BERLIN (AP) – Five years ago, Tareq Alaows crossed the Mediterranean in a thin rubber boat and headed 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 been fluent in German, found a steady job – and has just launched a campaign to run for parliament in September.
“I am running for the national parliament as the first refugee in Syria,” Alaows told the Associated Press at a rally in support of asylum seekers in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin, where Parliament is located. “I want to give a voice to refugees and migrants in Germany and to fight for a diverse and equitable society for all.”
Alaows joined the Green Party last year and is running as a candidate in the Oberhausen-Dinslaken parliamentary constituency in western Germany.
With his beard and long black hair pulled into 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 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 more and more brutal and he faced military service after graduation, Alaows decided to escape to a “place where I can live safely and with dignity,” he said. he.
After arriving in Dortmund, in western Germany, on September 3, 2015, he soon became active again, after being confronted with a system overwhelmed by the more than 1 million migrants who arrived that year.
After being crammed into a gym with 60 other people, “where no one could sleep at night if only one child cried,” he helped organize protests against the conditions.
Alaows now works as a legal adviser to asylum seekers at 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 right for them to remain in the European Union’s external borders in precarious conditions, drown in the Mediterranean Sea and have to live in huge camps in Germany, while European interior ministers gather to find ways to keep them away or deport them. ”
By the end of 2020, 818,460 Syrians were living in Germany. Most have not yet applied for German citizenship. Alaows is one of the first to meet the prerequisites to apply for citizenship, which he is confident will be approved before the September 26 election day.
Overall, about 21.2 million of Germany’s 83 million people 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 them.
But people from non-German backgrounds continue to be 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% have migrant roots, according to the Mediendienst Integration group, which monitors migrants in Germany.
That is why Alaows found a home with the Greens, a party that lobbies for better integration of migrants in addition to environmental issues and boasts that almost 15% of their MPs come from migrant backgrounds.
“Tareq is a candidate who supports 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, as she launched. campaign last week.
Germany has a complex electoral system that offers its citizens two votes each – one for a directly elected representative in the constituency and another for a party list. Alaows is facing an upward struggle to win the first post-the-post race to become a directly elected parliamentarian – Germany’s traditional big parties win the majority – but could enter parliament if he gets a prominent place on the party’s regional list .
That means he needs the party to vote enough to put him high enough on the list of delegates in West Rhine-Westphalia, where his constituency is, when he decides on candidates for the national parliament in the spring.
His current campaign team is working hard to help him get there.
A handful of volunteers, mostly young and involved like him, ask questions from the press, actively keep their social media accounts and post regular videos and photos.
On Saturday, Alaows joined a protest in front of the Reichstag against the deportation of rejected asylum seekers to their home countries.
Reggae music rang from the speakers on the snowy lawn, while about 200 people held banners with slogans saying “No one is illegal,” and speakers called for the opening of borders for refugees.
“I want to bring about a political change in parliament,” Alaows said, looking at protesters in front of the Reichstag building, whose façade bears the slogan “For the German People” carved in stone under its iconic glass dome.
“I want to bring to Parliament the perspective of people who are not represented there,” he said.