Alaa Alhamwi

Alaa Alhamwi (born 17 April 1984 in Damascus) is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens and a member of the Bundestag from Lower Saxony. He sits in the 21st Bundestag, elected in 2025 from the Lower Saxony state list after standing in the constituency of Oldenburg–Ammerland. An energy researcher by profession, he worked at the German Aerospace Center in Oldenburg and, on the parliament's disclosure of members' interests, retains a right to return to that post.

The Bundestag biography, which restates the member's own account, records a 2007 bachelor's degree in energy technology and mechanical engineering from the University of Aleppo and a 2013 dual master's degree in renewable energy and energy efficiency for the Middle East and North Africa, taken at Cairo University and the University of Kassel with support from the German Academic Exchange Service. He has said that he came to Germany to study the energy transition and then go back to Syria; press reports place that move in 2012. In 2018 he completed a doctorate in engineering on urban energy systems at the University of Oldenburg, funded by a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The foundation's description of the project presents it as a study of renewable energy and flexibility technologies, including storage, for cities, using geographic information systems and taking Oldenburg as the case.

Alhamwi joined the Greens in Oldenburg in 2014. From 2021 he sat on the city council and chaired its committee for urban green space, the environment and climate; the parliamentary disclosure records both the council seat and that committee role as ending on 1 July 2025. At a state delegates' conference in Celle in March 2023, he was elected co-chair of the Lower Saxony Greens with Greta Garlichs, defeating Tobias Redlin by 170 votes to 45. A regional profile later described him as the first person with a migration background to hold that state chair.

In the Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and one of the chamber's secretaries, a substitute member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government, and deputy chair of the German-Nordic Parliamentary Group. He held place 8 on the Greens' Lower Saxony list. In Oldenburg–Ammerland the Green first-vote total on 23 February 2025 was 28,728 votes, or 14.9 percent; Dennis Rohde of the Social Democratic Party won the seat with 34.4 percent, and the Greens' second-vote share in the constituency was 16.5 percent. Across Lower Saxony the party took 11.5 percent of second votes.

Early life and education

Childhood in Damascus and studies in Aleppo

Alaa Alhamwi was born on 17 April 1984 in Damascus, Syria. In a May 2025 profile in Das Parlament, the magazine of the German Bundestag, he said he was the first member of a large family to study at university. His mother worked as a nurse and his father as a civil servant; higher education was not usual among his relatives, and politics was seldom discussed at home. He told the magazine that he had become interested in sustainable energy and environmental protection while young, and that he had seen frogs disappear from his home city during a drought and people from northeastern Syria move into the region.

He took his first degree at the University of Aleppo. The biography he filed with the Bundestag — the parliament notes that such entries are members' own statements — records a 2007 Bachelor of Science in energy technology and mechanical engineering there. On the ORCID record he maintains, the same bachelor's degree, entered as power engineering at Aleppo University, runs from 2002 to 2007. Das Parlament reported that during his studies he worked in several jobs, among them newspaper delivery and refuse collection. In that interview he said that in 2011, in Aleppo, he saw the first demonstrations against the regime and joined them, and that intelligence agents once pushed him against a wall and searched him for weapons while he was carrying only a laptop. He said that he then spoke neither English nor German, but that his academic results had opened scholarship possibilities in Britain and Canada.

Master's programme in Cairo and Kassel

Published accounts of the move out of Syria do not describe the same journey. In the 2025 interview he said that in 2012 he chose Cairo and Kassel, completed a dual master of science in renewable energy and energy efficiency there with support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and had come to Germany because of the Energiewende. His ORCID entry dates that dual master's, at Cairo University and the University of Kassel, from July 2011 to March 2013. Those dates sit on the calendar of REMENA (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency for the Middle East and North Africa), the double-degree programme that the University of Kassel and Cairo University opened in 2009 as a German–Arab course with Egypt. A November 2009 announcement said that each cohort began in July in Cairo, moved to Kassel the following February, and that DAAD scholarships were available. The Bundestag biography states that in 2013 he received the dual master's in renewable energy and energy efficiency for the Middle East and North Africa from the two universities, supported by a DAAD scholarship.

The Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported in December 2024 that he had come from Syria to Germany in 2012 for a master's in renewable energy in Kassel, and quoted him as saying that he had been able to breathe freely only after leaving the Syrian dictatorship in 2012. The Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung likewise wrote in March 2023 that he had arrived from Syria in 2012. The Kreiszeitung reported in October 2023 that he had come in 2012 not as a refugee from the war but in order to continue his studies. Die Tageszeitung, in March 2023, wrote instead that he had fled the Syrian civil war to Germany as early as 2011. In February 2023 the Nordwest-Zeitung reported that he had left Aleppo in 2011 to take a doctorate in Germany on a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, on the Desertec idea of solar plants in North Africa supplying Europe, and quoted him as saying that he had commuted between Cairo and Kassel. That report runs the later foundation scholarship and the doctorate together with the earlier Cairo–Kassel master's: the Bundestag biography keeps the DAAD-supported master's, completed in 2013, separate from a Böll-supported doctorate completed in 2018.

Doctorate at the University of Oldenburg

In 2018 he received a doctorate in engineering (Dr.-Ing.) in urban energy systems at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, funded by a Heinrich Böll Foundation scholarship, according to the biography he gave the Bundestag. In May 2016 the foundation published his project, then described as a planned doctoral thesis, under the title "Evaluation of Renewable Energy and Flexibilisation Technologies for the Deployment of Smart Cities through the Application of Geographic Information Systems." The text set out the use of geographic information systems, open data and open models to examine renewable supply and electricity demand in space and time at low-voltage level, scenarios for self-consumption and storage in a city such as Oldenburg, the position of the grid operator, and the economic and social effects of applying those tools. Das Parlament summarised the degree he completed in 2018 as a doctorate on the optimisation of urban energy systems.

Scientific research

German Aerospace Center

Alaa Alhamwi’s ORCID record lists him as a researcher in “Energy Systems 2050” at NEXT ENERGY, the EWE Research Centre for Energy Technology in Oldenburg, from September 2012 to December 2013. NEXT ENERGY, founded in March 2007 by the University of Oldenburg, Lower Saxony and the utility EWE AG, became in mid-2017 the Institute of Networked Energy Systems of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Its departments covered urban and residential technologies, energy-systems technology, and energy-systems analysis, at Carl-von-Ossietzky-Straße 15 in Oldenburg; a merger completed on 1 January 2021 also brought in a Stuttgart systems-analysis group.

The same record lists a PhD candidacy in energy-systems analysis at the institute from July 2017 to October 2018, then a postdoctoral post from 1 November 2018 with no end date entered. A 2019 paper places him in its Grid and System Modelling group. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members’ own statements, calls him an energy researcher at DLR since 2012, working on storage and green hydrogen in urban systems, and the mandatory disclosure of his pre-mandate post lists a right of return (Rückkehrrecht) to the institute.

With David Kleinhans, Stefan Weitemeyer and Thomas Vogt he used weather and load data to compare renewable mixes. A 2014 conference paper on a hypothetical solar-and-wind-only supply for Morocco found storage needs smallest at about 63 percent solar and 37 percent wind. A 2015 Energy Strategy Reviews article looked at Morocco’s plan for 42 percent of installed capacity from solar, wind and hydropower by 2020 in equal shares; a residual-load calculation supported that broad direction while tying the mix to meteorological factors.

FlexiGIS and urban energy modelling

With Wided Medjroubi, Vogt and Agert, Alhamwi is first author of the papers that introduced FlexiGIS (Flexibilisation in Geographic Information System), an open-source platform held at the DLR institute. DLR describes three modules—mapping public geodata such as buildings, roads and land use; simulating demand and generation; and minimising technology cost while keeping supply secure and respecting limits such as available land—and says studies have covered Oldenburg, Berlin and Philadelphia.

A 2017 Applied Energy paper by the four authors reviewed geographic information system models of urban energy and outlined a transferable tool for siting storage and other flexibilisation options. The part they built extracted urban objects from OpenStreetMap and argued that open data could reproduce urban energy features for self-consumption, autarky, capacity and cost. A companion paper the same year found many OpenStreetMap attributes missing.

In 2018 they modelled Oldenburg electricity demand and on-site renewable energy from open data only, down to buildings and streets at quarter-hourly resolution. Regression against measurements explained up to 94 percent of the variance, and some local renewable mixes were reported to raise autarky and cut electricity drawn from the grid or from storage. An October 2018 Energy Procedia paper added that, in the scenarios they ran, local storage plus on-site renewables could lower total system costs and raise self-sufficiency.

The 2019 Applied Energy article extended this to distributed lithium-ion battery storage by coupling FlexiGIS to the open optimiser urbs, once treating Oldenburg as a single “energy cell” and once as connected districts. Local storage and renewables reduced costs and raised self-sufficiency, but a fully isolated, 100 percent self-sufficient city was judged neither affordable nor technically feasible. At a high renewable share, total costs were about 50 percent below their reference case, a cut they associated in particular with urban micro-generation around 90 percent.

With Joseph Ranalli, a 2020 paper applied FlexiGIS to Philadelphia, where OpenStreetMap was incomplete and other open data were used. The mix that most reduced residual-load variability was roughly even between wind and solar, and the city needed more balancing energy than Oldenburg at comparable renewable penetration. In 2022 Alhamwi, Hauke Bents and Medjroubi introduced FlexiGIS-Grid, linking FlexiGIS to the model rivus for synthetic power, heat and gas networks. In their district, heat pumps could replace natural gas for heat at lower cost only if the distribution grid was expanded, and hydrogen could replace gas only if other domestic heating still covered part of demand.

Publications and later research

Those urban-modelling papers accompany a 2018 doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) on urban energy systems at the University of Oldenburg. In 2016 the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which funded the doctorate, described the planned thesis as a GIS study of renewables and flexibilisation for “smart cities”, with Oldenburg used to examine self-consumption and storage.

Later articles are multi-author. With Luis Blanco, Björn Schiricke and Bernhard Hoffschmidt, Alhamwi co-authored a Sustainable Cities and Society paper that defined sixteen “urban energy units” from open data and literature and, using a random forest for missing building attributes and a decision tree, classified Oldenburg into 8,249 such units for municipal heat planning in Germany.

A 2024 review by Stella Steidl, Rebecca Peer, Alhamwi, Medjroubi, Alejandro Zabala Figueroa and Jannik Haas argued that a GIS can show local conditions missed by national hydrogen scenarios. The studies they surveyed often lacked a full hydrogen supply chain, sector coupling, future costs, transparency and fine time resolution, and made limited use of GIS. The same group’s FlexiGIS-H2 tool, applied to Auckland and Christchurch in New Zealand, found large technical potential for hydrogen from surplus rooftop solar, but levelised costs fell to about 1.5–2.8 US dollars per kilogram only under lower capital and solar costs plus carbon pricing. A 2026 data paper led by Steidl, with Alhamwi, Zabala Figueroa, Peer, Heinz Wilkening, Medjroubi, Hendrik Langnickel and Holger Ruf, released one-minute synthetic residential electricity and heat profiles for those two cities plus Oldenburg and Karlsruhe, including electric vehicles and electrified heating.

Municipal politics in Oldenburg

Election to the city council

On 12 September 2021 Alaa Alhamwi was elected to the council of Oldenburg, an independent city in Lower Saxony. He stood for Alliance 90/The Greens in electoral area IV, Nordost, second on a list headed by Jutta Schober-Stockmann. The Oldenburg Greens had drawn up their lists at a digital assembly on 8 May 2021, and 68 members confirmed them by ballot the next day, almost unanimously.

In Lower Saxony each council voter has three votes, which may be piled on one list or candidate or split across lists. Personal votes rank candidates inside a list and also count for that list. The official result recorded Alhamwi as directly elected in Nordost with 828 candidate votes, the most on the Green list there, just ahead of Schober-Stockmann with 801; both took seats. The label did not mean he led the district. Nicole Piechotta of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (2,047) and Esther Niewerth-Baumann of the Christian Democratic Union (2,429) were also recorded as directly elected there, and the SPD led Nordost with 33.85 percent to the Greens’ 25.71 percent.

Citywide turnout was 53.80 percent of 135,173 eligible voters. The Greens won 65,641 of 210,447 valid votes (31.19 percent) and 16 of 50 seats, 12.06 points above 19.13 percent in 2016, and became the largest group, ahead of the SPD on 15 seats and the CDU on nine. Die Linke took four, the Free Democratic Party three, and the AfD, Volt and the Pirate Party one each. A later check raised valid votes from 210,215 to 210,447 without changing the seats.

Committees and local climate policy

From 2021 he chaired the committee for urban greenery, environment and climate and sat on the committee for economic development, digitalisation and international cooperation. Bundestag disclosures date both, with the council seat, to 1 July 2025.

Sixteen seats were short of a majority, so the climate items he signed were mostly joint requests with the SPD, also signed by Green councillors Maik Niederstein, Sebastian Rohe and Thorsten van Ellen and by SPD councillors Paul Behrens, Vally Finke and Thomas Klein. They asked for reports and costings, not by-laws.

On 1 June 2022 they asked the administration to cost a geothermal cadastre, modelled on the solar and green-roof maps, showing where heat pumps could use near-surface or deeper geothermal energy, including for neighbourhood networks. The motion cited the city’s aim of climate neutrality by 2035. In September he also signed requests on why a green-roof and façade grant had drawn only 18 applications and €28,000 of commitments by the end of June against a €200,000 budget; on how much peatland could be rewetted by 2035; and on solar panels on listed buildings after a change to the state heritage law.

On 12 June 2025 that committee recommended a tree-protection ordinance by eight votes from the SPD and the Greens to three from the CDU and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, after 487 comments during a public display from 31 March to 25 May. The draft dropped a right of entry onto private land and no longer limited care to specialist firms. On 30 June the council adopted it by a majority, with a tree-retention strategy, while he was still a member. It covers deciduous trees and yews, larches and pines of at least 100 centimetres around at one metre. Felling needs permission, then replacement planting or €1,500; most fruit trees are exempt, and existing building rights remain. Supporters cited climate and better protection; opponents said residents were losing responsibility for garden trees. His council and committee memberships ended on 1 July 2025.

Other local offices

Until 30 June 2025 he sat on the supervisory board of TGO Technologie- und Gründerzentrum Oldenburg GmbH and on the advisory board of EWE Netz GmbH in Oldenburg, both recorded as outside activities. The Bundestag biography also lists him, from 2022, as a board member of Europa-Union Oldenburg.

He and Sebastian Rohe then resigned their mandates for professional reasons. On 25 August 2025 mayor Jürgen Krogmann swore in Susanne Menge and Kurt Bernhardt. Menge, a councillor in 2001–06 and 2011–13 and honorary mayor in 2011–13, joined the economic-development committee and took the group’s TGO supervisory-board seat. Bernhardt, a councillor from 2005 to 2021, joined the committee for finance and municipal holdings.

Leadership of the Lower Saxony Greens

Election as co-chair

On 18 March 2023, delegates of Alliance 90/The Greens in Celle elected equal co-chairs for the party in Lower Saxony. Greta Garlichs, 26, a political scientist from Hanover who ran the Bundestag office of Christina-Johanne Schröder, had no opponent for the seat reserved for a woman and took 190 of 215 votes, about 88 percent. Alaa Alhamwi, 38, an energy engineer at the German Aerospace Center and an Oldenburg city councillor who had come to Germany from Syria in 2012, won the other seat with 170 of 220 votes, about 77 percent, against 45 for Tobias Redlin of Burgwedel.

Alaa Alhamwi and Greta Garlichs with bouquets after their election as co-chairs at the state party conference in Celle, March 2023.

Redlin, an aide to Landtag member Sina Beckmann, was treated as a long shot, partly because he, like Garlichs, came from the Hanover region. The pair succeeded Anne Kura of Osnabrück and Hans-Joachim Janßen of the Wesermarsch, whom the HNA called Hanso Janßen. They had led the party since 2018 and did not stand. The dpa reported that Kura, new chair of the Green group in the Landtag of Lower Saxony, was leaving the party office, while Janßen wanted younger successors. Kura cited about 12,500 to 12,600 members, nearly double the end-2017 figure, and 14.5 percent and 24 seats in 2022.

Both set themselves against the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Garlichs said the party could not build motorways “until we suffocate” and needed a state association ready to criticise. The HNA read that as a warning to the Landtag group and the four Green ministers, and wrote that not every Green member of the state government cheered Alhamwi. He said Greens in office were not there to satisfy the partner, warned of an “asphalting policy,” and spoke of making the Greens the state’s strongest force. In December 2024 the Kreiszeitung called him the first state chair with a migration background.

The party in state politics

They led a party already in office. On 9 October 2022 the Greens had won 14.5 percent and 24 of 146 seats, three direct, beside the SPD on 33.4 percent and 57; turnout was 60.3 percent. On 1 November, after five days of talks, they published “Sicher in Zeiten des Wandels.” An NDR analysis for Tagesschau called the text full of compromises and often vague. Stephan Weil was the designated minister-president for the Landtag sitting on 8 November. The Greens took four of ten ministries, their largest share in the state. Julia Willie Hamburg, designated deputy minister-president, received education rather than economics; finance also went to the party.

Motorways were the open row. The taz wrote that the coalition had only asked Berlin to climate-test projects, after which economy minister Olaf Lies again backed the coastal Bundesautobahn 20 and the A 39. At Celle, Garlichs, Alhamwi and Bundestag co-chair Katharina Dröge opposed new roads through moors; the dpa recorded Lies’s support for the A 20, A 39 and A 33, and set Alhamwi’s rejection of liquefied-natural-gas terminals against the SPD’s industrial argument for them. The taz said the co-chairs would have to mediate between programme and coalition.

The coalition held. In early November 2024 in Gifhorn, Garlichs and Alhamwi made housing a lead motion, but NDR reported that the federal coalition and the crisis at Volkswagen dominated the conference. Bundestag co-chair Katharina Dröge said she sometimes envied red–green cooperation in the state, comparing the federal coalition to a pile-up, and that the Greens did not want that government to end early.

Leaving the chair

Alhamwi did not seek another term. On 21 February 2025 Rundblick reported that he would not stand on 22 March and was eighth on the Bundestag list, while Garlichs would run again. Among those then declared for his place was Maximilian Strautmann of Osnabrück, already a member of the state executive.

The conference followed what the dpa called a sobering Bundestag election. Garlichs, 28, was confirmed with just under 78 percent; Strautmann, 25, took Alhamwi’s place with just under 55 percent among five candidacies. The dpa said the handover came because Alhamwi was entering the Bundestag. Garlichs, citing the party’s own count of growth from about 12,500 members to more than 17,000, called for a more professional organisation and attacked Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz. Strautmann said nobody could pass the Greens, in government or in opposition.

Election to the Bundestag

Candidacy and the state list

On 29 October 2024 a joint nominating assembly of Alliance 90/The Greens from Oldenburg and the district of Ammerland selected Alaa Alhamwi as the party’s direct candidate for Bundestag constituency 27, Oldenburg–Ammerland. At the Hof von Oldenburg in Rastede he received 74 of 75 valid votes, with no opposing candidate. He was then a co-chair of the Greens in Lower Saxony.

The state list was chosen separately. On 14 December 2024, 228 delegates at a state conference in Hanover adopted a list of 31 names for the 2025 German federal election; the state party placed Alhamwi, of the Oldenburg city branch, eighth, after Filiz Polat, Helge Limburg, Julia Verlinden, Swantje Henrike Michaelsen, Lena Gumnior, Timon Dzienus and Karoline Otte. NDR reported the same conference and said Otte and Alhamwi had been elected to places seven and eight. On 24 January 2025 the constituency committee in Oldenburg admitted eight direct candidacies and named Alhamwi as the Green candidate.

The constituency campaign

Constituency 27 comprises the city of Oldenburg and Ammerland. Beside Alhamwi, the committee admitted Dennis Rohde of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the sitting member; Stephan Albani of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, also a sitting member, from Bad Zwischenahn; Carsten Helms of the Free Democratic Party, from Rastede; Andreas Paul of the Alternative for Germany; Arne Brix of Die Linke; Hero Jan Stroman of the Free Voters; and Andreas Werner of Volt. The vote on 23 February 2025 was the first Bundestag election under the 2023 reform of the electoral law. Voters still had a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party’s state list, but a plurality of first votes produced a seat only if the party’s second votes in the Land covered it.

The Oldenburger Onlinezeitung’s account of the Rastede speech is the regional record of his themes: the energy transition and green hydrogen, climate change and energy security for a city and a rural district, opposition to the far right, and a style he described as respect, solidarity, anti-racism and feminism, with the aim of a first Green direct seat. In 2021 Rohde had won with 38.16 percent of valid first votes, ahead of Susanne Menge of the Greens on 20.38 percent.

Result and mandate

The Federal Returning Officer’s final result put turnout at 193,988 of 229,344 eligible voters, 84.6 percent. Rohde was elected in the constituency with 66,280 first votes (34.4 percent). Albani was runner-up with 46,172 (24.0 percent). The Green first-vote total, for Alhamwi as the admitted candidate, was 28,728 (14.9 percent), down 5.5 points on 2021. Paul received 25,046 (13.0 percent) and Brix 15,672 (8.1 percent); Helms received 5,996 (3.1 percent). Green second votes in the constituency were 31,857 (16.5 percent), third behind the CDU on 23.9 percent and the SPD on 23.8 percent. Across Lower Saxony the Greens polled 576,845 second votes, 11.5 percent.

Second votes, converted by the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method, fix how many seats each party receives on each Land list. Constituency winners of that party are then ranked by their share of valid first votes and take seats only up to that second-vote total; any seats left over go down the closed state list in the order fixed by the party. A third-placed candidate can therefore enter the Bundestag without winning the constituency, if the list place is high enough to fall inside the party’s allocation. In Lower Saxony the Federal Returning Officer recorded eight elected Greens, all on the state-list roll, with Alhamwi in eighth place, and NDR described all eight as having entered via that list rather than by a constituency win. Eighth place was the last Green seat from the state. Albani (CDU list place 11) and Paul (AfD list place 6) likewise entered from Lower Saxony lists after losing the direct contest to Rohde.

The 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025. NDR reported that this first sitting opened the new electoral term and that the 65 members from Lower Saxony, including the eight Greens, began their work that day. The Bundestag’s biography lists Alhamwi as elected on the Lower Saxony state list, with a constituency candidacy in Wahlkreis 027, Oldenburg–Ammerland.

Work in the Bundestag

Committees and floor duties

In the 21st Bundestag, Alaa Alhamwi of Alliance 90/The Greens is a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and a substitute member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipalities. The economic committee was constituted on 21 May 2025 in a sitting chaired by Bundestag President Julia Klöckner. It has 42 members, six of them from the Greens, including Alhamwi. Christian Freiherr von Stetten of the Christian Democratic Union/CSU was elected chair, with 41 votes in favor and one against.

He is also a secretary (Schriftführer) of the Bundestag. In the groups' joint list of 20 May 2025, Drucksache 21/215 (neu), submitted under section 3 of the rules of procedure, the Green group named him first of its nine candidates. On 22 May 2025 the Bundestag elected the secretaries without debate: 21 from the CDU/CSU, 15 from the Alternative for Germany, 12 from the Social Democratic Party, nine from the Greens and seven from Die Linke. Two secretaries sit with the presiding officer as the presidium of a sitting, by custom one from the majority and one from the opposition. They keep the speakers' list and, in roll-call votes and elections by ballot, receive and count the voting papers.

Debates and legislation

His floor speeches have clustered on bills in the economic and energy brief. On 11 September 2025, in the first reading of drafts on consumer protection in energy law and on implementing the European Union Renewable Energy Directive for offshore wind and grids (Drucksachen 21/1497 and 21/1491), he criticized the pace set by Economics Minister Katherina Reiche. On 6 November he spoke on the bill to accelerate hydrogen supply and the hydrogen ramp-up (Drucksache 21/2506). On 13 November he opposed AfD bills to amend the Basic Law and ordinary law in the name of clearing climate-protection consequences, and later spoke on the Energy Industry Act amendment covering consumer protection and energy sharing. On 25 November, in the second reading of the 2026 budget, he spoke on heat-transition funding in Einzelplan 09, the chapter of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. On 4 December he spoke on accelerating geothermal plants, heat pumps and heat storage, and on the offshore-wind and grid part of the renewables directive.

He has been the first signatory of several Green motions. On 13 November 2025 the group tabled a call to continue the heat transition so that homes stayed warm and affordable (Drucksache 21/2724). On 21 May 2026 he led a motion for a renovation offensive in Germany through full implementation of the EU Buildings Directive (Drucksache 21/6005) and co-sponsored one on heating costs, tenants and energy independence (Drucksache 21/6006); in the debate he attacked the cabinet's Building Modernization Act (Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz). On 25 June 2026 he spoke in the first reading of the amendment to the Heat Planning Act (Drucksache 21/6587). On 24 September he spoke on synchronizing new installations with grid expansion (Drucksache 21/7866), with a Green motion for a grid package aimed at an all-renewable system (Drucksache 21/8121), and on accelerating the Energy Efficiency Directive (Drucksache 21/8027), with a motion on cutting energy waste (Drucksache 21/8139).

He has also put written questions and cast recorded votes. A question answered over the 2025–26 new year asked the government to confirm or deny Reiche's statement of 13 December 2025 that the 65 percent renewable quota in section 71 of the Building Energy Act would be abolished, and what would replace it. Questions answered in the week of 1 June 2026 covered a 20 May statement in the economic committee on legal review of the Building Modernization Act, the cost of switching planned high-voltage direct-current lines between overhead lines and cables, the hydrogen core network, and the federal timetable for rebuilding the Cäcilienbrücke in Oldenburg. On 24 April 2026 he voted for an amendment of the Electricity Tax Act and against a temporary cut in fuel energy tax; on 10 July against the Building Modernization Act; and on 16 October against an amendment of the Fuel Emissions Trading Act.

Interparliamentary and other roles

The Bundestag lists him as deputy chair of the German-Nordic Parliamentary Group. From 27 May to 4 June 2026 he travelled with the group to Denmark, Greenland and Iceland. The delegation was led by its chair, Sahra Mirow of Die Linke, and also included Bernd Rützel of the SPD, Susanne Hierl of the CDU/CSU, Wolfgang Wiehle of the AfD and the non-attached Stefan Seidler of the South Schleswig Voters' Association.

The Bundestag reported that the delegation met members of the three parliaments, in Copenhagen, Nuuk and Reykjavik, as well as government representatives and businesses, and looked in particular at housing supply and at climate policy. The call on the Danish Folketing was also described as a sign of solidarity with Denmark over Greenland. In Copenhagen the group met Kristina Háfoss, secretary general of the Nordic Council.

He is a deputy member of the Advisory Board of the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways. The Green parliamentary group nominated him as a substitute in the Bundestag’s election of board members on 17 September 2025; the agency’s membership list of 23 September 2026 records him as deputy for Anna Lührmann.

Separately from his parliamentary offices, the disclosures required by the members' code of conduct list an unpaid seat, from 17 September 2025, on the parliamentary advisory board of the German Business Initiative for Energy Efficiency (Deutsche Unternehmensinitiative Energieeffizienz, DENEFF).

Energy, climate and economic policy

Power, hydrogen and gas

On 6 November 2025 Alaa Alhamwi told the Bundestag, for Alliance 90/The Greens, that he was searching for “the hydrogen strategy of this federal government” and that its hydrogen bill was worse than an earlier traffic-light draft. Enacted on 29 March 2026, the law places electrolysers, stores, import terminals and pipelines in an “overriding public interest” until greenhouse-gas neutrality in 2045 and shortens permit deadlines. An electrolyser is defined by splitting water, with no requirement that the electricity be renewable. Alhamwi said plants could therefore run on “the dirtiest coal power” and still receive that status, that authorities would lack time to examine projects, and that hydrogen power stations planned as anchor customers had been dropped. A household grid, he said, was “nonsense”, because homes could heat more cheaply with heat pumps and district heat.

Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker of the Christian Democratic Union said the strategy had begun under Peter Altmaier and that a 2030 target of 10 gigawatts of domestic electrolysis was far from met. Jörg Cezanne of Die Linke said faster permits would not create users by themselves, while Mathias Weiser of the Alternative for Germany called the strategy a failure and cited what he presented as a Federal Audit Office finding that green hydrogen would stay much dearer than fossil fuels.

Alhamwi co-sponsored a Green question of 26 August 2026 on the EU methane regulation and liquefied natural gas contracts. It stated that Economy Minister Katherina Reiche had on 25 June 2026 asked the EU energy council to postpone the import obligations by three years, against a cabinet understanding. The government answered on 5 October that methane was the second most important greenhouse gas and the European Union regulation a central climate instrument, that an implementing bill was still being coordinated, and that it knew of only one contract with German participation in which the regulation had mattered.

Heat, buildings and efficiency

In December 2024 the Kreiszeitung reported a conversation in which Alhamwi’s host called the heating law unrealisable. Alhamwi said “the communication was not good”, attributed the Building Energy Act to the CDU and the Social Democratic Party, claimed the grand coalition’s 2020 text had contained a gas-heating ban, and called Robert Habeck’s version “much looser” than Altmaier’s. The 2024 Act, as the federal government described it, did not ban existing boilers. From 1 January 2024, heating in new buildings inside new development areas had to take at least 65 percent of its heat from renewables; elsewhere the duty followed municipal heat plans, due by mid-2026 in large cities and mid-2028 more widely.

On 4 December 2025 Alhamwi said the Geothermal Acceleration Act made only “tiny cosmetic changes” on geothermal energy while putting climate-friendly heat networks back five years, scrapping an e-kerosene quota and narrowing a battery-storage privilege adopted weeks earlier. He asked that drinking water be protected and petrothermal methods, which he compared with fracking, excluded. The Act puts geothermal plants, heat pumps, pipelines and stores in the overriding public interest until 2045. A committee change moved a Heat Planning Act date from 2040 to 2045: the coalition called that alignment with the neutrality year, and the Greens a five-year weakening of heat-network decarbonisation. The AfD opposed the bill, citing earthquakes at Landau in 2009.

A motion of 16 December 2025, in Alhamwi’s name, asked that the 65 percent rule stay, that about 21,000 technicians a year be trained and at least 500,000 heat pumps installed, and that electricity tax fall to the European minimum. Citing an industry study, it said German makers employed more than 25,000 people and that talk of repeal was holding back orders. On 21 May 2026 he called the draft Building Modernisation Act a “rollback law”, because ending the 65 percent rule would let new fossil boilers pass half their extra cost to tenants. In force from 29 July 2026, the Act did drop that requirement and again permits gas and oil heating, with a rising bio-share from 2029 and climate-neutral fuels by 2045. The government said tenants would be shielded from excessive charges caused by an uneconomic boiler. CDU deputy Lars Rohwer cited a finding of the National Regulatory Control Council that ending the heating law would relieve citizens and business each year.

Coasts, housing and the local economy

After visiting Wangerooge in January 2026, Alhamwi said the North Sea island’s shore was “intolerable in many places”, that the western revetment had barely advanced in more than ten years because federal and state authorities did not cooperate, and that further delay was “a danger to human life”.

The Waterways and Shipping Office Weser-Jade-Nordsee told the Nordwest-Zeitung that the contractor had failed after the first section, that funds ran out after work in 2024, and that money for the last sections had not been released after the 2025 election. Costs were about €150 million, with completion then planned for 2031, and storm-surge safety was said to be still assured. Mayor Tina Mißmahl agreed there was no acute danger, but said the Federation and Lower Saxony still owed a binding timetable.

The December motion also warned that, without a home market, heat-pump manufacturing could follow solar-module production out of Germany. In May 2026 Alhamwi said wealthier households could leave oil and gas with solar, a battery, a heat pump and an electric car, while tenants neither chose the boiler nor escaped half of any extra fossil cost.

Syria, migration and public debate

Leaving Syria and German citizenship

In a profile by Jan Rübel in the Bundestag newspaper Das Parlament on 22 May 2025, Alaa Alhamwi said that as a mechanical-engineering student in Aleppo he was still in Syria for the first demonstrations against the regime in 2011 and marched in them, and that intelligence agents once pushed him against a wall and searched him though he had only a laptop. The profile says he decided in 2012 on Cairo and Kassel, where a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship funded a dual master's in renewable energy and energy efficiency, because Germany's Energiewende had drawn him: "I came to Germany because of the Energiewende." It states that he has lived in Oldenburg since then, that he received German citizenship in the summer of 2018, and that he jokingly calls himself the "youngest German in parliament" for that reason.

The Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine wrote on 20 March 2023 that he had come from Syria to Germany in 2012. A Deutsche Presse-Agentur dispatch of 14 December 2024, carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, said he had gone to Kassel that year for a master's in renewable energy and later completed a doctorate on urban energy systems at the University of Oldenburg. His Bundestag biography records birth in Damascus on 17 April 1984, a 2013 dual master's at Cairo University and the University of Kassel, and energy-systems research at the German Aerospace Center from 2012.

The taz of 21 March 2023 wrote instead that he had already fled the Syrian civil war to Germany in 2011, as the paper's own summary rather than a quotation. That is not the chronology in the agency report, which says he left the dictatorship in 2012, nor in a Kreiszeitung interview of 20 December 2024, where he said he had come about twelve years earlier because "I wanted to study the energy transition here and then return."

After the fall of Assad

At a state conference of Alliance 90/The Greens in Lower Saxony, held in Hanover on 14 December 2024, Alhamwi described divided feelings after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. "The hope, the joy is incredibly huge," he said, but "at the same time there is also a lot of fear; many people in my homeland are anxious about what might still come." He said that only after leaving the dictatorship in 2012 had he really been able to breathe freely, that "my heart is now with my family and my friends in Syria," and that he supported people there toward democracy and freedom. The dispatch said Assad, an authoritarian ruler for 24 years, had been overthrown about a week earlier and had fled to Russia.

About a week later he told the Kreiszeitung that asylum seekers were often not abroad by choice: "Syrians do not necessarily want to come here, but they are forced to." He believed many would return if Syria's political situation continued to improve.

Asylum, discrimination and political entry

In the same interview he tied entering politics to discrimination against him and his family in Germany. The paper reported that they had regularly faced discrimination and xenophobia, after which he decided: "I said: 'I get involved.' I want, out of firm conviction, to fight for an open society," adding, "Only diversity strengthens us." He said, "We are talking about people who also have a right to a good life. The right of asylum must be defended," and that he was critical of an industrial nation which caused problems in poorer countries then telling people who were suffering and dying to stay. He also said that about 6,000 doctors from Syria were working in Germany and that "Germany needs these people."

In the May 2025 profile he gave another reason for joining the party: he had joined the Greens in 2014 because "they have the clearest view on energy policy." He also said, "Racism is unfortunately part of my everyday life," citing shouts of "Go away" and insults during the election campaign, and added: "I give everything so that we integrate, but one always feels a certain reserve."

Personal life

Family and Oldenburg

Alhamwi has lived in Oldenburg since 2012. In an October 2023 profile, the Kreiszeitung reported that he lived on the outskirts of the city with his wife and their sons, then aged ten and fourteen, and that his wife worked as a dentist in Elsfleth, in the Wesermarsch district of Lower Saxony. The same article said he had held citizenship of Germany since 2018, and that his children had already been subjected to racist hostility. Outside party work, it reported, he jogged regularly—he told the paper he always carried his running shoes—and kept two bee colonies at home, which he said let him switch off.

In December 2024 the Kreiszeitung again described him as living in Oldenburg and working part-time there as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Networked Energy Systems of the German Aerospace Center. In the 2023 profile he had said that he still did that institute work on Fridays and gave the rest of his working time to politics, and that as co-chair of the Lower Saxony Greens he earned less than in his previous research post. The Bundestag lists his constituency office at Friedensplatz 4, 26122 Oldenburg, and his parliamentary office at Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin.

Public profile

Regional reporting has presented him chiefly as an Oldenburg energy researcher who took on party office. Lars Laue’s October 2023 Kreiszeitung portrait, headlined on the move “from research into politics,” quoted him calling the combination of energy research and politics “ideal,” and recorded his answer that he had gone into a political career “definitely” out of passion rather than for the money. A December 2024 article by Jannick Ripking, built around a filmed conversation at a dining table in Heede during a visit to Diepholz, introduced him as the first co-chair of the Lower Saxony Greens with a migration background, living in Oldenburg and still a part-time postdoctoral researcher. The Nordwest-Zeitung reported on 31 October 2024 that the Oldenburg Greens had nominated him, with 74 of 75 votes, as their direct candidate in constituency 27, Oldenburg–Ammerland. On 24 February 2025 the same paper reported that he had entered the Bundestag on the last place on the Lower Saxony list, and described the election night in Oldenburg as full of suspense.

Nationally, the Bundestag newspaper Das Parlament published Jan Rübel’s profile “Der Offene: Alaa Alhamwi” (“The open one”) on 22 May 2025. It presented him as an energy-policy specialist, reported that he jokingly called himself the “youngest German in parliament” because he was naturalized in the summer of 2018, and described a pride and optimism that seemed hard to shake. The Bundestag member page lists a personal homepage and accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube.