Anna Lührmann

Anna Lührmann (born 14 June 1983 in Lich, Hesse) is a German political scientist and a politician of Alliance 90/The Greens. She served in the Bundestag from 2002 to 2009 and again from 2021, entering the 21st Bundestag via the Hessian state list while standing in the Main-Taunus constituency. From 8 December 2021 she was Minister of State for Europe and Climate in the Federal Foreign Office; that government role, and her parallel appointment as the federal commissioner for Franco-German cooperation, lasted until 2025. In the Bundestag elected in 2025 she is deputy chair of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization, and since 15 March 2025 she has been co-chair of the Greens in Hesse.

At 19 she won a seat in the 2002 federal election from fifth place on the Hessian Green list, and Der Spiegel reported her as the youngest member the Bundestag had ever had. The BBC, interviewing her that November, called her the youngest member of parliament in Germany and in Europe, and noted that she had gone into politics at 13. She was a member of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union from 2002 to 2004 and of the Budget Committee from 2004, and she left the Bundestag at the 2009 election. During the parliamentary years she completed a bachelor’s degree in political science and organization at the University of Hagen.

She then took a master’s degree in gender and peace studies at Ahfad University in Sudan and, from 2010 to 2012, advised the United Nations Development Programme on elections, parliaments and youth participation. At Humboldt University of Berlin she completed further graduate study and a doctorate in political science on democracy promotion. From 2015 to 2021 she worked at the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg: postdoctoral researcher from 2015 to 2018, deputy director from 2018 to 2020, and junior professor from 2018 to 2021.

In December 2021 Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock brought her into the Foreign Office as a minister of state, alongside Tobias Lindner and Katja Keul, in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung later credited her tenure with pushing the debate on European Union reform, including a Franco-German expert group, and with helping to found the youth network Generation Europa. She kept her Bundestag seat after the 23 February 2025 election, in which the Greens took 11.6 percent of second votes and 85 seats. In 2026 Emmanuel Macron named her a chevalier of the Legion of Honour for her work on relations with France.

Early life and education

Childhood in Hesse and the Green Youth

Anna Lührmann was born on 14 June 1983 in Lich, in the district of Gießen in central Hesse. She was the daughter of a teacher and a management consultant; her father, Harald Lührmann, had been city treasurer (Stadtkämmerer) in Gießen, and both parents were active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She grew up with a brother, first in Kassel and later in Hofheim am Taunus.

Her own activity began outside the parties. A 2009 profile, and later reporting, place her at about nine with Greenpeace and other environmental actions. In 1997 she joined the Grüne Jugend, the youth organization of Alliance 90/The Greens, and a year later the party itself. While the family was still in Kassel she was, at thirteen, elected a spokesperson of the Green Youth in the Kassel district; the Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine later recalled an interview from that time that called her spokesperson of the local Junge Grünen. The Bundestag’s biography dates her voluntary work, chiefly in the Green Youth, from 1996 to 2002. By April 2002 the taz described her as a spokesperson of the Hessian Green Youth since 2001 and, from 2002, an assessor (Beisitzerin) on the federal executive. She said she had become “green” at thirteen because sustainable development and a liberal, just and emancipated society matched her own views. The 2009 account also lists early work in student representation (Schülervertretung).

Schooling and the United States

In Kassel she attended the Albert-Schweitzer-Schule through the ninth grade, after which the family left the city. From 1999 to 2000 that Green Youth work was interrupted by a stay in the United States, which Munzinger records as a school exchange year in Syracuse, New York. A 2009 biographical note listed her, from 2000, as a member of the German Youth for Understanding committee.

In a 2024 Der Spiegel interview she looked back on the year as a pupil on the American East Coast. The magazine’s public account says she came to value freedom there and brought home an empathy for other ways of life, and it quotes her linking the Statue of Liberty with “the most positive side of the USA.”

She finished school in Hofheim. In 2002 she took the Abitur at the Main-Taunus-Schule, with a grade of 1.6. That April, with the examinations still ahead, she told the taz that she thought of herself as a pupil and wanted to study economics or politics.

First university degree

After the Abitur she began social science at the Humboldt University of Berlin; Munzinger describes the course as sociology. She later said that after several semesters a campus university could not be combined with a seat in the Bundestag, so she moved to the distance-learning FernUniversität in Hagen, where she could set her own timetable. She chose political and organizational science because she was interested in political science together with sociology, history and related fields.

From 2003 to 2008 she completed a Bachelor of Arts there, alongside the mandate. Parliamentary biographies call the degree political science; the Hagen student magazine and the Federal Foreign Office describe the subject as political and organizational science. In early 2009 she told SprachRohr that the bachelor’s had been awarded about a year earlier. Graduate study, including a doctorate in political science, came only after that first Bundestag term.

First term in the Bundestag (2002–2009)

Election at nineteen

In the federal election of 22 September 2002, Anna Lührmann won a seat in the 15th Bundestag for Alliance 90/The Greens from fifth place on the party’s Hesse state list, behind Antje Vollmer, Joschka Fischer, Margareta Wolf and Matthias Berninger. Omid Nouripour, then active in the Hessian Green Youth, said the state returning officer had confirmed the result.

Anna Lührmann receives her Bundestag identification at the Reichstag building in Berlin on 24 September 2002.

Born on 14 June 1983, she was 19. Der Spiegel reported that she would take her seat as the youngest member the Bundestag had ever had. The Hessian Green floor leader Tarek Al-Wazir hoped the result would end talk of the Greens as a one-generation party; counting from Fischer, he said, she already represented a fourth. A BBC profile that November called her the youngest MP in Germany and in Europe. Claudia Roth told the BBC, “We have the youngest elected member of any parliament in Europe,” and said young people were making policy, not only being discussed.

Lührmann said she had not wanted merely to grumble and hoped to “bring a young perspective.” The same report quoted a man who thought “some years of experience, some studies and some more basic work would be helpful before getting into parliament,” and a woman who wanted more young people in politics. The BBC noted that list seats let little-known candidates enter if their party’s second-vote share is high enough. She later said she had chosen the Bundestag “because that is where one can shape the most,” and that Hesse’s minimum age of 21 would have barred her from the state parliament. In March 2003 she told the Süddeutsche Zeitung she had first refused a list place, then accepted it as a chance for her generation; fears of not being taken seriously, of being overstretched, or of being kept off European affairs had, she said, not come true.

Committees and parliamentary work

Her Bundestag biography, based on her own account, lists the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union from 2002 to 2004 and the Budget Committee from 2004. In early 2003 the Süddeutsche Zeitung described a committee session with Commissioners Michaele Schreyer and Günter Verheugen on enlargement, and a Green paper on the European Convention that the parliamentary group adopted unchanged. She also spoke on pensions and fairness between generations, saying little had been won beyond making a commission consider the issue.

On the Budget Committee she sat with much older members. Herbert Frankenhauser of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria later said he first took her for a trainee in the wrong chair, that she needed time to find her footing “as everyone does,” and that respect came afterwards. Der Spiegel reported pensioners’ letters after she argued that older people should forgo higher benefits for the young: she had achieved nothing, lived off the state, and MPs should face a higher minimum age. Favouring tuition fees, against her party’s defence of a free first degree, brought complaints from students; she later dropped the position, citing fees of 500 euros a semester in Hesse.

She began social sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin, then, after attendance rules clashed with sitting weeks, moved to the FernUniversität in Hagen, completing a bachelor’s in political science from 2003 to 2008 with a thesis on the United Nations and Darfur. In 2005 the Hessian Greens placed her third on the state list, adopted on 2 July, and she returned for the 16th Bundestag, still on the Budget Committee and now in opposition. Der Tagesspiegel again called her the youngest member, “das Küken,” against Otto Schily, 73, the oldest. She and her staff tabled about 150 amendments to the 2006 draft budget. She said the opposition had obtained more climate spending; Frankenhauser called that volume of amendments normal, described her as “sehr insistierend,” and said she had sometimes almost been annoying. On 23 November 2006 she argued that the coalition’s plan for a partial sale of Deutsche Bahn contradicted itself on whether the rail network would remain federal property, and pressed for separating network and operations.

Leaving parliament

She did not stand again in 2009. That July she told Die Welt that she had resolved in 2002 to serve at most two terms, even though colleagues asked whether she was foolish to bind herself, because she wanted experience outside professional politics. The immediate move was to Sudan: her husband, Rainer Eberle, was German ambassador there, and she was going to Khartoum with their one-year-old daughter to begin a master’s degree in gender and peace studies at a women’s university and to seek work with the United Nations or a non-governmental organisation. In her farewell speech she described Budget Committee members as guardians of taxpayers’ money — “Wächter der Steuergelder” — and closed with the line, “Who knows, perhaps one day I will stand here again.”

International work and the doctorate

Sudan and the United Nations

After the 2009 election Lührmann moved to Khartoum. From 2009 to 2011 she took a master's degree in Gender and Peace Studies at Ahfad University for Women, on Arda Street in Omdurman. Ahfad University College for Women opened in 1966, gained degree-awarding powers in 1984 and university status in 1995. She finished in April 2011 and told Spiegel that Ahfad, with about 5,000 students, was one of Africa's largest women's universities and that debate there was more open than many people she knew in Germany had expected.

Her thesis examined Sudan's April 2010 elections—she described them as the first in more than twenty years—and asked how far they had affected democratization. Research included an internship at the United Nations Development Programme that turned into a staff job. From 2010 to 2011 she advised on elections and parliaments in Sudan. With a Sudanese partner organization she ran workshops for members of newly constituted state legislatures, many of them first-time deputies, on parliamentary functions, oversight of government and the budget. The sessions were held in northern state capitals, including Dongola, and included meetings with women members; Spiegel reported a statutory quota of at least one quarter women. She later wrote that her 2009–2011 stay included work as a consultant on a UNDP electoral-assistance project.

She returned to Berlin at the end of June 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she advised UNDP's Democratic Governance Group on youth participation. She was lead author of Enhancing Youth Political Participation throughout the Electoral Cycle: A Good Practice Guide (January 2013), which Aleida Ferreyra managed and edited. A desk review, interviews, a UNDP meeting in Cairo in February 2012 and the UNDP/UN-Habitat Youth 21 meeting in Nairobi that March produced 21 entry points, from the legal framework through the pre-electoral, electoral and post-electoral stages, with a warning against one-off or token measures.

Humboldt University

From 2011 to 2015, at the Humboldt University of Berlin, she completed a Master of Arts in Research Training in Social Sciences and a doctorate in political science on democracy promotion. A 2016 working paper acknowledges doctoral funding from the university and the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

The 2015 dissertation is titled UN Electoral Assistance: Enhancing Democratization or Legitimizing Authoritarian Rule? The published argument is in "United Nations electoral assistance: More than a fig leaf?", online in the International Political Science Review in January 2018 and in the 2019 volume, and in the 2016 paper "UN Electoral Assistance: Does it Matter for Election Management?".

That paper defines United Nations electoral assistance as technical, financial and logistical support, as distinct from observation. It calculates that between August 2007 and December 2014 the UN assisted 37 percent of all elections and half of those outside established democracies. An original dataset, Varieties of Democracy indicators and Heckman treatment-effect models for 217 elections outside established democracies associate UN assistance with better election management on average, while 42 percent of the UN-supported elections in the study were not free and fair on the V-Dem coding used. Cases include Sudan in 2010, when she was in the country, and Libya in 2012, where she did fieldwork in July and October 2012 and January 2013.

The journal article compares Sudan (2010), Nigeria (2011) and Libya (2012). It finds that assistance improved election quality where elites treated credibility as a priority—in Nigeria, and in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi—and that a medium-term democratizing effect was plausible in Nigeria. Where elites restricted competition, as under President Omar al-Bashir, in power since the 1989 coup, such effects were unlikely and UN involvement could legitimize authoritarian practice. On Sudan, the working paper notes that authorities set aside internationally supplied tabulation procedures, that European Union observers called the count untrustworthy and the results untraceable, and that donors channelled $84.2 million through a UNDP basket fund, with the UN Mission in Sudan estimating a further $55 million in technical and logistical support. A 2018 V-Dem Institute brief argued that providers should apply stricter political conditions—opposition repression, censorship, a record of manipulation—and stay less visible where fraud is likely.

Democracy research at the V-Dem Institute

Roles in Gothenburg

From 2015 to 2021 Anna Lührmann worked at the V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) at the University of Gothenburg. The institute is the headquarters of an international project that measures democracy with expert-coded indicators and publishes the V-Dem democracy indices; its 2020 dataset contained about 28 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2019, based on more than 3,000 country experts. Her Bundestag biography lists a postdoctoral appointment from 2015 to 2018, the deputy directorship from 2018 to 2020, and a junior professorship (Juniorprofessorin) from 2018 to 2021. In 2020 she was appointed Docent, a Swedish qualification for research judged equivalent to a second dissertation. Staffan I. Lindberg was a principal investigator of the project in which she held those posts.

Measuring regimes and autocratization

With Marcus Tannenberg and Lindberg, Lührmann published Regimes of the World in Politics and Governance in 2018, sorting almost all countries from 1900 to 2016 into closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies according to how elections and liberal constraints worked in practice, not merely whether multiparty rules existed on paper. Bayesian highest-posterior-density intervals mark cases known with high certainty separately from those given only upper or lower bounds. The 2017 working-paper version reported disagreement with other datasets in 7–12 percent of cases and, where they differed, more often treated severe electoral manipulation and restricted political freedoms as electoral autocracy.

In Democratization in 2019, Lührmann and Lindberg defined autocratization as a substantial de facto decline in the core requirements of electoral democracy and mapped episodes from 1900 onward. By analogy with Samuel P. Huntington's waves of democratization, they described three waves of autocratization, the latest starting in 1994, and argued that it mainly hit democracies through gradual setbacks behind a legal façade. They also wrote that the declines were still relatively mild and that the global share of democracies remained near its historic high, so that “panic is not warranted.”

Related papers applied the same data to narrower institutions. With Kyle L. Marquardt and Valeriya Mechkova, Lührmann introduced indices of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal accountability—constraints from citizens, from other state institutions, and from media and civil society—in the American Political Science Review in 2020, covering 1900 to the present. A 2018 working paper with Kelly McMann and Carolien van Ham, using OECD democracy aid and V-Dem scores for 120 countries from 2002 to 2012, argued that aid was more effective when it did not threaten regime survival and matched a country's specific democratic deficits. With Bryan Rooney, in Comparative Politics in 2021, she found that among 60 democracies from 1974 to 2016 a state of emergency was associated with a 75 percent higher likelihood of democratic erosion. She later co-authored the 2022 Electoral Studies validation of the Varieties of Party Identity and Organization dataset (V-Party), an expert survey of party organization and positions that the institute's 2020 report, which she coordinated, had already described as forthcoming.

Reports and scholarly reception

Lührmann was lead author and coordinator of the annual democracy reports for 2017 (Democracy at Dusk?), 2018 (Democracy for All?), and 2019 (Democracy Facing Global Challenges), and coordinator, co-editor, and first-listed author of the 2020 report Autocratization Surges – Resistance Grows. The 2017 report said global averages were still close to their highest recorded levels and that any recent world decline was slight and not statistically significant, even as some countries had fallen sharply. The 2018 edition, which also measured exclusion by gender, social group, and socio-economic status, stated that autocratization affected about 2.5 billion people and that, for the first time since 1979, countries backsliding and countries advancing were equal in number, at 24 each. In 2019 the institute counted 24 countries as severely affected, including Brazil, India, the United States, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, and said the population in autocratizing countries had risen from 415 million in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2018, while 99 countries (55 percent) remained democracies and liberal democracies had fallen from 44 in 2008 to 39 in 2018. The 2020 report said autocracies were a majority for the first time since 2001—92 countries, home to 54 percent of the world population—and that about 2.6 billion people lived in autocratizing countries; it classified Hungary as an electoral authoritarian regime, described India as close to losing democratic status, and recorded pro-democracy mass protests in 44 percent of countries in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2009.

The third-wave article prompted a direct debate in Democratization. Svend-Erik Skaaning argued in 2020 that the episode rules were not symmetric for autocratization and democratization and that defining a wave by the relative number of upturns and downturns departed from the usual focus on net change. On a more conventional reading of the electoral-democracy index, he wrote, the global average began to fall only in 2013 and the dip was not yet statistically significant; using the authors' own episodes, autocratizations outnumbered democratizations only from 2014. Luca Tomini's 2021 note, “Don't think of a wave!”, held that the wave metaphor had limited analytical value, and that a purely negative definition of autocratization together with numeric thresholds risked false positives, even though the phenomenon itself was worth studying. Vanessa A. Boese, Lindberg, and Lührmann replied that, since 1994, autocratization had substantially reduced the civil liberties and political rights of one third of the world's population, and that the Episodes of Regime Transformation dataset kept Huntington's wave concept while allowing waves to overlap. They presented the exchange as a productive debate rather than a deadlock.

Return to the Bundestag in 2021

Candidacy and election

At the federal election of 26 September 2021, Anna Lührmann stood for Alliance 90/The Greens in Hesse. The state's nomination register listed her as the Green candidate in constituency 178, Rheingau-Taunus – Limburg — a political scientist living in Hofheim am Taunus — and as number five on the Hesse state list, after Bettina Hoffmann, Omid Nouripour, Kordula Schulz-Asche and Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn.

She did not win a direct mandate. Klaus-Peter Willsch of the Christian Democratic Union took the constituency with 51,318 first votes (30.2 percent). The Social Democratic Party candidate was second, on 28.5 percent, and the Greens received 24,418 first votes (14.4 percent), with 14.9 percent of the constituency second vote; turnout was 78.1 percent.

In Hesse the Greens won 15.8 percent of the second vote (521,411 votes), up from 9.7 percent in 2017, and nine of the Land's 50 seats in the Bundestag: Nouripour's direct mandate in Frankfurt am Main II and eight list seats. Lührmann, fifth on the list, was one of those eight, so she entered the 20th Bundestag by the list rather than as the member for Rheingau-Taunus – Limburg. The new parliament held its constitutive sitting on 26 October 2021.

Appointment under Baerbock

On 2 December 2021, as the government was being formed, Der Spiegel reported that designated foreign minister Annalena Baerbock would name Tobias Lindner and Katja Keul ministers of state at the Federal Foreign Office, with the third post intended for Lührmann. A party spokeswoman confirmed the names. Franziska Brantner, who had been discussed for the Foreign Office, was instead to become a parliamentary state secretary under Robert Habeck at the economy ministry. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported the same day that Lührmann was to be Staatsministerin für Europa.

Michael Roth of the SPD said in Paris on 6 December that he was two days from the end of his term as Staatsminister für Europa, which he dated from December 2013.

On 8 December the Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor. After Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed the ministers, Bundestag President Bärbel Bas announced the parliamentary state secretaries, naming for the Foreign Office Staatsministerin Katja Keul, Staatsminister Dr. Tobias Lindner and Staatsministerin Anna Lührmann, all from the Greens. At the handover that day, Baerbock formally introduced the three as ministers of state. Lührmann wrote that Baerbock had appointed her Staatsministerin für Europa.

The Bundestag notice used the rank Staatsministerin and gave no subject title. Reporting before the appointment, and her statement on the day, described the brief as Europe, the portfolio Roth was leaving. A Foreign Office profile datelined 8 December 2021, but later revised — it refers to a Franco-German commissioner named in May 2025 — calls the office she held from that date Staatsministerin für Europa und Klima, a wording absent from the December 2021 appointment notices.

Minister of State for Europe and Climate

On 8 December 2021, the day Annalena Baerbock became foreign minister, she introduced Anna Lührmann, Katja Keul and Tobias Lindner as ministers of state at the Federal Foreign Office. Alliance 90/The Greens had named her for that post days earlier, after sending Europe specialist Franziska Brantner to the economy ministry. The Foreign Office dates her as Staatsministerin für Europa und Klima — Minister of State for Europe and Climate — from 8 December 2021; the full title was in official use by June 2022, while the first personnel reports described mainly a Europe brief. She remained through the cabinet of Olaf Scholz and its caretaker months, until Friedrich Merz took office on 6 May 2025.

European affairs and enlargement

Germany was represented at the European Union General Affairs Council by Lührmann. She was deputy head of the delegation Scholz led to the Council of Europe summit in Reykjavik on 16–17 May 2023, which, after Russia's exclusion, agreed a register of damage from the war against Ukraine.

Her enlargement line combined a case for widening the Union with a refusal to relax entry rules. In June 2022 she said the European Council should address prospects for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia and the overdue opening of talks with North Macedonia and Albania, and that keeping the promise to the Western Balkans mattered more to Berlin than any substitute political community. Asked whether the Russian threat justified leniency toward Poland and Hungary, she said there were "no discounts on the rule of law". She called unanimity a brake on foreign policy, and noted that the Lisbon Treaty's passerelle clause itself needs unanimity to be used.

In January 2023 she and French Europe minister Laurence Boone asked twelve independent experts how an EU of more than 30 members could still decide. On 19 September their report, Sailing on High Seas – Reforming and Enlarging the EU for the 21st Century, was given to member states beside the General Affairs Council. Lührmann said reforms belonged in the next legislative term, that more majority voting in foreign policy needed no treaty change, and that "EU enlargement and EU reforms must go hand in hand." The Foreign Office said the paper was not a government position. Le Monde reported that she and Boone would stress it bound neither Paris nor Berlin, and described France and Germany as trying to steer a split debate in which some capitals feared that tying enlargement to reform could delay accession. European Conservatives and Reformists MEP Cristian Terheș called the push by large states to drop the veto a "colonial attitude" toward smaller ones.

From Odesa in June 2024, travelling with Poland's Europe minister, she called the imminent opening of accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova historic, praised both governments' will to reform, and still expected those reforms to be pursued "with full determination". In Tbilisi in October 2023 she told Civil.ge it was "crystal clear that Georgia belongs to the EU family", but that membership required reforms across institutions, not a commitment held by one government — the EU, she said, citing Baerbock, admits countries, not governments.

Climate diplomacy

Before COP27 in Egypt she set three aims in an October 2022 interview: restoring trust in multilateral talks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, making the meeting a "COP of solidarity" for the poorest countries, and keeping promises to cut greenhouse gases. She called Just Energy Transition Partnerships "game-changing": a partnership with South Africa already existed, and others, including with Indonesia, were expected, with partners speeding a coal phase-out and G7 states supplying finance and know-how. She added that the EU negotiates for all 27 members and that Berlin would press for an ambitious mandate, including on loss and damage.

In December 2023, as COP28 opened in Dubai, the government adopted its first Strategy on Climate Foreign Policy, a joint text of the Foreign Office and the ministries for economic affairs and climate action, development, and the environment, aligned with the Paris Agreement and a 1.5°C pathway. The statements published with it came from Baerbock, Robert Habeck, Svenja Schulze and Steffi Lemke.

Franco-German cooperation

The Europe minister is also the federal government's commissioner for Franco-German cooperation. The Foreign Office records her successor, Gunther Krichbaum, in that function from 28 May 2025. He had become minister of state for Europe on 6 May.

Anna Lührmann and Laurence Boone at a Council of Ministers table in Brussels in September 2023, with German, French and EU flags behind them.

Her French counterpart for much of the term was Boone, with whom she commissioned that report and presented it in Brussels. The Franco-German Youth Office's Generation Europa network, meeting in Dresden on 4 July 2023, gave its first recommendations on climate, health, industry, memory and culture to Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to Lührmann and to French ambassador François Delattre.

End of the Scholz government

The coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party broke on 6 November 2024, when Scholz dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner for what he called a breach of trust. The FDP withdrew its other ministers, and Scholz carried on with the Greens in a minority. On 16 December the Bundestag denied him confidence, 207 votes to 394 with 116 abstentions, short of the 367 required; he asked the president to dissolve parliament, with the election set for 23 February 2025. Four days later Der Spiegel reported that Lührmann had criticised a "European-policy speechlessness" in the Chancellery and had said the government had a difficult standing in Brussels.

At that election, turnout was 82.5 percent. The CDU took 22.6 percent of second votes, the AfD 20.8, the SPD 16.4 and the Greens 11.6; the FDP, on 4.3 percent, left parliament. The new Bundestag met on 25 March 2025, after which Scholz and his ministers, Lührmann included, remained only as a caretaker government. On 6 May the Bundestag elected Merz on a second ballot, 325 of 618 votes, after he had received 310 that morning and missed the majority. Krichbaum, of the Christian Democratic Union, has been Minister of State for Europe since that day; the published title no longer includes climate.

Political positions

Europe, democracy and security

With Staffan I. Lindberg and V-Dem Institute data, Lührmann described a third wave of autocratization since the mid-1990s as gradual legal erosion inside democracies, not coups. As minister she applied that test to enlargement. A wider European Union would remove “grey zones,” she told the Centrum für europäische Politik, but only if the rule of law, democracy and press freedom held, with faster reformers joining first. The Growth Plan for the Western Balkans could give benefits before membership; pressure from Russia was no reason to drop the criteria.

In June 2022 she linked prospects for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, talks with North Macedonia and Albania, and institutional reform. Russia’s attack was also an attack on the rule of law, so there were “no discounts” for Poland or Hungary. Unanimity in the Common Foreign and Security Policy, she said, slowed decisions—Hungary had delayed the oil embargo—and the Treaty of Lisbon passerelle could allow qualified majority in defined areas, though scrapping the veto itself required unanimity. In May 2023 Germany and eight partners launched a Group of Friends to use those treaty tools. She wanted Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union and the conditionality regulation, used to freeze Hungarian funds, applied sooner: solidarity was “not a one-way street.”

She backed sanctions, aid and weapons for Ukraine, work with France on EU defence and NATO’s European pillar, and candidate status as a stabilizer. In July 2023 she wrote that if Putin stopped fighting the war would end, but if Ukraine stopped, Ukraine would end. In October 2024 she co-signed a statement that violations in Georgia’s elections betrayed Georgians’ European aspirations and that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did not speak for the EU.

Climate and energy

In March 2022 she told the Handelsblatt that “climate policy is security policy”: renewables and efficiency bought energy independence and EU “strategic sovereignty.” Germany should copy France’s diversification of suppliers, not only its nuclear fleet, and speed green hydrogen. In July she said Germany would be climate-neutral in 2045, called gas a short bridge rather than a green fuel, and described extra coal as a brief, regrettable result of leaving Russian supply. She cited Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s assurance that coal would not change the climate targets, and said Fit for 55 and REPowerEU could still meet the 2030 goal.

On nuclear power she accepted being outvoted. In January 2022 she told AFP that Germany could “agree to disagree” with France on a green label in the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities: uranium is imported, and waste means nuclear is not sustainable. Germany was not in the majority. In July she said a renewable system without nuclear was working, citing French plants offline for lack of cooling water. The dispute was with Paris and pro-nuclear governments, not a public split inside the coalition. The December 2023 climate-foreign-policy strategy, issued while she held the climate brief, aligned Germany with the Paris Agreement and 1.5 °C and treated climate as security policy; the launch quoted Annalena Baerbock and other ministers, not her.

Digital policy

After May 2025 her recorded Bundestag speeches treated digitalization as support for democratic debate and for less dependence on non-European suppliers. On 25 September 2025 she told Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger that sovereignty and safer, sustainable digitalization were headings until the budget paid for them—“the budget is policy cast in numbers.” Algorithms run by U.S. firms close to Donald Trump, or by firms close to the Chinese government, were shaping opinion. She wanted funds for open-source European services, staff for the Digital Services Act—fewer than half the posts were filled—and climate-neutral data centres. Alternative for Germany interjectors called enforcement censorship.

On 11 November 2025 she co-sponsored an Alliance 90/The Greens motion demanding an inventory of dependencies, money for openDesk, openCode and the Centre for Digital Sovereignty, and “public money, public code.” Sovereignty meant choice of supplier, not isolation; non-European control of cloud, operating systems and artificial intelligence was a risk to capacity, rights and peace.

On 19 December 2025, in an AfD debate demanding repeal of the Act, she said Elon Musk’s X, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms and the Chinese state behind TikTok decided what Germans see, so speech was not equal. The rules were to end a “Wild West” of the strongest and richest. She tied the sitting to a €120 million Commission penalty on X and White House opposition, called the AfD an agent of foreign powers, and said the Act had fallen short only because it was not applied consistently. She proposed bridging algorithms, press-code labels and optional time limits; the AfD called that censorship, and she called it equal voice.

Parliament and party leadership after 2025

The 2025 election and committee work

On 14 December 2024, at a state convention in Marburg, Alliance 90/The Greens in Hesse chose their list for the snap 2025 German federal election of 23 February 2025. About 1,100 members gave Lührmann, then a Bundestag member and minister of state, the first place, which the party reserves for a woman; she had no opponent and received 92.7 percent. Omid Nouripour was placed second, with 95.91 percent.

She also stood in constituency 180, Main-Taunus, where she took 14.0 percent of the first votes (23,001), down 2.9 points from 2021, and finished third. Norbert Altenkamp of the CDU won the seat with 39.8 percent; Nancy Faeser of the SPD was second with 17.8 percent. Statewide the Greens received 12.6 percent of the second votes (451,510), 3.2 points below 2021. The Hesse returning officer recorded her as elected on the state list in first place, one of seven Green members returned on that list rather than by a constituency plurality. The 21st Bundestag met for its opening session on 25 March 2025.

She is a full member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization (Ausschuss für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung). The committee was constituted on 21 May 2025, with Hansjörg Durz of the CDU/CSU in the chair, and the Bundestag named her among its full Green members. On 25 June 2025 the Greens nominated her for deputy chair, a post the factions had assigned to them. A secret ballot gave her 21 votes in favour, three against and five abstentions, and she accepted. The Bundestag biography also lists her as a substitute on the European Union affairs and interior committees, states that the seat comes from the Hessian state list, and gives a constituency office in Hofheim am Taunus.

Hessian Green leadership

On 15 March 2025 a state congress at the Lokschuppen in Marburg elected Lührmann and Julia Frank as Landesvorsitzende. Lührmann, again unopposed for the place reserved for a woman, received 533 of 606 votes, just under 88 percent. Frank, a Frankfurt city councillor, won the second place with 65.9 percent against Tobias Dondelinger of Offenbach, who received 30.2 percent; the party reported the shares as 87.95 and 65.85 percent.

The previous executive had resigned after co-chair Kathrin Anders criticised the handling of allegations about trips to Israel and the United States by co-chair Andreas Ewald. A day before the congress, the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office said preliminary inquiries had found no initial suspicion against him. Lührmann said the party would argue, including in opposition, for climate protection, security and serious budget policy; the association reported 13,177 members, about 1,500 of whom had joined since the start of 2025, and said the chairs would lead the 2026 municipal campaign. The Bundestag biography records her as Landesvorsitzende since March 2025.

Honours

By a decree of 26 January 2026, for the promotions of the second half of 2025, President Emmanuel Macron named Lührmann a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. The list issued by the Grande Chancellerie enters her among the German nominees for that grade, described as a member of parliament.

François Delattre and Anna Lührmann at the Légion d'honneur ceremony in Berlin.

On 18 July 2026 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the decoration recognised her work on cooperation with France. It pointed to her time as minister of state for Europe and federal commissioner for Franco-German cooperation, from 2021 to 2025: the debate on reform of the European Union, a Franco-German expert group she had initiated, and a role in founding the young-talent network Generation Europa. She received the insignia at the French embassy in Berlin. The Taunus-Nachrichten named ambassador François Delattre and noted that Laurence Boone, her former French counterpart, was there. Lührmann called the honour extraordinary, saying that Franco-German friendship "does not live from treaties alone, but from the people who shape it in everyday life."

Personal life

Family

The Bundestag biography, based on Lührmann’s own statements, records that she was born on 14 June 1983 in Lich, in central Hesse, and describes her as married, without naming a spouse or children. The Frankfurter Rundschau identified her husband as the diplomat Rainer Eberle, 28 years her senior and then Germany’s ambassador in Sudan, and reported that the couple had a one-year-old daughter when she left parliament to join him. In July 2011 she told Der Spiegel that she had spent about two years in Khartoum with her husband, the German ambassador, and their two-year-old daughter. A later Rundschau profile said Eberle held that post during her master’s studies, that she returned to Berlin in 2011, and that she attended a Fridays for Future demonstration in Gothenburg with her then eleven-year-old daughter. The profile also said she grew up in Kassel and Hofheim am Taunus, still kept a home in Hofheim, and had a second residence in Berlin. The Bundestag lists her constituency office at Wilhelmstraße 6 in Hofheim, in the Main-Taunus-Kreis.

Later accounts diverged from the parliamentary entry. In an interview with Die Tageszeitung published on 11 September 2025, Lührmann confirmed a marriage to a man and a daughter with him, and said she and her former husband had been separated for two years. She said that since January 2025 she had been in a relationship with a woman who has two children from a previous marriage, described the household as a patchwork family, and said publicly that she is a lesbian. The Bundestag biography still listed her as married.

Memberships and honorary offices

That biography lists membership of the Europa-Union Deutschland, BUND (Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland), the cooperative Pro regionale energie eG, Wir sind mehr e.V. in Limburg an der Lahn, and Frauen helfen Frauen Main-Taunus Kreis e.V. Under the parliament’s disclosure rules it also lists unpaid posts: chair of the supervisory board of the Zentrum für Internationale Friedenseinsätze (ZIF) gGmbH in Berlin; member of the foundation board of the Bundesstiftung Bauakademie; member of the advisory board of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg; and member of the assembly of curators of the Institute for European Politics.

ZIF reported on 28 February 2022 that Lührmann, then Minister of State for Europe and Climate at the Federal Foreign Office, had become chair of its supervisory board, succeeding Michael Roth. Its later list of the board for the 21st legislative period names Florian Hahn as chair and does not include her.