and raised in heavily Catholic south-west Germany, is no stranger to setting records. In 1994 he became the first politician of Turkish origin to be elected to the German parliament, just two years after taking German citizenship.

A long way to go
But the Greens' new co-head said there was still some work to do before a member of Germany's 2.4-million-strong Turkish minority or another ethnic group could become the head of government in western Europe's most populous country.

"We still have a long way to go until something like that is primarily decided on the basis of ability. It is not just Germans who have work to do, it it also immigrants and their descendants. They have to accept that Germany is their country," Özdemir said.

Turks make up Germany's largest ethnic minority but integration has been slow Ğ figures show that if you are of Turkish origin in Germany, you are less likely to finish school and more likely to be unemployed and poor.

At the party's weekend conference in Erfurt, eastern Germany, some delegates wore badges saying "Yes We Cem". If Ozdemir wants to be chancellor though, he has chosen the wrong party.

Usually it is the head of German's two biggest parties, the centre-left Social Democrats, or SPD, and Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU/CSU, that becomes premier.