The Green MP is the first black minister in Germany.
(Photo: IMAGO/penofoto)
Dusseldorf Minister of Social Affairs, top candidate for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in Schleswig-Holstein and Deputy President of the State Parliament – Aminata Touré has already had an impressive political career at the age of 29.
The Minister for Social Affairs, Youth, Family, Senior Citizens, Integration and Equal Opportunities, who was sworn in last Thursday, is believed to be much more capable: She could have had a post in Berlin, but she chose her home country of Schleswig-Holstein.
Touré was born and grew up in Neumünster. She spent the first years of her life in shelters for refugees. She only got German citizenship at the age of twelve. This time shaped the Schleswig-Holstein native.
“Every few weeks we had to worry about not being deported,” Touré describes her experiences on Instagram. Experiences that many people with a migration background have and for which she wants to speak.
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At 19, she realized: “I have to go into the political arena for something to change.” Since then, Touré’s career with the Greens has been on the up.
Aminata Touré has set herself ambitious goals for her newly tailored ministry – at state and federal level: As Minister of Social Affairs in Schleswig-Holstein, she wants, among other things, to “develop a youth policy strategy” to enable young people to have a say in society. The panels are also to be supported with an immediate program.
At federal level, she wants to promote basic security for children and young people and work to ensure that abortions are decriminalized. “The abortion should be regulated in a contemporary way beyond the penal code,” said the Green politician on Friday.
Chancellor? No thank you
Federal Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir knows that Touré “made history” when he took office. She is a role model “for many in our country,” he congratulates on Instagram. In 1991, Touré’s parents fled the coup in Mali. Now she is the first black woman minister in Germany. The Schleswig-Holstein native is aware of the appeal of her office. “It is important to deal with it responsibly,” she explains in an interview with the editorial network Germany (RND).
Özdemir was once the trigger for Touré to join the Greens. Now they are the first two ministers with a so-called “migrant background”.
Aminata Touré sees himself as a Black German. But she doesn’t want to be reduced to that. “The main reason I struggled with being black was that other people were constantly confronting me about it,” says the 29-year-old.
That would not do Touré justice either: while she was studying political science, she worked as a student assistant, then as a research assistant in the Bundestag office of party colleague Luise Amtsberg. In 2017 she was elected to the state parliament as a successor to the Schleswig-Holstein finance minister Monika Heinold. Five years later, both women formed the top duo of the Greens for the state elections.
Touré knows: “You have to claim power.” She did that in Schleswig-Holstein and therefore also encountered critics in her own ranks. But that is precisely what has made her a role model for young women throughout Germany. She has over 120,000 followers on Instagram.
The way to Berlin is open to Aminata Touré. When asked if she wanted to be chancellor, she replied to the “Stern”: “Nope.” Touré cannot imagine life only for politics: “I will not do politics my whole life, and I know that for sure .”
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