Saturday 30th October 2021
Lawyer, comrade, friend
MPs have a special history
As a young boy, Ahmetovic and his family were threatened with deportation from Germany. More than 20 years ago, lawyer Matthias Miersch prevented this. Now the two are doing something together in a not entirely unimportant place.
Adis Ahmetovic and Matthias Miersch are not only members of the SPD in the Bundestag – the two share a very special story. Without Miersch, Ahmetovic would probably not have recently entered the Bundestag. The story of the two began more than 20 years ago. Ahmetovic was a little boy at the time, Miersch a young lawyer. “My parents came to Hanover in 1992 as war refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. I was born in Hanover in 1993. Many Western Balkan refugees were deported from 1996, including us,” Ahmetovic told the German Press Agency.
In 1997, his family was again not granted a residence permit. A year later, the family was to leave Germany for good. “My parents didn’t want to accept that,” says Ahmetovic. “I was born in Hanover, my big brother went to school here. At the time, Bosnia and Herzegovina was a country marked by war and unfortunately also destroyed.” A lawyer should then lodge an objection against the procedure – it was his current party colleague Miersch.
After years of tough negotiations, Ahmetovic said his family received a permanent residence permit in March 2001. “Before the election there was a meeting between Matthias, my parents and me. We looked back over it all. It’s an indescribably great feeling.” First Miersch was a lawyer, then a comrade, now a friend. “It’s crazy. Now, 24 years later, we’re sitting together in the Bundestag for the Hanover region. It’s a blatant feeling.”
Memories of gummy bears
A few years after the successfully prevented deportation, Ahmetovic and Miersch met again by chance. At the age of 15, Ahmetovic joined the SPD in 2008; his party colleague was SPD chairman in the Hanover region at the time. “Then he came to me, gave me his card and said: Ask your parents if they know me? I couldn’t remember it.” When he then gave his mother the card, these tears were in their eyes.
“I was a little child back then. I could still remember that there was a bucket of Haribo in the office,” says Ahmetovic. Haribo continues to connect the two. “Matthias Miersch always has a bucket with Haribo in his office. Whenever I had a conversation with him and reached into it, we had to think about our first encounters.” Ahmetovic was formerly Jusos chairman in the Hanover region. For him, Miersch is a “sincere, reliable, committed and kind-hearted person.” Miersch himself said that he sees his party colleagues as an enormous asset to the SPD parliamentary group. Miersch feels, in his own words, on friendly terms with him and his family. The 52-year-old has been in the Bundestag since 2005.