Agnieszka Brugger

Agnieszka Brugger (née Malczak) is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens who has sat in the Bundestag since 2009 (17th to 21st electoral terms). She was born on 8 February 1985 in Liegnitz, the German name of Legnica in Poland. A 2012 profile by the Bundestag press archive called her the youngest woman in the chamber after she entered through the Baden-Württemberg state list, still under the name Agnieszka Malczak. Since January 2018 she has been a deputy chair of the Green parliamentary group, with responsibility for international affairs and human rights.

The same profile reports that her parents, Polish supporters of the Solidarity movement, moved to Dortmund in 1989, when she was four. She passed the Abitur in 2004 at the Mallinckrodt-Gymnasium in Dortmund and has studied political science, public law and philosophy at the University of Tübingen since that year; since 2021 she has been enrolled in a bachelor’s programme in political science with public law as a minor. From April 2006 to October 2009 she held a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She joined the Greens and the Green Youth at 19. In September 2008 the Ravensburg Greens nominated her unanimously as their Bundestag candidate, and a month later the state party placed her eleventh on its list, a rank that returned her after the Greens’ strong national result in 2009.

The 17th Bundestag held its constituent sitting on 27 October 2009. By 2012 she was a member of the Defence Committee and her group’s spokesperson on disarmament policy. On 23 January 2018 the Green group elected her deputy chair with 92 percent of the votes. In the 21st Bundestag, chosen at the federal election of 23 February 2025, the parliament’s biography lists her as an ordinary member of the Defence Committee, a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilization and Peacebuilding, and an ordinary member of the Joint Committee under Article 53a of the Basic Law. She sits via the Baden-Württemberg state list and is the party’s candidate in Ravensburg (constituency 294), where the Greens received 23,871 first votes, or 15.2 percent, in 2025.

In July 2014, as the group’s security and disarmament spokesperson and its defence whip (Obfrau), she opposed arming Bundeswehr drones, telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the systems would mark the entry into a new and risky technology. In 2015 she said fresh export licences showed that the federal government had not in fact paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia. On 14 March 2024, during a Bundestag debate on Taurus cruise missiles for Ukraine, n-tv reported that she demanded stronger support, including those missiles, and criticised Chancellor Olaf Scholz; the report said the Greens, the FDP and the CDU/CSU applauded, and the SPD did not.

Early life and education

Childhood and family background

Agnieszka Brugger was born Agnieszka Malczak on 8 February 1985 in Legnica (German: Liegnitz), in Poland's Lower Silesia. A taz profile in March 2010 still called her Agnes Malczak and reported that she had come to Germany at the age of four. In interviews she has dated the move with her parents to 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and said she then grew up in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia.

The February 2025 Bundestag ballot in the Ravensburg district printed Agnes Monika Brugger. She told the Schwäbische Zeitung that Agnieszka had been officially Germanized when she received German citizenship on the 1989 move, while she went on using Agnieszka in public. The paper reported on 8 December 2011 that she, then Agnieszka Malczak, had married in a civil ceremony on 3 December and taken the surname Brugger.

In the taz interview she said her parents had been active in Solidarity (Solidarność). After the early-1980s strikes were crushed and martial law imposed, she said, they hoped for more democracy in Germany; her grandparents already lived there, and they urged her, even as a child, to object to unfair treatment. She recalled a primary-school parents' evening at which a teacher told her and her mother that she would never earn a top mark for spoken German, a comment she called hurtful rather than malicious. Asked whether she felt Polish or German, she said she still spoke Polish but had been four on arrival, and that she felt European. She told Polish reporters she had no relatives or friends left in Legnica and had not been back for a long time.

School and university

She passed the Abitur in 2004 at the Mallinckrodt-Gymnasium in Dortmund, a Catholic Gymnasium sponsored by the Archdiocese of Paderborn.

In the advanced German course she was, by her account, the only pupil given 15 points, the top mark. She said she did not want to be disadvantaged for having been born abroad or for being a woman. Der Spiegel reported that party politics began while she was still at the Gymnasium: in 2003, when thousands demonstrated against the Iraq War, she wanted to take part, and she joined Alliance 90/The Greens soon afterwards. The Bundestag biography dates membership from March 2004.

From 2004 she studied at the University of Tübingen in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg. On Abgeordnetenwatch she wrote that her election to the Bundestag in 2009, at 24, interrupted a Magister programme in political science, philosophy and public law that was already well advanced. The Bundestag biography, based on the member's own information, lists those subjects from 2004 and a Heinrich Böll Foundation scholarship from April 2006 to October 2009. The taz reported that in Tübingen she lived in a nine-person flat in an alternative, self-managed housing project.

She has not taken a degree. In January 2015 Der Spiegel reported that, after nearly 20 semesters, she planned to submit a Magister thesis that year on defence-policy speeches by Federal President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen. She later wrote that she had neither finished nor dropped the course. After Magister programmes were phased out, she moved the credits into a bachelor's in political science with public law as a minor, which she described as a formal step backwards, and expected to finish only after leaving parliament. The Bundestag biography dates that bachelor's enrolment from 2021.

Green Party beginnings

Agnieszka Brugger, then still Agnieszka Malczak, joined Alliance 90/The Greens in March 2004, the year she began studying at the University of Tübingen. A taz profile reported that at 19 she also joined the Grüne Jugend, the party's youth organization, and worked on environmental protection and the peace movement. The Bundestag biography lists the years that followed as unpaid posts in Tübingen student and district politics, the Baden-Württemberg Green Youth, and two periods on the state executive.

Student politics in Tübingen

From October 2005 to September 2007 that biography records university political work, including the Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss (AStA) and the academic senate. A 2010 profile on the Green parliamentary group's site, and her later curriculum, add one year as AStA deputy chair and a senate seat from October 2006 to September 2007. Those seats predated the Verfasste Studierendenschaft, which a law of 10 July 2012 created at each university as a public-law corporation inside the institution. The science ministry has described that body as responsible for students' academic, social, economic and cultural concerns and for political education, without a general political mandate.

She was also in the Grüne Hochschulgruppe, which the university lists as a campus association and which presents itself as an independent lobby for student interests rather than as a party branch. In an interview published by the Tübingen Greens she said she had been active in the group from 2004 to 2009 and on the district executive, and had later chaired the state Green Youth. The Bundestag dates the district-board seat more narrowly, from November 2005 to May 2008. Under the district statutes of 2017, amended in 2024, the members' assembly is the highest body and elects the board, while a board of six to eight represents the association politically and in law. Der Spiegel described the sequence as AStA, district board, then state youth chair. A 2010 group profile also lists a 2005 party trainee programme with Boris Palmer as trainer. Palmer later told Der Spiegel she had been engaged, critical and, in his view, very alternative, and that he had not expected a Bundestag ambition so soon.

Green Youth and the state executive

The Grüne Jugend calls itself the youth organization of Alliance 90/The Greens and an independent association that stays close to the party but also criticizes it. Founded on 15 January 1994 in Hanover, it took its present name in 2000 and was recognized as the party's official youth organization in 2001. The Baden-Württemberg branch is older: after a Green youth congress in November 1990, the Grün-Alternative Jugend was founded on 14 April 1991 in Bietigheim-Bissingen, joined the federal association in 1994, became part of the state party in 1999 and adopted the name Grüne Jugend Baden-Württemberg at a members' assembly in Tübingen in spring 2000. The state branch says it argues in the street, in parliaments and inside the party, and that membership of the Greens is not required.

The taz reported that in 2007 Malczak was asked over ICQ to stand for the board because nobody else was available, and that she was elected. The Bundestag lists her as spokesperson of Grüne Jugend Baden-Württemberg from May 2007 to October 2009; her curriculum and the 2010 group profile call the same office Landesvorsitzende.

In November 2009 she joined the state party's wider executive. At the 24th state delegates' conference in Biberach on 21–22 November 2009, a history compiled by the Baden-Württemberg Greens lists her, by then a Bundestag member of the Ravensburg district association, on the new Parteirat. Reporting her re-election in Aalen in October 2011, the Schwäbische Zeitung described the Parteirat as forming the Landesvorstand together with the two state chairs and the treasurer, and said she won by a large majority. In the speech the paper reported, she stressed rural areas and the "important, driving role" of the Green Youth, and welcomed unanimous support for an Upper Swabian call to fund electrification of the Südbahn. The Bundestag records state-executive membership for 2009–2015 and again for 2019–2021; her curriculum gives the first spell as November 2009–October 2015.

Bundestag elections

The 2009 entry and early terms

Brugger entered the Bundestag on the Baden-Württemberg state list of Alliance 90/The Greens, not by winning a constituency. In September 2008, still under her birth name Agnieszka Malczak, she was nominated unanimously as the Green direct candidate in constituency 294, Ravensburg; the following month the state delegates’ conference in Schwäbisch Gmünd placed her 11th on the Landesliste. Place 11 was described at the time as having little chance of a seat. She nevertheless entered with the 17th Bundestag, constituted on 27 October 2009 after the election of 27 September. The Bundestag’s biography records her as a member continuously since 2009.

In Ravensburg the direct mandate went to Andreas Schockenhoff of the Christian Democratic Union, with 56,931 first votes (44.8 percent). On first votes the Social Democratic Party was second, with 22,530 (17.7 percent), and the Greens third, with 18,639 (14.7 percent); the Free Democratic Party had 17,946 (14.1 percent). Second votes in the constituency were led by the CDU on 37.6 percent, then the FDP on 18.7, the SPD on 15.6 and the Greens on 14.4 percent (18,408). Turnout was 71.8 percent.

At the election of 22 September 2013 she stood again in Ravensburg, now as Agnieszka Brugger and from place 5 on the state list rather than place 11. Schockenhoff kept the direct seat with 69,312 first votes (51.6 percent). The SPD’s Hannes Munzinger was second on 20.0 percent, and Brugger’s share was 13.6 percent. Green second votes were 16,571 (12.3 percent), against 50.0 percent for the CDU, and turnout was 73.4 percent. She returned on the state list for the 18th Bundestag.

Ravensburg and the state list, 2017–2025

She was the Green candidate in Ravensburg again in 2017, 2021 and 2025, and was returned each time on the Baden-Württemberg list, while the direct seat stayed with the CDU. In 2025 she was not the runner-up: first votes divided as CDU 38.7 percent, Alternative for Germany 18.6 percent and Greens 15.2 percent.

For 2017 the Federal Returning Officer’s candidate list named Axel Müller for the CDU and Agnes Brugger, already a member of the Bundestag, for the Greens on state-list place 5. Müller won the constituency with 55,758 first votes (38.5 percent). The Greens were the runners-up on 29,216 (20.2 percent), ahead of the SPD on 12.4 percent, the FDP on 10.1 percent and the AfD on 9.4 percent. Green second votes were 21,770 (15.0 percent), against 38.9 percent for the CDU, and turnout was 78.2 percent.

Before the 2021 election she contested the leading place on the state list against Franziska Brantner at the Greens’ conference in Heilbronn. About two-thirds of the delegates voted for Brantner and 35.6 percent for Brugger; Brantner and Cem Özdemir headed the list, and Brugger was then placed third with 96 percent and no opposing candidate. In Ravensburg, Müller was elected again, with 44,597 first votes (30.6 percent), and the Federal Returning Officer names Brugger as the runner-up. Her 30,743 first votes were 21.1 percent. The same final compilation records her as elected from list place 3 while also standing in constituency 294. Constituency second votes were 26.7 percent for the CDU, 19.0 percent for the SPD and 17.5 percent for the Greens (25,536). Turnout was 78.3 percent.

For the election of 23 February 2025 the Ravensburg and Wangen district associations nominated her in October 2024 with 96 percent of the vote and no opposing candidate. On 7 December 2024 the state nominating meeting in Reutlingen elected her to list place 3 with 94 percent. The Federal Returning Officer’s preliminary volume lists Agnes Monika Brugger, born in 1985, as the Green candidate in constituency 294 and as number 3 on the Baden-Württemberg list, and includes her among those provisionally elected from that list. The final count gave Müller 60,702 first votes (38.7 percent). Christoph Högel of the AfD was second with 29,159 (18.6 percent), and the Greens received 23,871 (15.2 percent). Second votes were 35.0 percent CDU, 19.0 percent AfD and 13.3 percent Greens (20,841), and turnout was 83.9 percent. She took her seat in the 21st Bundestag on 25 March 2025 via the state list, associated with constituency 294, still without the direct mandate.

Parliamentary offices

Defence and foreign-affairs committees

In the 17th electoral term, after entering the Bundestag in 2009, Agnieszka Brugger was a member of the Defence Committee (Verteidigungsausschuss) and the disarmament spokesperson of the parliamentary group of Alliance 90/The Greens. Article 45a of the Basic Law requires the Bundestag to establish that committee, as it does the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on European Union Affairs and the Petitions Committee. It prepares plenary decisions on bills and motions and supports parliamentary control of the executive in defence matters, including the Bundeswehr.

On 13 January 2014, at the start of the 18th electoral term, she told Deutschlandfunk Kultur that she was now Obfrau on the Defence Committee and spokesperson for security policy and disarmament. An Obfrau or Obmann is not the committee chair. Each parliamentary group names one on a committee: that member is the group's main contact, helps set its line, agrees agendas and reports the detailed work back to the group leadership. Her own list of offices also names her, for the 18th term, as the group's Obfrau on the Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and as an ordinary member of that subcommittee in the 17th term.

She remained an ordinary member of the Defence Committee after the 18th term. In January 2018 the Schwäbische Zeitung described her as a member of the Defence Committee and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Interior Committee. The archived biography for the 20th electoral term (2021–2025) lists her as an ordinary member of the Defence Committee and of the Joint Committee, and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. As of the Bundestag biography dated 25 October 2026, in the 21st Bundestag she is an ordinary member of the Defence Committee, a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilization and Peacebuilding, and an ordinary member of the Joint Committee under Article 53a of the Basic Law.

The Joint Committee is not a committee of the Bundestag. Article 53a places it in its own section of the Basic Law, as a supreme federal organ: two-thirds of the members are Bundestag deputies, allotted by the strength of the parliamentary groups and barred from the federal government, and one-third are members of the Bundesrat. In peacetime the government must keep it informed of planning for a state of defence. It can sit as an emergency parliament only when immediate action is indispensable and the Bundestag cannot meet in time or is inquorate; it may then determine a state of defence, but it may not amend the Basic Law or suspend it in whole or in part.

Deputy chair of the Green parliamentary group

On 23 January 2018 the Schwäbische Zeitung reported that the Green group had elected Brugger a deputy chair (stellvertretende Fraktionsvorsitzende) with 92 percent of the vote, to take international affairs and human rights. It also reported that, the week before, she had been elected coordinator of Arbeitskreis IV, the group's body for international politics and human rights. The Bundestag biography, based on members' own disclosures, describes that role from January 2018 to September 2021 as coordination of Europe, foreign policy and foreign cultural policy, human rights and humanitarian aid, global structural and development policy, security and peace policy, civilian crisis prevention and disarmament, and states that she has been deputy chair and coordinator of Fachbereich IV since January 2018.

The group elected her again as a deputy chair on 7 December 2021, with Maria Klein-Schmeink, Lisa Paus, Julia Verlinden and Konstantin von Notz, as Katharina Dröge and Britta Haßelmann became the chairs. After the 2025 election it re-elected Dröge and Haßelmann on 24 March 2025 and chose the rest of the executive on 29 April 2025. Der Spiegel reported that the deputy chairs elected that evening were Andreas Audretsch, Julia Verlinden, Konstantin von Notz, Brugger and Misbah Khan.

In the Green group the executive (Fraktionsvorstand) has twelve members: the two chairs, five deputy chairs, the parliamentary business managers and the group's Bundestag vice-president. The board conducts the group's business, plans its political work, prepares group meetings and reports to the group; Brugger's place on it has been tied to coordination of the international and human-rights area.

Disarmament and arms-export policy

Armed drones and parliamentary control

As spokesperson on security policy and disarmament for Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag, Brugger opposed arming Bundeswehr drones. On 2 July 2014, in a current-affairs hour requested by the Left, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said remotely piloted aircraft were part of protecting soldiers, favoured a future European type that could be armed, and argued that each use would still need a Bundestag mandate. She set the debate apart from extrajudicial killings and said no scenario then required armed drones, with the ISAF mission ending.

Brugger said the protection argument implied that critics were indifferent to the troops. The Greens had backed reconnaissance drones, she said, but protection alone could justify any new weapon, and no current mission needed armed ones. She refused a “blank cheque,” warned of systems in which machines rather than people decided on lethal force, and cited U.S. killings outside armed conflict as evidence that availability could lower the threshold for force. The same day she told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that drones already processed more imagery than operators could follow and could select targets from behavioural features—signature strikes on unidentified people—and that fully autonomous weapons were a near-term risk, not science fiction. The Bundestag approved mandates, she said, but the government set the tasks, and members usually could neither amend them nor vote on single questions.

In March 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, she called a NATO build-up on the eastern borders “a completely wrong signal,” a pretext for Moscow to arm in return. On 29 April 2018 she told Deutsche Welle that a large equipment drive would not bring more security: reconnaissance drones for Mali were acceptable, combat drones were not without a convincing scenario. In May 2020 she told taz that nuclear sharing meant U.S. weapons at Büchel Air Base and Bundeswehr pilots practising their release—“a surreal scenario from the Cold War”—and that the role should end whatever replaced the Tornado.

Arms exports, Saudi Arabia and Yemen

On 19 February 2014 the Green group, with Brugger as first signatory, tabled “Keine Rüstungsexporte nach Saudi-Arabien” (printed paper 18/576). It said Saudi Arabia was among the largest buyers of German arms, cited a reported 2011 approval for about 200 Leopard 2 tanks worth more than €5 billion, and a February 2013 preliminary approval for Lürssen patrol boats worth €1.4 billion, which the coalition planned to cover with Hermes guarantees. War weapons to a non-NATO, non-EU state, it argued, breached the 2000 Political Principles where repression was suspected; jobs must not decide, and the sale would feed a spiral that endangered efforts against an Iranian nuclear weapon. It asked that preliminary approvals be revoked and the guarantees withheld.

On 20 February 2014 Brugger quoted Sigmar Gabriel’s 2011 demand that a Saudi tank licence be withdrawn and Thomas Oppermann’s line that the previous government wanted to arm the kingdom “to the hilt.” The Hermes push, she said, was the Social Democrats’ first visible act, and approvals should not stay behind the Security Council’s doors. A ministry spokeswoman said the interministerial committee had backed the guarantee; Brugger called taxpayer cover for it a scandal. CDU deputy Klaus-Peter Willsch said the boats were for coasts, sea lanes, oil platforms and against piracy, quoted Gabriel that they could not suppress crowds, and noted red-green licences for Saudi Arabia of about €125 million and then €130 million from 1998 to 2005. SPD deputy Bernd Westphal separated boats from tanks, called a Hermes guarantee unnecessary given Saudi wealth, and said decisions should reach the Bundestag within 14 days but stay with the executive. On 13 March 2014 the House rejected the motion, CDU/CSU and SPD against the Greens and the Left; the lead committee was economics, not foreign affairs.

In May 2014 she led a motion for a control statute: binding human-rights tests, quarterly reports, a move of the portfolio to the foreign ministry, prior notice of sensitive approvals, a ban on third-country production licences, real end-use checks, and no Hermes cover for arms. In February 2016, after Gabriel announced an expert commission, she asked the government to table that bill within the term.

Licences continued. In February 2015 the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported approval of “Gladio” gunnery simulators for Saudi Arabia after claims of a full stop; Brugger said there was none, and that human rights had to outweigh short-term economic interests. The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, citing ministry figures, put individual licences in the first half of 2015 at €3.3 billion, about 50 percent up on a year earlier. Brugger spoke of the coalition’s “true and ugly face”; the ministry said policy stayed restrictive and that totals were “no suitable yardstick.”

After the Saudi-led war in Yemen began in 2015, the boats remained the test. In July 2016 the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung reported a first patrol boat, described as the first of 48. Frank-Walter Steinmeier cited coastal security; Angela Merkel and von der Leyen were reported as supporters. Brugger said Gabriel had “once again failed” to change course. In March 2018 Der Spiegel reported eight further Lürssen boats from Wismar, despite a coalition line against exports to states “directly” in the Yemen war; earlier approvals were grandfathered. Brugger called that stop worthless and said the Saudi blockade shared responsibility for the famine. The government said it had “no findings of its own” on how the boats were used.

Security policy after 2022

Military support for Ukraine

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Agnieszka Brugger, deputy chair of the Alliance 90/The Greens group in the Bundestag, treated sanctions, humanitarian aid and weapons as one policy. On 28 April 2022 she said threats and "hard sanctions" had not stopped Vladimir Putin. Lethal weapons were never simple, she said, but "false restraint" would not answer the war. She paired them with diplomacy, humanitarian aid, including care for women who had been raped, further sanctions and an energy policy that cut payments to the Kremlin. The motion then before the House, "Frieden und Freiheit in Europa verteidigen – Umfassende Unterstützung für die Ukraine" (Drucksache 20/1550), recorded that Germany was enabling heavy weapons with other NATO partners, especially Soviet- or Russian-designed systems Ukraine could use at once, replaced through German ring exchanges. It passed by 586 votes to 100, with seven abstentions. On 26 May 2022 she said training on the Gepard had already begun in Germany and that ring exchanges were under way, rejecting the charge that Berlin was too slow.

The argument later fixed on Taurus. On 26 February 2024 Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused a delivery: Germany must not be "linked at any point and in any place with the targets this system reaches", or it risked being drawn into the war. British and French programming of Storm Shadow and SCALP, he said, "cannot be done in Germany in the same way". There would be no German soldiers on Ukrainian soil, ammunition mattered more than this system, and the war must not become one between Russia and NATO. Brugger wrote that nobody demanding Taurus wanted Germany as a belligerent, and that the link was, "as far as I know", factually wrong.

On 14 March 2024 she opened debate on a Christian Democratic Union of Germany/CSU motion (Drucksache 20/9143) to decide on Taurus. Germany, she said, was doing much but not enough; ammunition and long-range weapons were both required. "Zur vollen Wahrheit gehört: Auch Zögern und Zaudern kann am Ende zur Eskalation beitragen"—"hesitation and dithering can in the end contribute to escalation"—if fear told Putin he could go further. France and the United Kingdom had sent similar, if less far-reaching, missiles without, she said, escalation or strikes on Moscow, and she knew of no Ukrainian breach of conditions on weapons received. The Greens would not let anyone, "not even the federal chancellor", deny them that judgement. They would still vote the motion down: she called such texts "Schaufensteranträge", and said the Federal Security Council decides, and only unanimously. The Foreign Affairs Committee had recommended rejection. The roll call on that recommendation was 494 to 188, with five abstentions, among 687 ballots, so the motion fell. Tagesschau reported that split as 494 against deliveries and 188 in favour: for the Greens, it wrote, the coalition outweighed agreement with the Union wording. Applause came from Greens, FDP and Union, not the SPD. Such exports are decided by the Federal Security Council, not the Bundestag.

She did not drop the demand later. On 15 April 2025, after Friedrich Merz said on Caren Miosga that such weapons should go only with European partners, she told Der Spiegel he should prepare a delivery as chancellor and, after months of "meandering", could not fold again. On 26 January 2026 she told phoenix it would "still be right to deliver Taurus, even if earlier would have achieved much more." On 15 April 2026 Die Welt reported her AFP remark that a delivery was "long overdue" and that Merz, "with his excuses", had become "the new Olaf Scholz."

NATO, the Bundeswehr and European defence

In May 2022 she preferred a one-off, constitutionally anchored €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr, passed with the opposition, to the regular budget, which she said would pit climate policy, security and social cushioning against one another. On 4 March 2025, during CDU/CSU–SPD talks on another package, she told the Funke newspapers that one or two capped funds were "completely inadequate and thought too small and too narrowly". Money, personnel and will, she said, required a broad reform of the debt brake, because "nothing is as expensive as not protecting our country and our society."

She opposed restoring the old draft. On 21 July 2024 she told the Frankfurter Rundschau that Defence Minister Boris Pistorius's word "kriegstüchtig" raised fears and dropped the claim that conflicts should be settled in words. She tied the force to Innere Führung and the "citizen in uniform": any compulsion would have to cover both sexes, a general service duty was problematic, and the work should go to volunteers. The debt brake, she said, was a security risk.

On 10 July 2024 the United States and Germany announced episodic deployments in Germany from 2026 of long-range fires from a Multi-Domain Task Force, as a step toward later permanent stationing. The conventional units were to include SM-6, Tomahawk and developmental hypersonic weapons, outranging land-based fires then in Europe. On 12 July she told Deutschlandfunk the plans were protection, not a 1980s repeat: those warheads were nuclear; these missiles were conventional, against a "brutal aggressor". American cruise missiles were the "clearly safer and wiser variant" than European nuclear weapons, and Scholz had excluded nuclear warheads. A European successor would cost billions, and the debt brake was itself a security risk. The same week she called a European or German bomb "sicherheitspolitischer Irrsinn" and the US missiles "appropriate and unfortunately necessary", though not for use.

The two lines sit side by side. She treated delay on long-range weapons as a risk of escalation, against Scholz and later Merz, while in March 2024 her group rejected the opposition motion that would have ordered Taurus, because the decision lay with the government and the text was, in her words, for show.

Human rights and civilian crisis prevention

Feminist foreign policy

Since January 2018 Agnieszka Brugger has been a deputy chair of the Alliance 90/The Greens group in the Bundestag. The biography the Bundestag publishes from members' own disclosures lists her as coordinator of Fachbereich IV, a brief it describes, for 2018–2021, as Europe, foreign policy, human rights, development, security and peace policy, civilian crisis prevention and disarmament.

On 20 February 2019 she co-sponsored the Green motion "Feministische Außenpolitik konsequent umsetzen". It asked the Bundestag to enforce the rights of women and marginalized groups, cited studies that peace agreements last longer when they take part, and sought to bar arms exports to crisis regions and to countries with serious human-rights violations, including gender-based violence. The motion invoked United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 of 31 October 2000, which calls for women's equal part in preventing and resolving conflict and for their protection from gender-based violence.

The 2021–25 traffic-light coalition agreement, quoted by the Bundestag's research service, used the English phrase "Feminist Foreign Policy" and pledged to strengthen women's and girls' rights, resources and representation, send more women into international posts, and carry out the national action plan on Resolution 1325. On 1 March 2023 Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Development Minister Svenja Schulze presented guidelines Baerbock called "not proclaiming a revolution, but doing something that goes without saying". The federal government described the focus as rights, representation and resources, and quoted her that the policy was for society as a whole, not for women alone.

FDP deputy chair Wolfgang Kubicki told Table.Media the concept aimed less at diplomacy than at "the emotional satisfaction of domestic political actors"; CDU spokesman Jürgen Hardt said standing with protesting women in Iran would have shown what it meant in practice. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported criticism from the CDU and from inside the coalition. In a November 2025 Bundestag speech, Brugger called women's rights international law rather than a "Western construct", criticized Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul for removing the guidelines from the Foreign Office site, and cited imprisonment over dress codes in Afghanistan, women in Iran and sexual violence in war.

Crisis prevention and international parliamentary work

In the 21st Bundestag she is a deputy member of the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilization and Peacebuilding, deputizing for Max Lucks. The Foreign Affairs Committee constituted it on 16 October 2025, with Peter Beyer (CDU/CSU) as chair. The subcommittee partly continues earlier civilian-crisis-prevention work but stresses strategic foresight in Germany's foreign and security policy, following the inquiry on lessons from Afghanistan, so that security decisions rest on realistic knowledge and clear aims, and it accompanies the National Security Council in the Chancellery.

A year after the Taliban took Kabul, she told taz that in August 2021 she and Omid Nouripour spent nights forwarding cases of journalists, human-rights activists and others at risk, and that anger was sharpest over local staff whom parliamentarians, civil society and the Bundeswehr had warned were in danger. She said calmer early years should have been used for civilian work on the conflict's causes.

In November 2020, in Libereco's #WeStandBYyou campaign, she took a parliamentary godparenthood for Marfa Rabkova of the Belarusian center Viasna. Viasna reported that Rabkova was arrested on 17 September 2020 and quoted Brugger calling such women central to peaceful resistance against Alexander Lukashenko and demanding the release of all political prisoners. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China lists her on its site. On 2 March 2024, after a recording of a Luftwaffe conference was published in Russia, she told Der Spiegel that Vladimir Putin was trying, especially in Germany, "through disinformation, destabilization and espionage" to influence an open society, and that government and Bundeswehr communications had to be as secure as possible.

Coalition talks, party debates and criticism

Coalition negotiations

After the 2017 federal election, Brugger sat on the exploratory team that Alliance 90/The Greens sent into talks on a coalition with the CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The taz named her in a team drawn from both wings, with the lead candidates and several former chairs. On security she was the Greens’ lead negotiator opposite Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, whom she had long criticised in the Bundestag. Von der Leyen then invited her and the FDP’s Alexander Graf Lambsdorff to private meetings and offered the briefings given to a governing party.

A Union paper treated armed drones as non-negotiable and aimed at NATO’s target of 2 percent of GDP for defence; the Greens opposed a further rise in the Bundeswehr budget, then about 1.2 percent. On nuclear sharing, Brugger told the taz that Russia and the United States were putting arms-control agreements in question and that a new government should press for the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Germany. She said the other parties were firmly opposed. The soundings produced no coalition. On the night of 19 November 2017 the FDP left; leader Christian Lindner said it was better not to govern than to govern wrongly.

In the 2021 talks that produced the SPD–Green–FDP government, Deutschlandfunk on 21 October listed her in working group 20, “Foreign affairs, security, defence, development, human rights.” Omid Nouripour led the Green side, Heiko Maas the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Lambsdorff the FDP. Der Spiegel reported that SPD and FDP negotiators treated the Green delegation as having two heads: Brugger, it wrote, spoke repeatedly about feminist foreign policy, while the group argued over China, Russia, Nord Stream 2 and the U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Germany.

The party left and criticism of the security turn

Brugger has long been placed on the Green left. In January 2015 she and Sven Lehmann published an appeal on the site of Grün.Links.Denken, which Die Welt called the umbrella of left groups in the party. It warned against a course aimed too much at the centre: the Greens, they wrote, did not want to attach themselves to everyone without courage or ideas of their own. The Schwäbische Zeitung still described her as a party left-winger in 2022, while reporting that she was arguing for heavy weapons for Ukraine.

Critics on the Green base and in Die Linke treated arms deliveries and higher defence spending as a departure from the party’s founding peace stance. At the October 2022 congress in Bonn, n-tv described unconditional pacifists as a minority even on the left. Delegate Karl-Wilhelm Koch asked what Petra Kelly and Heinrich Böll would think and said they would turn in their graves. Amendments to stop deliveries or to press for a ceasefire found little support, and a leadership motion for military aid passed widely, a year after an election promise of no arms exports into conflict zones. Die Linke chair Janine Wissler called planned Leopard tank deliveries “no good news” and “a very dangerous wrong path,” saying that ever more and heavier weapons were not a strategy and risked escalation beyond Ukraine.

Brugger told the Schwäbische Zeitung in 2022 that sanctions and offers of talks had not produced a political solution, and that anyone who did not want Ukraine overrun, with territory permanently occupied, had to support the country. She said the party’s values had not changed, but that new realities required new conclusions, including money to equip the Bundeswehr. In April 2024 she added that if Ukraine lost, the violence would not end, and that it must not pay to invade a neighbour and place “the right of the more brutal” above the international peace order. She did not accept every Ukrainian request. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2023, after a Ukrainian minister asked for cluster munitions and incendiary weapons, she told Der Spiegel that Germany might neither possess, develop nor sell cluster munitions, and so could not meet the request, while still backing lawful military support for self-defence.

A further criticism was tactical. On 14 March 2024 she opened the Bundestag debate on a CDU/CSU motion for Taurus cruise missiles by attacking Chancellor Olaf Scholz, arguing that hesitation could itself contribute to escalation; the Green group then voted the motion down. The taz reported that she called such “showcase motions” of little help. The recorded vote was 188 in favour, 494 against and five abstentions, with the Greens present staying with the coalition. SPD deputy Michael Müller said she had “jumped over every stick the Union held out” and attacked the chancellor like an opposition speaker, which he called dangerous in substance and damaging to the coalition.

Personal life and affiliations

Family and residence

The Bundestag biography current as of 25 October 2026, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, records that Brugger is married and has one child. The Schwäbische Zeitung reported on 8 December 2011 that the Ravensburg deputy, then still named Agnieszka Malczak, had married in a civil ceremony on 3 December 2011 and thereafter used the surname Brugger; the paper said a church ceremony was planned for 2012. In the biography for the 20th electoral period (2021–2025), also drawn from her own details, she was listed as Roman Catholic; the later biography does not state a denomination. The transparency project Abgeordnetenwatch states that she was on statutory maternity protection (Mutterschutz) from 28 June to 2 October 2018 and for that reason did not take part in recorded votes.

On her own website she writes that she has lived in Baden-Württemberg since 2004, that Upper Swabia is her adopted home, and that she lives in Ravensburg while also keeping an apartment in Berlin. The Bundestag lists her constituency office at Rosenstraße 39, 88212 Ravensburg.

Boards and public roles

That self-reported biography names her as a member of the members’ assembly of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung). The foundation describes itself as a political foundation independent of Alliance 90/The Greens and of the party’s Bundestag group, while remaining part of the broader green current; its members’ assembly is the highest decision-making body, and an unpaid supervisory board of up to nine people oversees the executive board. Both the foundation’s website and the Bundestag register of reportable interests list her on that supervisory board.

The narrative biography also lists her as a member of the advisory board of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik), the central cross-departmental training institution of the federal government of Germany for security policy, and as a curator of the charitable organization Experiment e.V. – The Experiment in International Living. In the published interests for the 20th electoral period those entries are dated: the academy role until 15 June 2022 and the Experiment e.V. curatorship until 1 September 2023. Neither office appears among the interests published for the following term.

Other roles named in the biography are patronage of Netzwerk F, patronage of the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium in Ravensburg for the project “Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage,” and membership of Kapuziner Kreativzentrum, Freie Kunstschule Ravensburg e.V. For 2026 the register records that the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C., that works on the transatlantic partnership, covered travel costs of 5,929.81 euros.