Germany's centre-left government yesterday bowed to conservative pressure and abandoned plans for a radical overhaul of the country's 85-year-old citizenship law. A spokesman for the Interior Minister, Mr Otto Schily, said that he would introduce a revised law reform proposal within weeks.
The Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, told Suddeutsche Zeitung that the victory of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) in Sunday's state election in Hesse made compromise on the new law a necessity. The loss of Hesse robbed Mr Schroder's coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens of their majority in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat.
"That forces us to negotiate," the Chancellor said.
Under Germany's present law, citizenship is defined according to ancestry rather than by place of birth. This means that the descendants of Germans who moved to Russia or Romania centuries ago can claim German citizenship while thousands of children born in Germany to immigrant parents remain foreigners under the law.
Mr Schroder signalled that the government was prepared to abandon the most controversial element of its proposed reform, a plan to allow foreigners to retain their original citizenship after they receive a German passport. The CDU has collected more than a million signatures for a petition against allowing dual citizenship, and the party announced yesterday that it will challenge the law in the courts.
Mr Schroder favours a proposal by the government of the Rhineland Palatinate, a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberal Free Democrats, to grant German citizenship to all children born in Germany, regardless of their parents' nationality, but to oblige them to choose at the age of 23 between German citizenship and that of their parents' home country.
Most Social Democrats welcomed the watering down of the government's proposals, which were seen as offering ammunition to the conservative opposition. But the Greens are angry that the Chancellor failed to consult them before announcing the change of policy in a newspaper interview.
Mr Schroder insists that the government has no option but to modify a proposed reform that could not win the necessary majority in both houses of parliament.
