The first ethnic minority head of a German party dismissed comparisons with Barack Obama as his Greens wrapped up an annual conference Sunday with fighting talk ahead of elections next year.

`The comparison (with the US president elect) is inappropriate,` Cem Ozdemir told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview after his nomination on Saturday as co-chairman of the opposition Greens.

`It is enough for me to be the Ozdemir of the Greens. What is exciting about Obama is that he is just as black as he is white ... this connection is important to me. I am a German of Turkish origin,` he said.

`I wish that one day it will not matter whether you come from (Turkey) or whether your forefathers battled against the Romans in the Teutonic Forest massacre,` he said. `Your origin should not be an indicator of whether you are doing your bit for Germany.`

The side-burned 42-year-old, born and raised in heavily Catholic south-west Germany, is no stranger to setting records. In 1994 he became the first politician of Turkish origin to be elected to the German parliament, just two years after taking German citizenship.

But the Greens` new co-head said there was still some work to do before a member of Germany`s 2.4-million-strong Turkish minority or another ethnic group could become the head of government in western Europe`s most populous country.

`We still have a long way to go until something like that is primarily decided on the basis of ability. It is not just Germans who have work to do, it it also immigrants and their descendants. They have to accept that Germany is their country,` Ozdemir said.

Turks make up Germany`s largest ethnic minority but integration has been slow -- figures show that if you are of Turkish origin in Germany, you are less likely to finish school and more likely to be unemployed and poor.

At the party`s weekend conference in Erfurt, eastern Germany, some delegates wore badges saying `Yes We Cem`.

If Ozdemir wants to be chancellor though, he has chosen the wrong party.

Usually it is the head of German`s two biggest parties, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Chancellor Angela Merkel`s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU), that becomes premier.

The Greens had a taste of power as coalition partners to Gerhard Schroeder`s SPD between 1998 and 2005. They held several cabinet posts including Joschka Fischer as foreign minister and were instrumental in Germany`s decision to mothball all its nuclear power stations by 2020.

The party, which holds 51 of the Bundestag lower house`s 612 seats, has been in opposition since 2005 during the SPD and the CDU/CSU`s at times acrimonious `grand coalition.`

In Erfurt, the party`s five-member leadership took it in turns to launch vitriolic attacks on Merkel`s government but with the global slowdown hammering the German economy it remains to be seen whether their message will chime with voters.

`A different world is needed and a different world is possible and that is what we Greens stand for,` thundered Juergen Trittin, who was chosen by party members together with Renate Kuenast to head the Greens` electoral list for the 2009 general election.

A survey earlier this month put the CDU/CSU on 40 percent, the SPD on 25 percent and the Greens in fifth place on nine percent behind the liberal FDP and the hard-left Die Linke.