The Green Party's integration policy spokeswoman, Filiz Polat, has called for local voting rights for citizens of non-EU countries
This, combined with the nearby call for "money for integration" reveals clearly what is this about:
Expanding the policy of letting EU citizens resident in Germany in long term vote in local elections (not that huge and abuseable deal, a lot of them don't care, and move in and out, solely on the basis of business needs) to non-EU residents...
And related to the other part, what's a huge group of non-EU residents staying in Germany in long term who may have interesting effects on local elections?
Yeah, that's what it is about. Well over 2 million migrants of various legal status, who will be naturally interested in increasing the influence of parties (even if not directly on federal level, but merely giving them cushy jobs in local governments) who are naturally supportive towards the cause of their own stay and government paid support, if not outright increasing the number of the likes of them as much as possible.
As for the obligation of children of "jus soli Germans" aka people given German citizenship just because they have stayed in Germany for a meaningful part of their childhood (kinda normal by New World standards, unusually generous by Europe standards to begin with) to choose between German and the other citizenship, to give some context, there was recently a lot of very related drama regarding a certain major demographic of foreigners in Germany that will influence the decisions in this regard.
German law only grants dual citizenship in exceptional circumstances. It's often a problem for German Turks, many of whom feel marginalized as they don't want to give up their Turkish passports.
www.dw.com
That in turn imports a lot of political drama from Turkey to Germany:
PARIS (RNS) European lawmakers are calling for tighter restrictions on the mosques, which critics say keep diaspora Turks from fully integrating.
religionnews.com
The Turkish president has called on Turks living in Germany to not vote for "enemies of Turkey." Will his call be heeded or ignored? DW's Christoph Ricking went to the heart of Cologne's Turkish neighborhood to find out.
www.dw.com
Turkish politicians have abandoned plans for more campaign events on German soil ahead of the April referendum, says the ruling AKP party. Previously, Angela Merkel threatened to ban such events over Nazi insults.
www.dw.com
German officials believe that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose power could be expanded by a vote on Sunday, is using a decades-old arrangement between the countries to spy on opponents.
www.nytimes.com
TL;DR Turkish government, through its organization managing most of Turkish community
mosque's in Germany, does shady stuff that can be compared to what "handlers" do with North Korean delegations, with the objective of securing their support for Turkey's current ruling party. And as long as the people in question hold Turkish citizenship, well, they get to vote in Turkey, and so Turkish parties are encouraged to campaign and propagandize to them in Germany.
That's what the "obligation law" is supposed to curtail, and Turkey is not happy, which leads to this:
German citizenship law and the Turkish diaspora - Volume 20 Issue 1
www.cambridge.org
In practice, the pink/blue card has not been as helpful as expected. Users complain that the Turkish bureaucracy was not instructed about the existence of this privileged status and so the promised advantages never materialized.
34 In addition, this status does not protect those who might own or inherit property in military security areas, ownership remains restricted to Turkish citizens. Turks have also expressed a lack of trust in the Turkish government to continue to offer the pink/blue card.
35 For these and other reasons, Turks who naturalized in Germany will have preferred their own particular workaround: Renunciation of Turkish citizenship, then naturalization in Germany, followed by reacquisition of Turkish citizenship and preservation of German citizenship due to the domestic exemption.
34: Haha sod off Kurds!
In 1981, Turkey, aware of its identity as an emigrant country, changed its nationality law to allow—for the first time—the possession of multiple citizenships.
27 Provision is made for the easy reacquisition of citizenship by Turks who renounce their citizenship in order to naturalize in a foreign country—they can reacquire Turkish citizenship without any period of residence in Turkey.
28 A professor at Ankara University’s law faculty states that the allowance of multiple citizenships was enacted expressly in response to the attempts by host countries to integrate Turkish-origin residents by offering them citizenship.
So basically, the "obligation law" row is chiefly about Turks, and an issue that basically on the personal level, is a bureaucratic inconvenience for Turks in Germany, but on national level is a political row between Germany and Turkey, with integration of said population into Germany or Turkey at stake. And Greens obviously are siding with Turkey on this one.
Besides, about the local EU voting for non-EU people, well, Turks who don't qualify for German citizenship for various reasons also obviously are counted in that one, millions of voters potentially too, depending on the future of the citizenship row with Turkey...
