Berlin The social worker Britta Haßelmann and the economic politician Katharina Dröge form the new head of the Green parliamentary group. The MPs of the Green parliamentary group elected her as their new chairman on Tuesday. “Now we can start,” said Haßelmann, so far the first parliamentary manager of the Green parliamentary group. It was elected with 98 percent of the vote. Dröge got 93 percent.
Haßelmann’s successor will be Irene Mihalic, most recently domestic policy spokeswoman for the Green parliamentary group.
With 118 MPs, the future ruling party will be the third largest parliamentary group in the new legislative period. It is bigger than ever. In the past four years there were only 67 MPs. The Greens put the average age of the new parliamentary group at 42 years. The proportion of women is 59.3 percent, 22 Green MPs are under 30 years old, 28 between 30 and 40. The previous parliamentary group chairmen Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Anton Hofreiter were no longer running. They had led the group together since October 2013.
This is the new top of the group:
Britta Haßelmann
The 59-year-old social worker from North Rhine-Westphalia had been the first parliamentary manager of the Greens parliamentary group since 2013 and was therefore jointly responsible for the smooth running of the plenary sessions. Haßelmann moved into the Bundestag in 2005. She describes herself as a “parliamentarian with heart and passion”. In her application for the parliamentary group chairmanship, Haßelmann, who belongs to the Realos, declared that she wanted “to give us the space to work on content and program, to discuss and also to argue, respectfully and trustingly”.
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Haßelmann, who turns 60 this Friday, was part of the ten-person group who conducted the exploratory talks with the SPD and FDP. During the coalition talks, she was chief Green negotiator in the working group on modern state and democracy.
Katharina Dröge
The 37-year-old economist, who, like Haßelmann, comes from North Rhine-Westphalia, has been in the Bundestag since 2013 and was most recently the economic policy spokeswoman for the Green parliamentary group. In the Bundestag election this year, she almost got the direct mandate in her Cologne constituency.
Katharina Dröge is one of the party left, but is respected across the wings. Most recently, she played a key role in the coalition negotiations to form a traffic light alliance. She was the chief green negotiator in the labor working group and was a member of the economics working group’s negotiating team.
It was anticipated that she might move to Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck’s new Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Change as State Secretary. A week ago, however, she announced that she wanted to apply to be chairman of the parliamentary group.
The new party leadership of the Greens will be elected at the end of January. The still-party leaders Habeck and Annalena Baerbock become ministers of the new traffic light government and therefore have to relinquish the leadership of the party. The statutes of the Greens provide for this.
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