Ryyan Alshebl, a 29-year-old Syrian refugee who arrived in Germany in 2015 after fleeing the conflict in his homeland, has been elected mayor of a village in southwest Germany. He settled in Baden-Württemberg and worked for seven years in the town hall in Althengstett.
As an independent candidate who campaigned on improving access to digital services, he won an outright majority in Sunday’s mayoral contest in the village of Ostelsheim, securing 55.4 per cent of the vote.
He described his win as “sensational,” and praised the village as having “set an example for broad-mindedness and cosmopolitanism for the whole of Germany.”
Initially from As-Suwayda in southwest Syria, Alshebl — a non-practising member of the Druze religious minority and the son of a secondary school teacher and an agricultural engineer—was forced to abandon his studies in finance and banking because of the war.
The new mayor of Ostelsheim is probably the first of the approximately 430,000 Syrian refugees who applied for asylum in Germany between 2015 and 2016 to be elected to higher office in the country. Over those two years, nearly 1.2 million asylum applications were registered in Germany.
He is also among just 1.2 per cent of Germany’s elected mayors from a migrant background, as opposed to 27 per cent of the country’s total population, according to Mediendienst Integration.
Frankfurt’s Mayor Mike Josef, the most high-profile German politician with Syrian roots, was born in Qamishli in 1983 but moved to Germany with his family soon after as political refugees for their Christian faith.
