Bonn elects first mayor with Indian background

History has been made in the former German capital after CDU's Ashok-Alexander Sridharan became the city's first mayor to come from an immigrant background. But he told DW that his roots were irrelevant to his campaign.

Deutsche Welle, 14 Sep 2015

Following last weekend's mayoral election, Sridharan became the first candidate from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to win the Bonn mayoral election in over two decades, leaving the Social Democratic Party (SPD) out in the cold after 21 years in office.

Even more unique perhaps was that Sridharan became the city's first mayor to come from a migrant background. Born in Bonn in 1965, the Catholic father of three spent his whole childhood and university life in Germany's former provisional capital city, branding himself during his election campaign as a "Bonn lad." It was his father, an Indian diplomat, who first moved to western Germany in the 1950s before marrying Sridharan's German mother.

Despite drawing media attention from India, in an interview with Deutsche Welle, Sridharan said his Asian roots weren't relevant to his campaign.

"That's not important to me at all," Sridharan told DW. "I didn't think about it because it played absolutely no part in the campaign."

The World Conference Center Bonn

The attention on Bonn from overseas could reap rewards for the city, however.

"Of course I think it's great that people in India are interested in who has been elected as Bonn's mayor," Sridharan said.

"I think that could even contribute efforts to make Bonn better-known internationally than it already is and that would do us good. We have many international companies and organizations here and I feel we have to strengthen that."

End of SPD office

Some 50.06 percent of Bonn's electorate voted for Sridharan in Sunday's election. Throughout the course of his campaign, however, Sridharan received a handful of xenophobic posts on social media such as: "The German population's still only 25 percent migrants. Why didn't the Bonn CDU find a German candidate?"

For the Sridharan, however, the comments aren't a matter of concern.

"I just ignored them. I didn't react at all. There were also really so few of them, just a handful of very infrequent posts," he told DW.

As the former treasurer of nearby Königswinter prepares to move office into Bonn's historic town hall, the SPD will now be looking to see where they went wrong after 21 years.

Beethoven's birth house is in Bonn

Sridharan said he believed that much of his success in Sunday's election came from his own personal efforts.

"I think overall it helped that I was at so many events and made myself as well known as is possible in Bonn, and clearly that worked… but we'll look at the results and then at exactly what the reasons were behind our success."

Re-branding Bonn

Top of the agenda for Sridharan, when he officially takes office on October 21, is to improve Bonn's international presence - both politically and economically, as well as culturally.

Since the fall of the Berlin wall 25 years ago, the Berlin-Bonn law has regulated the move of the German Bundestag to Berlin and certain federal facilities between the two cities. Sridharan warned, however, that the law should not be implemented to Bonn's detriment.

"In the recent weeks, months and years, the majority of the arrangements have been at Bonn's expense. Therefore ,I think we must watch out that the law doesn't unravel and the facilities that have come to Bonn as compensation are not put in danger. We need to discuss the issue with broad agreement as we did at the beginning of the 90s, both regional and partisan."

As the birthplace of composer and pianist Ludwig van Beethoven, the newly-elected mayor also hopes to rebrand the city.

"We need a stamp for Bonn and I'd like to develop it as 'Beethoven city' and make it known internationally," Sridharan said.