BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s Bundestag lower house of parliament agreed to a draft law on Thursday that will prevent civil servants, judges, and soldiers in Germany from wearing full-face veils at work.
The move comes after Chancellor Angela Merkel called in December for a ban on full-face Muslim veils “wherever legally possible.” There are five months to go before a federal election, and her conservatives lost some support to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) during the migrant crisis.
More than a million migrants, many of them Muslims from the Middle East, have arrived in Germany over the last two years, and concerns about integration are widespread.