Is anyone really surprised about the news that a potential CSU mayoral candidate in Bavaria’s Wallerstein, Sener Sahin, has been rejected by grassroots activists entirely because the candidate is … wait for it … yes, a Muslim?
It has always left me slightly bewildered that Bavaria, or more accurately, far too many (certainly not all) Bavarians, never really ‘got’ the concept that ‘their’ state could ever truly be home to people of different ethic origins, religions and, bluntly, skin colour.
Of course, that’s what most Bavarians also thought after 1945, when ethnic Germans displaced from the ‘east’ after the Second World War needed to be housed and fed here. They were for many years treated as outcasts, not German, certainly not Bavarian. Only when it politically suited the CSU (when they became voters) did these people start to become accepted.
Sener Sahin in the SZ, with the headline suggesting that there wouldn’t’ be a Muslim lord mayor for 30 years
Sahin’s rejection seven decades later by parts of the CSU should surprise few people. Sahin told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that, ‘I'm sure that here in the countryside it will take another 30 years before people are ready to elect someone like me as mayor.’ It’s shameful.
But it’s also directly related to deeper beliefs across Bavaria (and to a degree across Germany), reflected in the Basic Programme of the CSU, which mentions that its ‘basic values are derived from the Christian concept of man’. There is certainly something problematic with notions that basic values are ‘derived’ from so-called Christian concepts. One could argue about this all day, but there is the obvious suggestion, or insinuation, that there is something uniquely Christian about such ‘basic values - are these basic values not universal values? At best, such notions can be exclusionary, not just to other religions but to people with no faith at all.
And let’s not forget that banging on about ‘Christian values’ is also a familiar trope for radical-right-wing nationalists to attack Islam - just look at Poland and Hungary, but also the far right across Europe.
But the CSU Basic Programme does go on to say that, ‘Our party is open to all people who profess these basic values and our goals - regardless of their personal faith.’ And it was left to Honoury Chairman of the CSU and former German cabinet minister Theo Waigel to bring a bit of perspective to the miserable affair, telling the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper:
‘Especially at a time when a dialogue between the world religions is so urgently needed, such a thing must not happen.’
It’s curious to say the least that the wisest words come from a politician born in 1939, the year the Second World War started – a man who experienced the destruction of Germany, the mass incoming of around 11 million immigrants in the late 1940s and the rebuilding of his country in the 1950s and 1960s. Reports from the Merkur newspaper suggest that most of the people opposing Sahin’s candidacy were more than 60 years old.
Waigel is 80 years old, but experience seems to have tought him lessons about intolerance that some of his contemporaries have either forgotten or just ignored.