Bärbel Kofler

Bärbel Kofler (born 24 May 1967 in Freilassing) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and a member of the Bundestag from Bavaria. She entered the Bundestag on 21 September 2004, succeeding the deceased member Hans Büttner of Ingolstadt, on the Bavarian SPD state list. She has remained a member since 2004, and in the 21st Bundestag she again sits via the Bavarian state list for constituency 224, Traunstein. Since December 2021 she has been Parliamentary State Secretary to the federal minister for economic cooperation and development.

She finished Realschule in Bad Reichenhall in 1983, trained as a bank clerk from 1983 to 1986 and worked as a bank employee until 1987, then earned a Fachhochschulreife in Traunstein in 1987 on the second-chance route. She studied computer science at the Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences and linguistics, Slavic studies and Romance studies at the University of Salzburg, and received a doctorate in 1998. Before entering parliament she worked for a Salzburg travel company from 1996 to 1999, as a lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service in Moscow from 1999 to 2001, as a freelance language teacher from 2001 to 2002, and as a lecturer at the civilian-service school in Geretsried from 2002 to 2004. She joined the SPD in 1991.

On 24 February 2016 the federal cabinet appointed her Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Assistance, on a proposal by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, after Christoph Strässer resigned on 22 February. She took up the post at the Federal Foreign Office on 1 March 2016 and held it until December 2021. In the 15th Bundestag she was a full member of the finance committee and of the committee on human rights and humanitarian aid. The Bundestag's current biography also records membership of the development, environment, finance and foreign-affairs committees, and her role as the SPD parliamentary group's spokesperson on development policy from 2013 to 2016.

In the 2025 Bundestag election she received 20,845 first votes (12.1 percent) in Traunstein, behind Siegfried Walch of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria on 46.9 percent and Christoph Birghan of the Alternative for Germany on 18.0 percent; the SPD's second-vote share in the constituency was 9.8 percent. When Reem Alabali-Radovan succeeded Svenja Schulze as development minister on 7 May 2025, the ministry stated that Kofler remained parliamentary state secretary. In the 21st Bundestag she is a deputy member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly and is not listed as a member of a standing committee.

Early life and education

Family background and schooling

Bärbel Kofler was born on 24 May 1967 in Freilassing, a town in the district of Berchtesgadener Land. She has called that birthplace a railway town shaped for generations by the railway, and has described herself as the daughter of a railway worker. The Munzinger biographical archive states that her father was a railwayman active in a trade union and her mother a factory worker. In a portrait for the Oberbayerisches Volksblatt, which identified her as 50, she said she had grown up in a "classic working-class family" and had been clear that only education would change her chances. She has also written that political questions mattered in her parents' home and awakened an early interest in politics.

Her schools were in and around Freilassing. From 1973 to 1977 she attended the Grundschule in Feldkirchen, and from 1977 to 1979 the Hauptschule in Mitterfelden, in the municipality of Ainring. In 1979 she transferred to the Realschule St. Zeno in Bad Reichenhall, which she left in 1983 with the Mittlere Reife, the intermediate school-leaving certificate. The same school later attributed a jump in its roll, from 324 girls in 2001 to 522 in 2004, mainly to Bavaria's introduction of the six-grade Realschule. The school, founded in 1852 as a Höhere Töchterschule by the Englische Fräulein, the congregation of Mary Ward, was still girls-only while she was a pupil. The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising became its sponsor in 1996, and boys were first admitted in the 2013/14 school year; the Bavarian education ministry lists today's Erzbischöfliche Maria-Ward-Realschule St. Zeno as a state-recognized private Realschule.

Bank apprenticeship and the second-chance qualification

After the Mittlere Reife she trained as a bank clerk (Bankkauffrau) at the Sparkasse Berchtesgadener Land. The development ministry dates that apprenticeship to 1983–1986. She has written that it ended in February 1986, that the training convinced her she would advance only through further education, and that she stayed on as a bank employee until the autumn of 1987 while, from February 1986, preparing by correspondence course for the Fachhochschulreife. In the summer of 1987 she passed that examination in Traunstein as an external candidate.

In Bavaria the second-chance route (zweiter Bildungsweg) is the set of programmes for people who gain a school qualification after ordinary schooling, or who did not obtain the certificate they wanted in the regular track. The Fachhochschulreife is not the Abitur. The state education ministry states that this certificate, as distinct from a subject-restricted variant, opens admission to all degree programmes at a Fachhochschule, a university of applied sciences. The development ministry's published chronology is the Mittlere Reife in 1983, the bank apprenticeship from 1983 to 1986, and the Fachhochschulreife by the second-chance route in 1987. The Bundestag biography lists her trained occupation as Bankkauffrau, records the Fachhochschulreife from that route, and names work as a bank employee among the jobs she held before parliament; the parliament notes that members' biographical entries rest on their own disclosures.

Academic research and professional work

Computer science at Rosenheim

In the winter semester of 1987 Bärbel Kofler began a degree in computer science at the Fachhochschule Rosenheim, a university of applied sciences in the Bavarian city of Rosenheim. During the course she spent a practical semester in 1990 at the University of Delaware in Newark. Munzinger states that she finished at the end of 1991 as a Diplom-Informatikerin. The Bundestag records the qualification as Diplom-Informatikerin (FH) and heads her biography with the occupations Bankkauffrau, Diplom-Informatikerin (FH) and Sprachwissenschaftlerin. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and a Bundestag biography preserved in the Internet Archive date the informatics course from 1987 to 1992. Her own curriculum vitae places the completion in December 1991 and does not mention the Delaware semester, which is recorded in the Munzinger biography.

Linguistics doctorate in Salzburg

From 1992 to 1996 she studied linguistics, Russian and Spanish at the University of Salzburg. She then continued there as a doctoral student and in 1998 was awarded a Dr. phil. The dissertation was a study of language policy and the language situation in the former Soviet Union and its successor states. Munzinger gives the title as Sprachpolitik und Sprachsituation in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion und deren Nachfolgestaaten. Ministry and parliamentary biographies treat the 1998 doctorate as the close of that Salzburg sequence and describe her as a promovierte Sprachwissenschaftlerin, a linguist with a doctorate. Her website dates the preceding course more narrowly, from the summer semester of 1992, and the doctoral programme itself to 1996–1998.

Employment before parliament

After her training as a bank clerk she worked as a bank employee, a spell the archived Bundestag biography places in 1986–1987, overlapping 1987, when the Rosenheim course began. From 1996 to 1999, overlapping the doctorate, she was employed by a tourism firm in Salzburg. From 1999 to 2001 she was a lecturer in Moscow for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). On her own website she describes that posting as two years at the technical university in Moscow, the Salzburg tourism job as part-time work alongside the doctorate, and the language teaching that followed as freelance work. Ministry and archived parliamentary timelines date the teaching to 2001–2002 and specify German as a foreign language and Russian. From 2002 to 2004 she was a lecturer (Dozentin) at the school for alternative civilian service (Zivildienstschule) in Geretsried. In the Bundestag's mandatory disclosure of pre-membership employment, that post is given as Dozentin at the Zivildienstschule Geretsried, the job she held before becoming a member in 2004.

Party and local politics

Entry into the SPD and party offices

Bärbel Kofler joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1991. The Bundestag biography that records the date notes that such entries rest on information supplied by the member.

In southeastern Upper Bavaria, the biographies published for the 17th, 18th and 19th electoral terms list her as chair of the SPD branch in Bad Reichenhall from 1996 to 2007 and as chair of the sub-district association in Berchtesgadener Land from 2001 to 2007. The same texts describe her as a member of the SPD executive for Upper Bavaria, the Bezirksvorstand. The 17th-term biography, preserved in a November 2013 archive, also listed membership of the SPD state executive in Bavaria. Biographies for the 18th and 19th terms no longer mentioned that state executive. They instead described her as deputy chair of the Bavarian SPD Landesgruppe, the grouping of the party's Bavarian members of the Bundestag.

On 6 May 2017 a district conference elected her a deputy chair of the SPD in Upper Bavaria with 69 percent of the vote, at the meeting that chose Florian Ritter to succeed Ewald Schurer as district chair. Delegates meeting in Rosenheim re-elected her on 30 June 2019 with 89 percent. The executive list later published by the SPD district of Upper Bavaria does not include her among its chairs or deputy chairs. In March 2018 the Oberbayerisches Volksblatt reported that she had again been elected deputy chair of the Landesgruppe, alongside Marianne Schieder, with Martin Burkert remaining chair.

Councils in Bad Reichenhall, Berchtesgadener Land and Traunstein

The profile maintained by Abgeordnetenwatch states that she was a city councillor in Bad Reichenhall from 2002 to 2006 and a district councillor in Berchtesgadener Land from 2002 to 2010. A disclosure printed with the archived 17th-term Bundestag biography gives October 2010 as the end of that Berchtesgadener Land seat. The current Bundestag biography records both roles only as past offices.

The next council seat was in the neighbouring district of Traunstein. On 22 November 2013 the SPD there adopted its list for the 2014 Kreistag election, with Sepp Konhäuser in first place and Kofler in fourth. The Bundestag biography states that she has been a member of the Traunstein district council since 2014. At the 2020 municipal election the SPD won 9.34 percent and seven of the 70 seats, four fewer than in the previous council; the Traunsteiner Tagblatt named Kofler among the seven Social Democrats returned. The paper reported a turnout of 60.72 percent among 143,654 eligible voters.

The following regular election of district councils in Bavaria was held on 8 March 2026. In Traunstein the official result records a turnout of 61.2 percent and lists Kofler, with 21,561 votes, among those elected. The SPD won six of the 70 seats. The largest groups were the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, with 24 seats, and the Free Voters, with 14; Alliance 90/The Greens took nine and the Alternative for Germany eight. The SPD's own list of its Kreistag group still names her as one of the six members.

Bundestag membership and elections

Succession to Hans Büttner and continuous membership

Bärbel Kofler entered the Bundestag on 21 September 2004, during the 15th electoral term, as successor to Hans Büttner on the Bavarian state list of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Büttner, an SPD deputy elected on that list and resident in Ingolstadt, died on 18 September 2004. The Bundestag's data handbook and the Bavarian state returning officer both date Kofler's succession to 21 September 2004.

She had already stood for the SPD in constituency 226, Traunstein, at the federal election of 22 September 2002, but she was not elected. In the state returning officer's final account of that election, closed as of 17 October 2002, she is recorded as the first successor still waiting on the SPD state list, not among the deputies returned. From the 2004 succession she has sat without a break through the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st electoral terms. Every return was by the Bavarian SPD Landesliste; she has not won a constituency seat. The Bundestag's biography records membership since 2004, a mandate taken on the Bavarian state list, and a candidacy in constituency 224, Traunstein. Her committee work, the federal human-rights commissionership and the office of parliamentary state secretary are treated separately.

List places and Traunstein first-vote results

The Traunstein constituency is made up of the districts of Berchtesgadener Land and Traunstein. In 2002, as constituency 226, it also included the Kirchweidach administrative community, in the district of Altötting. From the 2005 election it has been those two districts alone: number 226 in 2005, number 225 from 2009 through 2021, and number 224 in 2025.

Peter Ramsauer of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) held the direct mandate at each election from 2002 to 2021. Kofler's places on the SPD state list, and her first-vote results against him, are documented in the state and federal returning officers' reports.

In 2002 she received 32,948 first votes (20.0 percent). Ramsauer received 113,558 (69.0 percent). Turnout was 81.8 percent. In 2005 she stood in 18th place on the state list and took 33,582 first votes (21.7 percent) to Ramsauer's 99,041 (63.9 percent), with turnout at 77.7 percent; she entered on the list. In 2009, placed 16th and standing in the renumbered constituency 225, she received 21,406 first votes (15.2 percent) against Ramsauer's 76,741 (54.6 percent). Turnout was 69.5 percent.

The list place then moved to eighth for both 2013 and 2017. In 2013 she won 24,570 first votes (17.6 percent) to Ramsauer's 87,598 (62.6 percent), on a turnout of 68.4 percent. In 2017 the figures were 25,659 (16.1 percent) against Ramsauer's 80,056 (50.3 percent), with turnout of 77.0 percent; the state returning officer's register of candidates gives her list place as 8. For 2021 the SPD put her second on the Bavarian list. She received 27,644 first votes (17.0 percent) to Ramsauer's 59,555 (36.6 percent), and turnout was 78.5 percent. Second votes in the constituency split 31.5 percent for the CSU and 15.4 percent for the SPD.

The 2025 election and the 21st Bundestag

At the election of 23 February 2025 Kofler was again second on the Bavarian SPD list, behind Carsten Träger, and the SPD candidate in constituency 224. The federal returning officer's final result put turnout at 82.6 percent: 172,572 voters out of 209,020 people entitled to vote. Siegfried Walch (CSU) won the constituency with 80,507 first votes (46.9 percent). Dr. Christoph Birghan of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was second with 30,994 (18.0 percent). Kofler was third with 20,845 (12.1 percent), 4.9 percentage points below her 2021 share.

Second votes in the constituency went to the CSU with 66,829 (38.8 percent), the AfD with 34,619 (20.1 percent), Alliance 90/The Greens with 17,677 (10.3 percent) and the SPD with 16,925 (9.8 percent). The SPD second-vote share was 5.6 points lower than in 2021. In the federal returning officer's volume of preliminary results Kofler is listed among those elected, on Bavarian SPD list place 2, and is marked as re-elected, while also shown as a candidate in constituency 224. She sits in the 21st Bundestag by that state-list seat.

Committees, spokesperson roles and parliamentary groups

Standing committees across electoral terms

The current Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own information, states that Kofler sat on the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, the environment committee, the Finance Committee and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, without assigning each seat to an electoral term. Dated rolls fill in only part of that span. An October 2013 capture of the 17th-term list names her as an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, with Martin Gerster as substitute. On her own site she dates that ordinary seat from 2005 to February 2016.

The archived biography for the close of the 18th electoral term (2013–2017) records a single ordinary committee seat, on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Abgeordnetenwatch likewise records Foreign Affairs membership for 2013–2017 and for 2017–2021. In the 19th term the archived biography lists her as an ordinary member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and as a deputy member of the Joint Committee and of the Subcommittee on the United Nations, International Organizations and Globalization.

From December 2021 she was Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The biography for the 20th electoral term records that office and no ordinary or deputy committee seat. In the 21st Bundestag the same pattern holds: the current biography names no standing committee. The SPD parliamentary group records her, from 23 March 2026, as a deputy member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, which is also the only body listed under her other parliamentary memberships. As a state secretary she appears for the government rather than as an ordinary committee member. The human-rights commissionership of March 2016 to December 2021, and the development-ministry post itself, are treated in later sections.

Development-policy spokesperson and friendship groups

From 2013 to 2016 Kofler was the SPD Bundestag group's development-policy spokesperson. The group used that title in a January 2015 contribution in which she wrote that the year would decide what followed the Millennium Development Goals. Her website dates the spokesperson role more narrowly, from January 2014 to February 2016, ending with the move to the human-rights commissionership. A taz portrait of 24 February 2016 described her as having been the group's development spokesperson for two years.

She also chaired the Bundestag's German-Ukrainian parliamentary friendship group. A June 2009 Bundestag list, from the 16th electoral term, names Dr. Bärbel Kofler (SPD) as chair, with deputies from the other parliamentary groups, among them Hans Michelbach of the CDU/CSU. An April 2011 list, from the 17th term, again names her as chair. On 18 December 2013, in the fifth sitting of the 18th Bundestag, she told the chamber that she had held the chair for eight years and, speaking for the group, expressed respect for demonstrators in Kyiv who wanted Ukraine to have a European perspective.

The Parliamentary Left and coalition talks

The Parlamentarische Linke, an organized current inside the SPD Bundestag group, published a members' page that included Kofler. Copies archived on 18 February 2016, 2 August 2021 and 21 April 2022 all list Dr. Bärbel Kofler. The live site no longer carries that full roster. In the February 2016 portrait, the taz wrote that she was counted as part of the left wing of the SPD.

She took part in at least two rounds of coalition talks on the foreign-policy and development side. A working-group list dated 25 January 2018 and circulated by the German Armed Forces Association places her, for the CDU/CSU–SPD negotiations, on the SPD side of the group on foreign affairs, development cooperation, defence and human rights, with Sigmar Gabriel, Rolf Mützenich, Niels Annen, Gabi Weber, Fritz Felgentreu or Thomas Hitschler, and Michelle Müntefering. For the 2021 negotiations among the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party, an SPD assignment paper of 21 October 2021 puts her in working group 20, on foreign policy, security, defence, development and human rights, together with Heiko Maas, Siemtje Möller, Dietmar Nietan, Gabriela Heinrich and Nils Schmid.

Commissioner for human rights and humanitarian assistance

Appointment after Christoph Strässer's resignation

On 24 February 2016 Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed Kofler at the Federal Foreign Office after the cabinet, on his proposal, had appointed the Social Democratic Party member of the Bundestag as Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Assistance (Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Menschenrechtspolitik und humanitäre Hilfe). She was to take office on 1 March. She succeeded Christoph Strässer, who had announced his resignation on 22 February. Steinmeier said he accepted it only with a heavy heart and that Strässer wanted to give more time again to the Bundestag and to Münster.

Strässer, commissioner since 2014, wrote to Steinmeier — and published the letter on Facebook — that the demands of the post, especially humanitarian assistance, could no longer be combined satisfactorily with a parliamentary mandate, and that he would leave at the end of February. Der Spiegel reported that, in a separate letter to SPD members in Münster, he also said decisions then taking shape on refugee policy, in particular Asylum Package II, were hard to reconcile with his positions and his credibility, and that he meant to vote against the package.

Steinmeier called her a Kämpfernatur and, citing United Nations figures, said about 60 million people were displaced, more than at any time since the Second World War. Kofler called the appointment confirmation of her work for human rights and for people in a weaker position. She said she would press women's, children's and workers' rights and refugee protection, watch the action plan on business and human rights, and represent the government at the 31st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. She was then the SPD group's development-policy spokesperson.

Mandate, priorities and international representation

The office was created in November 1998 and sits at the Foreign Office. The commissioner follows human-rights and humanitarian policy, proposes lines to the foreign minister, and works with other ministries, the Bundestag, the Länder, humanitarian coordinators, foundations and non-governmental organizations, and with the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Council of Europe and the United Nations. The holder leads Germany's delegation to the Human Rights Council; the Foreign Office describes the post as an interface between government and civil society.

On Human Rights Day 2016 she said that only governments, not the people affected, claimed rights could not be realized equally everywhere, and she insisted they were universal. She urged adoption of the National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights, cited work on Security Council resolution 1325 and Germany's OSCE chairmanship, and said attacks on medical facilities in Syria and Yemen had to stop if humanitarian law was to be respected. On 30 March 2016 she visited the Idomeni and Nea Kavala camps on the border of Greece and what is now North Macedonia, and said Idomeni had worsened sharply after the Western Balkan route closed.

The cabinet adopted the business-and-human-rights plan on 21 December 2016, based on the UN Guiding Principles of 2011. Kofler called it a beginning: companies were expected to adopt a human-rights policy, identify adverse impacts, act on them, report, and provide a grievance mechanism. Amnesty International, Brot für die Welt, Germanwatch, Misereor, Oxfam Germany and Südwind called the plan vague, not binding in international law and built on voluntary action. Its benchmark was that by 2020 half of German firms with more than 500 employees would apply the standards, and firms could explain why a step was disproportionate or a chain too complex.

By Human Rights Day 2020 she listed binding rules on business and human rights among her priorities, with the fight against impunity, protection of defenders' civic space, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and human rights in digital change. She said the COVID-19 pandemic had sharpened, not created, intimidation and prosecution of defenders, and that during Germany's EU Council presidency talks had concluded so exports of surveillance technology could be refused on human-rights grounds, while EU foreign ministers agreed a sanctions mechanism for serious violations. In April 2017 she called reports of persecution of LGBTI people in Chechnya intolerable, and said those affected apparently could not escape it elsewhere in Russia. In June 2020 she presented the Elisabeth Selbert Initiative, run for the Foreign Office by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, offering threatened defenders a temporary stay with a host organization in their region or in Germany.

After the 2018 German–Chinese human-rights dialogue in Lhasa she told Deutsche Welle that the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang had been discussed for nearly two hours. She rejected what she described as a Chinese "hierarchy" placing economic rights ahead of civil and political freedoms. On 26 November 2019 she called reports that more than a million Uyghurs were held in camps there "absolutely appalling", demanded access for independent observers, and said people detained unlawfully must be released at once.

Transition to Luise Amtsberg

The Bundestag biography, based on the member's own information, records the term as March 2016 to December 2021, when it ended as the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz took office. On 5 January 2022 spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said the new cabinet had appointed Luise Amtsberg of Alliance 90/The Greens commissioner for human-rights policy and humanitarian assistance at the Foreign Office. Amtsberg said autocracies were using the pandemic as a pretext to restrict fundamental rights, that defenders would be a focus, and that Germany, which she called the second-largest humanitarian donor, should extend and improve its assistance. She described the office as an interface between civil society, parliament and government, and said she wanted to continue Kofler's work.

Parliamentary State Secretary at the development ministry

Appointment in the Scholz cabinet and continuation after 2025

On 8 December 2021 Svenja Schulze took office as federal minister for economic cooperation and development after appointment by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, succeeding Gerd Müller at the Berlin seat of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The ministry announced that Niels Annen and Bärbel Kofler had been appointed parliamentary state secretaries and that Jochen Flasbarth would be the civil-service state secretary, in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The BMZ leadership on 7 May 2025: Niels Annen, Bärbel Kofler, Reem Alabali Radovan and Johann Saathoff (from left).

Parliamentary state secretaries are not members of the federal government. The 1974 law on their legal status assigns them to a minister and requires them, except in a narrow case at the Chancellery, to be members of the Bundestag. The federal president appoints them on the chancellor's proposal, with the minister's agreement. They support that minister in governmental work and hold a public-law office that ends with the minister's tenure, or if they leave the Bundestag, but not merely because an electoral term ends. The Bundestag describes the office as the link between ministry and parliament: holders may stand in for the minister in debates and question time, in committees, in the Bundesrat and in cabinet.

When Reem Alabali Radovan succeeded Schulze, the ministry stated on 7 May 2025 that she had taken over the Berlin office after appointment by Steinmeier, that Johann Saathoff had been appointed parliamentary state secretary, that Kofler remained in that office, and that Annen would become the civil-service state secretary. The cabinet was that of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The ministry's leadership page continued to list Kofler alongside Alabali Radovan, Saathoff and Annen.

Portfolio, travel and institutional roles

Kofler has described the post as representing the minister in cabinet, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and has named poverty reduction, climate protection and decent work as priorities, with the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda as the benchmark.

In February 2023, at the OECD Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector, she argued that pay below a living wage had left garment workers — about 80 percent of them women, on the ministry's figures — without reserves in the pandemic, and urged firms to raise wages with suppliers. The ministry linked that stance to the Textiles Partnership's Living Wage Lab and to the Green Button 2.0 label. On 1 March 2023 Schulze, not Kofler, presented the ministry's feminist development-policy strategy, defined as equal rights, equal resources and equal representation for women.

From 16 to 20 July 2023 she led the German delegation, with Bettina Hoffmann of the environment ministry, to the high-level segment of the United Nations High-level Political Forum in New York, the midpoint review of the 2030 Agenda. She said the goals would be missed at the current pace and argued for steps that advance several at once, including a socially just ecological transition and fewer discriminatory structures, and she presented a ministry paper on sustainable cities. In June 2025, before the financing-for-development conference in Seville, she told the Bundestag development committee that Germany would help shape new rules, citing climate adaptation, a UN estimate of a four-trillion-dollar annual gap, and priorities of tax systems, private capital and World Bank reform.

Budget pressure, ODA and public debate

Einzelplan 23 shrank in both cabinets during her tenure. In the September 2023 Bundestag debate the 2024 draft was 11.52 billion euro, against 12.16 billion planned for 2023. Schulze called the cuts painful, warned that later years would sharply limit Germany's scope, and said the remainder would be used as efficiently as possible. Volkmar Klein (CDU/CSU) contrasted the draft with the coalition's pledges. Agnieszka Brugger (Alliance 90/The Greens) said it missed a coalition rule matching extra defence spending with development cooperation, humanitarian aid or diplomacy. Cornelia Möhring (Die Linke) said it broke trust with the Global South. The AfD wanted still deeper cuts; the FDP defended consolidation.

The July 2025 draft allowed 10.27 billion euro, against 11.22 billion in 2024 — about 940 million less, the steepest departmental cut. Alabali Radovan said she took domestic criticism seriously and that Germany would have to choose where to concentrate and where to withdraw. Jamila Schäfer (Greens) called the cut, and about another billion by the end of the term, the wrong response to a Seville pledge of 0.7 percent of gross national income. Sascha Wagner (Die Linke) called it unacceptable; Rocco Kever (AfD) sought a 70 percent reduction. VENRO, on the June 2025 cabinet decision, said the development budget would fall to 10.3 billion euro and Foreign Office humanitarian aid to one billion, 52 percent less than the year before. Chair Michael Herbst said that humanitarian cut would cost lives and called the draft dishonest for repeating the previous government's figures after the debt brake had been changed.

On preliminary OECD figures reported by the ministry, German official development assistance in 2024 was about 30 billion euro, or 0.67 percent of gross national income — the first miss of the UN 0.7 percent benchmark since 2020 — and 0.54 percent without in-country refugee costs. For 2025 it reported about 26 billion euro, or 0.56 percent (0.46 percent without those costs), about 39 percent of it from the development budget. Germany was, on that account, the largest absolute donor after large US cuts, and sixth by share of national income. Alabali Radovan said Germany remained a reliable partner despite painful savings.

Political positions

Development finance and the Sustainable Development Goals

On 26 April 2013, speaking for the SPD in the Bundestag, Kofler said Germany's official development assistance had fallen to 0.38 percent of gross national income in 2012. She called it untrue for the CDU/CSU–FDP government under Dirk Niebel to claim the 0.7 percent target for 2015 while cutting the budget, and said that without adequate finance no effective development policy was possible. As development spokesperson from 2013 to 2016 she kept that criticism inside the grand coalition. On 26 November 2014 she welcomed a €60 million rise in the 2015 budget but called it still too small, described missing 0.7 percent again in 2015 as "really embarrassing", and backed a financial-transaction tax for poverty reduction.

In government she defended cooperation rather than accusing ministers of breaking the ratio. On 19 January 2024, as parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, she called the mid-term review of the Sustainable Development Goals sobering—735 million people hungry, more than 160 million children working—and rejected setting that engagement against domestic needs. AfD member Rainer Kraft called unproven her claim that inaction costs more. On the 2024 budget she recorded savings at the Foreign Office and the development ministry. Before COP29 she said climate finance needed contributions from emerging high emitters and oil producers as well as industrial countries, plus World Bank Group reform, levies on shipping and aviation and a "billionaire tax", with public money only "part of the whole". In June 2025 she described a huge gap, widened by the United States' retreat, to be met through partner-country tax systems, private capital and further World Bank reforms. The ministry later reported a preliminary 2025 ratio of 0.56 percent, or 0.46 percent without in-donor refugee costs, against the 0.7 percent benchmark of the OECD Development Assistance Committee.

Human rights, business and humanitarian protection

In April 2013 she said Niebel praised the economy but not decent work. Citing the International Labour Organization, she named decent work, social security and basic protection as what reduces poverty. In January 2014 she told the taz that a garment-factory collapse in Bangladesh showed why ILO minimum wages mattered, including because poverty wages abroad pressured German workers. In the Bundestag that month she called it a "bottomless scandal" that some 900 million employed people had less than two dollars a day. That November she tied a motion on "good work worldwide" to the SPD's 2013 pledge of a statutory corporate duty of care, set against voluntary codes.

As human-rights commissioner on 9 December 2020 she said rights must run "like a red thread through all policy fields", called arms exports "very problematic", and favoured very strict rules. She pressed for a supply-chain due-diligence law along points drafted by Hubertus Heil and Gerd Müller, appealed to the economics ministry to drop its opposition, and described women and children suffering from chemicals, unsafe work and child labour. On 7 July 2022 she defined Svenja Schulze's feminist development policy as human-rights-based rather than "politics by women for women", gender-transformative, inclusive of LGBTIQ+ people, and built on rights, representation and resources. CDU/CSU development politicians, in a 2024 letter, criticized that approach being announced while microcredits used by women were cut.

In 2014 she called aid for Syria's neighbours well invested but not enough if camps were a dead end; in 2024 she said decent work and prospects in host countries reduced flight. For the 2025 election she wrote that the individual right of asylum was a "high good", that people who need protection should receive it, that decisions should come within six months, that returns should be "humane and consistent", and that family reunification for subsidiary protection should continue.

Labour, social policy and the constituency

In January 2014 she said health campaigns without social insurance excluded the poorest, citing schemes in Mexico and Brazil. On the 2024 budget she pointed to stable pensions, the completed East–West alignment and €2.42 billion for housing benefit and the heating subsidy, quoting Rolf Mützenich that rigid debt-brake rules were a "prosperity risk".

In Traunstein and Berchtesgadener Land she has pressed for rail. In December 2024 she met the passenger council about the Munich–Mühldorf–Freilassing upgrade, delays and staffing. In October 2026 she told Deutsche Bahn that a reliable link was "indispensable" for work, school and tourism.

Memberships and personal life

Trade unions, the AWO and trusteeships

The Bundestag states that its member biographies rest on the members' own disclosures. In that self-report, Kofler has belonged to a trade union since 1986 and is currently a member of the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW), IG Metall and the Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau, Chemie, Energie (IG BCE), as well as of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt. The leadership page of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development repeats the same statement. Neither source names an office she holds inside those organisations.

The same Bundestag page publishes the Angaben required under the members' code of conduct (§§ 45 ff. of the Members of the Bundestag Act). Posts marked as held ex officio are an honorary seat on the advisory board of GreenTec Capital Africa Foundation gGmbH (Bornheim); the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (Abidjan); the Governing Council of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (New Delhi); the co-chair of the high-level consultative group of the InsuResilience Global Partnership (Bonn); and an honorary seat on the advisory board of the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn. Also listed ex officio is a seat on the broadcasting council of Deutsche Welle in Bonn, which the broadcaster attributes to a nomination by the federal government. That is the only role for which the Bundestag entry states a payment: 534.96 euros gross a month until 31 December 2025, and 546.73 euros gross a month from 1 January 2026.

Further entries, without a published fee, are the board of trustees of WHS Foundation GmbH (Berlin) from 13 October 2025, the supervisory board of the Center for International Peace Operations (Zentrum für Internationale Friedenseinsätze, Berlin) from 15 October 2025, and the foundation council of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) from 26 September 2025. Roles described there as honorary are the foundation council of the German Foundation for Peace Research (Osnabrück) from 1 April 2026; the boards of trustees of Aktion Deutschland Hilft and CARE Deutschland-Luxemburg (both Bonn); the parliamentary advisory board of the German Foundation for World Population (Hannover); and the advisory board of action medeor (Tönisvorst). The list also records membership of the district council (Kreistag) of Traunstein.

Residence, languages and private life

Abgeordnetenwatch gives Traunstein as her place of residence. In a 2021 candidate profile for the Oberbayerisches Volksblatt she gave the same residence and wrote that, born in Freilassing, she had lived in Traunstein for more than ten years; the form left marital status blank. A February 2025 profile in the same paper named Ainring/Mitterfelden as her Heimatort and did not mention a spouse or children. The Bundestag biography and her own curriculum vitae likewise do not.

The ministry biography records study of linguistics, Russian and Spanish at the University of Salzburg (1992–1996), a lectureship for the German Academic Exchange Service in Moscow (1999–2001), and work in 2001–02 teaching German as a foreign language and Russian. In the 2025 profile she said she had been learning several foreign languages for many years, and listed reading, travel and hiking as leisure; her website adds an interest in languages, literature, cultures and other countries.