Berlin New Year's Eve riot: CDU demands clarification - question by first name outraged Greens and leftists
Created: 01/06/2023 10:14 am
By: Florian Naumann
Scenes from Berlin's New Year's Eve: a bus burns in the Neukölln high-deck settlement.
© Paul Zinken/dpa
Violence against emergency services on New Year's Eve shocked Berlin.
The CDU calls for clarification, in a delicate way.
The Greens see Berlin youth at work in particular.
Berlin/Munich – The riots on New Year's Eve in Berlin also have a political aftermath: the CDU in the Bundestag and in the Berlin House of Representatives is demanding extensive clarification - at least at the state political level, but also on controversial paths.
Greens and left warn against stigmatization and populism.
New Year's Eve riot in Berlin: CDU man wants to know first names - "summit of shabbiness"
On New Year's Eve, police officers and other emergency services such as the fire brigade in Berlin and other cities were massively attacked.
The focus of the debate is research into the causes – but also the origin of the perpetrators.
The Berlin police have published initial statistics on this: as of Wednesday (January 4), investigators counted 145 perpetrators from 18 nations.
Among them 45 Germans, but also about 27 people from Afghanistan and 21 from Syria.
The CDU in the Berlin state parliament, the House of Representatives, is now interested, among other things, in the 45 German citizens: In a catalog of questions published by Left MP Nik Schrader for the Interior Committee, she asked about the first names of these people.
Schrader sees a "peak of shabbiness" - and a clear role model: in 2019, the AfD in Saarland asked about the first names of knife attackers.
However, the right-wing populists had received unexpected information.
Berlin-CDU argues about advance, Green makes it clear: "This is the next generation of Berlin"
The Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey reprimanded the CDU opposition for "pithy pub slogans".
"To understand how this could happen, you have to look at the situation in these social hotspots and not ask first names in parliament," she said on Twitter.
According to a report by the Tagesspiegel
, the CDU MP Danny Freimark also spoke out
against the initiative of his parliamentary colleague Frank Balzer: "I will propose that this question be withdrawn because I neither share it nor find it helpful."
Bettina Jarasch (left) and Franziska Giffey follow speeches during a plenary session of the Berlin House of Representatives.
© Wolfgang Kumm/dpa
The Green Senator Bettina Jarasch - Giffey's competitor in the upcoming Berlin elections - expressed fundamental criticism of the debate about the New Year's Eve attacks on Friday (January 6) on rbb Inforadio.
What is needed, for example, is better equipment for the courts and the teaching of "respect" in schools, she explained, as well as "clear boundaries and perspectives" in general.
But not "short-term actionism" and debates about expatriation and the sentence.
Two-thirds of the perpetrators have a migration background.
This magnitude roughly corresponds to their share of the total number of young people in Berlin.
"If the young people as a whole have an ever-increasing share of migrants, then they are our young people," said Jarasch, adding: "These are the next generation of Berlin." Giffey had also emphasized that it was probably mostly young people who were born and grew up in Berlin .
Jarasch added that many hundreds of thousands of young people who celebrated peacefully also have a migration background.
Berlin's New Year's Eve: CDU demands clarification - "raw, violent integration refusers"
The topic could soon also occupy the Bundestag.
Parliament must deal with the incidents in one of the first weeks of the new year, said CDU/CSU Parliamentary Secretary Thorsten Frei of the
Rheinische Post
(Friday edition).
"We must not just go back to business as usual." He called for a "comprehensive and honest inventory" of the extent and causes of failed integration.
Frei emphasized that there were millions of people in the Federal Republic who were not born in Germany, who were committed and who obeyed the law.
"But only a few years after Cologne's New Year's Eve, Germany again has to discuss the fact that we obviously have a frightening problem with raw, violent people who refuse to integrate," he told the newspaper.
The situation picture announced by Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) can only be a first step "and only on the condition that it creates complete transparency".
Among other things, it must be about the question of “why young men in particular, sometimes in the second or third generation”, have not arrived in society, Frei told the newspaper.
In an interview with the Münchner Merkur, the Union party leaders Friedrich Merz and Markus Söder also criticized "chaotic" and a lack of integration.
(
fn with material from dpa
)
Also interesting:
Berlin has a problem with violence – and Germany has an integration problem, comments Christian Deutschländer.
