It seems that a certain government maybe did some thinking over the summer break. With the far-right hitting all-time highs, the main opposition doing a fine job portraying the ruling coalition as feckless, and the ruling coalition itself not really needing extra help to appear that way, at least someone among them thought it might be a good idea to return from the beach to smash through a few, outstanding to-dos.
The big one being naturalization reform: Long debated, not yet approved, finally heading to the Bundestag to become law. The cabinet agreed to a bill that would, among other things, a) reduce the number of years being here before you can apply, and b) permit dual citizenship.
At least 12 million people live in Germany, pay taxes, but can’t vote. Admittedly, a lot of them are from elsewhere in the European Union who could get a German passport without giving up their other one, but choose not to bother with the paperwork. That strategy didn’t work out so well for the Brits here, but it still leaves a lot of people who also don’t want to deal with the paperwork and would have to give up their other one.
It also includes first-generation guest workers from southern and eastern Europe, including Turkey, who weren’t quite as temporary as many in Germany would have liked. They and their families have been here since, but have faced all kinds of legal and discriminatory hurdles to claiming their spot among the Volk. In a better-late-than-never nod to the solid these people did for postwar, decimated (West) Germany, a language test won’t be required to naturalize because German Officialdom never made it very easy for them to learn.
Bitteschön!
For everyone else, “particularly well-integrated” foreigners will have the chance to apply after just three years, instead of five (it was, with exceptions, eight). What that means is kinda vague, and intentionally so, because it wouldn’t be German federalism without Willkür discretion.
The whole thing still had to be packaged in a presentation that the Teutonic Imaginary could easily envision, as Interior Minister Nancy Faeser put forward, that just because foreigners might like to hold onto their legal connection to their native countries doesn’t mean they don’t also “feel German.” Lady, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I just want to vote and get through the airport faster.
All criticism aside, this is a pretty neat development in the long history of Germany’s sense of self. And for the CDU skeptics out there, no need to worry: The bill-cum-law ensures that no pesky racist or anti-Semite — however Germany defines that, which is questionable — will get hold of the “precious” German passport. There are enough already here.
If many more people get added to the voter rolls, it will be interesting to see if and to what extent that shapes domestic politics, and which parties benefit. Turkish communities have a conservative streak, and many refugees from 2015 now becoming citizens love Angela Merkel for her decision to let them come in. So the Christian Democrats score points there.
Foreigners from elsewhere in the EU and high-income countries tend to lean left-ish, which means the Social Democrats and Greens — currently in power — could benefit. How many in this broad group are wooed by the liberal marketing spin of “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” will determine if the Free Democrats (also in government) can save themselves from themselves.
Of course, all this depends on by which election any of these people can actually get their paperwork through. Germany’s bureaucracy is already getting drawn and quartered, and may have trouble handling what could be a deluge of citizenship applications. In many places the processing time is at least a year, and some offices have been telling applicants: Don’t call us; we’ll call you.
The cabinet also recently decided that its civil service has better things to do than nitpick over people’s names. Germany has a weird hangup about what you can call your kid. Like, if your parents don’t have the same last name, you only get to have one of them. The reform would allow for the hyphenated compound last name. Kids will also be able to more easily change their names in the event of divorce, or when they grow up and just want to.
In theory, a lot of these existing, persnickety rules are to protect kids — in case your dad is, say, Elon Musk and wants to name you X Æ A-12. It’s also to maintain a nice, orderly society in which everyone more or less kinda sounds the same. Because diversity is good, but not too much diversity, and only the diversity that the regulations we have made approve of.
It took Justice Minister Marco Buschmann to point out the obvious: These rules are “no longer compatible with the country’s social reality.”
The cabinet also — finally, kinda sorta — gave its green light to legalize pot. I’m not going to say much more about this because the issue has been easily the most over-discussed part of the three-way government’s coalition agreement. You’d think there was nothing more urgent to address, or that Germany was doing something a bunch of other places haven’t already done.
There has been so much hand-wringing over cannabis, one wonders if there is any dexterity left to actually roll a joint.
If by now you are thinking, “Wow, look at Germany go!” fear not: Some good ol’ classic fails remain on standby. Take climate goals. The government’s advisory panel announced this week there is no way the country will meet its 2030 targets at the rate it’s going. In response, an alliance of climate groups put together a list of stuff Germany could do to maybe get there. Some of them would be pretty easy to do and are therefore surely not going to happen.
Foremost among them is a general speed limit on highways and major roads. Germany’s refusal to implement one is stratospherically pathological, and it remains the only EU member to have zero interest in discussing it. One excuse you sometimes hear is that shutting up on speed limits is an acceptable political trade with the liberal Free Democrats, who love their fast cars and hate the idea, in exchange for climate-friendly concessions elsewhere.
Thing is, the targets are a Potemkin village, anyway, so what exactly is the trade here? The FDP controls both the finance and transport ministries, which respectively decide how money gets spent, and how people and stuff get around. Both of those are fairly central to mitigating climate change. And over at justice, also an FDP-led ministry, they’re busy calling climate activists terrorists.
If Germany can’t slow its cars down, good luck with another recommendation to do away with subsidies for the combustion engine and the fossil fuels that power them. The irony here is that Germany is nothing without its energy-hungry automative and chemicals industries. The feds can only write fat checks, when they want to at all, for incentivizing the tools and methods to meet climate targets — heat pumps, for example, or battery storage expansion — thanks to all the money it gives to support the profit-taking sectors of the economy that undermine those climate targets.
But it’s not all bad transport news, at least not in Berlin.
Bono is back, baby! By which I mean, the U2 — one of the most important U-Bahn lines in the city. It hasn’t been able to run all the way through for almost a year because someone in city government approved plans to build a swanky new tower in the middle of the city without bothering to check if its construction would endanger the subway tunnel below it. Oops.
No, no one has been held accountable for that very special level of incompetency — officially, the investor had to pay the extra costs — but there will be super-duper sensors now to make sure construction can continue without the risk of it crushing everyone underneath to death.
Alexanderplatz, the site of the tower and the line interruption, is teeming with dilapidated buildings that remain largely unused since the Berlin Wall fell some three decades ago. So, a building getting put up there from scratch certainly sounds questionable even without the U-Bahn interruption. But with the U2 running again, at least next year’s Berlinale won’t welcome movie people from around the world with creaky, replacement bus service.
I kid. They all take Ubers, of course.
Finally, to the future. Berlin is determined to fix its present-day administrative woes with a “town hall of the future.” It promises to turn your appointment-making hell into a digital day at the beach. The pilot location, in Kreuzberg, is going to offer such groundbreaking services as printing IDs! putting public employees with time to spare to better use! and Wi-Fi in the waiting room!
There will be displays on which you can do … stuff. If this doesn’t get Ukrainian refugees to shut up about how analog ass-backwards things are around here, I don’t know what will.
All this for just a half-million federal euros. Not to worry, like anything new in Germany, it will be tested to death to ensure there is no risk of it failing, by which point it will probably be obsolete. The semi-digitalized “town hall of the future” hopes to be up and running by 2025 — and will have a four-year evaluation phase. Better safe than sorry!
The nice thing about the future is that, by definition, it never comes.