Education Minister Karin Prien has said the violence that occurred in the aftermath of youth protests on Saturday evening was in part an indication that the integration of people of migrant background into German society could be improved.
Prien told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk said that the “for the most part peaceful demonstrations” had been followed by rioting by left-wing radicals “but also by others who probably come from migrant milieus.”
She said that recognizing this fact was not about stirring up resentments, which she called “politically wrong,” but about facing reality and getting a picture of why people resort to such means.
“And if they come from migrant milieus, we should be worried about it and look at the causes,” said Prien, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz‘s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU).
She said one question was why integration succeeds less well in some groups than in others.
“And it’s not about the question of a passport. It’s about the question: Why have people not been integrated into our society and what can be done so it works better in future,” she said.
Her comments came despite the fact that authorities in Frankfurt, which saw the worst of the violence, said that most of the people they arrested in connection with rioting over the weekend were German citizens.
Interior minister blames ‘migrant anarchists’
Prien’s remarks came after archconservative Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) said the “peaceful demonstrations were hijacked toward the evening by violence-prone left-wing groups and migrant anarchists,” without offering evidence for who was behind the violent turn in the demonstrations.
Dobrindt’s comment was, however, called into question by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Germany’s federal coalition government.
“What are migrant groups, then? Are these people living in Germany in the third generation who are German nationals? Where do we stop differentiating here? I think this is going in the wrong direction,” he said.
Pistorius said, however, that whoever had been responsible for the rioting had to be punished for it.
His intervention comes as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues, without evidence, to blame migration for most of the country’s problems, with Dobrindt seeming to adopt some of the populist party’s anti-migrant rhetoric.
