A third of vacancies within the city of Hanover will be reserved exclusively for migrant applicants, new proposals praised by the local Green party have revealed.
“A green mayor makes the difference!” wrote Turkish-born Filiz Polat, the managing director of the Greens parliamentary group, in a tweet on Wednesday, which confirmed that “by the end of 2026, a third of all newly advertised positions in the city should be filled by applicants with a migration background.”
The draft resolution proposed by the city’s integration committee, which is currently comprised of Greens, SPD, and CDU politicians, says the “target figure for all new hires is 30 percent” in order to significantly increase the proportion of people with foreign roots within the local administration.
The city will furthermore establish a publicity campaign to “motivate young people from immigrant families to take advantage of the wide range of training and study opportunities in the state capital” in order to firmly cement Hanover’s status as an “immigration city.”
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The campaign will comprise a “Day of Diversity” at local schools, while further developing “anti-racist coaching” across authorities and public bodies. A prize will also be awarded for “migrant companies” in the local area.
The Green mayor, Belit Onay, also of Turkish heritage, has pushed the party’s agenda vigorously since taking office in November 2019.
The plan has attracted criticism from political opponents who consider the proposal to be unlawful.
Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, an FDP member of the Bundestag declared the plan to be “evidently unconstitutional, if I understand our Basic Law correctly.”
“What happens to the other two-thirds?” Lambsdorff asked Polat in a tweet. “Are they reserved for organic Germans?” he added, suggesting any form of discrimination in favor of either “organic Germans” or “those of a migrant background” for a particular vacancy would be unconstitutional.
The Greens are yet to outline how they would address this issue following the implementation of the scheme.
A similar plan had been put forward in Berlin, but has yet to be implemented. Responding to the Berlin proposal, the labor law expert and constitutional lawyer Arnd Diringer emphasized that according to Article 33, paragraph 2 of the German Constitution, such a quota would be “grossly unconstitutional.” The article clearly reads that “based on the aptitude, ability and professional performance, every German has equal access to every public office.”
