FRiedrich Merz talks regarding the multicultural society. And regarding tolerance. If you want to be a multicultural country, then above all religious tolerance is necessary, said the CDU chairman on Monday evening at the party headquarters, the Konrad Adenauer House, in Berlin. Pointing to the “C” in the party name, he says that Christian does not mean Protestant or Catholic, but rather being tolerant of other religious communities. He calls the major Christian festivals important. “As far as I’m concerned, the festivals of other religious communities too. But with great tolerance.”
“Germany as a country of opportunity. “Shaping integration together, strengthening cohesion” is the title of the two-hour discussion event at which Merz discusses with Ahmad Mansour, the well-known Israeli-German psychologist and author with Arab-Palestinian roots. Merz, who was long known and liked for sharp and provocative statements, is becoming more and more of an integrator. He obviously doesn’t want to open up any trenches this evening. He wants to open up fewer and fewer rifts, at least not within his own party. At most to the federal government, but that is a different topic.
On Monday he will talk regarding leading culture. That’s even the headline above the part of the event contested by him and Mansour. Leitkultur, that was the term that caused so much excitement at the beginning of the millennium. He was controversial in the CDU. However, the woman who, a decade and a half later, was harshly criticized by party colleagues for her liberal refugee policy, fought for the term leading culture at the time. The then CDU leader Angela Merkel championed the term at least as determinedly as Merz. Even when the chairman of the Central Council of Jews, Paul Spiegel, criticized the word, Merkel stuck to it and said that Spiegel had brought a deliberate misunderstanding into the debate.
Central culture as a “cultural minimum”
But that is in the past. Merkel’s name does not appear on Monday. Now Merz has to say what the dominant culture means, which the CDU wants to use to promote itself once more. Merz calls dealing with women and homosexuality, as is common in Germany, something that must be internalized as a prerequisite for successful integration. With regard to the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent anti-Semitic riots in Germany, Merz says that not accepting that is “what I would describe as a dominant culture.” He also likes to use the term “cultural minimum,” says Merz.
CDU Bundestag member Bettina Wiesmann speaks out. She likes the term “cultural minimum.” She says that she is strange regarding the choice of words in German dominant culture; it has something exclusionary regarding it. She would rather understand the dominant culture in a European way. Merz counters. There are also “typical German things”, good and bad. This should not be left to the ethnic nationalists. “Patriots are people who love their country, nationalists are people who hate everyone else,” says Merz. He recommends “uninhibited patriotism.” But this small disagreement is the highlight of two very harmonious hours. There is no dispute regarding the dominant culture in sight in the CDU, at least in this format.
Incidentally, the event is taking place at the same place where integration and migration were discussed five years ago in February. At that time, the new CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer tried to calm the debate regarding the highly charged issue in her party. Angela Merkel has no longer been party leader for a few months, but she was still Chancellor. She didn’t find it particularly useful that her successor in the party leadership believed that she had to discuss refugee policy since 2015. Merkel called it “wasting time.”
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