Hawzah News Agency - (Bavaria - Germany) - With his neatly trimmed beard, sharp suit and broad smile, Ozan Iyibas looks like a typical politician out to win votes ahead of a municipal election in southern Germany's Bavaria region.

But he has unleashed a mini earthquake with his candidacy -- as the first Muslim standing for the Christian Social Union (CSU) in a predominantly Catholic region.

"I don't see any contradiction in this choice," says the 37-year-old, sitting back in an armchair and clutching a mug of tea in the town of Neufahrn.

"It's a question of values. The values of my religion are very close to those of Christians."

While Iyibas won the local CSU's nomination unanimously, such support is not always a given in the region where party chief Markus Soeder in 2018 ordered crosses to be displayed at the entrances of all public buildings, as a way of honouring the region's "cultural heritage".

In another Bavarian village, Wallerstein, resistance from local CSU members was so great against a Muslim candidate that the hopeful was forced to pull out of the race.

"It was not about me, but about my faith. For example, an argument is that the C in CSU and I as a Muslim did not go together," Sener Sahin told Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Party top brass had sought to intervene in Sahin's favour, but the rank and file would not budge, even though Sahin is a successful entrepreneur who was both player and trainer in the village football club and whose wife is Catholic.

- 'No difference' -

The CSU, sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has been the dominating force in Bavaria since the end of World War II.

But the far-right and Islamophobic AfD, and the ecologist Greens, have in recent years chipped away at that support, which at the last state elections in 2018 hit its lowest level since 1954.