Eight years after arriving as a refugee from Syria, Ryyan Alshebi was elected mayor of the municipality of Ostelsheim (Germany) on April 2nd. The man who took office on Monday 18 June assured that this election was “a message of tolerance and openness”.
A meteoric rise that creates a beautiful story. Eight years after arriving as a refugee from Syria, Ryyan Alshebi was elected mayor of the municipality of Ostelsheim (Germany) on April 2 at the age of just 29.
The latter originally fled war-torn Syria along with 49 other migrants on a rubber boat one evening in November 2015 to avoid recruitment. Arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, he successively crossed Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Austria before arriving in Germany after a twelve-day journey.
Ryyan Alshebi decided to settle in Baden-Württemberg, where he first lived for a few months in collective accommodation and then shared a room with six people. The Syrian then learned German before being hired as an administrative employee in the region and receiving German naturalization in January 2022.
Elected mayor in the first ballot with 55% of the votes
It was through this work that the idea of running for the local town hall came to his mind. “It was my boss who pushed me to run for mayor of Ostelsheim, a town of 2,500,” he told Liberation.
To give himself every chance, he ran a door-to-door campaign to listen to each voter’s wishes. An approach that enabled him to establish his program, which is based on reducing bureaucracy, digitizing administration, strengthening day-care facilities and local businesses. On April 2, Ryyan Alshebi, a candidate without license plates, won the local elections on the first ballot with 55% of the vote.
“My refugee background never played a role. There was no incident with the extreme right,” the elected official commented. Nonetheless, before taking office officially on Monday 18 June, he conceded that “it’s not easy to win in a conservatist rural area”.
With this new position, Ryyan Alshebi hopes to inspire refugees around the world to integrate. “The Ostelsheim vote is to be understood as a message of tolerance and openness,” said the 29-year-old after the results were announced. A victory that already had a worldwide impact on the evening of the formalization, as the sixty interview requests from the international media show.