Friedrich Merz doesn’t want to leave it that way. The debate about his Pascha statements in a TV show moves the CDU leader audibly. Merz is on the stage of the Gropiusstadt community center in Berlin-Neukölln, he looks briefly at the crowd in front of him, then he says: “I said four or five times that we are having a sensational integration success.” That was all hidden. “This is manipulation through excerpts – also in public broadcasting.” The CDU boss obviously feels misunderstood.
Since New Year’s Eve there has been a debate in Germany about violence by migrants, about integration, but also about racism. In Berlin, the CDU had asked for the first names of the suspected German youths from the night to prove that they had a migration background.
Merz himself had described the sons of migrants in “Markus Lanz” as “little pashas”. Here in Neukölln, where one of the hotspots of violence was on New Year’s Eve, the CDU wants to discuss. The motto: focal point Neukölln. The question: How can such riots be prevented in the future, how should the police be strengthened?
All around the concrete building of the community center, the apartments tower up into the Berlin evening sky. Whitewashed prefab towers, some more than 20 floors high. Half of the people who live here have a migration background. There are only a few of them in the audience this evening. Most are at least apparently CDU members with German ancestry. “Bio-Germans”, as Friedrich Merz puts it.
That one Merz moment, the slip
On this evening, Merz emphasizes above all the successes of integration and talks about an action by migrant restaurateurs in Neukölln. On Sonnenallee they had opened their bars to police officers and firefighters and gave them their food for a symbolic euro. “I would have liked the same media coverage of this campaign as on New Year’s Eve,” says Merz.
Applause. Some of these people, even with foreign ancestors, were more ashamed than others of what happened on New Year’s Eve, the CDU leader then added.
Berlin’s governing mayor had criticized the date in Neukölln in an unusually drastic way: “First exploit the terrible events on New Year’s Eve, then people in Berlin want to put them in drawers by first name and now stage an election campaign date in Neukölln of all places,” wrote the SPD politician on Twitter . “The scam is well known: first split and rush, then put it into perspective again,” wrote the SPD politician.
You didn’t want to leave it that way that evening. Kai Wegner, CDU top candidate for the Berlin repeat election, said at the beginning of the event: “If a governing mayor comments on a party event, I don’t know whether that does the office justice.”
Giffey has been responsible for years in Neukölln, in the federal government and now in Berlin. “What happened? Nothing!” said Wegner. Instead, the reasons for the violence in the city would be concealed. The CDU man emphasizes that it is different than the Social Democratic Federal Minister of the Interior, who named the violence of “young migrant men”.
Wegner said: “It wasn’t just New Year’s Eve! We have a problem of violence in Berlin, 365 days a year. We have a problem of violence from the right, from the left and from young men with a migration background.”
Merz later made a similar statement. He said: “You don’t solve problems by hiding them. We have to eliminate the causes as quickly as possible so as not to cover up the many integration successes.” That evening, the head of the federal government made an audible effort to be objective and spoke without any polemics.
And yet, there was this one Merz moment, the slip. At first he spoke audibly moved about the event commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in the German Bundestag. Holocaust survivor Rozette Kats reported on her survival there. Merz then spoke about the importance of processing.
“When you hear that, you’re proud of Germany,” he suddenly says. He probably means the culture of remembrance in Germany. But the word “pride” on this day still triggers an uneasy feeling almost 80 years after the end of the war. Some listeners from the SPD took advantage of the moment and left the room in protest. Short scramble at the entrance, otherwise it remains quiet this evening.
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