Give Them the Vote : Chancellor Kohl misses a chance to make a statement

President Richard von Weizsacker was the most prominent official to attend Thursday’s funerals for the five Turks who were murdered last weekend in the latest spasm of anti-foreigner hatred in Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was, typically, the most prominent official to stay away.

Kohl has made it a habit to distance himself from public displays of support for foreign victims of right-wing extremism. Eight years ago he stood over the graves of Nazi SS troopers in a cemetery in Bitberg and suggested that the time had come to move beyond the past. Today, ignoring the future, he finds it inconvenient to take part in public mourning for the victims of neo-Nazi xenophobia. His critics say that Kohl fears offending the far-right. Right-wing Germans can vote. Turkish immigrants, like all non-Germans, can’t. Until that changes, they are likely to remain both vulnerable and scorned.

Weizsacker is one of those advocating such change. So is Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, justice minister in Kohl’s Cabinet. Both favor allowing dual citizenship for Germany’s 1.8 million Turks, some of whom have lived in the country for decades, many of whom were in fact born there. “They live under the rules of the German state,” Weizsacker said Thursday, “but, unlike other citizens, without any influence on it.” Giving Turks the franchise would give them some political power. That in itself could reduce their defenselessness.

Germany’s citizenship law, which dates from 1913, essentially defines citizenship on the basis of blood alone and prohibits dual citizenship, a recognized right in a number of other European countries. Revising this archaic code would give a say to at least some of the hundreds of thousands of tax-paying, German-speaking immigrants.

Revision would not, of course, quash the vicious extremism that so many concerned and law-abiding Germans have taken to the streets to condemn. The strongest weapon against that extremism will come in clear signals of rejection from the government. Thursday’s funerals offered another chance for Kohl to send such a signal. It was, once again, a chance that was muffed.