Karamba Diaby makes his way through the historic heart of Halle with the speed of a seasoned politician: slowly. More than two decades of involvement in local politics means the 51-year-old immigrant can't go more than a few steps without being stopped for a chat. 
 
 In this picture taken July 25, 2013, Karamba Diaby, a German Social Democratic Party, SPD, candidate waits prior an election campaign in Halle , central Germany, Thursday, July 25, 2013. He was born... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this picture taken July 25, 2013, Karamba Diaby, a German Social Democratic Party, SPD, candidate smiles during an election campaign in Halle , central Germany, Thursday, July 25, 2013. He was born... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this picture taken July 25, 2013, Karamba Diaby, a German Social Democratic Party candidate , SPD, second right, talks with people during an election campaign in Halle , central Germany, Thursday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this picture taken July 25, 2013, Karamba Diaby, a German Social Democratic Party candidate talks with citizen Heidi Juergens during an election campaign in Halle , central Germany, Thursday, July... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this picture taken July 25, 2013, Karamba Diaby, a German Social Democratic Party candidate, smiles during an election campaign in Halle , central Germany, Thursday, July 25, 2013. He was born in... (Associated Press) 
 
 Two months before Germany's general elections each handshake and greeting carries added significance because Diaby is intent on becoming the country's first black member of Parliament. He listens patiently to his constituents and responds in fluent German with a strong Franco-African accent, courtesy of his Senegalese origins. 
 
 Nationwide just 81 _ or about 4 percent _ of the candidates running for the roughly 600-member parliament in the Sept. 22 election have an immigrant background. It is the highest number yet but still far behind countries such as France and Britain. Most of the immigrant candidates belong to the Greens or the Social Democrats, while Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party has only six immigrants on its slate. 
 
 Diaby's Social Democrats badly need candidates who will pull in enough votes to hold onto the three seats they won in the state of Saxony-Anhalt in 2009. Diaby has been placed third on the party list, making him one of the few immigrants with a strong chance of being elected. 
 
 "I didn't throw my hat in the ring," he said, a touch apologetically. "I was asked by others." 
 
 The decision to place him near the top of the ticket is all the more remarkable because, like other states in the former East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt has a reputation for being more hostile toward immigrants _ especially those from outside Europe _ than western parts of the country. 
 
 While the trained chemist is reluctant to criticize his adopted home _ he moved to Halle in 1986 and gained German citizenship in 2001 _ Diaby nevertheless acknowledges that he was once physically attacked because of the color of his skin. 
 
 Still, the father of two puts this down to the fact that under communist rule East Germans had limited exposure to immigrants and that time will change old habits. 
 
 Another tradition he would like to see broken is that politicians from ethnic minorities are automatically pigeonholed as experts on immigration. "I want everyone to talk about immigration, not just immigrants," he said. 
 
 Germany urgently needs immigrants to make up for the country's falling birthrate, though few politicians are prepared to campaign on the issue. Diaby's pet topic is education and how it can help people from all parts of society _ immigrants, the unemployed, school dropouts _ improve their lot. 
 
 To make his point, Diaby cites the story of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a former slave who became the first West African to study and teach at a European university about 300 years ago. By coincidence, it was the University of Halle. 
 
 As an example of the way black immigrants were treated in Germany, Amo's story remained unique for more than two centuries _ except for the racism he reportedly endured, and that prompted him to return to West Africa. 
 
 That racism reached its horrendous peak with the Nazis' 12-year reign, which ended in 1945 with millions killed in death camps. Among them were many of Germany's small black community at the time, said Nkechi Madubuko, a Nigeria-born former athlete and TV presenter who has researched the history of Afro-Germans. 
 
 The biggest influx of African immigrants to Germany occurred in the post-war period, when newly liberated countries in Africa sent their best and brightest abroad to study. Diaby was one of them, receiving a scholarship to study in East Germany at a time when communist rule was slowly unraveling. 
 
 By 2005 there were about 200,000 people of African origin with full German citizenship, and about 303,000 more Africans with residency permits in Germany, said Madubuko. 
 
 While Afro-Germans have become more visible in recent years as athletes, actors and journalists, none has broken into national politics. This reflects the general lack of minority representation in German political life. Although nearly one in five people in this nation of 80 million are first-, second- or third- generation immigrants, only a handful has made it into the federal legislature _ and most of them are ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. 
 
 Three have a parent who was born in India, another is of Iranian origin, while several more belong to Germany's sizeable Turkish community. Vice Chancellor Philipp Roesler is an ethnic Vietnamese who was adopted by German parents before he was a year old. 
 
 Ekin Deligoez, a member of the left-leaning Green Party whose family came to Germany from Turkey when she was a child, said immigrants were long discouraged from becoming involved in German politics by the country's restrictive citizenship rules and a general sense that they were not welcome. 
 
 "Every step of the way immigrants get the signal that they don't belong here," she told The Associated Press. "A foreign name will get you worse results in school, turned down for jobs, and rejected by landlords." 
 
 The period after 1990, when the unification of East and West Germany sparked a burst of nationalist sentiment, was particularly difficult, she said. But hostility remains today. "I'm pretty sure that some of the farmers in my Bavarian constituency still have a problem with me," she said. 
 
 Germany's political parties are beginning to accept that they can be represented by immigrants, even in senior positions, because of changes in the law over a decade ago that made it easier for immigrants to adopt German citizenship. This made them interesting as potential voters, said Madubuko. 
 
 "It's a whole new development for parties to actively court immigrants, rather than just use them for negative propaganda," she said. "So it would definitely be important for Afro-Germans if Mr. Diaby is elected." 
 
 Putting down his distinctive African-patterned briefcase to exchange Facebook contacts with two university students, Diaby said he hopes that his candidacy alone will encourage other immigrants to consider entering politics. 
 
 "The fact that I'd be first African-born lawmaker is not something I would want to dwell on," he said. "But a lot of eyes are on me and I hope they realize I'll be just one of over 600." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Frank Jordans can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter ||||| “They’re all coming here for the money.” The occasion was a routine meet-and-greet session involving pensioners from the suburb of Silberhöhe in the eastern city of Halle and their prospective Social Democrat MP as part of the gear-up towards Germany’s general election in September. 
 
 There was nothing unusual about the meeting apart from one thing: the would-be MP was a black politician called Karamba Diaby. The 51-year-old was born in Senegal and aims to become Germany’s first black MP. For many in the room, it was the first time they had ever spoken to a black person. 
 
 “I have to tell you that Germany has some of the toughest immigration laws in the world,” Mr Diaby told the pensioner who had voiced her anti-immigrant view. “What is more, eastern Germany is the area least visited by foreigners. They prefer to go to places like Canada, where there is a more welcoming culture.” 
 
 That eastern Germany has a reputation for making foreigners unwelcome is something Mr Diaby has experience of. In 1992, he was attacked by a gang of far-right skinheads while walking the streets of Halle. Two years ago, he was inundated with hate mail and death threats after his photograph appeared on the front page of a right-wing newspaper. 
 
 He insists that racism occurs everywhere and that since German reunification in 1990, Halle has made great progress in overcoming the problem. That said, the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party holds seats in the parliaments of two eastern federal states. The far right has created “no-go” areas for foreigners in some regions and Roland Berger, a renowned international business consultant, warned earlier this year that the predominance of the far right threatened to deter investment in east Germany. 
 
 Trapped behind the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall for close on three decades, most east Germans’ experience of non-Europeans was minimal. Against this backdrop, Mr Diaby’s ascent from the position of ostracised black foreigner in communist East Germany to that of prospective MP for the region seems like material taken from a Hollywood film script. 
 
 Yet his upbringing in Senegal was also a struggle of Herculean proportions. Mr Diaby was born in the small town of Marassoum in the country’s south-west. By the time he was seven he had lost both his parents. He was brought up instead by his older sister and her husband. At 13, he was sent to boarding school and four years later he gained a place at a Senegal Lycée, putting him on track for university in the capital, Dakar. 
 
 It was at university that Mr Diaby became interested in politics. As a member of the student movement, he became friends with the country’s current president, Macky Sall. “We were both interested in changing things,” Mr Diaby recalls. But while Mr Sall went on to pursue a career in Senegalese politics, his friend applied for and won a coveted place to study in communist eastern Europe. 
 
 “I was very grateful to the East Germans. I didn’t see the country as the oppressive place it was considered to be by the West,” he says. After spending nine months in Leipzig on a compulsory German language course, Mr Diaby was in 1986 awarded a place at Halle’s Martin Luther University, which at the time he had mistakenly assumed was named after the black American civil rights campaigner. 
 
 “I wanted to go study at a university I thought was named after one of my heroes. It was Martin Luther King who brought me to Halle,” he admits with a smile. It was in Halle that he met his future German wife, Ute, who was studying agriculture. Mr Diaby studied chemistry and remained active in student politics as head of the International Student Committee. But then the Berlin Wall fell and the secure if not often monotonous world of communist East Germany suddenly fell apart. Like millions of others, Mr Diaby’s future was uncertain. But then Halle’s allotments came to the rescue. At the time, a western developer was convinced that most of Halle’s 12,911 allotments had been hopelessly polluted by the region’s chemical plants. He used his claims to argue that most of the allotments should be broken up for use as building land. 
 
 Mr Diaby, the chemist, was told to go and find out whether the developer’s claims were true. “Like many students, I looked down on allotment holders. I thought they were all small minded and petit bourgeois. I couldn’t have been more wrong,” he says. 
 
 “There were all kinds of different people, ranging from university professors, to policemen and train drivers. Many had lost their jobs since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They took an interest in me. At first, they made jokes about black men always wanting blonde girls, but I got to know them and they me.” 
 
 Mr Diaby’s research showed that the allotments had suffered from air pollution but that the ground was largely uncontaminated. His conclusions saved thesmallholdings and since then Mr Diaby has not looked back. He joined the Social Democratic Party and in 2009 was elected to the city council. He is now so well known locally that it takes him half an hour to cross Halle’s main marketplace because so many people want to stop and talk to him. 
 
 During the city’s severe flooding last month, when the River Saale reached its highest level for 400 years, Mr Diaby helped to fill sandbags with the rest of the population, taking time out from his job as integration adviser to the regional state government. 
 
 His candidacy is a rare highlight in one of the Social Democrats’ worst election campaigns in recent history. Although Mr Diaby is likely to win a seat in the Bundestag, few give his party much chance of beating Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union. Mr Diaby’s latest election gimmick is to have persuaded a local brewery to produce Karamba Diaby beer mats. “Your Good Health – from Karamba Diaby” reads the accompanying slogan. 
 
 “His chances of winning a seat must be good,” Marcus Schelgelmilch, his campaign manager, told The Independent yesterday. 
 
 “The beer mats are disappearing like hot cakes. Now lots of other Halle breweries want them.” 
 
 Merkel pledges no tax rises if she is elected 
 
 Chancellor Angela Merkel would oppose tax rises of any kind if she is re-elected in September. 
 
 “[For many voters the election is] about a stable euro, jobs – if possible for everyone, a strong economy for our country,” she said yesterday. “For that you need reliable conditions. That means tax rises are wrong. Of any kind.” 
 
 While most pollsters expect Ms Merkel to win a third term in September, it is unclear if her Christian Democratic Union will be able to continue its centre-right alliance with the Free Democrats, who favour low taxes. She may have to seek a “grand coalition” with the the opposition Social Democrats. Tax policy could be one of the thorniest issues in any talks between the parties. Reuters
– It's tough to figure out what's more interesting: that Karamba Diaby hopes to become Germany's first black member of parliament, or the very fact that Germany has never had a black member of parliament. Either way, the 51-year-old immigrant from Senegal wants to make history in September's general election, reports AP. Diaby, a trained chemist, has lived in the country for more than two decades, is married to a German, and has two children, reports Der Spiegel in an earlier profile. He's running with the center-left Social Democrats, one of a relative handful of immigrants running for the 600-seat parliament. He's also trying not to make a fuss about his race. "It could be that some people have problems with the color of my skin," says Diaby, who has recounted getting roughed up by two young neo-Nazis in his home city of Halle some time ago. "But I hope I will be accepted because I am involved in many projects." Just two years ago, he received a slew of racist hate mail when a newspaper put him on its front page. And at one recent campaign event, many of those in attendance had never met a black person before him, reports the Independent. Still, Der Spiegel gives him a "very solid chance" of winning his seat come September 22. "The fact that I'd be first African-born lawmaker is not something I would want to dwell on," says the candidate. "But a lot of eyes are on me and I hope they realize I'll be just one of over 600."