DThe political association DAVA wants to become the voice of all people with a history of immigration and especially of Muslims in Germany. How big is DAVA's voter potential? Party representatives speak of five million Muslims in Germany, some even as many as seven million. Not all of them are eligible to vote, also because many of them do not have a German passport. However, the representatives are betting that the number of Muslims eligible to vote will continue to increase due to immigration and the liberalization of citizenship law decided by the traffic light coalition.
Social researcher Yunus Ulusoy from the Center for Turkish Studies and Integration Research is nevertheless cautious about the chances for DAVA. The close ties to Erdoğan's AKP limited the reach, says Ulusoy. “I cannot imagine that an association with Turkish ethnic structures can reach voters from the Arab-Muslim region.”
According to the Federal Statistical Office, there are 1,133,000 German citizens of Turkish origin who are eligible to vote in the European elections, Ulusoy calculates. Even if fifty percent voted – that would be around 550,000 voters – half of them would have to vote for DAVA in order for the association to be able to send a representative to the European Parliament if necessary. “This is a big challenge, especially since there are likely to be many Kurds, Alevis and secular people who would never vote for Erdoğan and therefore not DAVA either.”
Lamya Kaddor does not believe DAVA will be a quick success
The Islamic scholar and Green Party member of the Bundestag Lamya Kaddor also does not believe that the DAVA will quickly become a success. However, the chances could increase depending on social development. The core clientele for DAVA are conservative Muslims with Turkish roots. “It’s not a very small group,” says Kaddor. In addition, the party could also become attractive to conservative Muslims from other backgrounds if Islamophobia in Germany becomes more important than conflict lines in their countries of origin.
If there is an extreme increase in everyday racism in Germany, even liberal or secular Muslims could become receptive to DAVA demands. The DAVA program not only focuses on a conservative concept of family and more rights for Islamic associations, but also continually uses terms such as “anti-discrimination” and “diversity”. “The more these groups of voters feel cornered, the more likely they are to vote for such a party,” says Kaddor. It is therefore in the interest of the other parties that the Islamophobic tendencies and polarization in society do not increase any further.
Lars Castellucci, the religious policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, also sees DAVA as an attempt by people close to the AKP to stylize Muslims as a “victim group in the country”. Statements from DAVA people leave little doubt about this. For example, top candidate Fatih Zingal complains about “a gap between those represented and those who are represented” and accuses all “established parties” of not taking people with an immigration history seriously and reducing them to their immigration history. Zingal himself was in the SPD for a long time and says of his former party: “Experiences of racism and problems finding accommodation were not a big part of the SPD’s agenda, although it always advertised that it represented the interests of immigrants.”