German should be an official language of the European Union along with English and French, according to the draft election manifesto of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union party.
The inferior status of German is a long-standing grievance for Berlin, which points out that it has over 100 million speakers, including German-speaking minorities in Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Poland Photo: ALAMY
The Telegraph, By Jeevan Vasagar, Berlin, 18 Jun 2013