The New Year’s Eve riots and the way they are dealt with continue to determine the topics and appointment calendars of the top candidates for the House of Representatives elections on February 12 – and are also increasingly shaping the election campaign.
At dawn on Friday, the SPD top candidate and governing mayor Franziska Giffey made her way to a Neukölln fire station to speak to the emergency services about the attacks on New Year’s Eve. The fact that she was accompanied by three SPD politicians – the district mayor Martin Hikel, Senator for the Interior Iris Spranger and Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser – had factual reasons, but was certainly not inconvenient for the campaigning Giffey.
Giffey speaks to firefighters and sees “break”
As in the past few days, Giffey found sharp words about the riots, spoke of a “break” and that “patience was more than exceeded”. “What we see is that obviously we have young people here who don’t feel as part of a society anymore and aren’t as committed to respect for emergency workers as we would consider normal,” Giffey said. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible for 13-year-olds to aim at police officers in the face.”
The summit against youth violence initiated by the Governing Mayor on Wednesday is meanwhile taking shape. According to information from the Tagesspiegel, in addition to the responsible Senate administrations (interior, judiciary, youth and education), the police, representatives of the affected districts, the integration officer, a representative of the state commission against violence, a representative of the district management of the High Deck settlement and social workers attend the meeting.
Jarasch doubts the summit against youth violence
Meanwhile, Giffey’s competitor for the office of governor, Bettina Jarasch, voiced cautious criticism of the summit. She spoke up on Friday even earlier than the SPD politician. You can do a summit like this, said Jarasch on RBB’s Inforadio, “only there, I’m already predicting that we will decide on solutions that don’t sound completely new”.
Jarasch emphasized that existing structures had to be strengthened. These included schools, youth work and street workers. “If we make sure at the summit that this is important and stick with it and give resources to it, then that’s a good point. It’s just nothing that will help the day after tomorrow.”
The only thing that would quickly help in the debate is a ban on alarm guns, said Jarasch. She would have been happy if Interior Senator Spranger “maybe had done that earlier.” Spranger, in turn, later dismissed this statement as campaign banter and pointed out that gun law was a federal and not a state matter.
Wegner wants to strengthen prevention
CDU top candidate Kai Wegner, who had been accused of racism the day before because of a catalog of questions from his parliamentary group on the New Year’s Eve riot, tried to be classified on Friday. Those people who live in Germany in the third generation and are “Berlin boys”, as Wegner explained, but who do not feel they belong to society, have to be addressed “specifically and precisely”.
“For this we need cooperation with clubs from sports to mosque clubs,” said Wegner on the occasion of his visit to a boxing club in Schöneberg. “I would like these people to commit to us,” he explained, and called for “a whole package of measures”, which, in addition to increased prevention, also include better equipped security authorities and a functioning judiciary.
Wegner defended the question about the first names of the German suspects, which was included in a CDU questionnaire for the interior committee meeting next Monday and led to criticism from and from the parliamentary group. “We need to know those names so we can give accurate answers,” he explained, expressing disappointment at being pushed into the right-hand corner.
The question found its way into the catalog at a time when there was no information about the background of the suspects, Wegner said. He rejected the accusation that he was contributing to the exclusion of people with a migration background. “It’s not about exclusion, it’s about getting the right information,” said Wegner.
According to information from the Tagesspiegel, the party leader himself was not particularly happy with the question, which had led to fierce internal debates and public distancing from individual faction members. Since there is now a lot of information about the suspects, it is reported that the CDU no longer attaches great importance to it.
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