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Multiculturalism In Germany a Failure: Angela Merkel
Audrey Kauffmann | October 18, 2010

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mamaku
10:50am Oct 18, 2010

not failed, Mrs Merkel, but unsuccesful yet. Here in Indonesia is consisted different tribes and habits too. But logically, newcomers should obey, respect and adapt norms and regulations on any place they live and work. Stand up the same land, rise up the same sky. Of course there'll be problems. Usually it occurs when economy is unstable

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Berlin. Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country’s immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values.

Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

“Multikulti,” the concept that “we are now living side by side and are happy about it,” does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party at Potsdam near Berlin.

“This approach has failed, totally,” she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.

“We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here,” she said.

“Subsidizing immigrants” isn’t sufficient; Germany has the right to “make demands” of them, she added, such as mastering the language of Goethe and abandoning practices such as forced marriage. Merkel spoke a week after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which they pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany’s 2.5-million-Turkish community.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul, in a weekend interview, also urged the Turkish community living in Germany to master the language of their adopted country.

“When one doesn’t speak the language of the country in which one lives that doesn’t serve anyone, neither the person concerned, the country, nor the society,” the Turkish president told the Suedeutsche Zeitung. “That is why I tell them at every opportunity that they should learn German, and speak it fluently and without an accent. That should start at nurseries.”

The immigration debate has at times threatened to split Merkel’s conservative party, and she made noises to both wings of the debate.

While saying that the government needed to encourage the training of Muslim clerics in Germany, Merkel said “Islam is part of Germany.”

The integration of Muslims has been a hot button issue since August when a member of Germany’s central bank sparked outrage by saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants with headscarves. The banker, Thilo Sarrazin, has since resigned but his book on the subject — “Germany Does Itself In” — has flown off the shelves, and polls showed considerable sympathy for some of his views.

“Hardly eight weeks have passed since publication of Sarrazin’s theory of decline, and the longer the debate continues to a lower level it falls,” the weekly Der Spiegel commented on Sunday.


Agence France-Presse