BERLIN (AP) – Five years ago, Tareq Alaows crossed the Mediterranean in a thin dinghy and headed north through the Balkans towards Germany, fleeing the civil war in his home country of Syria in search of a safe haven.
Since then, the 31-year-old has learned fluent German, found a permanent job – and has just started a campaign to get a seat in Parliament in September.
“I am running for the national parliament as the first refugee from Syria,” the mild-mannered Alaows told The Associated Press at a rally in support of asylum seekers outside the Reichstag building in Berlin, where the parliament sits. “I want to give a voice to refugees and migrants in Germany and fight for a diverse and fair society for all.”
Alaows joined the Green Party last year and is a candidate in the Oberhausen-Dinslaken parliamentary constituency in West Germany.
With his beard and long black hair in a bun, he has the casual look of a Green politician, and also shares the party’s focus on human rights and social justice.
In Syria, he took part in peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s government while studying law at Aleppo University. He also volunteered for the Red Crescent relief group during the Civil War and helped register internally displaced refugees.
In 2015, as the war in Syria became increasingly brutal and he had to be enlisted after graduation, Alaows decided to flee to “a place where I can live in safety and dignity,” he said.
After arriving in Dortmund in West Germany on September 3, 2015, he quickly regained activity after being confronted by a system overwhelmed by the more than 1 million migrants arriving that year.
After being crammed into a gym with 60 other people, “where no one could sleep at night when only one child was crying,” he helped organize protests against the circumstances.
Alaows now works as a legal counsel to asylum seekers at a non-governmental organization in Berlin, splitting 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,” said Alaows. “It is not okay for them to hang around the European Union’s external borders in precarious conditions, drowning in the Mediterranean and living in huge camps in Germany, while European interior ministers gather to find ways to get them out. to hold. or deport. “
At the end of 2020, 818,460 Syrians lived in Germany. Most of them have not yet applied for German citizenship. Alaows is one of the first to have met the conditions to apply for citizenship, and he is confident it will be approved before election day on September 26.
In total, about 21.2 million of Germany’s 83 million residents have migrant roots, mostly from Turkey, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Poland. About 1.8 million of these have recently arrived from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and other refugees who arrived much earlier.
But people of non-German background are still severely under-represented 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 Media Service Integration group that tracks migrant issues in Germany.
That’s all the more reason why Alaows has found a home with the Greens, a party that lobbies for better integration of migrants alongside environmental issues, boasting that nearly 15% of their lawmakers come from a migrant background.
“Tareq is a candidate who advocates social justice and equality for all people as well as inclusive politics,” said Beate Stock-Schroer, a Green spokeswoman in Alaows’ Oberhausen-Dinslaken district, when he launched his campaign last week.
Germany has a complex electoral system that gives its citizens two votes each: one for a directly elected constituency representative and one for a party list. Alaows faces an uphill battle to win the first-past-the-post race to become a directly-elected legislator – Germany’s traditional major parties win most of them – but can still enter Parliament if he becomes a prominent is placed on the party’s regional list.
That means he needs the party to vote to get him high enough on the list of delegates from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where his constituency is located, when it decides on candidates for the national parliament in the spring.
His current campaign team is working hard to help him do that.
A handful of volunteers, mostly young and engaged like himself, ask media questions, keep his social media accounts active, and regularly post videos and photos.
On Saturday, Alaows joined a protest in front of the Reichstag against the deportation of rejected asylum seekers to their home country.
Reggae music blared from speakers across the snowy lawn as about 200 people held banners with slogans saying “No one is illegal” and speakers demanded open borders for refugees.
“I want to bring about a political change in parliament,” said Alaows, looking past the protesters to the Reichstag building, whose facade bears the slogan “To the German people” carved into the stone beneath the iconic glass dome.
“I want to bring to Parliament the perspective of the people who are not represented there,” he said.