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WELT:

Ms. Neu, you head the Election and Social Research Department of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and you recently completed a representative study of the voting behavior of Germans with a migration background.

What is the main result?

Viola Neu:

We find out among those eligible to vote with Turkish roots that the extremely firm ties to the SPD have become looser and that the Union parties benefit greatly from it.

Viola Neu from the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation

Source: via Viola Neu

WORLD:

How is that expressed in cold numbers?

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New:

When we carried out a representative survey of people of Turkish origin in 2015, 50 percent answered that they wanted to vote for the SPD if there were parliamentary elections next Sunday.

In 2019, only 13 percent were in favor of the Social Democrats in the Sunday question.

WORLD:

Why is the SPD losing so much of its approval among people of Turkish origin?

New:

We believe it's a normalization process.

In the past, voters of Turkish origin were closely tied to social democracy, particularly through the trade unions.

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At the same time, we saw in our study what we always assumed: that classic, traditional, conservative, religious values ​​play a greater role for this electorate.

And apparently this value orientation has now led to the connection to the SPD becoming fragile.

WORLD:

How does the Union fare in your survey?

New:

In the Sunday question in 2015, only 17 percent of German Turks voted for the CDU and CSU.

In 2019, approval rose to 53 percent.

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WORLD:

Does an economically liberal attitude also play a role?

So is the social democratic mix of higher taxes and, in return, higher social security no longer so attractive for migrant population groups who have lived in the country for a long time and who have gained a foothold economically?

New:

That would be conceivable, but we don't have any comparable survey results on this.

What we can clearly see, however, is an economic and cultural normalization as well as an alignment in the level of education.

Incidentally, we see that overall for the population with a migration background, there are immense advancement processes there.

Representative surveys like ours are the mouthpiece of the silent majority.

We can see that there are hardly any differences between migrant and indigenous populations when it comes to questions of consent to democracy or trust in the state.

The majority of Germans are calling for relaxation

According to a survey, the majority of Germans are in favor of less stringent measures.

A campaign topic: The SPD is calling for extensive openings from an incidence of 70.

Source: WELT / David Schafbuch

WELT:

Is it also because the Union is now making more offers to immigrants and has moved towards the positions of the left-wing parties in its migration and integration policy?

New:

We didn't ask about that, but it could also be a factor.

We find that religious beliefs play a bigger role for people of Turkish origin.

They view the insults of their own beliefs, abortion and gay marriage more critically than other groups.

Possibly the Union is seen as a little more open to such positions than the SPD.

WELT:

Your data also show that 20 percent of people of Turkish origin want to vote for the Left Party.

Can this be explained by the party's particular proximity to the Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in Turkey?

Almost a million of the people who immigrated from Turkey are Kurds.

New:

At least it is striking that the Left Party is the only party that explicitly formulates and supports Kurdish positions.

However, it is difficult to investigate empirically because German statistics do not include an evaluation based on ethnicity, only based on nationality.

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At most, after we have selected our survey sample, we could ask again about ethnicity.

But that would be very cumbersome if we were to do this for all states with strong ethnic minorities.

WORLD:

How did you go about finding a survey group from which all voters of Turkish origin can be inferred?

New:

Our study initially focused on the three groups of foreigners, Germans with a migration background and Germans without a migration background based on the resident population aged 18 and over.

Then we selected a purely random sample, i.e. using a randomized procedure to draw landline and mobile numbers using a computer program.

We decided against the often used name-based analysis method, and I would like to illustrate why: With this method, for example, the pop singer Andrea Berg could be a man from Italy, while Helene Fischer, who immigrated from Russia, could not be identified as a German with a Russian migration background.

WORLD:

And then the social researcher gropes "breathlessly through the night" ...

New:

In any case, Ms. Fischer would never have appeared in the selection of a representative survey group for voters with a migration background, and Ms. Berg might have been interviewed.

These name-based procedures work well for respondents with Turkish roots, but we also wanted a representative sample of all Muslims living in Germany.

If we had only selected respondents of Turkish origin, we would have almost only had Sunnis in the survey.

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Source: WORLD / Laura Fritsch

WORLD:

Now studies like yours appear very rarely.

Why is it so difficult for social researchers to examine the party preferences of different migrant groups?

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New:

It is a very complex research design that ties up considerable resources.

This leads to a very long field time.

We conducted interviews in six foreign languages ​​and tried to use the sample as extensively as possible.

This means that we call up to eight times over a period of several weeks to set up an interview date.

Because all of this is labor-intensive and cost-intensive, we only do these analyzes about every five years.