On December 8 2021, Germany swore in a new chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats (SPD), ending the 16-year reign of Angela Merkel. Scholz will oversee a three-party coalition, which includes the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) as junior partners. Long-time Green Party member and former head of the party, Cem Özdemir,…
Turkey will hold parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24 – roughly one and a half years ahead of schedule. Turkish citizens living abroad can already vote at Turkish consulates prior to that date. In Germany, home of the world’s largest diaspora of Turkish origin, roughly 1.4 million Turkish citizens are eligible to cast their…
Germany is, as is well known, home to a large community with Turkish roots, numbering roughly 3 million. Many of them have lived in the country for generations, and roughly half now hold German citizenship – even if the widespread parlance of ‘second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants’ stubbornly continues to emphasise their quintessential Otherness. In…
Are the rising levels of Islamophobic hate crimes in Germany indicative of a new form of racism? Yes, says Yasemin Shooman, researcher at the Technical University of Berlin and director of the Jewish-Islamic Forum at Berlin’s renowned Jewish Museum. ‘Immigrant’ = ‘Muslim’ The backdrop to Shooman’s argument is the de facto Islamisation of immigration debates. While…
After one year and two days in Turkish prison – mostly spent in solitary confinement – journalist Deniz Yücel was set free by the Turkish authorities on February 16, 2018. The case of Yücel, a German and Turkish dual national working for the German Die Welt newspaper, had been a severe stumbling block in German-Turkish…
