CDU Members Reject German Official's Proposal for Muslim Holidays
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told a party rally in northern Germany this week that he was willing to discuss Islamic holidays in areas with large Muslim populations.
There are an estimated 4.7 million Muslims in Germany, mostly immigrants from Turkey.
Senior CDU member Wolfgang Bosbach told the newspaper Bild that everyone in Germany could celebrate whatever religious festivals they wanted but added, "Whether the state should also protect non-Christian holidays with legal regulation in the future is a different issue entirely.”
Alexander Dobrindt, a senior figure in the Christian Social Union (CSU) — the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU — told the same newspaper that Germany’s Christian heritage was non-negotiable.
"We won’t consider introducing Muslim public holidays in Germany,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry said de Maiziere remained of the view that Germany’s public holidays were of a Christian nature "and don’t have any other roots.” However, she said the northern city states of Hamburg and Bremen and other states had signed agreements with some Muslim organizations so that Muslim pupils could have such time off school and workers could take holidays for festivals important to Islam, seeming to suggest that there would be nothing wrong with the introduction of holidays on official local calendars.
The German constitution states that Germany’s individual states decide on religious public holidays so the federal interior minister has no influence on whether there should be Muslim public holidays, the spokeswoman added.
Meanwhile, the CDU is set to start three-way coalition talks with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Green Paert next week.
The conservatives won a September election but suffered their worst result since 1949 as they lost some support to the far-right.
