Germany: essayist Thilo Sarrazin excluded from SPD, ten years after his Islamophobic publications

Ten years: this is the time it will take the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to exclude the most cumbersome of its members. Author, in 2010, of the very controversial bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab ( Germany disappears , ed. Of Toucan, 2013), “Thilo Sarrazin is no longer a member of the SPD” , announced the party's conflict commission, Friday July 31, in a press release.

It all started in September 2009. Then aged 64, economist Thilo Sarrazin has just left the Berlin Land Ministry, which he had headed since 2002, to join the Executive Board of the Bundesbank. In an interview with Lettre International , he said:

“I do not accept people who live on the state, reject this state, do not care about the education of their children and keep producing little girls with headscarves. This is the case for 70% of Turks and 90% of Arabs who live in Berlin. "

In reaction to these remarks, two sections of the SPD demand the exclusion of Thilo Sarrazin, member of the party since 1973. In vain. In March 2010, the conflict commission of the Berlin SPD federation decided that he was entitled to keep his membership card, considering that the party "can accept provocative statements of this nature" . She adds, however, that this decision is not a "blank check for any type of provocation in the future".

Huge success in bookstores

But Thilo Sarrazin does not hear the warning, as evidenced by the publication, in August 2010, of Deutschland schafft sich ab. "I wouldn't want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be largely Muslim, to speak mostly Turkish and Arabic, for women to be veiled and for the pace of the day to be determined by the calls of the muezzin. If that's what I want to experience, I can book a trip to the Orient, ” wrote the former Berlin finance minister in particular.

Despite its 465 pages, the book was a huge bestseller, for twenty-one weeks topping the Spiegel bestseller in the “essays” category . In total, more than 1.5 million copies will be sold. The debate it provokes is also considerable. Even the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, takes part in it through her spokesperson, who qualifies the author's comments as "offensive, defamatory and very seriously controversial".