Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work.

Mrs Merkel's comments come amid recent outpourings of strong anti-immigrant feeling from mainstream politicians.

A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners".

The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for the social benefits.

Foreign workers

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country... We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality.

"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

In her speech, the chancellor specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany" like Christianity and Judaism.
Muslims read Koran in Hamburg, file pic Mrs Merkel says Islam is part of Germany but more must be done on integration

While acknowledging that this was the case, Mrs Merkel stressed that immigrants living in Germany needed to do more to integrate, including learning to speak German.

"Anyone who does not immediately speak German", she said, "is not welcome".

By speaking now, Mrs Merkel has now joined the increasingly hot debate on multiculturalism, coming down on the side of those who are uneasy about immigration, says the BBC's correspondent in Berlin, Stephen Evans.

Her comments come a week after she held talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany's estimated 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.

Earlier this week, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, CSU, said about integration that it was "obvious that immigrants from different cultures like Turkey and Arab countries, all in all, find it harder".

"'Multikulti' is dead," Mr Seehofer said.

In August, Thilo Sarrazin, a senior official at Germany's central bank, said that "no immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime". Mr Sarrazin has since resigned.

Such recent strong anti-immigrant feelings from mainstream politicians come amid an anger in Germany about high unemployment, even if the economy is growing faster than those of its rivals, our correspondent says.

He adds that there also seems to be a new strident tone in the country, perhaps leading to less reticence about no-go-areas of the past.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451

I wouldn't have imagined Germany was an easy touch for social benefits

And can you imagine the 'debate' in this country if the Cameron/Clegg hybrid came out with that

Welcome home Dave.

The problem for many immigrants is that they do not integrate and stick with other immigrants and as such do not integrate well. This is the same everywhere.

Oh dear, Germany's lurching to the right again, maybe we shouldn't cancel that Eurofighter order after all.

I don't see anything there that's not also happening in this country (or France and Italy) - particularly printed by the Daily Fail and repeated by its readers.

Hardly surprising, the Daily Mail was all in favour of Hitler in the 30s.

What's different between us and them at the moment is that when intolerant measures such as banning headgear etc are proposed, no matter how popular with the unwashed pig ignorant masses, leaders of the worthwhile political parties describe them (accurately) as 'unbritish' and proceed no further.

Nah, I'm staying. The report is very hyped up and doesn't represent the reality of the situation. Having heard the report on television last night, in German, it sounds like sensationalistic editing.

The biggest problem is that a lot of immigrant groups don't learn the language. If they don't bother to learn the language, they can't integrate into society. Mix this with some cultures that don't want to integrate, it leads to a problem of them being accepted.

Germany has been talking, for years, about having a policy, where people who want to stay in the country must have a rudimentary understanding of spoken and written German.

The Islamic immigrants exaserbate the problem more, especially among the more strict muslims, where the woman is supposed to stay at home and be covered up, when she does go out - I've seen several families, where a German girl has married into a muslim family and run away, because of abuse and a lack of rights, within the family. Where the women stay at home and only go out to do the shopping, they don't speak the language, so can't make themselves understood and it can be very frustrating.

On the other hand, when I was in the language school, I got to know a large number of muslims, one was an trainee Imam, who was teaching Sunday school in a mosque in München. He studied the language hard and learnt it quicker than I did - although his heavy accent was hard to understand at times. There were also a lot of muslim women in the school.

We had a muslim from Bosnia and 2 women also from Kosovo, one a muslim, the other a christian. The two women got on well, the muslim woman (bother around 19 - 20) didn't wear a head scarf. The muslim man was telling the rest of the class to ignore the girls, they were unclean and undesirable members of society - because the one was a christian and the other not a devout muslim, who stayed at home, but wanted to study at the university...

In Berlin and some eastern cities, there is some discent and hatred towards immigrants, especially Turks. But it is a minority. When Sarrazin spoke out about it, and published his new book, he had to step down as director to the bank and he was expelled from his political party.

In general though, I haven't experienced any racial hatred - although coming from a country further west than Germany, which isn't France, puts me on a different standing. But even when I was out with the Turkish muslims for an evening out in a restaurant or going for coffee after classes, I never experienced any predjudice; although for eating, they did tend to stick to their own restaurants, because they could get food that had been "properly" prepared.

When I invited the Imam and a couple of other students over for lunch and an afternoon watching DVDs and discussing them, I made it a point to go with him, to a Turkish shop and buy the chicken and vegetables there, so that he would feel comfortable and not have to keep asking about its origin or whether I had used alcohol in the preparation of food or drink...

Where I live, the Turkish and Greek communities aren't a problem, nor the Chinese, the biggest problem are the Einsiedler (eng. Anchorite), which is the term given to the "Russian Germans", those that lived in Russian captured land, after the war and which used the collapse of the Russian regime to escape to the west. They are very insular, much like the Turks, but they have brought a lot of the attitudes of Russia with them, which causes a lot of problems. This mainly has to do with alcohol abuse - anything that isn't vodka, isn't alcohol, so drinking 10 beers and getting in the car to drive home isn't a problem, because it is just a soft drink! Likewise, they drink a lot more than the "average" German - again, this is a generalisation, but it is one that does actually cover a majority of the community. On the other hand, I saw this year, that the families are very extravagant, when their daughters leave school, splurging out on proper evening dresses, often in traditional russian style, for the graduation party.

But they were also drinking to excess, falling over on the dance floor and causing a general nuisance, at times. Again, not all, but a vast majority. I was glad we left relatively early, because they were starting to pile into their cars and drive home.

We have had several incidents in the last couple of years, with 17-20 year old Russian Germans causing large accidents, one, a teen driving a tuned up Audi A3, with 6 people in it, hit a tree in the middle of a residential area at 150km/h, none were wearing seatbelt, not that there was much left of the car either...

Edit:

It is unconstitutional here, to do that. The German Constitution makes it illegal to denegrate minirities or get involved in racist or "extreme right wing" activities or parties.

That makes allot of sense to me I was working in North London a few years back and the council there were printing most of their material in about 30 languages. And several schools don't have English as the first language.

I'm sorry but that is crazy IMHO.

I'd certainly agree that immigrants to ANY country should have made an effort to learn some of the basic language of the country they are emigrating to just so that they can be understood.

See, that stuff might wash in conformist Germany, but in Britain our laws assume a certain libertarian stance which we should be trying harder to hold onto. The principle is very simple, there are laws against criminal stuff like murder and rape. Obey those, and you get to live your life as you wish in every other respect. Anyone who can commit to this is welcome.

Only the Germans (I hope) are so anal as to consider making a law requiring integration. That's not part of the deal in a libertarian nation. Multiculturalism isn't a flawed policy, it's an inevitable outcome of genuine freedom, and to describe it as a failed experiment is to describe liberty in the same terms.

It isn't a law. They were trying to help minority groups to better integrate into society, so that they weren't seen as minority groups who didn't want anything to do with the country in which they were living.

The initiative failed, because the minorities are happy not to integrate, they don't mind taking the better social services they receive, but they don't see why they should conform to the laws of the land - there have been a few cases, where families have killed daughters who were integrating and ignoring the Sharia laws of their home land, they pleaded not guilty, as it wasn't a crime in Afgahnistan!

To be honest, I don't see what the problem is, with requiring people to learn the language of the country where they are living. When I moved to Germany, my first task, which I set myself, was to learn the language. How could I expect to get a job, sign up for social services etc. if I couldn't speak the language?

Exactly my point.

The laws which require councils & etc to provide all materials in a plethora of languages are not in any sense a 'British tradition'. They're new. Even 20 years ago pretty much everything was just in English, or in English and French if you were lucky. If you told a council they would have to provide leaflets in Urdu and Pashtun and Farsi they would have told you to get lost.

The British notion of libertarianism is essentially the notion that, provided what they are doing is not detrimental to anyone else, people should not be told what to do. It stems (IMO) from the fact that Britain, as a nation, tended to be rather orderly anyway so people resented being told to do things they were probably already going to do. It has nothing to do with languages or religions or any of that. The ideas of 'integration' and 'multiculturalism' are inventions of the late 20th century - starting with the major influx of Indian and Caribbean migrants post world war 2. While the Empire brought many things to GB, those things didn't modify the British character in any measurable way.

The tenant that the indigenous people should make equal effort to integrate as the migrators they are accepting is a very new notion indeed, not only in the UK but in the civilised world. Before that you either learned the way the locals did things or you suffered. Unless you were a successful invading army, in which case you forced the locals to do things your way at the point of a sword. And that's hardly 'integration' now is it?

There is nothing inherently 'British' about multiculturalism. That doesn't make it a better or worse thing for it, but it's simply not true. Britain has only been more accepting of strangers than anywhere else for pretty much the current generation. The people who have said otherwise in the past were just using it as a political ploy - 'If you don't agree with us you're being anti-British'. It's no more true when they say it than when the BNP say it for their beliefs. Trying to equate acceptance of migrants with some inherent (and laudable) British characteristic is just another variant of a political double-talk, like when they stand up and call for the banning of things everybody thought were pretty reprehensible anyway.

Jon

Bit of a reporting fail there - the full quote actually gives the opposite impression:



Also, Merkel wasn't actually saying that multiculturalism has failed but rather that the specific "Multikulti" policy followed in Germany has failed.

BBC fail. Again.

[Edit] The BBC article seems to have had a slight rewrite. Still - total headline fail.

Thanks for checking that Jim. I thought she hadn't said anything like that, but hadn't had the time to double check...

No probs.

The BBC fail was even more annoying as certain impressions given by the interpreter in English weren't in what Merkel actually said in German.