# Elisabeth Kaiser

# Elisabeth Kaiser

Elisabeth Kaiser (born 4 March 1987 in Gera) is a German politician of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag from Thuringia since 2017. She contests the constituency Gera – Greiz – Altenburger Land and sits through the Thuringian SPD state list. In the February 2025 election the direct mandate in that constituency went to Stephan Brandner of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany, with 44.8 percent of the first votes, while Kaiser was returned as one of two SPD members elected on the state list. Since 6 May 2025 she has been Minister of State and Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Germany at the Federal [Ministry of Finance](/organizations/ministry-of-finance), in the cabinet of Chancellor [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) and Finance Minister [Lars Klingbeil](/people/lars-klingbeil).

She passed the Abitur in 2005 at the Albert Schweitzer Gymnasium in Gera, completed a bachelor's degree in governance studies (Staatswissenschaften) at the University of Erfurt in 2008, and a master's degree in administrative sciences at the University of Potsdam in 2012. From 2011 to 2012 she was a working student at Telefónica in Germany. She then worked as a junior consultant at Partake (2012–2013) and as office manager of the German Society for Political Consulting (degepol, 2013–2014), before serving from 2014 to 2017 as press spokesperson for the SPD parliamentary group in the Thuringian Landtag.

From 2017 she was deputy chair of the SPD's eastern state group in the Bundestag and spokesperson of its Thuringian state group, and from 2021 to 2023 deputy spokesperson on interior policy for the SPD Bundestag group. The housing ministry credited her with experience on the Bundestag committee for building, housing, urban development and municipalities. On 28 April 2023 [Klara Geywitz](/people/klara-geywitz), then federal minister for housing, handed her the certificate of appointment as parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building, in succession to Cansel Kiziltepe. She left that post when the Merz cabinet took office.

Kaiser succeeded [Carsten Schneider](/people/carsten-schneider), another Thuringian Social Democrat, as commissioner for the new states of Germany. The SPD executive announced the choice on 5 May 2025, and the office moved from the Federal Chancellery, where it had sat under Schneider, into the Finance Ministry. In her home constituency the SPD's share of first votes was 11.8 percent in 2017, when the [Christian Democratic Union of Germany](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) led with 30.4 percent; 22.2 percent in 2021, when the AfD led with 29.0 percent; and 10.9 percent in 2025. The commissioner's official curriculum vitae describes her as married, with two children and a stepson.

## Early life and education

### Childhood in Gera

Elisabeth Kaiser, née Lier, was born on 4 March 1987 in Gera, in what is now Thuringia and was then the German Democratic Republic. Both parents were journalists: her father was for a time deputy editor-in-chief, and her mother an editor, of the *Volkswacht*, the Bezirk newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in Gera. After the end of SED rule and German reunification in 1990, the paper became the *Ostthüringer Zeitung*, where her mother continued to work. Kaiser has a brother.

She grew up in a *Plattenbau*, a prefabricated apartment block, in Gera’s Lusan district. For a long time she shared a room with her brother in a two-and-a-half-room flat; at 12 or 13 the family moved within the same complex into a five-room apartment, with a room for each of them and a study. After her father died, when she was 17, they moved again to a smaller flat higher in the building, without a lift, where her mother was still living in 2026. She has described Lusan as green, quiet and well developed, and has called the district home, while saying that she does not miss living there.

She was about three at reunification and later said she had been too young to experience 1990 consciously, but had noticed change through her parents’ conversations. Her father, 25 years older than her mother, had at 16 served in the Volkssturm in the Second World War. From her mother she learned that he had believed in a socially just country free of fascism and oppression, then grew disillusioned with the GDR in the 1980s and once told her he had always lived in the wrong system. Her mother, she said, remembered greater cohesion in the GDR newsroom, found the thinning of the editorial staff after reunification a burden, and also valued new freedom to travel and to choose one’s work. Kaiser has said the upheaval was hard for her family, as for many others, and that most people managed to rebuild.

As a teenager she was not directly involved in party politics, but was active culturally, including in theatre, in a city where right-wing skinheads and left-leaning skaters sometimes clashed violently. In 2005 she passed the Abitur at the Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium in Gera.

### University studies

From 2005 she studied *Staatswissenschaften* at the University of Erfurt, whose faculty combines law, the social sciences and economics, and also at the University of Essex, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 2008. The Bundestag biography, based on her own disclosures, records the bachelor’s degree as *Staatswissenschaften* at Erfurt and does not mention Essex. In Erfurt she worked at the chair of comparative government. She has said a left-leaning home and politically outspoken lecturers shaped her, and that one instructor told her it was time to take a side. She held a scholarship from the [Friedrich Ebert Foundation](/organizations/friedrich-ebert-foundation), which she described as close to the Social Democratic Party of Germany, was active with the Young Socialists in the SPD at the university, and specialised in political communication while still considering journalism.

From 2009 she studied politics and administrative science (*Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaften*) at the University of Potsdam, completing a Master of Arts in 2012. The Bundestag lists that qualification as a master’s in administrative science (*Verwaltungswissenschaft*). In 2011–12, while still a student, she worked at Telefónica in Germany. She has said that periods abroad, and the chance to study in France, were opportunities her parents had not had. In 2012 she joined the SPD and entered political consulting; from 2014 to 2017 she was press spokesperson for the SPD parliamentary group in the Landtag of Thuringia, before taking a seat in the Bundestag in 2017.

## Career before the Bundestag

### Consulting and degepol

The Bundestag states that members’ biographies rest on their own information. Kaiser’s current entry lists her, for 2011–2012, as a working student (*Werksstudentin*) at Telefónica S.E. (Deutschland). That was the German business of the Spanish group Telefónica, run as Telefónica Germany under the O2 brand. When Telefónica Deutschland Holding listed in Frankfurt on 30 October 2012, *manager magazin* described O2 as the smallest of Germany’s four mobile networks; the shares were issued at €5.60 in a placing of about €1.45 billion.

From 2012 to 2013 she was a junior consultant in Berlin. The biography for the 19th electoral term names the management consultancy partake AG; the current biography names Partake GmbH for the same years. In January 2014 the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* described Partake as a Berlin consultancy for design thinking and quoted its head, Jürgen Erbeldinger, on the need to “break dogmas” if firms were to innovate.

She joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 2012, the year given in the 19th-term Bundestag biography. In a 2018 interview with the SPD newspaper *Vorwärts* she called that start, as a young woman, very positive. People in Potsdam already knew her, she said, because she had led the Friedrich Ebert Foundation group at the university, and she was soon asked onto the local branch board, which was still heavily male.

From 2013 to 2014 she was office manager of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Politikberatung (degepol; styled de'ge'pol), a registered association in Berlin. Its Bundestag lobby-register entry describes degepol as the professional association of interest representatives in Germany, and states that it has stood for ethics, trust and transparency in interest representation since 2002, with a code of conduct since 2003 that the statutes make binding on members and that requires truthfulness and transparency. LobbyControl, reporting in 2008 on the expulsion of a member under that code, treated the association as a lobbyists’ body enforcing its own rules, and argued that self-regulation could not replace a statutory register in which lobbyists would have to name their clients.

### Press spokesperson in the Thuringian Landtag

On 1 April 2014, *politik&kommunikation* reported, Elisabeth Lier — coming from degepol — took over press work for the SPD parliamentary group in the Landtag of Thuringia in Erfurt, succeeding Georg Grünewald, who was on sick leave. Bundestag biographies under the name Elisabeth Kaiser record the same post, as press spokesperson of the SPD Landtag group from 2014 to 2017; the 19th-term text specifies until October 2017, and the parliament’s disclosure of pre-mandate employment likewise lists her as press spokesperson of the SPD group in Erfurt.

She was already in the job before the state election of 14 September 2014. The state returning officer’s final result gave the SPD 12.4 percent of the list vote and 12 of 91 seats — one constituency seat and 11 list seats — behind the Christian Democratic Union (33.5 percent, 34 seats) and [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) (28.2 percent, 28 seats), with turnout at 52.7 percent.

On 5 December 2014 the Landtag in Erfurt elected [Bodo Ramelow](/people/bodo-ramelow) of Die Linke minister-president on the second ballot. He received 46 of 91 votes, the absolute majority required and the exact strength of a coalition of Die Linke, the SPD and Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens). Kaiser’s recorded post remained the parliamentary group’s press office rather than a ministry, and the Bundestag biography carries it through to October 2017.

## Bundestag elections

### 2017 election

Elisabeth Kaiser was the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) for the eastern Thuringia constituency Gera – Greiz – Altenburger Land at three successive Bundestag elections. The Federal Returning Officer's boundary descriptions comprise the independent city of Gera and the districts of Greiz and Altenburger Land, numbered 194 in 2017 and 2021 and 193 in 2025, with an unchanged area of 1,567.5 square kilometres. Official structure data gave the constituency about 279,900 inhabitants in 76 municipalities at the end of 2019 and about 278,100 in 74 municipalities at the end of 2023.

The election on 24 September 2017 was her first candidacy. A state delegate meeting in Erfurt on 25 February 2017 put Carsten Schneider first on the Thuringia SPD list and then elected Kaiser, then spokeswoman of the SPD group in the Thuringian Landtag, to second place with 100 of 193 votes, ahead of Petra Heß, the state executive's nominee. The *Ostthüringer Zeitung* listed her among the ten direct candidates in the constituency and noted that list place.

She did not win the constituency. Of 240,738 eligible voters, 176,933 voted, a turnout of 73.5 percent. Volkmar Vogel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took the direct mandate with 52,980 first votes (30.4 percent), 12.3 points below the CDU share in 2013. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) received 47,558 first votes (27.3 percent), up 21.1 points, and Die Linke 32,573 (18.7 percent). As the SPD candidate, Kaiser received 20,627 first votes (11.8 percent); the SPD's second votes in the constituency were 19,845 (11.4 percent). In Thuringia the SPD won 13.2 percent of second votes, and the CDU took all eight constituencies. The Bundestag biography for the 19th electoral term records that she was elected on the state list while standing in constituency 194.

### 2021 election

She stood again in constituency 194 on 26 September 2021. On 5 June 2021 the Thuringia SPD's delegate conference elected her to list place 2 with 85.7 percent of the vote, behind Schneider and ahead of [Frank Ullrich](/people/frank-ullrich). Turnout was 73.2 percent, with 168,147 ballots from 229,588 eligible voters. [Stephan Brandner](/people/stephan-brandner) of the AfD won the direct mandate with 48,034 first votes (29.0 percent). The constituency returning officer's final notice and the Federal Returning Officer's archived result both name Kaiser as the SPD candidate and runner-up, with 36,760 first votes (22.2 percent), 10.3 points above 2017.

Vogel, again the CDU candidate, received 33,067 first votes (20.0 percent), and Die Linke's Björn Harras 19,421 (11.7 percent). Second votes in the constituency split 28.1 percent for the AfD (46,659) and 21.9 percent for the SPD (36,326). Across Thuringia the SPD's second-vote share rose to 23.4 percent. Kaiser did not win the direct seat; the Bundestag biography for the 20th electoral term records her as elected via the state list for constituency 194.

### 2025 election

For the election of 23 February 2025 the same territory was constituency 193. The Federal Returning Officer lists Kaiser, born in 1987, as elected for the SPD from Thuringia on list place 2, and as having also stood in constituency 193. The state returning officer's final notice names her among the successful list candidates rather than the constituency winners, and the provisional result identified that list place as 2, behind Schneider.

Turnout rose to 78.9 percent (173,700 of 220,281 eligible voters). Brandner was re-elected with 77,161 first votes (44.8 percent), 15.8 points above the AfD share in 2021, and Cornelius Golembiewski of the CDU was second with 34,406 (20.0 percent). A Tagesschau constituency table whose first-vote totals match the final official count names the further candidates: Frank Tempel of Die Linke with 20,441 votes (11.9 percent), Kaiser with 18,698 (10.9 percent, down 11.3 points), and Günter André Polter of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) with 10,915 (6.3 percent). On second votes the AfD led with 43.4 percent, followed by the CDU on 17.8 percent, Die Linke on 13.0 percent, the BSW on 9.9 percent (17,065) and the SPD on 7.9 percent (13,622). In Thuringia the SPD's second-vote share fell to 8.8 percent; the state returning officer reported two SPD members, Schneider and Kaiser, both from the list, while the AfD won seven of the eight constituencies, including 193.

## Parliamentary work, 2017–2023

### Committees and rapporteurships

In the 19th legislative period Kaiser, an SPD member for Gera – Greiz – Altenburger Land on the Thuringia list, was a full member of the Committee on the Interior and Home Affairs and of the Committee on Building, Housing, Urban Development and Local Government, and a deputy on the committees for family affairs and the digital agenda and on the Subcommittee on Civic Engagement. The SPD group dates the interior seat from 29 January 2018 (from 25 April 2018 under the committee's new name), the building seat from 24 April 2018, the family deputy seat from 29 January 2018, the civic-engagement subcommittee from 14 May 2018 and the digital-agenda seat from 17 December 2019; from 19 March 2019 she was also an ordinary member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, and from 17 April 2018 to 26 January 2021 a Bundestag sitting secretary.

On 20 December 2019 she spoke on motions from Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens about municipal and housing-company debt. She said a good life depended on where people lived, and that old debts left poorer towns unable to fund libraries, youth clubs or pools. In the five Länder of eastern Germany, excluding Berlin, she put old debts of municipal housing companies and cooperatives at more than €4 billion, mostly GDR state-bank loans transferred at reunification; the 1993 assistance act and Stadtumbau Ost had not stopped vacancy where people were still leaving. A €10 million fund was too small, she said. She wanted investment aid for energy-efficient and age-friendly renovation, urban-development money for partial demolition (with the federal ceiling raised from €70 to €110 per square metre) and incentives for cooperatives, and said the SPD would reject both motions.

At the sittings of 15 December 2021 she was named again to the 46-member interior committee and to the 34-member Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government. With [Felix Döring](/people/felix-doring) she was the SPD rapporteur on the Democracy Promotion Act that the cabinet adopted on 14 December 2022.

### Civic education

From 26 June 2018 she was a trustee of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the Bundestag panel that receives the agency's budget estimates, plans and activity reports. For 2019–2021 the agency lists her among the SPD trustees, with [Thorsten Frei](/people/thorsten-frei) of the CDU as chair and Daniela Kolbe as deputy. The Bundestag records her as chair from 3 June 2022 to 4 July 2023; the agency's 2022–2023 report says she remained a member until June 2023, when Simona Koß succeeded her.

In November 2020 she told Vorwärts that one weekly politics lesson was not enough against online hate, racism, antisemitism and conspiracy narratives in her constituency, and that civic education should run from nursery through working life and work with older people. She had involved Karamba Diaby, Susann Rüthrich, Daniela Kolbe and [Stefan Schwartze](/people/stefan-schwartze) in an SPD paper, "Demokratie braucht mehr politische Bildung." When Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and Family Minister Lisa Paus took the Democracy Promotion Act to cabinet on 14 December 2022, Kaiser said mobile counselling and victim and exit counselling would be placed on a lasting footing, and called ideologies of inequality and right-wing extremism the greatest threat to a plural democracy. From 15 February 2022 to 24 May 2023 she also sat on the board of the German Foundation for Engagement and Voluntary Service.

### Posts in the SPD parliamentary group

A December 2019 faction handbook lists her as spokesperson of the Thuringia Bundestag group, deputy spokesperson of the Landesgruppe Ost — the members from Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia — deputy spokesperson for municipal policy, and a member of the faction executive. The group dates the municipal-policy post from 13 March 2018 and the executive seat from 5 November 2019, renewed from 11 January 2022; in the 20th term it still listed her as Thuringia spokesperson and recorded her as deputy chair of the eastern group until 16 October 2023.

A June 2022 directory names her, with Uli Grötsch, deputy spokesperson of the interior working group under Sebastian Hartmann, and spokesperson of the working group on strategies against right-wing extremism. The government's later note dates the interior-policy role from 2021 to 2023. The extremism group elected her on 15 February 2022, just before the second anniversary of the Hanau shootings, and said civil-society experience should shape the action plan against right-wing extremism and the democracy bill. On 15 February 2023 she welcomed Faeser's draft to speed disciplinary proceedings so extremists could be removed from the federal public service more quickly, citing the raids on the Reichsbürger movement. The same February 2022 meeting of the Parlamentarische Linke elected her treasurer, with [Wiebke Esdar](/people/wiebke-esdar), Sönke Rix and [Matthias Miersch](/people/matthias-miersch) as speakers; from 15 December 2022 the Bundestag register also lists her as treasurer and second chair of that group's support association. On 28 April 2023 the SPD group recorded her as parliamentary state secretary for housing, urban development and building, which ended this period of committee and faction work.

## State secretary for housing, 2023–2025

### Appointment

On 28 April 2023 Klara Geywitz, federal minister for housing, urban development and building, gave Elisabeth Kaiser, a Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) member of the Bundestag from Thuringia, the certificate appointing her parliamentary state secretary. Kaiser succeeded Cansel Kiziltepe, who had held the post since the ministry was created in December 2021 and who left it for the Berlin senate; Kaiser remained a member of parliament. Geywitz cited Kaiser's work on the Bundestag committee for building, housing, urban development and municipalities and called her an engaged, highly competent politician from eastern Germany. Kaiser said she had great respect for the office and described affordable housing for low- and middle-income households, in cities and in rural areas, as a central social task.

In a May 2023 interview Kaiser said she had largely taken over Kiziltepe's brief—national urban-development policy, homelessness, social housing, a new non-profit housing regime and amendments to building law—while Sören Bartol remained the ministry's other parliamentary state secretary. She said a digital amendment and smaller changes to building law were already in negotiation.

The *Leipziger Volkszeitung* reported discontent among politicians of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Alternative for Germany in the Altenburger Land, part of her constituency. They questioned her qualification, citing what they described as a lack of substantial professional experience outside politics, and warned of patronage in the appointment.

A separate dispute followed the demonstrations in Gera on 1 May 2023. Kaiser told the *Thüringer Allgemeine* that she had neither registered nor helped to organize any demonstration that day, and she called an announced AfD complaint an attempt to intimidate her over her work against right-wing extremism. State legislator Dieter Laudenbach alleged that she, as a declared Antifa supporter, had registered a counter-demonstration under the slogan "Willst du mit mir Randale machen?" in order to incite a "civil war." An account of the Gera public prosecutor's statement to MDR Thüringen said the office found no initial suspicion—the slogan was ambiguous and did not necessarily mean violent crime—and did not open an investigation. Kaiser called the claims baseless and said she had attended only as a parliamentary observer.

### Portfolio and record

Kaiser treated the target of 400,000 new homes a year, 100,000 of them publicly subsidized—set out by [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz) before the 2021 election—as one the ministry should keep, while noting that housebuilding is primarily for the Länder. Partly harmonizing the 16 state building codes, she argued, would ease serial and modular construction, the shortage of skilled workers, and the use of cheaper, recyclable materials and simpler standards. She pointed to the Alliance for Affordable Housing as the forum for reconciling more homes with climate targets. For shrinking places such as Gera she emphasized vacancy, grants for structurally weak regions, and energy renovation that would not push rents beyond local means, and she named homelessness—including housing people before other support—as a personal priority, toward a stated aim of ending it by 2030.

In October 2023 she handed Petra Kahlfeldt a federal grant of €3.27 million, supplemented by €1.63 million from Berlin, under the National Urban Development Projects programme for the former Haus der Statistik. The ministry said the work would provide about 300 affordable homes plus cultural, social and educational uses and a new town hall for Mitte.

At a later DEMO municipal congress she said many challenges remained and that she understood frustration in town halls over scarce planning staff. She pointed to more federal money for social housing, a Building Code amendment to speed up land-use plans and allow denser building, a restored municipal right of pre-emption against the displacement of tenants, and a closer link between urban-development grants and social housing.

Completions stayed far below the target. The Federal Statistical Office of Germany recorded 294,400 finished dwellings in 2023, 0.3 percent fewer than in 2022, and 251,900 in 2024, a fall of 14.4 percent. In September 2023 Geywitz told the ARD programme *Maischberger* that raising productivity in the building industry by more than 30 percent was "mathematically extremely unlikely," and said the annual promise would not be kept in that legislative term. CDU member Thomas Heilmann called the original pledge reckless. The housing industry's peak association saw little in a government package presented that week that would help social-housing providers, and Deutsche Umwelthilfe called the package a climate-policy failure because energy-saving standards were not raised.

Kaiser left the building ministry when the next federal government was formed. The SPD executive announced on 5 May 2025 that she would become commissioner for eastern Germany, based at the finance ministry rather than, as under Carsten Schneider, in the Chancellery. She took up the post of minister of state and federal commissioner for eastern Germany at the Federal Ministry of Finance (Germany) on 6 May 2025.

## Commissioner for Eastern Germany

### The office and the 2025 transfer

In early May 2025 the executive of the Social Democratic Party of Germany named Elisabeth Kaiser Staatsministerin and Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Ostdeutschland in the CDU/CSU–SPD cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. She succeeded Carsten Schneider, also of the SPD, who became federal environment minister. Unlike Schneider, whose post had sat in the Chancellery, Kaiser was placed in the Federal Ministry of Finance under Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil. The coalition agreement, *Verantwortung für Deutschland*, assigned the minister of state and federal commissioner for eastern Germany to the SPD and to the Finance Ministry, while the same text promised to cut the number of federal commissioners by about half.

That wording followed an argument inside the Union about abolishing the office. In January 2025 the *Berliner Zeitung* reported that eastern CDU politicians had for months urged dropping the commissioner as the Union sought fewer federal appointees. [Philipp Amthor](/people/philipp-amthor), then CDU general secretary in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, had said the previous summer that the office holder had “nur die Macht der Visitenkarte” and that Schneider had little in government “zu entscheiden und zu sagen.” After the post had been kept and moved, Sepp Müller, a deputy chair of the Union Bundestag group from Saxony-Anhalt, returned to the point just before German Unity Day 2025. He told *Focus* that rural areas needed more attention “nicht nur für den Osten,” and that the eastern commissioner should become a commissioner for structurally weak regions nationwide.

Kaiser’s first months in the office were broken by maternity leave. On 22 May 2025 *Welt* reported that she expected a second child, would enter maternity protection, and planned to return immediately after the summer break if she and the child were well, with her husband taking parental leave. She told the *Tagesspiegel* that “Ein Baby ist kein Hindernis für ein wichtiges Regierungsamt.”

### Priorities and the report on German unity

The annual report she presented on 30 September 2026, *In Bewegung bleiben: Was Menschen voranbringt. Was Chancen schafft.*, treats growth, who holds office, and local volunteering as connected conditions of German reunification rather than as a separate eastern programme. In the preface Kaiser describes “Branchendialoge Ost” with industry, the Mittelstand, crafts and start-ups, and writes that policy can set conditions for investment but cannot decree economic development. The same text presents the competition “machen!”, which she said drew more than 1,000 applications a year; prize money had risen from about €400,000 to more than €830,000, with the 100 best projects invited to Berlin. A footnote lists the Zukunftszentrum für Deutsche Einheit und Europäische Transformation, planned in Halle (Saale) by 2030, among federal decisions to locate institutions in eastern Germany.

The report’s statistical core continues the federal concept on eastern Germans in leadership posts. At the Berlin presentation Kaiser said eastern Germans should sit where decisions are made—in ministries, authorities, companies, science, the judiciary, culture and the media—and that without them “ein großer Teil der Erfahrungen in Deutschland” was missing. In the highest federal authorities, the share of leaders born in eastern Germany including Berlin rose from 13.9 percent in 2022 to 16.3 percent in 2026. She said the pattern still held: “Je höher die Führungsebene, desto geringer ist tatsächlich der ostdeutsche Anteil.” In the upper federal authorities the comparable share, again including Berlin, reached 13.4 percent in 2026, 2.1 points above 2022 and, the report said, the first year with more than 100 such leaders from eastern Germany. Among heads of those authorities the share was 4.3 percent. The eastern states account for 14.8 percent of the population without Berlin and 19.2 percent with Berlin.

### Representation, wealth and cohesion

Kaiser linked the gap in offices to private wealth. In a guest article for the *Rheinische Post*, quoted by *Der Spiegel* on the morning she took the report to cabinet, she wrote that average net household wealth in 2023 was €125,500 in eastern Germany and €257,100 in the west, and property wealth €97,800 against €214,500. The figures, she argued, did not show that people in the east saved or took fewer risks, because “Unterschiedliche Wirtschafts- und Eigentumsordnungen und die Umbrüche nach 1990 wirken bis heute nach.” Inheritance tax is a state tax and is collected where assets are transferred. She called for a financial equalization between states with high and low receipts, and for a review of exemptions on very large transfers, so that extra revenue would not go only to the states where the take is already high: “Wer wenig erbt, darf nicht zweimal verlieren: beim privaten Vermögen und bei den öffentlichen Möglichkeiten seines Landes.” On ARD and ZDF she said large fortunes and inheritances should be taxed more heavily “damit wir letztendlich mehr Geld im System haben,” and she asked that a “Grunderbe” for every 18-year-old be discussed, for training or for building assets, because “Wer wenig erbt oder nichts erbt, der muss eben trotzdem die Chance haben, selbst etwas aufbauen zu können.”

After the [2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election](/facts/2026-saxony-anhalt-state-election) on 6 September, in which the Alternative for Germany finished first but short of an absolute majority, Kaiser spoke at the East German Entrepreneurs’ Day in Potsdam. Further growth, she said, needed investment from Germany and abroad and skilled workers, and therefore stable politics. According to her speaking notes: “Wenn eine Partei stärkste Kraft wird, die unsere Demokratie und den europäischen Binnenmarkt so radikal infrage stellt, dann schreckt das Investoren ab.” The party’s openly xenophobic slogans, she added, were “keine Einladung an Arbeitskräfte aus dem Ausland.” In a *Spiegel* interview published on 10 September she also placed responsibility for the result on the federal government and asked democratic parties to be more present locally. A photograph of her in her office carried the line “Natürlich sollten wir uns alle überprüfen.”

Around German Unity Day, held in Bremen on 3 October 2026, she extended the representation argument to the presidency. None of the senior representatives of the state at the ceremony came from the east, the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* reported. She told the *Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung*: “Ich finde, die Zeit ist reif wieder für ein ostdeutsches Staatsoberhaupt. Warum sollte die nächste Bundespräsidentin nicht eine kluge Frau aus Ostdeutschland sein?” On 5 October she told MDR Aktuell that the office should carry both the experience of change shared by many eastern Germans and women’s perspectives, and that birthplace alone should not decide. She said she had names in mind but did not give them. The [Federal Convention](/organizations/federal-convention) was to elect a successor to President [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier) in January. Germany had not yet had a woman as president; the only eastern woman previously nominated, Dagmar Schipanski of Thuringia, lost the 1999 election to [Johannes Rau](/people/johannes-rau).

## Party offices and local politics

### SPD Gera and Thuringia

Elisabeth Kaiser has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) since 2012 and, according to the biography for the 19th Bundestag, chair of the SPD district association in Gera since 2018; the parliament notes that these biographies rest on members' own information. The district association lists her as *Kreisvorsitzende* and states that its executive was last elected by a members' assembly in September 2022, for a two-year term. On 19 October 2024 a members' meeting placed her first among the district's delegates to SPD state congresses in Thuringia, for two years. A party notice in April 2025 and the Bundestag biography, modified in October 2026, still describe her as district chair.

She is one of 18 assessors on the Thuringia SPD state executive, which the state party says is elected every two years with the chair, four deputies and a treasurer. The party states that the board then in office was elected on 16 November in Bad Blankenburg, where a congress on 16 November 2024 re-elected Georg Maier as state chair. The current Bundestag biography also lists her as chair of Forum Ostdeutschland der Sozialdemokratie e.V.

### Bundestag land group and the federal executive

A December 2019 brochure of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag named Kaiser spokesperson of the Thuringia *Landesgruppe* and deputy spokesperson of the *Landesgruppe Ost*, the grouping of the party's members from Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia. In the 21st Bundestag the group again lists her as spokesperson of the Thuringia *Landesgruppe* and as a deputy chair of the *Landesgruppe Ost*. An overview dated 30 March 2026 gives the Thuringia group two members and the eastern group 17, with [Kathrin Michel](/people/kathrin-michel) as its chair and Kaiser among the deputies.

At its ordinary federal party congress in Berlin, the SPD on 28 June 2025 filled 24 assessors' seats on the party executive (*Parteivorstand*). The quorum on the first ballot was 307 votes; Kaiser received 415 of 612 votes cast and was elected on that ballot. She had been nominated by Maier, who had himself been a member of the federal executive and did not stand again. The state association said that, with the Gera-born politician, eastern German issues would weigh more heavily in the federal party's debate; the Deutsche Presse-Agentur report identified her as the federal government's commissioner for eastern Germany since May 2025. Including the officers who remained in place, the SPD said the executive then consisted of 19 women and 15 men.

### Gera city council

In the municipal election of 26 May 2024 the SPD list in Gera received 7,399 votes, 5.9 percent, and two of 42 council seats, with turnout at 58.6 percent; the Thuringian statistical office no longer publishes personal results for candidates. On 26 June 2024 Bürgermeister Kurt Dannenberg swore in the 42 honorary members in the town hall. Kaiser joined the joint caucus of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens, Die PARTEI and the Liberale Allianz, together with Monika Hofmann, Nils Fröhlich, Anne Kathrin Hildebrand and Ingo Kaschta.

She left the honorary seat at her own request. Heiner Fritzsche, a councillor from 2019 to 2024, accepted the mandate on 1 April 2025; the city announced the change on 3 April, and the Gera SPD said he had been elected deputy chair of the joint caucus. In the council chamber she said leaving was difficult because municipal politics and the city's development mattered to her. The *Ostthüringer Zeitung* gave her reasons as duties in Berlin, as a Bundestag member and parliamentary state secretary in the federal housing ministry, and her pregnancy; the district SPD said she would concentrate on the mandate won again in February and was expecting a second child. Oberbürgermeister Dannenberg of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany thanked her and cited federal funding commitments for the Kultur- und Kongresszentrum, the Bildungscampus Lusan and the puppet stage, which he linked to her work in federal politics.

## Political positions

### Eastern Germany and the economy

Kaiser, of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, has treated equivalent living conditions as unfinished after German reunification. She separates cultural difference, which she says should remain, from gaps in wages, wealth and inheritances. She links lower eastern pay to weaker collective bargaining, calls good wages and tariff coverage the route to saving, and has put the eastern median income at 2,200 euros. In the 2026 unity report she cited 2023 household net wealth of 125,500 euros in the east against 257,100 in the west, and property wealth of 97,800 against 214,500, tracing the gap to different pre-1990 orders and the upheaval after 1990. Because inheritance tax accrues to the states and most taxable transfers are in the west, she proposed reviewing exemptions on very large transfers and sharing any extra revenue with poorer states: someone who inherits little, she wrote, “must not lose twice: in private wealth and in the public capacity of their state.” She also floated a starting sum for every 18-year-old, and said advancement should not depend on parental income, inheritance or contacts.

She has said the statutory pension is often the only pillar in the east. She told MDR that 73 percent of pensioners there rely on it because of broken careers and low wages, and that the level should stay stable if private supplements are discussed. She later said a funded element in the first pillar might lift the level toward 50 percent, but she criticized calls to work harder, saying many easterners already hold second or third jobs.

Presenting the report, she said eastern Germans should sit wherever decisions are made, in ministries, companies, science, the courts, culture and the media. A rise in their share of senior staff in the highest federal authorities, from 13.9 percent in 2022 to 16.3 percent, still thinned out, she said, “the higher the leadership level.” Inside the governing CDU/CSU, Sepp Müller called a dedicated eastern commissioner outdated 35 years after reunification and, shortly before Unity Day in 2025, proposed instead a commissioner for structurally weak regions nationwide, citing gains in cities such as Leipzig and Schwerin.

### Housing and municipalities

As parliamentary state secretary to Building Minister Klara Geywitz, Kaiser served while the coalition target of 400,000 new homes a year was missed. The Federal Statistical Office recorded 251,900 completions in 2024, down 14.4 percent from 2023, after about 294,000 a year in 2021–2023. Der Spiegel said the coalition had repeatedly missed its own figure; higher interest rates and building costs were among the reasons given for investors holding back. She later stressed municipal finance over a national quota, telling n-tv that faster relief for local budgets would rebuild trust, and arguing that weak regions needed the coalition’s infrastructure borrowing because they could not raise it themselves.

### Democracy and the far right

Kaiser opposed letting projects under Demokratie leben! lapse. After Family Minister Karin Prien said about 200 of several hundred projects would lose funding at year’s end while the rules were rewritten, Kaiser told the Leipziger Volkszeitung and the Sächsische Zeitung that structures built with public money and volunteers would be hard to restore, above all in the east, where she said civil society and democratic parties were thinner. Prien said the programme would continue as an instrument of defensive democracy, with projects reapplying after a review she described as finding goals too vague and digital radicalisation underweighted.

On May Day 2023 in Gera, the Alternative for Germany, including Dieter Laudenbach, alleged that Kaiser had registered a demonstration under the motto “Willst du mit mir Randale machen?” in order to stir a “civil war.” The Gera public prosecutor’s office told MDR there was no initial suspicion of an offence, the slogan not necessarily being a call to violence. Kaiser called the claims lies, said she had attended only as a parliamentary observer of a protest against right-wing extremism, and filed a defamation complaint on which MDR then had no result. She called the AfD move an attempt to intimidate that engagement.

Before the September 2026 election in Saxony-Anhalt she told taz that an AfD-led government would be a “heavy burden” on cooperation between governments, while expecting the [democratic centre](/organizations/democratic-centre) to keep a majority. After the AfD placed first without an absolute majority, she said in Potsdam that a party which “radically” questioned democracy and the European single market, and used openly xenophobic slogans, would deter investors and foreign workers. In Der Spiegel she also put part of the responsibility on the federal government and asked parties to be more present locally. She has said the rise is not only eastern, and that where a party appears to work against the free democratic basic order the instruments in the Basic Law, including a review by the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court), should be used in earnest.

## Personal life and public reception

### Family and civic affiliations

Kaiser is married and gives Gera as her place of residence. On that profile she describes herself as the mother of a daughter and a young son, and as having a stepson. The *Ostthüringer Zeitung* reported that her daughter, Viktoria, was born on the evening of 21 February 2021; Kaiser said she would take eight weeks of maternity leave and that her husband would then take parental leave. Her Gera constituency office later told the paper that a second child was born healthy on 3 July 2025, and the paper added that a social-media post indicated the child was a boy. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own information, still listed her in October 2026 as married with one child.

That biography lists membership of the union ver.di, Naturfreunde Thüringen, the support association of the Vogtland Philharmonie Greiz/Reichenbach and the friends of the Lindenau-Museum, and names her deputy chair of the THW-Landeshelfervereinigung Sachsen-Thüringen, linked to the Technisches Hilfswerk. The register of notifiable interests records her, from 25 June 2025, as deputy chair of the supervisory board of Germany Trade and Invest and, from 15 July 2025, as chair of the supervisory board of the Zukunftszentrum für Deutsche Einheit und Europäische Transformation in Halle (Saale). It also lists an ex officio seat from 6 May 2025 on the Mittelstandsbeirat of KfW, and the same THW deputy chairmanship, there given as based in Altenburg.

### Reception

In May 2023 the *Leipziger Volkszeitung* reported discontent in the Altenburger Land after Kaiser, then 36, became parliamentary state secretary for housing in succession to Cansel Kiziltepe. The paper called it a rise into a senior Berlin post without notable experience outside politics, and wrote that the CDU and the AfD denied her the qualification and warned of patronage in appointments.

The May 2025 appointment as federal commissioner for eastern Germany revived debate about the office. The *Berliner Zeitung* treated both her selection, as successor to what it called the much-scolded Carsten Schneider, and the survival of the post as surprises, and asked whether she could be more than a ceremonial "Grüß-August". In October 2026 Andreas Becker argued in the *Nordkurier* that the CDU/CSU had wanted to abolish the commissioner and that the SPD had kept it only by moving it from the Chancellery into the Federal Ministry of Finance under Lars Klingbeil. He quoted Philipp Amthor, speaking of Schneider, that the office had "only the power of a business card", and Thomas de Maizière, a negotiator of the 1990 unification treaty, that it was "fine and good, but not necessary" and at best a "clever letter-carrier and admonisher", because solutions lay with the ministries. Becker himself called the post, 36 years after German reunification, patronising supervision the east no longer needed, while noting that Kaiser still cited unequal living conditions as its justification.

A September 2025 *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* profile headlined her remark that she had become "ever more East German" with age; the standfirst said she spoke among Gera's Plattenbau blocks about her childhood and her pride in that origin. In July 2026 she told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, as carried by *Der Tagesspiegel*, that distrust was closely tied to the coronavirus pandemic and the decisions of that time, and that a deep breach of trust had followed. She called it "poison for democracy" when decisions were no longer checked with the public, beside a YouGov survey in the same report in which 71 percent of eastern and 66 percent of western respondents did not see politicians as trying to represent the population.

She took the commissioner post while pregnant. She told *Der Tagesspiegel*, in an account by *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)*, that "a baby is no obstacle to an important government office", that the pregnancy had not figured in her selection, and that her husband would take parental leave while she returned after maternity protection, after the summer break, if she and the child were well. She said there was no right moment in politics for a pregnancy, and recalled that in the German Democratic Republic women had commonly gone back to work early even though care at home often remained theirs. After the July birth the constituency office said she would ease off for some weeks, continue the mandate and the commissioner role with her teams, and resume public appointments in the autumn; expecting the child, she had left the Gera council in April, citing the combined load.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/elisabeth-kaiser