His inauguration occurs on June 19 and is symbolic. Ryyan Alshebl, a 29-year-old Syrian, was elected last March to head the municipal council of the German municipality of Ostelsheim. As of this Monday, June 19, he occupies the mayor’s chair, as our colleagues from Release. A first for a Syrian refugee.
Ryyan Alshebl has told the press several times about his career. He left Syria in 2015 at the age of 21 and avoided conscription imposed by Bashar al-Assad, president of a country ravaged by civil war. To reach Europe, Ryyan Alshebl boarded a makeshift boat and managed to reach, along with other migrants, the Greek island of Lesbos. He then takes the “Balkan route”, passes through Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Austria and arrives in Germany after a journey of a dozen days.
There he meets one of his brothers and settles in the town of Althengstett. There he learned German and even managed to become an apprentice as an administrative assistant in the town hall.
Naturalized in 2022, elected mayor in 2023
After several years on German soil, he obtains nationality there in 2022, a condition sine qua non to be able to claim the exercise of a local mandate. The Syrian’s attraction to politics, already present in his family, has not diminished over time. Ryyan Alshebl then decides to run for the Ostelsheim municipal elections.
“It was my boss who pushed me to run,” Ryyan Alshebl said, comments reported by Release. The Syrian refugee also explains that he does not see the position of mayor as a simple administrative mandate but as a “mediator between citizens and politics.”
Located in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, the small town of Ostelsheim, home to some 2,500 souls and nestled between rolling hills and green fields, has a reputation for being conservative.
Ryyan Alshebl, who has become a member of the German Greens, is running in the municipal elections in March as an independent, and even achieves the feat of being elected in the first round with 55.41% of the vote against two other candidates. local. “A sign of openness to the world” of the Ostelsheim voters according to him.
“I am happy to have had the opportunity to live here. Others have not,” he finally said a few weeks before taking office.
Source: BFM TV
