BERLIN (AP) – Five years ago, Tareq Alaows crossed the Mediterranean in a light rubber boat and walked north through the Balkans to Germany, fleeing the civil war in his native Syria to seek safe refuge. .
Since then, the 31-year-old has learned German fluently, found a stable job and just launched a campaign to run for Parliament in September.
“I present myself to the national parliament as Syria’s first refugee,” Alaows, speaking softly, told The Associated Press at a rally in support of asylum seekers in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin, where finds Parliament. “I want to give a voice to refugees and immigrants in Germany and fight for a diverse and just society for all.”
Alaows joined the Green Party last year and is running as a candidate for the Oberhausen-Dinslaken parliamentary constituency in western Germany.
With his beard and long black hair pulled on a bun, he has the casual look of a Greens politician and also shares the party’s focus on human rights and social justice.
In Syria, he took part in peaceful protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad while studying law at the University of Aleppo. He also volunteered for the Red Crescent aid group during the civil war and helped register internally displaced refugees.
In 2015, as the war in Syria became increasingly brutal and he was facing military service after graduating, Alaows decided to escape to “a place where I can live safely and with dignity,” he said.
After arriving in Dortmund, West Germany, on September 3, 2015, it soon reactivated after facing a system overwhelmed by more than a million immigrants who they arrived that year.
After being crammed into a gym with 60 more people, “where no one could sleep at night if only a child was crying,” he helped organize protests against the conditions.
Alaows now works as a legal adviser to asylum seekers in a non-governmental organization in Berlin and divides his time between the capital and the city of Oberhausen, in his constituency.
“I really want to help improve the living conditions of refugees in Germany,” Alaows said. “It is not good for them to stay in the European Union’s external borders in precarious conditions, drown in the Mediterranean and have to live in huge camps in Germany, while European interior ministers meet to find ways to maintain expel them or deport them. “
By the end of 2020, 818,460 Syrians were living in Germany. Most of them have not yet applied for German citizenship. Alaows is one of the first to meet the prerequisites to apply for citizenship, which he hopes will be approved before election day on September 26th.
Overall, about 21.2 million of Germany’s 83 million have migrant roots, mainly from Turkey, as well as from the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and Poland. Recent arrivals from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and other refugees who came much earlier, account for about 1.8 million of these.
But people of non-German descent remain severely underrepresented in many sectors of society, including Parliament.
Of the 709 lawmakers who took office in the last federal election in 2017, only 58, or 8.2%, had migrant roots, according to the Mediendienst Integration group which tracks migrant issues in Germany.
This is the most important reason why Alaows has found a home with the Greens, a party that is pushing for better integration of migrants in addition to environmental issues, and boasts that almost 15% of its legislators are from home. migrant.
“Tareq is a candidate who advocates for social justice and equality for all human beings, as well as inclusive politics,” said Beate Stock-Schroer, a spokeswoman for the Greens in the Alaows district of Oberhausen-Dinslaken. launching his campaign last week.
Germany has a complex electoral system that gives its citizens two votes each: one for a representative elected directly from the constituency and another for a list of parties. Alaows faces an upward struggle to win the first race to become a directly elected legislator (the big traditional German parties win the majority), but he could still enter Parliament if he gets a prominent place in the regional list of the party.
This means that the party needs to vote to place it sufficiently on the list of delegates from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where its constituency is located, when it decides on candidates for the national parliament in the spring.
Your current campaign team is working hard to help you get there.
A handful of volunteers, mostly young and committed like him, ask questions from the media, keep their accounts active on social media, and post videos and photos regularly.
On Saturday, Alaows joined a protest in front of the Reichstag against the deportation of rejected asylum seekers to their home countries.
Reggae music sounded from the snowy lawn speakers, as about 200 people had banners with slogans saying “No one is illegal” and the speakers called for open borders for refugees.
“I want to bring political change to parliament,” Alaows said, staring at protesters in the Reichstag building, whose façade bears the slogan “To the German People” carved into stone under its iconic glass dome.
“I want to bring to Parliament the perspective of the people who are not represented there,” he said.