Has multiculturalism failed in germany?

(Warning: What follows is a somewhat long political rant.)

So, since I am german, I get asked what I think about multiculturalism in germany a lot, recently, because of some ridiculous remarks made by our chanellor earlier this month.

As you might have guessed from that itroductory paragraph already, I do not believe that what Merkel said holds and water at all, and I find such claims detestable and damaging to not only germanys reputation in the world.

Merkel and her right-wing social-convervative party buddies are framing an issue that is primarily one of social inequality in education - rich parents, good education, poor parents, not so much - as a “culture” issue. This is quite obviously bullshit, as you can see by looking at your average poor neighbourhood - there’ll be just as many kids with german parents as not, all similiarily bad in school.

The reason for this is, as I (And as most students and teachers) see it, our highly selective school system where kids are seperated into three schools based on pretty much one teachers opinion at age 8 to 10. Since that age is far, far too young to be able to actually tell anyones ability at anything much, this ends up basically selectiong by social status. I’ve seen this happen live and in colour with a friend of mine getting sent to a more vocational school while I got to go to the more academic one - with us both having the same grades. On the other hand, in the school I later went to, there were people whose parents had immigrated, but had managed to make some money - some of them dumb as fuck, some really smart.

There’s also notoric underfunding of the more vocational schools and of schools in “bad” neighbourhoods, and the fact that in some states you now have to pay a lot of money to go to uni, which - as studies have shown - further discourages someone who is poor from going to uni. All in all, our educational system is set up so that the result is that for the most part, people who are poor, stay poor.

Those are all issues students have been protesting about for years. These are all issues Merkel and the CDU have been ignoring or, in some cases, been making worse.

These are very much issues that happen to affect first-gen immigrants kids - being a first-gen immigrant happens to coincide with being poor as fuck a lot, since rich people do not generally emmigrate from their home county to germany to do shit jobs for little money - they are, however, not issues of “culture” - and framing them as such only serves to isolate, which is horrible.

All these things coming up close to elections (BW state elections, in polls for which the CDU is doing very badly right now) makes me doubt Merkels honesty here - I simply cannot see this as anything else but a grab for votes from the people who are still afraid of brown people and the kind of persons that are enraged by a mosque with a minarett higher than the local churches church tower. It’s a subtle playing of the racism card in a way that makes it hard to call anyone out on it, but that really is what it is.

It’s detestable and stupid, and it makes me feel ashamed of living here that it seems to be working.