German chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party has distanced itself from a proposal by its Bavarian sister CSU party that immigrant families should be obliged to speak German at home.<br /><br /> German media blasted the idea as discriminatory over the weekend and poked fun at the proposal.<br /><br /> CSU secretary general Andreas Scheuer said: “The idea cited over the weekend keeps in focus that language is the key to successful integration.”<br /><br /> Bavarian Economy Minister Ilse Aigner said that she speaks Bavarian rather than the standard German dialect at home.<br /><br /> In the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a front-page column joked that German is foreign to many Bavarians, who speak a heavily-accented version of the language.<br /><br /> Peter Tauber, a politician from Merkel’s conservative party tweeted: “It’s none of the politicians’ business whether I speak in Latin or Klingon at or in a local accent at home.”<br /><br /> “This is not part of the coalition agreement and is not government police,” Merkel’s spokesman Stefan Seibert told a news conference when asked about the CSU proposal.<br /><br /> However, he added that the government considered the ability to speak the German language is a key for the integration of immigrants and their success in school and at work.<br /><br /> The proposal is a response to a sharp rise in immigration to Germany, Europe’s largest economy, driven by arrivals from eastern EU member states and asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria.
