There's a delivered speech by the German Chancellor every year on the 31st of December. It's supposed to be this reassuring dialogue that reflects Germans upon the past year, their triumphs, their losses, their achievements, and the year ahead.
To be kinda honest, it's mostly people over the age of thirty that watch the speech.....and I have my belief that of the population of eighty million residents....there might be ten million that actually watch it. Toss in the fact that it's on state-run TV, which most teenagers would never watch....it has a limited audience.
The German Commissioner of Integration (Aydan Ozoguz) has spoke up and suggests that the Chancellor's speech ought to have sub-titles added.....in Arabic.
There is some logic to this. If you take in the group of immigrants from 2013, 2014 and 2015....there's almost two million in the country. Although one must be honest and admit that of the million for 2015.....at least half aren't Arabic (southeastern Europe, Africa, and a dozen countries other than Syria or Iraq).
Aggravating a segment of German society? If you were looking for a campaign theme for the three states that March elections coming up.....this would fire up the opposition to the both the CDU and SPD and give them a jump-start on the campaign period.
No one from Merkel's staff have said anything about the sub-titles suggestion and my humble guess is that they don't mind it being recorded and replayed, with sub-titles later, for a lesser seen public situation. They might still have some ability to see a controversial problem in doing this.
The humor side of this is that no one in Germany ever took the Chancellors speech to be more than a slight bit of reassurance about the future. A ten-minute pep talk....some talk over the problems faced, and the great strides toward fixing issues. Germans have become a bit cynical over the past decade and it might take some patience to feel the "pep".
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