Muhanad Al-Halak fled Iraq with his parents and ended up in Grafenau, in the Bavarian Forest. “My greatest luck,” he says himself. Now he is a member of the Bundestag for the FDP.
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Deniz Aykanat, Grafenau
Muhanad Al-Halak stands on the sloping town square of one of the easternmost cities in Bavaria: Grafenau in the Bavarian Forest. “My home,” he says when greeting you. The place is sloping because the place stretches up a mountain slope. Al-Halak’s career, which led him from Baghdad via Grafenau to the Bundestag, is also weird. The 32-year-old has been sitting there as a member of the FDP for a few weeks, and you don’t really know what the more spectacular information is: that he made it from a small town of 8,000 people on the easternmost tip of Bavaria to Berlin? Or that he made it even though his name is not Michael or Thomas? This is the name of most of the members of the Bundestag.