Word: germanize
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...media debates and shapes government policy. But the era in which Muslims became a feared minority also saw another trend: the rise of a Euro-Muslim middle class. A Gallup poll last year found European Muslims to be at least as likely to identify themselves as British, French or German as the general populations. Migrants' children have begun moving from corner shops and factory floors to offices. They swap business cards at Muslim networking events like Britain's Emerald Network or Holland's Toward a New Start, a group for Moroccans who, in the words of founder Ahmed Larouz...
Such moxie is the preserve of the exceptionally talented. And it is far easier to be a practicing Muslim in a globalized London firm than in Denmark, where prayer rooms at work are controversial, or in those German states that have outlawed the hijab for government employees. Islam is traditionally a faith that shapes not just individual souls, but public life. That makes for difficulties. Many Muslims who want to thrive in the European mainstream feel they have to take their cue from Christians and make their faith a private matter, so that they become Protestantized, as it were...
This particular brand of angst spread comparatively late among Germans. Back in the mid-1990s, they were still more consumed with the economic consequences of German reunification. Pollsters say that only in the past five years or so did Germans look up and start worrying about the costs of globalization, and their concerns seem to be growing. Last month the country rose as one in protest when Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia announced it was shutting down its plant in the Rhineland city of Bochum to move to Romania, threatening 2,300 German jobs. When the local SPD branch called...
Voters expressed that anxiety in two major German state elections on Jan. 27. In the state of Hesse, which includes Germany's financial capital, Frankfurt, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) posted an 8 percentage point gain in the popular vote - at the expense of its conservative rivals, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - with a campaign for "social justice" and a statutory minimum wage. In both Hesse and neighboring Lower Saxony, a far-left-wing party with roots in the former East Germany won seats in a major west German parliament for the first time. "Today we have...
...incumbent, Roland Koch, but she didn't quite surpass his vote tally. And the SPD fared poorly in Lower Saxony, where a clean-cut CDU candidate played to the center and the Left Party gnawed at the SPD's union base. But after 10 years in which German politics - and the SPD - remained largely in the political center, left-wing economic policies are winning votes again, marking a break with a decade of cautious reformism. That sets a new tone for elections in Hamburg and Bavaria later this year, as well as for federal elections in late 2009. In Berlin...