Germany's Turkish Obama

IGOR KOPELNITSKY

Berlin

Cem Özdemir is referred to as Germany's Obama, even if the 43-year-old Green politician modestly downplays the comparison. But the parallels are, at least in part, legitimate: Özdemir is the son of Turkish immigrants and, as newly elected co-chair of the Greens, the highest-ranking German politician with foreign-born parents.

The Özdemirs came to West Germany in the early 1960s with millions of other Turks, Greeks, Italians and Yugoslavs who provided the booming economies of Northern Europe with badly needed unskilled labor. While most of the "guest workers" returned to their homelands as planned, many others stayed on, brought their families to join them or started new ones, and haltingly put down roots. Today in Germany there are 15 million "people with migration background," the new PC term that designates people residing in Germany as of 1950 who were born abroad, as well as their offspring. This is 19 percent of the population; in major western German cities children with migration backgrounds make up 40 percent of all elementary school students. Roughly half of these people have German citizenship (and thus are no longer de jure "foreigners," the old, non-PC term). The largest group after ethnic Germans from Russia is the cohort with Turkish roots, the Deutschtürken, like the Özdemirs.

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