The Berlin CDU has come under criticism with a controversial request for the first names of the German suspects. A left-wing politician accuses her of AfD methods. In fact, the procedure has already been used by the populist party.
The Berlin left-wing politician Niklas Schrader accuses the CDU of a “new peak of shabbiness” in the capital’s senate – and in doing so lets a bomb burst: Schrader posts a screenshot on his Twitter account, which he started from a template for a request from the CDU parliamentary group wants to have made the interior committee.
“The
Several questions can be seen, one of which is: “What are the first names of the suspects with German nationality?” Another question is: “Do the suspects with German nationality have other nationalities? If so, which ones?”
After just a few hours, the post had over 100,000 clicks and was shared several times. The accusation raised by the left-wing politician sits. The nature of the questions is strongly reminiscent of a similar approach by the AfD in Saarland after a knife attack, as the “Saarbrücker Zeitung” reported at the time.
The party’s request in 2019 referred to crime statistics, according to which 30 percent of crimes involving knives in Saarland in 2018 were committed by foreigners. At the time, the AfD had assumed that the German perpetrators included numerous people with a migration background and therefore asked for the first names of the German perpetrators.
Also read: New Year’s Eve riots in Berlin – are migrants the problem? “The simplest answer, but not the right one”
In fact, the Berlin CDU itself had announced that it would send a “detailed list of questions” to the committee about the incidents on New Year’s Eve. The Berlin CDU parliamentary group announced on Twitter on January 4: “We will bring up the unbelievable violent incidents at the meeting of the interior committee. We will present a comprehensive catalog of questions. We must do everything we can to ensure that such an escalation of violence does not happen again. “
A request from FOCUS online to the domestic policy spokesman for the Berlin CDU parliamentary group, Frank Balzer, initially went unanswered. For his part, he had already launched a counterattack against the government factions of the SPD, the Left and the Greens in a press release.
The accusation: “SPD, Greens and Left are obstructing the efforts to clarify the terrible excesses of violence in Berlin on New Year’s Eve. We have no understanding why the government factions want to prevent a hearing of affected police officers and firefighters in the interior committee on Monday with their majority.”
However, the “education efforts” of the Berlin CDU are treated with little understanding in the federal party.
The parliamentary director of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Thorsten Frei, told FOCUS online on request: “My expectation is that the Berlin Senate will provide full transparency about what happened on New Year’s Eve. In this heated debate, we shouldn’t have any room for Leave insinuations, suspicions and advantages.”
Nevertheless, he protects his colleagues in Berlin to a certain extent: “The accusations made by the left against the Berlin CDU are irrelevant.” But Frei also says: “A German suspect is a German suspect, whether with or without a migration background.”
On Monday, the events of Berlin’s New Year’s Eve are to be discussed in detail in the responsible Berlin interior committee, as the spokeswoman for the responsible Berlin interior committee, Gollaleh Ahmadi (Greens), confirmed to FOCUS online on request. The committee expects “detailed information from the senator, but this will of course comply with data protection regulations,” as Ahmadi emphasizes.
Ahamdi also warns against hasty decisions: “The political measures that will be necessary to strengthen security for everyone involved in the future will be decided in the next few weeks, once the events have been evaluated.”
However, the Greens politician clearly condemns the CDU’s initiative: “Beyond that, it is up to the law enforcement authorities and the judiciary to deal with the incidents. I consider speculation about the origin, nationality or religion of the alleged perpetrators to be populist and completely inappropriate.”
