ERBIL, Kurdistan - Germany’s Green Party has given Kurds in the country a political voice, a Kurdish member of the party told Rudaw on Thursday.
“For the first time in history, I established a parliamentary group for Kurds in the German parliament which strengthened the Kurdish voice at the political and legislative level as well as at the financial level, so that Kurdish organizations in Germany receive financial assistance,” said Kassem Taher Saleh, noting that the Kurdish issue is an important one for him as he is Kurdish himself.
His party also supported a law recognizing the Islamic State (ISIS) massacre of Yazidis as genocide.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is also part of the Green Party and visited Damascus last month with her French counterpart. They met with the country’s new de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
Sharaa is the head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led a coalition of rebel groups that ousted the former regime and installed a transitional government. HTS has Islamic jihadist roots and there are concerns about how that ideology will be reflected in the new Syria, especially among the country’s minority populations.
“Our Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was in Syria at the beginning of the year, looking at the situation. She spoke with the interim phase president and very clearly said, if we support Syria, it must be democratic and all minorities must be at the table. What does this mean exactly? Those minorities are Christians, Jews, and very specifically Kurds. Without Kurds, a stable Syria will not be established in the future,” said Saleh.
Germany will hold parliamentary elections on Sunday.
The Green Party is in fourth place in the polls, right behind the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It is considered center-left and working class. They are committed to ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Their long-term goal is a federal European republic.
There are many Kurds in the Green Party, including at high positions. The deputy speaker of the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament is a Kurd and he is a candidate for the mayor of Cologne.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling in second place. It is a far-right party that opposes integration and migration. It also publicly condones mass deportations. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has faced backlash after cooperating with the AfD on an anti-immigration bill they tried to pass last month.
