“Although my roots are in Syria, my home and my future are in Germany,” says Ryyan Alshebl. In June, Alshebl takes office as mayor of Ostelsheim, a municipality with 2,500 inhabitants in Baden-Württemberg. In the past few weeks he has been in election campaign mode, visiting local companies, clubs and groups such as the “Stricklieselgruppe” in the Evangelisches Gemeindehaus: “Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary skills and talent to knit myself. That’s why I have the ladies knitting with campaign talk entertain,” writes Alshebl humorously on Instagram. The many contacts have paid off.
He has only been in Germany for eight years. In 2015, like millions of others, he left Syria to avoid military service. On his website he describes a dilemma that he would not have liked to have had at the age of 21: “being forced to be burned up in favor of a warring party in the war, or leaving the country and surrendering to an uncertain fate”. Alshebl opted for the latter.
Ryyan Alshebl grew up in as-Suwaida, around 100 kilometers from the Syrian capital Damascus. For his parents, a high school teacher and an agricultural engineer, political and social issues were always important, he writes on Instagram. This is one of the reasons why he applied for the post of mayor in Ostelsheim. After graduating from high school, he studied finance and banking until 2015. Then came the escape.
2015 was the peak of the refugee movement at that time. Around 890,000 asylum seekers came to Germany, most of them from Syria. Alshebl also made his way across the Mediterranean, was on the road for several weeks: “Suddenly you wake up on the cold, dark flight and realize: Everything that was taken for granted is no longer there!” he writes in his introduction. He suddenly felt alone until he landed in Baden-Württemberg. There he is said to have quickly made plans for the time after that and wanted to take on responsibility: “In shared accommodation, where the demands cannot go beyond a bed, a roof and a few groceries, but for which you are of course very grateful, you can only do one thing: get back on your feet quickly and start investing quickly in your own future.”
The future mayor quickly learned the German language. He was unable to continue his studies from Syria, so he began training as an administrative assistant. In this area, his “passion for politics and the rule of law was fulfilled”. He worked in administration at the Althengstett town hall in the Calw district for a total of seven years until his boss recognized his talent. He is said to have encouraged him to run for office in Ostelsheim. Alshebl is a member of the Greens, but ran in the mayoral elections as a non-party candidate – Alshebl explains his decision that he wants to work free of party-political framework conditions.
Shortly before the count, the SWR accompanies him. Alshebl is excited, feels like he’s about to take his final exam, he says. Then he gets the result around 7 p.m. on Sunday evening: 55.41 percent of the votes in the first round of the election. The turnout was high and he was very happy: “Today Ostelsheim sent a signal of tolerance and cosmopolitanism to the whole of Germany.” Cem Özdemir already congratulated on Instagram on the election victory.
From June Ryyan Alshebl will have the opportunity to focus on the issues that are important to him: social cohesion, business development and the digitization of administration. Like his mayor colleague Boris Palmer in Tübingen, he wants to make Ostelsheim climate-neutral and wants to invest in renewable energies in particular. Incidentally, in an interview with the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” he said about Alshebl: “He is very Swabian and sheepish.”
Sources: Municipality of Ostelsheim, Ryyan Alshebl, Instagram
