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Updated February 9th, 2021 at 12:36 IST

Syrian who fled to Germany runs for parliament

Tareq Alaows is running to become "Germany's first refugee lawmaker" in national elections in September, five years after fleeing the civil war in Syria.

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Tareq Alaows is running to become "Germany's first refugee lawmaker" in national elections in September, five years after fleeing the civil war in Syria. Alaows said he wants to enter German politics to give a voice to the more than one million refugees who arrived in the country with him.

The 31-year-old human rights activist from Damascus runs as a candidate for the Green Party and has a grassroots network of volunteers who support his campaign for election on September 26. Alaows crossed the Mediterranean in a flimsy rubber dinghy and trekked north through the Balkans toward Germany, fleeing the civil war in his homeland Syria to seek a safe haven.

Since then, he has learned fluent German, found a steady job and has launched a campaign to run for a seat in Parliament in September. Alaows joined the Green Party last year and is running as their candidate in the Oberhausen-Dinslaken parliamentary constituency in western Germany.

With his beard and long black hair pulled into a bun he has the informal look of a Greens politician, and also shares the party's focus on human rights activism and social justice. In Syria, he participated in peaceful protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad while studying law at the University of Aleppo. 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 was facing conscription into military service after graduation, Alaows decided to escape to a place when he could live in safety and dignity. After he arrived in Dortmund on September 3, 2015, he soon became active again after being confronted with a system overwhelmed by the more than one million migrants who arrived that year alone.

After being crammed into a gym with 60 other people, where nobody could sleep at night if just one child was crying, he helped organise protests against the conditions. Alaows now rents his apartment in Berlin and works as a legal counsellor for asylum seekers at an NGO there splitting his time in the capital and Oberhausen, in his constituency.

Most of the 818,460 Syrians who live in Germany have not yet applied for German citizenship. Alaows, who applied for German citizenship soon after he arrived into the country, is confident that it will be approved before election day on September 26. People of non-German backgrounds continue to be severely underrepresented in many sectors of society, including parliament.

Of the 709 lawmakers who took office in the last federal elections in 2017, only 58 or 8.2 percent had migrant roots, according to the Mediendienst Integration group that tracks migrant issues in Germany. Alaows has found a home with the Greens, a party that lobbies for better integration and participation of migrants in addition to environmental issues, and boasts that almost 15 percent of their lawmakers are of foreign backgrounds.

Germany has a complex electoral system that gives its citizens two votes each - one for a directly elected constituency representative and another for a party list. Alaows faces an uphill struggle to win the first-past-the-post race to become a directly elected lawmaker - Germany's traditional big parties win most of those -  but could still enter parliament if he gets a prominent spot on the party's regional list.

That means he needs the party to vote to put him high enough on its list of delegates from the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, where his constituency is located. A handful of volunteers, mostly young and engaged like himself, field questions from the media, keep his social media accounts active and put out regular video and photos. On Saturday, Alaows joined a protest in front of the Reichstag against the deportation of rejected asylum seekers to their home countries. 

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Published February 9th, 2021 at 12:36 IST

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