On the Wednesday before Germany's Sept. 22 election, members of the local branch of the Seniors' Union, a faction of the center-right Christian Democratic party (CDU), in the western city of Hagen were looking forward to an exciting afternoon. All the chairs in the Gasthaus Abrahams were taken and the tables were covered with glasses of beer and cups of tea.

Norbert Lammert, president of Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, was visiting this part of the Ruhr Valley region to speak about what Chancellor Angela Merkel  has achieved over the past four years.

But the old political veteran interested some of the pensioners far less than the small, dark-haired woman who accompanied Lammert to a table at the end of the room. Cemile Giousouf, born in nearby Leverkusen, is the parliamentary candidate for Merkel's CDU in Hagen, where she has lived for only the past few months.

"She looks nice enough, even if she's a bit gnomish," said one man to another sitting at his table. It sounded like approval.

The crowd certainly didn't intimidate Giousouf, who went from table to table, shaking hands and patting shoulders. In a short speech, she thanked Lammert, the local CDU  chapter boss and "generally everyone supporting me." The innocent address lasted less than five minutes, and Giousouf avoided mentioning anything remotely political.

The CDU's First Muslim Candidate

But she didn't have to -- her mere presence was political enough. She considers herself a "strategic signal" by the CDU that the party is taking immigrants seriously. The 35-year-old was the first Muslim parliamentary candidate for the Christian Democrats. The party put her in the Hagen district because two-fifths of the city's population has an immigrant  background. She didn't manage to win the district outright, but Giousouf will still join the Bundestag because her spot on the party list was good enough for a seat. The daughter of so-called "guest workers," who came to Germany more than 40 years ago, will be the CDU's first MP with Turkish roots, finally following the trail blazed by the country's other major political parties.

The newly elected Bundestag will represent Germany's 800,000 voters with Turkish heritage better than ever before. Out of 630 MPs, 11 have roots in Turkey -- an increase of six on the previous parliament. Five belong to the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), three come from the environmentalist Greens, two are members of the far-left Left party and Giousouf, of course, is with the conservative Christian Democrats.

Politicians from other ethnic backgrounds have also managed to get into the Bundestag. The SPD  candidate in the eastern city of Halle, Karamba Diaby , is a trained chemist originally from Senegal. He will be one of the nation's first two black MPs. But Romeo Franz failed to become the first member of the Sinti ethnic group to enter Germany's parliament after his Green party fared worse than expected on Sunday.

'Steadily Rising for Some Time'

According to the information service Mediendienst Integration, this election  saw almost 100 parliamentary candidates with foreign roots, 34 of whom were successful.

"The number of representatives with immigrant backgrounds has been steadily rising in state and local legislatures for some time," says Orkan Kosemen, an immigration expert for the Bertelsmann Foundation. "Now the parties are becoming more courageous and accepting at the federal level."

Even Germany's conservative parties no longer fear they'll lose votes by promoting foreign candidates.

Sometimes, the parties don't even take note of where a parliamentarian's parents come from. The Left party failed to mention its most prominent MP with immigrant roots -- saying ahead of the election that they had five such parliamentarians, forgetting that deputy party leader Sahra Wagenknecht's father came from Iran.

While some politicians actively promote their foreign ties in their biographies, others do not even mention the issue on their own websites. Sometimes only their name or the color of their skin can hint at heritage from outside Germany. But these days, all parties are trying to benefit from the immigrant factor .

An Appropriate Candidate for Hagen

Giousouf's path into parliament was already being planned by Christian Democratic officials in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia three years ago. Back then, the former state minister for integration and current CDU party leader, Armin Laschet, made her an advisor in his ministry. She admits it was "total coincidence" that she ended up campaigning in Hagen. The party leadership decided they needed an appropriate candidate for the region.

But she still had to prove herself by winning a vote against a long-serving CDU official and defending her promising spot on the party list, when another female candidate challenged it on grounds of seniority. "If we immigrants are forced to put up campaign posters for the next 30 years, there won't be any such representatives in the Bundestag," Giousouf said at the time to ensure her position.

Ever since, she's been forced to address the question of her role as a Muslim in an ostensibly Christian party. She says her "religious otherness" poses no problems, but her candidacy was undoubtedly a new experience for the Christian Democrats in Hagen.

Giousouf not only managed to attract several party bigwigs to the town during the campaign, one local CDU official said she also drew the interest of people who had previously shunned the conservatives as she handed out flyers to prospective voters in a market square.

'I Embody Kreuzberg with All That I Am'

Immigrants would seem to have better career opportunities in left-leaning parties, but in the 1990s, having foreign roots was a real disadvantage even in the Social Democrats, according to Sebastian Edathy. The son of a German mother and an Indian father, the legal policy expert's last name was originally Edathiparambil before he decided to shorten it.

Last year, he took over the chairmanship of a high-profile parliamentary inquiry into the NSU scandal , a series of racist murders by neo-Nazis that shook Germany. "Due to my political expertise, not my background," he emphasizes.

Hamburg native Aydan Özoguz, deputy chairwoman of the SPD, managed this year to bag her constituency, Wandsbek, for the party for the first time.

And Cansel Kiziltepe, the SPD candidate for Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, personifies just how normal the rise of immigrant politicians has become. Like Giousouf, she will join this year's freshman batch of MPs. The 37-year-old was born in her electoral district, which like Hagen has a large immigrant population . Her guest worker father worked as a mechanic at Mercedes-Benz and her mother was a housewife. "I embody Kreuzberg with all that I am," she says.

Out in the neighborhood shortly before the election , she wore a short leather jacket and her curly hair spilled out onto her shoulders. An SPD official recommended she pin up her hair for a campaign poster so she wouldn't look "too Turkish" on them. On a busy street, Kiziltepe stopped and called out of the car window to an old schoolmate smoking a cigarette in front of his telephone shop. "I'm counting on you," she said in Turkish. "Of course, we're only going for you, we've never voted before!" he replied. A woman at a beauty salon asked Kiziltepe for Turkish flyers. Campaigning in Turkish works, the SPD officials have been pleased to discover.

A Girl from the 'Hood

Unlike many of her friends from school, Kiziltepe has always been focused on her career. She studied economics, worked as a staffer in the Bundestag and for a German trade union association. These days she's responsible for economic analysis for carmaker Volkswagen. On her Facebook profile, she describes herself as: "Mother with career. European. Economist. Renter. Worker. Unionist. Pro pensions. Girl from the 'hood." Many identities, one candidate.

The growing number of MPs with families from Turkey -- including Kurds -- isn't surprising to political party observers. "There's really an ethnic mobilization in that area," says Professor Thomas Saalfeld at the University of Bamberg.

According to him, Germany's Turkish population has started to place more importance on their political representation than in past decades. Candidates are well connected to the community, and much of their campaign information is written specifically in Turkish.

No one knows for certain if the country's 5.8 million voters with foreign roots support politicians with similar backgrounds, but Saalfeld believes that traditional party ties -- Turkish-Germans backing the SPD and ethnic Germans from eastern Europe going for the CDU -- are breaking down. "The second and third generations of immigrants behave more like other voters do," he says. "They aren't static blocs anymore."

And that has increased the pressure on German political parties to back candidates with foreign backgrounds. "They need to have visible representatives of the entire population," the professor says.

'Token Immigrants'

That makes it unsurprising that young and upcoming politicians often have to fight perceptions that they aren't simply "token immigrants" used for PR purposes, according to Bielefeld-based sociologist Devrimsel Deniz Nergiz. "They're under a lot of pressure to prove their particular abilities and suitability," she says, referring to a recent survey done for her dissertation.

Moreover, they are often shunted into the role of integration  expert both by their parties and the media. But that's something many are no longer willing to accept, preferring instead to be taken seriously in other policy areas.