Tarek Saad is sees the federal election on Sept. 26 as an opportunity to help other Syrian refugees who have fled the war in their homeland to make a new home in Germany.

Mr. Saad is campaigning in his adopted state of Schleswig-Holstein on the Baltic coast for the Social Democrats, a party he joined in 2016, just two years after he arrived in Germany bearing two gunshot wounds he had survived in Syria.

I thought the things making my life difficult must be tormenting others as well. To overcome them as quickly as possible, one should be in a political party, said the 28-year-old student of political science.

Our parents lived under a different political system for long years in Syria. It is an opportunity to develop a new generation in Germany, said Mr. Saad, who like many refugees will vote for the first time as a German citizen.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the door to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015 was a defining issue of Germany’s last federal election campaign in 2017.

An informal poll among members of a Syrian migrants’ group on Facebook showed most would now vote for the SPD,
a rival Ms. Merkel's Christian Democrats.

Not all newly naturalised refugees are as clear as Mr. Saad about their voting intentions.

I am happy to have this opportunity but I am being cautious and maybe I won’t vote, said Mr. Maher Obaid, 29, who lives in the town of Singen near the Swiss border.

The number of Syrians who have acquired German citizenship rose by 74 per cent in 2020 to 6,700, federal statistics show.

An informal poll among members of a Syrian migrants’ group on Facebook showed most would now vote for the SPD, followed by the Greens, if they were entitled to vote.

Who Is Mr. Scholz?

The 63-year-old was born in Osnabrück but grew up in Hamburg in northern Germany.

• Has two brothers
  
  
• Studied law
  
  
• Vice president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. During the Cold War, it was a pro-Moscow group  focused on Kremlin's favorite issues of decolonisation efforts and struggles for independence, especially in Africa and Asia.
  
  
• First Mayor of Hamburg from 2011 to 2018.
  
  
• In 2018, Scholz was appointed as both Minister of Finance and Vice Chancellor of Germany
  
  
• He is supporter of a financial transaction tax, a levy targeting specifically financial sector.
  
  
  

Why he is leader in polls?

The main proposal: raise of a minimum wage to about $14 per hour.