Merz, would exceed the absorptive capacity of German society. Immigrants had a duty, according to Merz, to adopt the basic cultural values of Germany. Bassam Tibi now protested that politicians had appropriated his proposal for their own purposes, and pronounced the entire debate a 'failure'. Most of the reactions to Merz's proposals were negative, and the debate split along party lines, with the government coalition (social-democratic SPD and the Green Party) rejecting a German Leitkultur. Cem Özdemir (then Bundestag member, Green Party) and others defended 'integration' as against 'assimilation' of immigrants. Forcing immigrants to assimilate at any price would in any case, according to Özdemir, deny the reality that Germany was a multicultural society. Some reactions in media outside Germany likened the Leitkultur proposals to the enforced Germanisation in territories occupied by Nazi Germany, where the population was usually forbidden to speak local languages. In 2005, the new presiding chairman of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert (CDU), proposed a re-opening of the debate on a Leitkultur. The proposal, he said in an interview in Die Zeit, has been summarily dismissed without argument; "The noticeable thing about the very short national debate is that the Leitkultur concept was widely rejected, as a negative reflex, but that there was a wide recognition of the problems underlying the debate" ("Das Parlament hat kein Diskussionsmonopol", Zeit 43/2005). There was no noticeable reaction to his suggestion at first: Lammert then proposed to move the discussion to a European level, to establish a European core identity. In an article in Die Welt, he wrote: "If Europe wishes to preserve the multiplicity of nation identities, and yet establish a collective identity, it must develop a political core ideal, a set of foundational values and convictions. Such a European core ideal must necessarily be based on the common cultural roots of Europe, on its shared history, and on shared religious tradition," (Die Welt, 13 December 2005). In early 2006, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy led to violent protests in Islamic countries, against depictions of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Lammert now restated his demand for a re-opening of the Leitkultur debate. The cartoon protests, he said, show that German society must reach a consensus on its "foundational values and a minimal standard of value orientation". The 'constitutional patriotism' (proposed by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas) would not suffice, since all constitutions are based on non-random cultural assumptions. Fundamental rights, such