Credits: @picture-alliance/dpa | Deutsche Welle

Germany’s Christian Democrats want more diversity and believe more Muslims in their party will make the Union more open. A Deutsche Welle columnist believes that “the CDU should strive for openness as Germany’s biggest political party“. He observes that “the Greens have a chairman called Özdemir, the Social Democrats a general secretary called Fahimi – now the Christian Democrats want to open up as well. From now on, multiculturalism will no longer be something that has been imposed upon them by the political left. The CDU wants to present itself as ethnically mixed, too. This is a cultural revolution – or a mini-revolution, at the very least“.

MPG’s Diversity Assessment Tool, developed in the framework of the project Diversity in Political Parties’ Programmes, Organisation and Representation (DivPol) is designed to assess to what extent political parties adopt measures to integrate people with an immigrant background into the life of the party. Parties are organisations that are to a greater or lesser extent professional organisations operating at local, regional, national and European levels. In order to achieve their overall goals, parties aim to:

• seek the support of voters
• recruit members
• select candidates for representative office
• select leaders
• employ staff
• purchase goods and services.

As part of a broader strategy to achieve these goals, parties can adopt and implement equal opportunity, anti-discrimination and diversity principles. This would make parties more representative and effective to mobilise the population. The tool is primarily meant for the national level where general rules are set for the party as a whole. However, the tool can also be used for party operations at sub-national level and by party affiliated organisations such as training institutes.

For the design of the tool we made use of a compendium of benchmarks and indicators on diversity in political parties.

Migrants’ Telephone Call Centre, Roquetas de Mar, Almería, January 2004. Credits: John Perivolaris | flickr

Building on the ACIT (http://eudo-citizenship.eu/about/acit) project, MPG’s Spanish partner CIDOB (link) will conduct focus groups and in-depth interviews to analyse the discriminatory effect of Spain’s different naturalisation procedures for immigrants coming from countries with historical ties to Spain (largely Spanish-speaking countries) and for immigrants coming from the rest of the world. The different legal procedures and the administrative difficulties for immigrants from the rest of the world were analysed in the ACIT project, leading to a Handbook for Spain available in English and in Spanish. Also the Spanish results of the Immigrant Citizens Survey (www.immigrantsurvey.org) launched in Spain by CIDOB, suggest that immigrants from the rest of the world are less likely to naturalise (http://www.immigrantsurvey.org/downloads/Immigrant%20citizens%20survey%20-%20Questionnaire%20-%20Online%20Version.pdf), even after 20 years’ residence in Spain, and twice as likely to report administrative problems during the naturalisation procedure

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