GERMAN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel has risked igniting cultural tensions in her country by claiming that immigrants should be forced to learn the German language – and saying the attempts to build a pluralist multicultural society had “utterly failed“.
Speaking at a rally of the youth wing of her Christian Democratic Union party, the chancellor said Germany was “a country which, at the start of the 1960s, actually brought guest workers to Germany.
Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves, saying that they won’t stay and that they will have disappeared again one day, but that’s not the reality.
This multicultural approach – saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other – this approach has failed. Utterly failed.
In a speech widely interpreted as a lurch to the right, Merkel was joined by Horst Seehofer of her party’s Bavarian sister organisation which said their two parties were “committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one”.
“Multikulti [the idea of a happy multiculturalism] is dead,” Seehofer said.
The remarks come after a series of new surveys showed a wave of anti-immigrants support within Germany; a study last week showed that 60% of Germans wished to restrict the practice of Islam, while 17% said Jews had too much influence.
13% of the respondents in the same poll said they felt that Germany needed to be ruled by a ‘strong leader or Führer’ – the latter being a term exclusively used in relation to Adolf Hitler.
Voters for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party were revealed as the most anti-Semitic, at 12%, while voters for their main opponents the Social Democrats were the most xenophobic, at 24%.
President Christian Wulff was also attacked in the national press for “sucking up to Islam” after he said that the religion had become part of German culture, and saying it should be taught in schools.
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