# Felix Banaszak

# Felix Banaszak

Felix Banaszak (born 24 October 1989 in Duisburg) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2021 and, since 16 November 2024, one of the party's two federal co-chairs, serving alongside [Franziska Brantner](/people/franziska-brantner). Delegates at a congress in Wiesbaden elected him with 92.88 percent of the vote, a larger share than Brantner received, after [Ricarda Lang](/people/ricarda-lang) and [Omid Nouripour](/people/omid-nouripour) had resigned with the rest of the federal executive following losses in three state elections in September 2024.

Banaszak grew up in Duisburg, in the Ruhr area of North Rhine-Westphalia. He has described a family history marked by migration and industrial work: great-grandparents on his father's side came to the Ruhr from Poland, and his grandfather worked at the Thyssen 4/8 coking plant. He was a pupil representative at the Steinbart-Gymnasium, took the Abitur there in 2009, and then performed civilian service in elderly care in Berlin. From 2010 to 2014 he studied social and cultural anthropology and political science at the Free University of Berlin, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts.

He joined the Greens in 2009, about three weeks before that year's federal election, the first in which he could vote. In the Green Youth he sat on the Berlin state board from 2010 to 2011 and on the federal board from 2011 to 2014, ending as federal spokesperson. From 2014 to 2017 he headed the North Rhine-Westphalia office of Members of the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament) Sven Giegold and Terry Reintke; from 2016 to 2018 he was spokesperson of the Duisburg district association; and from 2018 to 2022 he chaired the state party, a period in which he helped negotiate the coalition agreement of the Christian Democratic–Green state government. Reporting at the time of his election as co-chair identified him with the party's left and Brantner with its realist wing and with Robert Habeck.

Before the chairmanship he was a member of the Bundestag committees on economic affairs and on the budget. He and Brantner took office weeks after the collapse of the Social Democratic–Green–Free [Democratic coalition](/organizations/democratic-coalition), with a snap 2025 German federal election set for 23 February 2025. The Greens' share of second votes fell from 14.7 percent in the [2021 German federal election](/facts/2021-german-federal-election) to 11.6 percent, and the party won 85 of 630 seats. Banaszak remained a deputy. In the 21st Bundestag he is a substitute member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs.

In June 2026 the Berlin public prosecutor's office was reported to be investigating underpayment of the city's second-home tax since 2022, after moves within Berlin that he said he had failed to update with the tax office. He disclosed the matter himself and said he would pay the amount once it was assessed; party sources confirmed the account to *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)*. The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own statements, records that he is married and has one child, and that he belongs to the trade unions ver.di and IG Metall.

## Early life and education

### Family and upbringing in Duisburg

Felix Banaszak was born on 24 October 1989 in Duisburg, an industrial city in North Rhine-Westphalia in the Ruhr. He calls himself a "child of the Ruhr," and industrial work and structural change run through the family story he tells. His grandfather, born in 1927, trained as a carpenter, worked for several years at the Friedrich Thyssen 4/8 coking plant in Duisburg-Hamborn. His grandmother, from Silesia, kept the household and also cleaned for a parish. He places them among the Ruhr Poles: the surname comes from his grandfather's line near Poznań, their parents were already in Duisburg, and the couple met in Duisburg-Meiderich. He has described that past as assimilation rather than a migration background of his own, and has said he was the first in the family to use the Polish pronunciation.

His parents met as nurses. His father, whose eyesight was too poor to keep dispensing medication, retrained as a software developer and was still on that course when Banaszak was born. Banaszak has said the birth came under difficult health conditions and that his mother then became seriously ill, so his father was suddenly raising a six-year-old daughter and a newborn. For about four years he lived with his grandparents, who had just retired; at about four he moved in with his father and sister. The *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* reported that he grew up first in Meiderich and later in Neudorf, in a small two-room flat. His father, who did not drive because of his eyes, commuted to jobs in Wuppertal and Essen, and the household also went through unemployment. In 2025 he told *Bild*, "I come from a family that knows Hartz IV from the inside." He has resisted a misery story: the home was loving, there were many books, and he learned housework early, even if schoolmates could afford things his household could not. He has said he was the first in the family to finish a degree, though his father had also studied.

### Schooling and civilian service

From 2000 to 2009 Banaszak attended the Steinbart-Gymnasium in Duisburg's Dellviertel and took the Abitur there in 2009. The *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* reported that he was the school's student spokesperson.

He took French as an advanced course and wrote a paper on May 1968 in Paris. In 2007 he spent two weeks at the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia with the Green deputy Sigrid Beer, then wrote that the work was interesting but not for him. A friend's course drew him into a Duisburg dance school, where he took up competitive rock 'n' roll, earned a trainer's licence and taught a youth group. *Bild* reported that before politics he also delivered pizzas for €4.50 an hour.

After the Abitur he moved to Berlin in 2009 for civilian service in elderly care, which ran into 2010, and stayed on to study. He has recalled a shared room for 82 euros and the end of daily dance training; he also switched then to the Polish pronunciation of his name. He joined Alliance 90/The Greens in 2009, during that year's Bundestag campaign, about three weeks before the election—the first federal poll in which he could vote.

### University studies

From 2010 to 2014 he studied social and cultural anthropology and political science at the Free University of Berlin, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in autumn 2014. He has described the anthropology course as the renamed successor to ethnology. His thesis examined how German colonialism appeared in history textbooks or history lessons; political science was the minor, and he did not take a higher degree.

As a student he was already active in Green politics in Berlin. He later told the *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* that study and party work became hard to hold together, because describing reality and trying to change it pulled in different directions, and that he chose politics as his work. He called those Berlin years "a really exciting time," and after graduating in 2014 he moved back to Duisburg.

## Green Youth and early political work

### Entry into the party

Felix Banaszak has been a member of Alliance 90/The Greens since 2009. In an account published by the party's Duisburg branch, he said that after his Abitur that year he moved to Berlin for civilian service in elderly care and for university study, landed in the Bundestag constituency of [Hans-Christian Ströbele](/people/hans-christian-strobele) — then the only Green returned by a direct mandate — and joined three weeks before the [2009 federal election](/facts/2009-german-federal-election). The Bundestag biography, based on members' own disclosures, places his first offices in the Green Youth (Grüne Jugend), the party's youth organization: the Berlin state executive from 2010 to 2011, and the federal executive from 2011 to 2014. It also lists him, from 2010 to 2012, as a staff member for Dirk Behrendt, then a Green deputy in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin.

### Federal Green Youth leadership

At the 41st federal congress in Gelsenkirchen in early November 2013, the Green Youth elected Banaszak and Theresa Kalmer as its two federal spokespersons. Banaszak, 24 and born in Duisburg, had been the organization's political director; Kalmer, a 22-year-old politics student, had been an assessor on the federal executive. Over three days the congress discussed the youth organization's course after the [2013 federal election](/facts/2013-german-federal-election) and a programme for the European election of May 2014. Banaszak named asylum and social policy among his priorities; Kalmer stressed ecology, which she called the Greens' original theme.

The executive on which he served as political director had been chosen in October 2012, also in Gelsenkirchen, and sat until autumn 2013 under the spokespersons Sina Doughan and Jens Parker. Its own profile described Banaszak, then living in Neukölln while studying social and cultural anthropology and political science in Berlin, as responsible for asylum, migration, anti-racism, interior affairs and social policy, including an unconditional basic income.

While still political director, he argued at the federal delegates' conference in Berlin on 27 April 2013 for ending the use of paid informants, or V-Leute, by the domestic intelligence service. *Der Spiegel* quoted him: "The system is wrong in itself," and it made no sense "to pay convinced perpetrators." Delegates overruled a leadership proposal limited to a moratorium in the far-right scene. After an inconclusive show of cards, a repeated written ballot carried the waiver by 330 votes to 294. The *taz* traced the amendment that passed to the Brandenburg branch around the Bundestag member Monika Lazar; parliamentary-group leader [Renate Künast](/people/renate-kunast) had answered that the party also had "the responsibility to provide for security." The programme adopted that weekend, *Zeit für den grünen Wandel*, said that paid informants always posed unacceptable risks to the rule of law for limited intelligence gain, and that the Greens would forgo them even if information-gathering suffered. The same chapter called for dissolving the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and replacing it with a smaller service limited to counter-espionage and violent threats. *Der Spiegel* tied the debate to the National Socialist Underground: informants had not prevented the murders attributed to the group, and collaboration had been alleged. Thomas Oppermann, parliamentary business manager of the Social Democratic Party, replied that evening that the SPD would bind informants by law but would not accept an absolute ban.

In June 2014, when *nd* still described Banaszak as a Green Youth spokesperson, the Institut Solidarische Moderne elected him to its executive, a Berlin association seeking a social-ecological politics across the SPD, [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) and the Greens and across politics, scholarship and social movements. New members included the Social Democrat Hilde Mattheis and the Left deputy Cornelia Möhring; the Green MEP Sven Giegold left the board. Banaszak has dated his own service there to 2014–2016. On 13 November 2014 the *taz* interviewed [Erik Marquardt](/people/erik-marquardt) as the person who had led the youth organization for about a month.

### Work for members of the European Parliament

From 2014 to 2017 Banaszak worked for the Green members of the European Parliament Sven Giegold and [Terry Reintke](/people/terry-reintke) as head of their joint North Rhine-Westphalia Europe office in Düsseldorf. The appointment followed the bachelor's degree in social and cultural anthropology and political science that the Bundestag biography dates to 2010–2014 at the Free University of Berlin, and the return to Duisburg that he places in autumn 2014.

## Leadership in North Rhine-Westphalia

### Duisburg and the Ruhr district

Banaszak's route to the state leadership ran through the Duisburg district association of Alliance 90/The Greens, in the Ruhr city to which he had returned after university. From April 2016 to March 2018 he was a spokesperson (*Vorstandssprecher*) of the Duisburg *Kreisverband*. The *Rheinische Post* identified him in that office in June 2016, and in January 2018 described him as the association's former speaker as he stood for the state co-chair.

The Ruhr's industrial transition became state-party policy during his co-chairmanship. At the congress in Dortmund on 15 August 2020, delegates adopted guidelines aimed at making North Rhine-Westphalia "the first climate-neutral industrial region in Europe," with more wind power, and spoke of a "green economic miracle" in the state.

### State chairmanship

On 20 January 2018 a state congress in Kamen elected Banaszak co-chair beside Mona Neubaur, who had held the other chair since 2014 and was not a candidate that day. He succeeded Sven Lehmann, who left after eight years for the Bundestag. Of 267 votes, Banaszak received 151 (56.6 percent) and state treasurer Wolfgang Rettich 109 (40.8 percent); Felix Naumann, nominated during the congress, received none. Delegates also backed cutting the state executive from 20 members to eight.

The election followed the Greens' 2017 defeat. On 14 May 2017 their list vote fell to 6.4 percent, from 11.3 percent in 2012, and they left government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). A [Christian Democratic Union (CDU)](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany)–Free Democratic Party (FDP) majority under Armin Laschet replaced them; the CDU took 72 seats and the FDP 28 in a Landtag of 199, and the Greens 14.

The new co-chairs were confirmed twice without opponents. On 16 June 2018 in Troisdorf, Banaszak received 78.71 percent and Neubaur 75.41 percent; the *Landesverband*, then the Greens' largest, had about 13,600 members. On 15 August 2020 in Dortmund, at the first in-person congress of any Landtag party in the state after the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic) began, Banaszak won 77 percent and Neubaur 83 percent. Membership was about 21,000 then and about 26,000 by June 2022, which the *Rheinische Post* described as more than double the post-2017 level.

### The 2022 state election and coalition

The Landtag election on 15 May 2022 was the test. In the state returning officer's final count, the Greens took 18.2 percent of list votes (1,299,821) and 17.8 percent of constituency votes, 11.8 points above 2017, and 39 of 195 seats. Turnout was 55.5 percent, against 65.2 percent in 2017. The CDU led with 35.7 percent and 76 seats, the SPD had 26.7 percent and 56, the FDP fell from 12.6 to 5.9 percent and 12 seats, and the AfD took 5.4 percent and 12, ending the CDU–FDP majority. Neubaur was the Greens' lead candidate.

With 115 seats between them, CDU and Greens opened coalition talks on 31 May at the Malkasten artists' club in Düsseldorf, using 13 working groups on each side. Banaszak led the Green group on the budget, staffing and finance, with Sven Giegold as deputy, and deputized for Verena Verspohl on schools. Neubaur led the group on climate protection, energy and the economy.

[Hendrik Wüst](/people/hendrik-wust) and Neubaur presented a 146-page *Zukunftsvertrag für Nordrhein-Westfalen*, giving the CDU eight departments and the Greens four, including a ministry combining economic affairs, industry, climate protection and energy. Both congresses approved it on the weekend of 25–26 June, and it was signed on 27 June. On 15 June the two chairs told members they would not run again. Neubaur hoped to implement the agreement in office. Banaszak wrote that he would not enter the state government and that his place was in the Bundestag group; state-party rules bar chairs from federal, state or [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission) office and limit parliamentarians to one third of the executive. He called a return to government after five years in opposition the departure he wanted. On 26 June in Bielefeld, delegates elected Yazgülü Zeybek with just under 92 percent and Tim Achtermeyer with just under 82 percent; there were no other candidates.

On 28 June the Landtag re-elected Wüst, minister-president since 27 October 2021, with 106 of 181 votes on a secret first ballot (74 against, one abstention); 98 were required. The next day he named the Second Wüst cabinet. Neubaur became deputy minister-president and minister for economic affairs, industry, climate action and energy. Josefine Paul took children, youth, family, equality, flight and integration; Oliver Krischer environment, nature conservation and transport; and Benjamin Limbach justice. Finance stayed with the CDU under Marcus Optendrenk. Banaszak remained a Bundestag member and left the state chair.

## Member of the Bundestag

### Candidacies and elections

Banaszak's first candidacy for the Bundestag was in Duisburg. On 2 June 2016 a members' meeting of the city's Alliance 90/The Greens backed the then 26-year-old co-speaker of the district association, with 97 percent, to stand at the next federal election. In the [2017 German federal election](/facts/2017-german-federal-election) of 24 September he was the Green candidate in constituency 116, Duisburg II. The Federal Returning Officer's final result for that constituency gives the Greens 4,622 first votes, 4.6 percent, and 4,493 second votes, 4.4 percent; turnout was 64.7 percent of 160,204 people eligible to vote. The direct mandate went to [Mahmut Özdemir](/people/mahmut-ozdemir) of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany), with 34,799 votes, or 34.7 percent. Banaszak was not elected.

For the 2021 German federal election the Greens in North Rhine-Westphalia adopted an 80-person state list, the longest in the Land association's history, at a delegate conference from 9 to 11 April 2021. [Britta Haßelmann](/people/britta-hasselmann) of Bielefeld led it and Oliver Krischer of Aachen was second; places three to six went to [Irene Mihalic](/people/irene-mihalic), Sven Lehmann, [Katharina Dröge](/people/katharina-droge) and Banaszak of Duisburg. He again contested Duisburg II, still numbered 116. The Green first-vote total there was 10,518, or 10.9 percent, 6.3 points above 2017, and Abgeordnetenwatch records that figure as his constituency result. Özdemir held the seat for the SPD with 38,162 votes, 39.4 percent. Green second votes in the constituency were 10,287, or 10.6 percent, and turnout was 63.3 percent. Banaszak entered parliament from sixth place on the state list rather than from the constituency; the biography for the 20th term records him as a member from 2021.

He stood again at the snap 2025 German federal election on 23 February, in Duisburg II, now constituency 115, and in sixth place on the Green state list. The *Rheinische Post* reported that the list was settled in Bielefeld at the beginning of December 2024, with Haßelmann and Dröge first and second, Mihalic third and Lehmann fourth, and with Banaszak standing for sixth place; the state returning officer's candidate table for the constituency confirms that place. Tagesschau's constituency table gives him 7,599 first votes, 6.9 percent, down 4.0 points from 2021. He placed behind Özdemir, who won the seat with 36,731 votes, or 33.3 percent; [Sascha Lensing](/people/sascha-lensing) of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany, with 29,445 votes, or 26.7 percent; Björn Pollmer of the Christian Democratic Union, with 21,791 votes, or 19.7 percent; and Hüseyin Kenan Aydin of Die Linke, with 9,976 votes, or 9.0 percent. The Federal Returning Officer's final result matches those first-vote figures and records 7,268 Green second votes in the constituency, 6.6 percent, also down 4.0 points, on a turnout of 73.4 percent. He missed the direct mandate and was returned again on the North Rhine-Westphalian list.

### Committees and rapporteur roles

In the 20th Bundestag Banaszak began with full seats on economic affairs and the budget. At the constituting session of the Economic Affairs Committee on 15 December 2021 he was one of five full members from the Green parliamentary group; the committee had 34 full members. The Bundestag's account, dated the same day, of the Budget Committee's constituting session names him among seven Green full members of a body of 45.

The party states that his committee work covered industrial policy, energy and the maritime economy, and the estimates of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and of the [Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development](/organizations/federal-ministry-for-economic-cooperation-and-development). On his own website he adds basic industries, including steel and chemicals, and regional economic policy, and writes that his budget reporting also covered the Bundesrechnungshof. Abgeordnetenwatch's roster for the 20th Bundestag includes him on the audit committee, the Rechnungsprüfungsausschuss. The party profile says that until November 2024 he was spokesperson for the group's North Rhine-Westphalian state group, and that he shares the leadership of its internal project group on climate-neutral economic activity. In February 2025 the *Saarbrücker Zeitung* reported a final paper from a Green project group of that description. As the newspaper summarized the paper, the group treated climate-neutral production as a question of competitiveness and proposed a debt-financed investment fund, a ten-percent investment premium excluding buildings, European lead markets for goods such as climate-neutral cement, and an extension of climate-protection contracts from large plants to medium-sized firms.

The full seats did not run to the end of the term. The archived biography for the close of the 20th Bundestag lists only a substitute membership of the Economic Affairs Committee. Banaszak has written that his election as federal co-chair in November 2024 was when he gave up ordinary committee memberships. Neither that archived page nor his current Bundestag biography records a seat on the Committee on European Union Affairs.

### The 21st Bundestag

In the 21st Bundestag the mandate is again a North Rhine-Westphalian list seat, with constituency 115, Duisburg II, recorded as the district in which he stood. The official biography and the Green group's member page list him only as a substitute member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs. He is not listed there on the Budget Committee or the audit committee. He ties that shift, from the full economic and budget seats of the previous term to substitute membership, to the federal co-chairmanship he took up in November 2024.

## Federal co-chairmanship

### The 2024 leadership change

On 25 September 2024 the federal co-chairs of Alliance 90/The Greens, Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, announced that the entire federal executive would resign. Nouripour called the Brandenburg result of the previous Sunday “a testament to the deepest crisis of our party in a decade”: the Greens had missed the five-percent hurdle and left that Landtag. He and Lang also cited the 2024 election to the European Parliament, where the party fell from 20.5 to 11.9 percent and from 21 to 12 seats, and the earlier September Landtag elections in Saxony and Thuringia, where the party only just returned in Saxony and again missed the hurdle in Thuringia. The European vote was one defeat in that series, not the occasion on which they quit. Lang said the party needed “new faces” and that it was “not the time to cling to the chair.” The executive chosen in November 2023 for two years was to stay only until a November congress. Robert Habeck called the resignations a service to the party; a spokesman for Chancellor [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz) said they would not affect the coalition. Reporting already named Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak as possible successors.

### Election and first months

The federal delegates’ conference met in Wiesbaden in mid-November 2024. Nouripour spoke on the Friday; after the coalition collapsed, the party used the meeting to open the campaign for the Bundestag election of 23 February 2025.

On 16 November delegates elected Brantner with 78.15 percent and Banaszak with 92.88 percent, each for two years. A challenger from Bayreuth took 14.44 percent in Brantner’s ballot, with 4.2 percent voting no and 3.21 percent abstaining; Banaszak’s four opponents together received 3.72 percent. Brantner, on the Realo wing, argued for climate policy and investment—“Tightening the belt does nothing if the trousers are already missing”—and against another “standstill grand coalition,” and kept her state-secretary post through the election. Banaszak, from the left, asked the Greens to be “a force of confidence,” rejected child and pensioner poverty, and said the party should campaign to keep governing as a government’s “motor,” not its corrective or its press office.

Heiko Knopf was re-elected deputy chair with 77.37 percent, and Sven Giegold, who had left a state-secretary post in Habeck’s ministry to run, became the other deputy with 80.81 percent. Knopf was the only eastern German on the six-member executive. Pegah Edalatian, until then a deputy, was elected political director with 81.15 percent, and Manuela Rottmann treasurer with 78.38 percent. Edalatian said the election programme, shorter than the roughly 270-page 2021 text, would be adopted on 26 January.

On 17 November, 741 of 768 delegates voted for Habeck as lead candidate, 20 against and seven abstaining; he said the campaign should, “if it carries us very far,” reach the chancellery. Before that session he and Foreign Minister [Annalena Baerbock](/people/annalena-baerbock) had been presented as the campaign pair. At a one-day congress in Berlin on 26 January 2025 the delegates adopted the leadership’s draft with no votes against and two abstentions. Banaszak used the meeting to tell [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) not to go further “into a dead end” and to seek agreement among democrats rather than majorities that would depend on the Alternative for Germany.

### The 2025 federal election and opposition

Federal returning officer Ruth Brand gave the final result on 14 March 2025: the Greens took 11.6 percent of the second votes and 85 seats, down from 14.7 percent and 118 seats in 2021, in a Bundestag cut from 735 to 630 members. The Christian Democratic Union had 22.6 percent and 164 seats, the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) 6.0 percent and 44, and the Social Democratic Party 16.4 percent and 120, a majority between them. The morning after the vote, Tagesschau described failed hopes of a Union–Green coalition and, on a preliminary voter-flow estimate, about 700,000 votes lost to the Left. The Greens remained in the caretaker cabinet until the new government took office in May.

On 18 March the outgoing Bundestag passed a defence and infrastructure package negotiated by the Union, the SPD and the Greens, clearing the two-thirds mark of 489 votes. On 24 March the Green Bundestag group re-elected Britta Haßelmann and Katharina Dröge, who had led those talks, as co-chairs with 90.4 percent each, and Irene Mihalic as first parliamentary secretary with 93.9 percent.

The Bundestag elected Merz chancellor on 6 May 2025 on a second ballot, by 325 of 618 votes, after he had missed the required 316 that morning on a CDU/CSU–SPD nomination, and the Greens went into opposition. At the November 2025 congress in Hanover, Banaszak said the ecological standard should not be lowered but that “the social claim must go up,” and called Merz a “chancellor of the overflowing mouth and the empty hands.” Delegates adopted the executive’s climate lead motion by a large majority and added a Green Youth aim of returning the Deutschlandticket toward nine euros. On 27 September 2026 both said they would seek a second term at the Berlin congress of 4–6 December, Banaszak in order “to prepare our party, with all of you, for the next Bundestag election.” By then the Greens had won Baden-Württemberg with 30.2 percent, risen in Saxony-Anhalt from 5.9 to 8.9 percent and returned to the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern parliament, while losing more than four points in Berlin; an ARD DeutschlandTrend put them at 15 percent, and another term for the pair was described as possible but not assured.

## Political positions

### Industry, climate and the Ruhr transformation

Banaszak’s Bundestag work on industry has treated steel in Duisburg as the test of whether the Ruhr can cut emissions and keep the plants. In September 2022 he told the Bundestag that aid to firms had to come with more renewables, green hydrogen and money for direct-reduction steel.

In September 2023 the *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* headlined an interview with his judgement that not every blast furnace would be replaced. In June 2024, as industry spokesman of the Greens, he told *Handelsblatt* that a fast sale to [Daniel Křetínský](/people/daniel-kretinsky)’s group suggested Thyssenkrupp doubted the full steel chain still had a future in Germany, and would then have to justify about two billion euros in public aid. The aim, he said, looked like cleaning up the balance sheet. When the unit that November planned about 5,000 job cuts by 2030 and capacity of 8.7 to 9.0 million tonnes, down from 11.5 million, *Der Spiegel* quoted him doubting a no-redundancy pledge and whether an integrated firm would remain. The federation and North Rhine-Westphalia still envisaged up to two billion euros; the plant was expected to start on natural gas. [IG Metall](/organizations/ig-metall)’s Jürgen Kerner called the plan a “declaration of war”.

He has denied that the energy transition caused the weakness. In the ZDF summer interview of August 2026 he called “nonsense” Evonik chief Christian Kullmann’s claim of about a trillion euros spent for nothing: power was dear because cheap wind and solar did not reach users while grids lagged. In January 2025 he told *WirtschaftsWoche* that cheaper energy, less bureaucracy and skilled workers were the core of Green economic policy. He backed Robert Habeck’s investment premium — 10 percent of spending on machinery or software by firms that invest, not a general company-tax cut. To [Donald Trump](/people/mig-donald-trump)’s “America First” he answered “Europe United”. In September 2026 he told *auto motor und sport* that Chinese overcapacity and “knock-down” prices were state dumping, that China policy had been too naive, and that tariffs were warranted. “Industrial policy is democracy policy,” he said.

### Public finance and the debt brake

He has argued for reforming the constitutional debt brake, not abolishing it. At Wiesbaden in November 2024 he opposed a Green Youth motion to scrap it: “We are close to winning this fight for the future of our society. Let us not throw it away in the wrong place.” Delegates backed borrowing in line with investment, a larger cyclical component, and a debt-financed “Deutschland-Investitionsfonds”. Banaszak thought CDU state premiers, unlike the FDP, could accept a reform. In January 2025 he told *WirtschaftsWoche* that without a debt-brake reform the investment offensive would fail, including defence spending Habeck had suggested moving toward 3.5 percent of output.

On 2 March 2025 he said the Greens would back a broad change to the debt rules in the Basic Law, because internal and external security were at risk. It must not be bought “at the price of our society falling apart, of climate protection falling by the wayside, and of no longer investing in schools and daycare centres”. He accused Friedrich Merz of having denied the gap before the vote. After a 500-billion-euro infrastructure and climate fund was written into the Basic Law, he accused Finance Minister [Lars Klingbeil](/people/lars-klingbeil) in the August 2025 ARD interview of using “a high degree of creativity” so that money [for the future](/organizations/for-the-future) subsidised the past, including gas paid from the Climate and Transformation Fund. Tagesschau confirmed that the gas-storage levy was to be paid from that fund.

### Social policy, labour and equality

At Hanover in November 2025 he refused to lower the ecological claim — “but the social claim, that has to be high”. A “Mitmach-Ökologie”, he said, should not scold drivers or families saving for one flight; those who can pay, and who emit more, should carry the cost. Delegates sought a Klimageld, a per-capita rebate tilted to lower incomes, from 2027. Green Youth chair Henriette Held, calling the climate crisis “a class question”, carried a return toward a nine-euro public-transport ticket against the executive’s 49 euros. Banaszak said “left” was not an insult. He called the minimum-wage path to 13.90 euros in 2026 and 14.60 in 2027 a “bitter disappointment”, telling *Tagesspiegel* that pay had to be livable without benefits or the state was subsidising dumping, and that the SPD had campaigned on 15 euros.

### Foreign and European affairs

On 8 September 2022, after [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht) called sanctions an economic war and sought talks on Russian gas, he called her the “chief Kremlin lobbyist” and said Die Linke should not have given her the floor. To [Klaus Ernst](/people/klaus-ernst) he replied that she and Ernst wanted Nord Stream 2 opened and were reversing perpetrator and victim, casting [Vladimir Putin](/people/vladimir-putin) as the victim of a Western economic war while he attacked Ukraine and, through energy and hunger, Europe. In August 2024 he called Nord Stream 2 “the greatest foreign-, energy- and economic-policy failure since the Federal Republic has existed”, and demanded an inquiry the SPD was blocking. He blamed an SPD reading of Ostpolitik and interests the Union had shared, but said Nord Stream 1 and Green decisions could be examined too. Military aid was “not alms but an investment in our peace and security order”; to cut it would put security “on the altar of small-minded fiscal policy”. He faulted Chancellor Olaf Scholz for warning of escalation, then supplying the weapons once it failed to come. On trade he has since argued for European Union tariffs against distorted import prices and for public support of European batteries, chips and hydrogen equipment.

## Personal life

### Family

Felix Banaszak is married and has one child, according to the biography published by the Bundestag, which states that such entries rest on members' own information. On his Abgeordnetenwatch profile he specifies that the child is a daughter. In a note posted in December 2022 he wrote that he had become a father for the first time that November, a date a later FOCUS profile also reported.

His wife was named in April 2025, when the couple appeared together in public for the first time, at the Bundespresseball in Berlin on 4 April. BUNTE, which met them at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, identified her as Charlotte Obermeier and quoted her saying she was very proud of him. He has described his centre of life as lying in both Berlin and Duisburg. Party statements reported by Deutschlandfunk in June 2026 placed his primary residence in Duisburg, his constituency and birthplace; he has also kept a second home in Berlin and, by his own account, moved several times within the capital from 2022 onward. Commenting that July on a portrait in *Die Zeit*, he wrote of receiving a video of his daughter while on a train instead of being with her.

### Civic affiliations and public identity

The Bundestag biography records membership of the service-sector union ver.di and of IG Metall. In the 20th electoral term the parliament's disclosures listed him on the supervisory board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Bonn, from 11 May 2022 until 4 January 2025.

A July 2025 *Die Zeit* portrait stated that he is attracted both to women and to men. On Instagram, as quoted by queer.de, he wrote that he had chosen to speak about realizing he was drawn not only to women but also to men. Later that month, on the Funke Mediengruppe podcast *Meine schwerste Entscheidung*, he said he had "actually never had a coming-out": he had recognized his bisexuality at about 17 or 18, had few people to discuss it with then, and found that at the Free University of Berlin and in the Green Youth nobody made an issue of it. He called Christopher Street Day in Duisburg effectively a fixed date and noted that the Gelsenkirchen event had recently been cancelled over security concerns.

On 26 June 2016, at a banned closing gathering of Istanbul Pride, Turkish police detained Banaszak, then spokesperson for Alliance 90/The Greens in Duisburg and a staff member of MEP Terry Reintke, together with [Max Lucks](/people/max-lucks), then a spokesperson of the Green Youth in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Reintke and the Bundestag member Volker Beck were held only briefly. [Deutsche Welle](/organizations/deutsche-welle) reported that Banaszak and Lucks remained in custody, and that organizers counted at least 19 detentions. The governor of Istanbul had banned the march on security grounds in Ramadan; Banaszak had also attended the previous year, when the march was likewise banned. He told the *Rheinische Post* that he and Lucks were held as they and Turkish activists tried to read a statement on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, after police used water cannon and tear gas. He said he was released after several hours with bruises on one arm, and that the authorities had spread a climate of fear.

## Reception and controversies

### Media and intra-party reception

German reporting cast Felix Banaszak as a left-wing Green whom Realos also called pragmatic. He co-chaired Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2018 to 2022; on 15 May 2022 the state party took 18.2 percent of second votes, 11.8 points above 2017. When Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour said in September 2024 that the federal executive would resign, Der Spiegel named Banaszak alongside Franziska Brantner, a confidante of Robert Habeck, as the cross-wing pair already seen as likely successors.

At Wiesbaden, Tagesschau reported, Brantner received 78.15 percent and Banaszak 92.88 percent. He asked the Greens to meet people's fears, to be "a force of confidence," and to campaign to stay in government. In a taz interview of 3 November 2024 he defined his "left" as arms for Ukraine, no softening on Hamas or antisemitism, and poverty as a social question, while conceding an aloof image. The interviewer said centrist voters and supporters who found the Greens no longer left enough were both leaving.

The Green Youth split came in the same weeks, before he was chair. All ten federal board members, including Svenja Appuhn and Katharina Stolla, said they would leave and found a "new, decidedly left youth association." It was not possible, they wrote, "to be part of a party and at the same time campaign for a fundamentally different politics." Spiegel reported that they cited the clearance of Lützerath and tighter asylum rules and saw no medium-term majority for "class-oriented politics." Banaszak, a Green Youth speaker in 2013–14, was the left-wing candidate days later. Renate Künast told rbb she would not weep over a board unfit for reality; group chair Katharina Dröge would have urged them to argue from inside.

At the Leipzig congress, taz reported on 11 October 2025, new speakers Henriette Held and Luis Bobga still sounded like that board. Bobga promised to "turn this party left again," and during Banaszak's greeting members raised a banner, "Felix, bitte links abbiegen" ("Felix, please turn left"). He said he would rather argue by telephone than via dpa. Held wanted opposition without "traffic-light heartache," but also cooperation.

After the 2025 federal election, coverage turned to losses in the east and among wage-earners. Tagesschau, at a small office he opened that November in Brandenburg an der Havel, noted a poor eastern image, exit from the Thuringia and Brandenburg legislatures, and polls of about three to five percent in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He said the Greens looked like an aloof academic party; passers-by did not know his name, and some blamed them for dearer fuel. In Hanover he called for a "climate policy for all" that would not shame a car or a saved-for flight to Mallorca, and said couriers and cashiers should feel at home. "Left" was not an insult, he said; Held called the climate crisis a class question.

### Second-home tax investigation

On 3 June 2026 Banaszak said prosecutors in Berlin were investigating him over the second-home tax. He told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur — carried by taz and n-tv, and confirmed to Der Spiegel in Green circles — that after moves in the city he had not updated the tax office and had underpaid since 2022, on the earlier flat's rent. His main home remained Duisburg. On Instagram, under "Transparency in my own case," he said he had failed to keep his own affairs in order, regretted it, was cooperating through his lawyer, and would pay the assessment. The cited rate was 15 percent of net cold rent from 2019 and 20 percent from 2025. Prosecutors would not comment, citing tax secrecy.

Members of the Bundestag are in principle immune: investigations are generally authorised, but the president must be told, and searches need the plenary. Spiegel said the immunity committee would hear the case the next sitting week, and that President [Julia Klöckner](/people/julia-klockner) of the Christian Democratic Union had already been notified. As of 3–4 June 2026 the public record was an open investigation and a promise to repay, not a charge or a finished assessment. taz called paying at all "exemplary": the levy had raised 20.5 million euros the year before, about 0.03 percent of revenue, from 19,556 of 115,802 people with a main home elsewhere. In 2014 Anton Hofreiter, then Green group leader, said he had never registered a Berlin flat taken in 2005 and put the arrears at 2,475 euros; taz set Banaszak beside that round.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/felix-banaszak