Özdemir as the German Obama?Has change come to Germany as well?

Last weekend a perfectly fitting example of what I described of the liberal world happened.

In Germany Cem Özdemir was announced to be the new party leader of the green party.Cem Özdemir was a Member of Parliament before he had to resign over a travel miles affair.

After that he became a member of the European Parliament.He is the first Turkish party leader in the German history and a lot of members of the public wouldn't have thought of this to be possible even a couple of weeks ago.

Rumours are saying that the election of Özdemir was a deal between the left oriented members and the realists within the party, so they could both get their candidates through. Cem Özdemir on the one side and Claudia Roth on the other side will now lead the green party. Özdemir won the election with an overwhelming result of 79,2 % even though part of the party still believes him to be a shapeless self-exposer massively prone to thinking too commercial.In his initial speech as party leader Özdemir said, that the party had spent too much time caring about themselves and only discussing internal issues and that it was time to compete and debate the politics made by other, in particular the governing parties of Germany, the big coalition of SPD and CDU.

He especially criticised foreign secretary Frank Walter Steinmeier for not assisting Murat Kurnaz, a boy with Turkish background, born and brought up in Germany, who was a prisoner in Guantanamo.

He also criticised the secretary of environment Sigmar Gabriel. He accused him tobe part of the car lobby and not caring about environmental and climate issues enough.

After those more than rough first words, making his position quite clear, I read an article relating Özdemir to Obama. He is an outsider and he is a forceful man, who might be able to attract Turkish migrants to vote green.On his homepage you can see that even though Özdemir himself distances himself from this comparison his election campaign was run under the slogan of Yes we Cem in relation to Obama’s campaign which was called Yes we can.

Germany is trying to joke about this new found cookie of political diversity already


So after I found this I thought, do we only vote faces or do we vote party programmes? Do we really care anymore about what is written down in party programme or has our political system Americanised?Is a model such as PR proportional representation a system that could work?