Filiz Polat

Filiz Polat (born 11 July 1978 in Bramsche) is a politician of Alliance 90/The Greens and a member of the Bundestag from Lower Saxony. A qualified economist (Diplom-Volkswirtin), she has sat in the federal parliament since 2017. On 7 December 2021 the Green parliamentary group elected her as one of its parliamentary managing directors (Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin), alongside Irene Mihalic, Anja Reinalter and Till Steffen.

Polat took her Abitur in Münster in 1997 and studied economics at Goethe University Frankfurt, graduating in 2002 as a Diplom-Volkswirtin. In the same year she completed the intermediate examination in political science and worked as a student assistant to the chair of statistics and econometrics at the university. She has been a member of the Greens since 1996. From 2005 to 2007 she was deputy state chair of the party in Lower Saxony, and from 2004 to 2017 she was a member of the Landtag of Lower Saxony. She sat on the Bramsche city council from 2006 to 2016 and on the council of the district of Osnabrück from 2011 to 2016.

The 19th Bundestag, the first in which she held a seat, met for its opening sitting on 24 October 2017. She has remained a member through the 20th and 21st electoral terms. At the 2025 federal election she stood in constituency 38, Osnabrück-Land, and was returned from first place on the Lower Saxony Green state list. In that constituency the Greens took 10.1 percent of the first votes; the direct mandate went to Lutz Brinkmann of the CDU, with 36.6 percent.

In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member, and the Green spokesperson (Obfrau), of the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and the Rules of Procedure, a member of the Council of Elders, and a deputy member of the Interior Committee and of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid. Since 2022 she has been a full member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. On the Interior Committee she was a rapporteur for the government bill to modernise nationality law, whose committee report of 17 January 2024 set out naturalisation after five years of residence instead of eight and a general acceptance of multiple nationality.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing

Filiz Polat was born on 11 July 1978 in Bramsche, in the district of Osnabrück in Lower Saxony, and grew up there. A portrait published by Goethe University Frankfurt described her as the child of a German-Turkish family of physicians.

Her mother was born in Bramsche. The university portrait identified her as a founding member of the Bramsche group of Alliance 90/The Greens, and a 2019 profile in the Green Bundestag magazine profil:GRÜN called her one of the first Greens in Lower Saxony. Her father came from the east of Anatolia. The 2019 profile said he had Turkish and Kurdish roots, studied medicine in Germany and worked as a physician; a later account of a public talk said he had come from Turkey as a young student and qualified as a doctor in Germany. In 2007 the taz noted that Polat herself spoke Turkish well.

The university portrait, based on an interview with her, presented the household as politically engaged. It said her father had been highly political since his medical studies and argued for an open, secular Islam, and that Polat and her siblings grew up where arguing about politics was part of ordinary life. From the 1970s, the same account continued, he was one of the few physicians of Turkish origin in northern Germany, and patients in his consulting hours described the difficulties of residence rules and discrimination they had experienced. The portrait added that she was not herself subject to those rules, but was confronted from childhood with the problems of immigrants.

In a 2024 interview on nationality law, Polat said that under the jus sanguinis rule then in force her mother’s north-German origin gave her German citizenship at birth, while her Turkish father also gave her Turkish citizenship, so she was a dual national from birth and did not go through naturalization. She has described that childhood as sheltered and carefree, and said her parents encouraged her early to take responsibility and to get involved. In the university interview she said that two of her sisters live in Istanbul, and she also referred to family on her father’s side.

Biographies published by the Bundestag and by the Green parliamentary group date her political activity to 1986 and her party membership to 1996. She told the university that the Chernobyl disaster was a decisive experience for her generation and the reason she became active in Greenpeace.

Schooling and university

Polat passed the Abitur in 1997 in Münster. Her own biographical note names the Wilhelm-Hittorf-Gymnasium, and the 2019 profile places the Gymnasium in Westphalian Münster. A write-up of a talk she gave for the Muslimisches Jugendwerk says she moved to Münster at 16 in order to take the Abitur there.

She then studied economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. She later said she had wanted to understand how money and the economy worked. In 2002 she graduated as a Diplom-Volkswirtin, and in the same year she completed the Vordiplom, the intermediate examination, in political science (Politologie). A taz profile of 4 January 2007 reported that her economics diploma thesis dealt with the employment effects of technological change.

During the course she worked as a student research assistant (wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft) at the university’s chair of statistics and econometrics. Asked afterwards whether private business had attracted her, she said a life as a professional politician had not been planned, remembered studying “in the tower” and the colleagues at the chair, and described both the university and that chair as having been very good. The university portrait records that she then returned to Bramsche.

Local politics in the Osnabrück region

Green Youth and party offices

Filiz Polat joined Alliance 90/The Greens in 1996. Her biography on the Bundestag website also lists her as politically active since 1986. She describes herself as a founding member of the Grün-Alternative Jugend in Bramsche, a local youth group of the party in the Osnabrück district of Lower Saxony.

Her first statewide party office recorded in the press was a deputy seat on the Lower Saxony executive, held while she was already a member of the Landtag of Lower Saxony. In September 2005 the tageszeitung described her as a deputy on that board. She did not stand that autumn for the co-chair left open when Brigitte Pothmer entered the Bundestag, a post the state delegates' conference in Braunschweig was to fill in November; Polat said a candidacy would still be "a bit too early." The Bundestag biography dates her term as deputy state chair from 2005 to 2007.

She did contest the leadership at the state delegates' conference in Stade on 27 January 2007. At 28 she was discussed in the party as the favorite for one half of the dual chair, with the backing of co-chair Raimund Nowak and the Hanover district association, and she presented the bid as a "sign of renewal." Dorothea Steiner, a 58-year-old Landtag colleague from Osnabrück, won instead. The Nordwest-Zeitung reported 86 of 133 delegate votes for Steiner and 44 for Polat. Polat said she had not convinced the delegates at the decisive moment. The paper added that she then had to leave the deputy post, because the five-member executive could include only one woman who also held a parliamentary mandate. Nowak was re-elected as the other co-chair and, at her send-off, told her that the future belonged to her.

Municipal councils

Separate from the state executive, she held municipal seats in Bramsche and the district. On her own account she sat from 1996 to 2001 on the Ortsrat of Bramsche-Mitte, the elected body for that locality. In Lower Saxony, members of an Ortsrat are chosen by law on the same day as city councillors. General local elections for these bodies are held every five years.

The Bundestag biography lists her as a member of the Bramsche city council from 2006 to 2016 and of the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Osnabrück from 2011 to 2016. The council term then running ended on 31 October 2011, and the next general local elections, which also filled the district councils, were held on 11 September 2011. Further elections followed on 11 September 2016, with the new term starting on 1 November 2016. Her decade on the city council therefore covered the term that closed in 2011 and the term elected that year, and neither local mandate continued into the councils seated in November 2016.

Member of the Landtag of Lower Saxony

Entry and re-election

Filiz Polat entered the Landtag of Lower Saxony on 15 September 2004, the day Rebecca Harms resigned her seat to take one in the European Parliament. The Landtag’s report on the 15th electoral period records both the resignation and Polat’s succession from the state list of Alliance 90/The Greens; the group kept its 14 members. She had stood at the 2003 election without winning a mandate. The Greens then took 7.6 percent of the second votes and 14 list seats, while a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party under Christian Wulff replaced the Social Democratic Party. The taz later called that candidacy a narrow miss.

Born in Bramsche, north of Osnabrück, on 11 July 1978, she was 26 when she took the seat. A profile by Goethe University Frankfurt, where she had studied economics, later described her as the youngest member of the Landtag and the first with Turkish roots in the Leineschloss in Hanover. A February 2017 taz portrait likewise called her the first member with a Turkish migration background.

She was re-elected on 27 January 2008 from place 7 on the Green list. The party won 8.0 percent and 12 list seats. In constituency 75, Bramsche, Clemens Lammerskitten (CDU) took the direct mandate; the Greens’ second-vote share there was 8.4 percent. Stefan Wenzel chaired the Green group. The deputies were Gabriele Heinen-Kljajić and Miriam Staudte, with Christian Meyer replacing Ursula Helmhold in August 2010. Polat was not among them.

On 20 January 2013 she was returned again from list place 7. The Greens took 13.7 percent and 20 list seats; the CDU won 36.0 percent, the SPD 32.6 percent and the FDP 9.9 percent. SPD and Greens held 69 seats, a majority of one, and formed a government under Stephan Weil. In Bramsche, Lammerskitten again won the seat; the Greens polled 14.0 percent of second votes and 12.5 percent of first votes. On 18 February 2013 the group elected Anja Piel chair and expanded the deputies from three to five. The Deutsche Presse-Agentur named Polat, then 34, among them, with Meta Janssen-Kucz, Thomas Schremmer, Miriam Staudte and Helge Limburg, also parliamentary managing director.

The mandate ended with the 17th electoral period. At its last sitting, on 21 September 2017, she gave what she called her final speech after 13 years. The vice-president wished her success in the Bundestag election three days later.

Portfolios in the state parliament

Polat describes her last Landtag offices as deputy group chair and spokesperson for refugee and migration policy, older people and care, and monument protection. In 2017 she told the chamber she still held the monument brief and had sat on the petitions committee for nearly a decade.

Before a hardship commission existed, deportation cases came to that committee as petitions whose recommendations did not bind the interior ministry. In February 2006 the taz quoted her calling the attached advisory panel an “alibi body” of the CDU–FDP majority, because favourable opinions rarely produced a right to stay. Under Interior Minister Uwe Schünemann, Lower Saxony set up a hardship commission in September 2006, one of the last Länder to do so. In its first year it decided nine cases, five for the applicant. Welfare associations then withdrew, arguing that a threshold of six votes out of eight, and rules that could block a whole family, were meant to keep cases out.

On 9 June 2009 the Green group, in a bill signed by Wenzel, proposed replacing the 1978 Monument Protection Act with a statute on monument care, archaeology and building culture, extending protection to palaeontological evidence and referring to the UNESCO World Heritage convention. It was not passed under the CDU–FDP majority. Polat later said the first complete bill she drafted herself was that monument law, and she described the decision to renovate rather than demolish the Landtag building as a focus of the work.

After 2013 the taz identified her as the migration politician the SPD–Green majority intended to chair the Commission on Questions of Migration and Participation. Founded in 1993, it advises the Landtag on cultural, philosophical and religious diversity; members include deputies, migrant organisations, welfare associations and, after a 2013 reform that replaced unanimity with majority votes, scholars. The CDU delayed the restart and failed with a motion to give the chair to a migrant representative from the commission rather than to Polat, warning that non-parliamentarians could outvote deputies. On 23 August 2016 it asked the government to report on religious minorities in refugee accommodation and on pupils entering school mid-way, and recommended, by 13 votes to none with four abstentions, an SPD–Green motion on standards for adult language courses.

On 20 June 2013 the Landtag, with the votes of the SPD and Green groups, abolished tuition fees for elderly-care training, previously as high as 200 euros a month. A levy on providers that did not train was discussed and left undecided.

Elections to the Bundestag

At a Bundestag election each voter has two votes. The first vote (Erststimme) is cast for a candidate in a constituency, and the candidate with the most votes wins that seat. The second vote (Zweitstimme) is cast for a party and determines how seats are distributed; candidates on a state list are elected to the extent that the party's seats in the Land are not already filled by its constituency winners. Filiz Polat of Alliance 90/The Greens used both routes in Lower Saxony. In 2017, 2021 and 2025 she stood in constituency 38, Osnabrück-Land, and on the Green state list. The constituency covers the municipalities of the district of Osnabrück except Georgsmarienhütte, Belm, Hagen am Teutoburger Wald, Hasbergen and Wallenhorst, which belong to constituency 39, the city of Osnabrück. She did not win the constituency in any of the three elections. She entered the 19th, 20th and 21st Bundestag from the Lower Saxony list.

The 2017 and 2021 elections

On 19 February 2017 a Lower Saxony Green delegates' conference elected Julia Verlinden and Jürgen Trittin to the first two places on the state list and Polat to the third. At the federal election of 24 September 2017, Dr. André Berghegger of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won Osnabrück-Land with 68,379 first votes (45.6 percent). Polat, the Green constituency candidate, received 11,613 first votes (7.7 percent). The Social Democratic Party (SPD) received 42,438 (28.3 percent). Turnout was 76.0 percent of 199,131 people eligible to vote. In Lower Saxony the Greens won no constituency. All six of their seats were list seats, so third place fell within the seats produced by the second votes. The district returning officer listed Polat, of Bramsche, among the candidates from the constituency who were returned by the state list; Berghegger was recorded as the directly elected member, and his biography for the 19th electoral term describes the same direct mandate in constituency 038. The Bundestag elected on 24 September met for the first time on 24 October 2017, opening the 19th electoral term. Polat's archived biography for that term records the mandate as a list seat, not a constituency seat.

On 29 May 2021, delegates meeting in Oldenburg elected Polat to first place on the state list, with Sven-Christian Kindler second. The election of 26 September 2021 again gave the constituency to Berghegger. The CDU received 54,535 first votes (36.2 percent), 9.3 points below 2017. The SPD received 44,709 (29.7 percent) and the Greens 22,011 (14.6 percent), a gain of 6.9 points. Turnout was 75.9 percent. The district returning officer named Berghegger as the member directly elected and Polat, with Anke Hennig of the SPD, among those from the constituency elected through a state list. For the 20th electoral term the Bundestag again recorded Polat as elected on the Lower Saxony list, with a candidacy in constituency 038, and as a member of the Bundestag since 2017. Berghegger's biography for that term again lists a direct mandate in the same constituency.

The 2025 election and the 21st Bundestag

Meeting in Hanover on 14 December 2024, the Lower Saxony Greens again nominated Polat for first place on the state list, with Helge Limburg second. The federal election of 23 February 2025 was the first under the amended electoral law. As the district returning officer set out for that election, the Bundestag has 630 members, overhang and compensatory seats are no longer allocated, the second vote decides the distribution of seats, and the leading constituency candidate receives that seat only if it is covered by the party's second-vote share. In Osnabrück-Land, Lutz Brinkmann (CDU) received the most first votes, 60,952 (36.6 percent), and took the seat on that basis. Anke Hennig (SPD) was second, with 24.2 percent. The Alternative for Germany received 29,985 first votes (18.0 percent). Polat received 16,758 (10.1 percent), 4.6 points fewer than in 2021. Turnout was 84.1 percent of 199,476 eligible voters. Because she did not win the constituency, the second-vote-coverage rule did not decide her own seat. The Federal Returning Officer lists her as elected from place 1 of the Lower Saxony Green list, and as having also stood in constituency 038. The district documentation likewise records her, with Marcel Queckemeyer of the AfD, as returned from the constituency by a state list. Her biography in the 21st Bundestag continues to describe the mandate as a Lower Saxony list seat, with the Osnabrück-Land candidacy in addition, and states that she has been a member of the Bundestag since 2017.

Migration, integration and citizenship policy

Spokesperson and coalition negotiations

In the 19th Bundestag, Polat was an ordinary member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and, from its constitution on 31 January 2018, Obfrau for the parliamentary group of Alliance 90/The Greens. Reporting in that term identified her as the group’s migration-policy spokesperson. In a November 2018 interview she argued that Germany had not met the aims of the UN Global Compact for Migration and rejected the claim that labour migrants were generally unwilling to integrate. On 7 December 2021 the group elected her a parliamentary managing director, with Irene Mihalic as first managing director. Later coverage described her in that office, or as the group’s migration specialist, while she still led for the Greens on residence and citizenship bills.

In the 2021 talks that produced the traffic-light coalition, she was a Green member of the working group on flight, migration and integration, with Luise Amtsberg, Erik Marquardt and Dirk Adams. The leads were Boris Pistorius for the Social Democratic Party, Amtsberg for the Greens and Joachim Stamp for the Free Democratic Party.

Reform of nationality law

Polat was the Green rapporteur on the government bill to modernise nationality law, with SPD members Gülistan Yüksel and Hakan Demir and FDP member Stephan Thomae; CDU/CSU and AfD rapporteurs also signed the report. The interior committee heard eleven experts on 11 December 2023 and, on 17 January 2024, recommended the amended bill against the votes of the CDU/CSU and the Alternative for Germany.

In the first reading on 30 November 2023 she treated late naturalisation of the guest-worker generation as a failure to recognise a life’s work, citing a woman from Turkey who received citizenship only after 22 years. More than 11 million people in Germany, she said, lacked German citizenship, 1.7 million of them despite having been born there, and she called that gap between residence and the vote democratically troubling. The ordinary wait was eight years, against five in Britain and France and three in Canada; the bill would shorten the periods while leaving the other conditions. She called acceptance of multiple nationality a milestone and said women, pensioners, disabled people and people unemployed through no fault of their own must not be disadvantaged. Alexander Throm (CDU/CSU) called the draft a devaluation of citizenship, said five or three years was too short a test of integration, and opposed multiple nationality as the rule.

The Act of 22 March 2024, promulgated on 26 March, cut ordinary residence under section 10 of the Nationality Act from eight years to five, and allowed three years for special integration, a secured livelihood and C1 German. It removed the duty to give up another nationality, ended loss of German citizenship on acquiring another, abolished the option procedure for children who acquired citizenship at birth, and cut from eight to five years the parental residence required for citizenship at birth. People who had entered by 30 June 1974 under a recruitment agreement, or by 13 June 1990 as contract workers in the GDR, and spouses who joined them, needed only oral everyday German and no citizenship test, and were not barred by basic benefits if they were not responsible for drawing them. Applicants also had to affirm responsibility for Nazi injustice, including protection of Jewish life, and the ban on wars of aggression. Most of the Act took effect three months after promulgation, on 27 June 2024.

The Bundestag passed it on 19 January 2024 by 382 votes to 234, with 23 abstentions: the coalition in favour, aside from two FDP votes against and six abstentions, and the CDU/CSU and AfD against. Polat asked Throm whether her own dual citizenship meant he was denying her loyalty; he said no, but that individual cases did not justify the general rule. FDP member Wolfgang Kubicki voted no because he thought dropping the avoidance of multiple nationality was wrong. Green member Canan Bayram, thanking the negotiators including Polat, said the Greens had wanted to go further on social barriers. The committee asked the interior ministry to treat people unable to secure a livelihood, such as pensioners, disabled people and single parents, as hardship cases for discretionary naturalisation. The Bundesrat cleared the Act on 2 February 2024.

On 8 October 2025 the Bundestag, by 450 votes to 134 with two abstentions, passed a bill deleting the three-year route. Union, SPD and AfD voted yes; Greens and the Left voted no. Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said the passport should reward completed integration, not encourage illegal migration. Polat called the repeal backward-looking and harmful to integration and the economy. The consolidated Act still uses five years and the guest-worker rules; section 10(3) is marked repealed.

Asylum, residence and deportation

On 2 December 2022, on the Chancen-Aufenthaltsrecht, Polat said more than 137,000 people were to leave what she called the degrading system of chain toleration (Kettenduldung) and receive a status in which to qualify for a lasting right to stay, including through work, language courses and proof of identity. The same bill, she said, eased family reunification by dropping the requirement to show German before entry. In May 2023 she backed Schleswig-Holstein integration minister Aminata Touré’s proposal for a broad “lane change” (Spurwechsel), so asylum applicants with a job could move to a permit for employment. A pending asylum procedure, she said, citing the coalition agreement, should not block a permit if the conditions had existed on entry.

After federal and state governments agreed in November 2023 to examine asylum procedures in third countries, Polat told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland that a review was unnecessary and that procedures outside the European Union were not workable. She invoked the individual right of asylum in the Refugee Convention. The remark also answered openness inside her party, including from Baden-Württemberg minister-president Winfried Kretschmann.

In the first reading on 6 June 2025 of a CDU/CSU–SPD bill to suspend family reunification for people with subsidiary protection, she said families belonged together and that the right to family life in the Basic Law was not at the government’s disposal. Closing that legal route, she argued, contradicted the demand that people enter only legally. The Bundestag passed the two-year suspension on 27 June 2025 by 444 votes to 135. Dobrindt presented it as writing a limit back into residence law; Green interior spokesman Marcel Emmerich called it irresponsible.

Role in the Green parliamentary group

Parliamentary managing director

On 7 December 2021 the Bundestag group of Alliance 90/The Greens elected Filiz Polat, the member for Osnabrück-Land, as one of its parliamentary managing directors (Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerinnen). The same meeting made Katharina Dröge and Britta Haßelmann group chairs, in place of Anton Hofreiter and Katrin Göring-Eckardt, and Irene Mihalic first parliamentary managing director, succeeding Haßelmann. Elected with Polat were Anja Reinalter and Till Steffen. Her Bundestag biography records the office as held since 2021.

Managing directors run a group's day-to-day business with the chairs. They prepare plenary sittings, agree agendas with the other groups and in the Council of Elders, keep members together for important votes, help fill committee places, and deal with the government, the Bundesrat, the party and associations. Pairing is separate: government and opposition offset excused absences so the balance of votes does not shift by chance. The Council — the President, the Vice-Presidents and 23 further members named by the groups according to strength — sets sitting weeks and, at short notice, each agenda and the length of debate. If there is no agreement on speaking time, the President decides; under the 2025 rules that debate should last at most one hour, shared by group strength. Polat is an ordinary member of the Council.

After the 2025 election the Greens had 85 members and were the fourth-largest of five groups. From 26 February the previous executive, Polat included, stayed in office on a caretaker basis. On 29 April the group confirmed Polat and Reinalter as managing directors; Claudia Müller replaced Steffen and took on links with the eastern Länder. Mihalic remained first managing director, and Dröge and Haßelmann had already been confirmed as chairs in March.

Committee on election scrutiny, immunity and rules of procedure

In the 21st Bundestag Polat is an ordinary member, and the Greens' Obfrau, of the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and the Rules of Procedure. Each group has one such member on a committee: the Obleute are the leadership's main contacts, shape the group's line, settle agendas and follow the detail of the work. With 14 members, it interprets and amends the rules of procedure, looks for ways through conflicts in the plenary and in committees, and watches over members' immunity. A member may be prosecuted or arrested only with the Bundestag's permission, unless caught in the act or arrested the next day; the protection is meant to keep Parliament working, including against politically motivated cases. Constituted on 21 May 2025 under President Julia Klöckner, the committee elected Macit Karaahmetoğlu of the SPD as chair, with 11 votes in favour and three abstentions. The Greens' ordinary members are Mihalic and Polat.

On 3 July 2024, with the Greens governing alongside the SPD and the FDP, the Bundestag gave a first reading to a coalition motion (document 20/12088) and a CDU/CSU motion on the rules, then sent both to the committee. Polat spoke. The coalition text, noting that the last full revision dated from 1980, proposed clearer procedure and a modest widening of disciplinary powers, including for committee chairs faced with disruption.

On 16 October 2025 the Bundestag adopted a new text in the committee's version (21/2196). The CDU/CSU and SPD voted in favour, the AfD and Die Linke against, and the Greens and the non-attached member Stefan Seidler of the South Schleswig Voters' Association abstained. A change to the Members of the Bundestag Act, cutting the flat-rate expense allowance and raising disciplinary fines, passed on the same lines. Polat said much of the reform was welcome, because the Greens had done much of the preparatory work in the previous term, and that tighter order rules were necessary, but that the coalition had missed a chance to make Parliament more open. The Greens wanted criteria, drawn from Article 3 of the Basic Law, against insulting, discriminatory, racist or sexist speech; stronger rights for members of national minorities; plenary debates on petitions with 100,000 supporters; disclosure of outside influence on bills; and public committee sittings as the norm. The CDU/CSU and SPD rejected both Green motions. On the transparency motion the Left and the AfD voted with the Greens.

Her biography also lists her as a deputy member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid. The Bundestag's Kunstbeirat, its advisory board on art, lists her as the ordinary member for the Greens.

Council of Europe and international parliamentary work

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

On 13 January 2022 the Bundestag elected Filiz Polat as one of three full members of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from Alliance 90/The Greens, with Max Lucks and Julian Pahlke. Her credentials as a representative of Germany took effect on 24 January 2022, when she also joined the Assembly's Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group. The Bundestag elected her again as a full member on 5 June 2025, as one of two Green representatives, alongside Lucks.

The Assembly is the parliamentary organ of the Council of Europe. It holds public plenary weeks at the Palais de l'Europe in Strasbourg; Germany sends 18 representatives and 18 substitutes among 306 members and 306 substitutes from 46 states. It follows the Committee of Ministers, initiates conventions, adopts recommendations and resolutions, observes elections, monitors compliance with the organisation's standards, and elects the judges of the European Court of Human Rights.

Polat has been a full member of the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination since 24 January 2022. She has not been the Assembly's migration rapporteur. On the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons she has sat only as an alternate, in turn for Sabine Weiss (24 January to 29 September 2022), Catarina dos Santos-Wintz (10 October 2022 to 25 May 2023), Thomas Bareiß (26 May 2023 to 22 June 2025) and, from 23 June 2025, Adam Balten. On the Sub-Committee on the Rights of Minorities she was alternate to Derya Türk-Nachbaur from 25 January 2022 until she became a full member on 25 June 2025.

At the extraordinary session of 14 and 15 March 2022 she spoke for a resolution to isolate Russia and defend human rights, quoting Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Her Assembly record also includes an April 2025 motion for a resolution on follow-up to the fourth evaluation round of the Group of States against Corruption concerning parliamentarians (Doc. 16157), and 2025 written declarations on the Budapest Pride march and on the detention in Hungary of the activist Maja T. In May 2026 she signed, but did not author, the motion "Migration and Europe's colonial past: towards historical justice and democratic resilience" (Doc. 16407), tabled by the Swiss socialist Fabian Molina.

Bilateral and thematic groups

The Bundestag's parliamentary friendship groups are cross-party bodies that maintain contacts with other legislatures through visits and talks with parliamentarians, governments and civil society, alongside rather than instead of government diplomacy.

Polat has been a member of the German-Turkish Parliamentary Group since 2018, the Bundestag's channel for relations with the parliament of Turkey. She was not an officer of that group in the 20th electoral term: the board list of 12 July 2024 names Max Lucks as chair. She has belonged to the Malta-Cyprus group since 2022 and, in the 21st Bundestag, is listed as one of its deputy chairs; the group covers parliamentary relations with Malta and Cyprus. In July 2024 the Green deputy chair was still Ulle Schauws, under the SPD chair Derya Türk-Nachbaur.

She is deputy chair of the German-Pacific Parliamentary Group. In the 20th term its portfolio was Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, with Johannes Vogel (FDP) as chair. She joined Vogel's delegation to Australia from 13 to 23 February 2023, for talks on security, trade, hydrogen and skilled immigration. From 6 to 14 February 2024 she led the delegation to New Zealand, covering research cooperation, Pacific security, climate risks to small island states, and the return of Māori ancestral remains and cultural objects held in Germany. The Bundestag's biography still listed the Pacific deputy chairmanship in October 2026.

In the 19th Bundestag she was an advisory, not a voting, member of the working group on migration, asylum and integration of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly. The Assembly created the group on 22 September 2020 to compare German and French practice and encourage joint initiatives; after two expert hearings, coordinators Aydan Özoğuz and Ludovic Mendes reported on 28 June 2021. As of 30 March 2021 the voting Green member was Franziska Brantner, and Polat an advisory member with Luise Amtsberg. The Bundestag also records her as honorary deputy chair of the Osnabrück city and district branch of Europa-Union Deutschland, which describes itself as a non-party citizens' association for European unification.

Domestic policy beyond migration

Social policy, care and heritage

In the Landtag of Lower Saxony from 2004 to 2017, Polat was the care-policy spokesperson of the Alliance 90/The Greens group. In March 2017 she welcomed the committee that was to found the Lower Saxony nursing chamber, then only the third in Germany, and called registering about 70,000 nurses within a year a large task in an ageing society. On 21 September 2017 she said she still held the group's monument-protection brief and that the first bill she had written in full concerned the state monument act. The dispute over demolishing the Landtag, she recalled, had ended in renovation.

Her Bundestag biography lists her, since 2021, as chair of the cross-party group Kulturgut Alleen, formed in 2016. On the Tag der Alleen in October 2026 the Bramsche member said road safety and avenue protection should not be set against each other, that old trees should be felled only as a last resort, and that replanting had to be planned. She said a federal transport-budget line open to the Länder was expected to hold about seven million euros in 2027. She is also an ordinary member of the Bundestag's Kunstbeirat.

The Minority Secretariat lists her, with no deputy, on the advisory committee for the Low German speaker group. In February 2025 answers she called herself the Green member responsible for the language. She backed constitutional rights for national minorities but noted the lack of a Bundestag majority, Germany already being bound by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. She favoured a Länder initiative to add Low German as a court language, called the March 2023 Bundestag debate on the charter a high point, and supported municipal Plattdeutsch commissioners in Lower Saxony and young members of the Parlamentskreis Platt.

Climate, energy and regional issues

On 11 November 2022 the Bundestag passed the nineteenth amendment to the Atomic Energy Act by 375 votes to 216, with 70 abstentions, on 661 votes cast. The Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 reactors could keep generating, on fuel already at the sites, until 15 April 2023. Coalition speakers presented that stretch operation as a way through the winter after Russia's attack on Ukraine disrupted gas supply.

Harald Ebner, for the Greens, called the amendment a heavy decision. A stress test, he said, showed the three plants could do little, and that Emsland could hinder renewables, but the group could accept the April date because the phase-out would stand and no new fuel would be bought. Of the Greens, 101 voted yes, nine voted no and Linda Heitmann abstained. The SPD and the FDP voted yes; the CDU/CSU and The Left voted no, and most of the AfD abstained. The nine were Kathrin Henneberger, Sven-Christian Kindler, Helge Limburg, Swantje Henrike Michaelsen, Karoline Otte, Julian Pahlke, Polat, Jürgen Trittin and Julia Verlinden.

Kindler, Limburg, Pahlke, Polat and Trittin filed a joint explanation under section 31 of the rules of procedure. The extension, they wrote, was not required: stress tests gave the two southern plants no role or only a small one, gas savings were in the per-mille range, and the wholesale-price effect was about one percent. They would not have ruled out a conditional reserve for those two plants, but a chancellor's instruction had made operation of all three unconditional. Emsland, they argued, was baseload in a region where wind farms are curtailed because the grid has too much power, not too little. The instruction did not bind the Bundestag, and the coalition agreement, they said, ruled out extending the technology past 31 December 2022.

In June 2024, as a federal climate-adaptation act was about to bind the federation, the Länder and municipalities to assess climate risks, Polat urged Grafschaft Bentheim to record those risks and to finance adaptation together with emissions cuts. Ems-Vechte-Welle reported the appeal from a statement by her office.

Reception, threats and criticism

Threats signed NSU 2.0

On 22 July 2020 Der Spiegel reported that an email signed “NSU 2.0” had reached Belit Onay, mayor of Hanover, and three Bundestag members of Alliance 90/The Greens: Anton Hofreiter, then Green parliamentary-group leader, Renate Künast and Filiz Polat. Spiegel, which said it held the message, reported a death threat signed “Heil Hitler,” “Der Nationalsozialistische Untergrund 2.0” and “NSU 2.0,” a reference to the National Socialist Underground, which murdered ten people between 2000 and 2007. The Green group forwarded the mail to the police and filed a criminal complaint. Polat told Spiegel the threat would have “eine besondere Qualität” for her if a right-wing network, or suspects inside the security authorities, stood behind the signature, and that she hoped for a full investigation. Onay called the threats unbearable because verbal incitement was followed by violence; Künast said society and the security authorities had to focus on right-wing terrorism or society would come apart.

She was one of many addressees. The same day Peter Beuth, interior minister of Hesse, said the state criminal police office already knew of 69 such messages, sent to 27 people in eight states, and the ministry named Hanspeter Mener special investigator. Spiegel reported that some earlier letters contained non-public data said to have come from police computers in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, including data on the lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız, the Left politician Janine Wissler and the comedian İdil Baydar; it did not report that the July 2020 mail to Polat contained police data.

On 17 November 2022 the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main sentenced Alexander M., born in 1968 and living in Berlin, to five years and ten months for offences including repeated incitement and threats. The Federal Court of Justice recorded that, from August 2018 to March 2021, he alone sent 67 emails, faxes and text messages as “NSU 2.0,” first to counsel in the Munich NSU trial and then to many further recipients, and that the series stopped after his arrest on 3 May 2021. The court could not say how he obtained some secret data. Four injured parties had been subject to unauthorized police queries, including in August 2018 from Frankfurt’s 1st police station, but no link to police circles or to backers was shown. On 21 March 2024 the Third Criminal Senate rejected his appeal, except for treating a threat with a loaded blank-firing pistol at the arrest as resistance rather than assault, and the judgment became final. The published reasons do not name Polat, so the July 2020 mail is not identified as one of the 67 counts.

Debate over her migration positions

In the Bundestag on 19 January 2024, Alexander Throm, interior spokesman of the CDU/CSU, called the nationality bill a “Staatsangehörigkeitsentwertungsgesetz.” Naturalization after five or three years was, he said, much too fast, and general multiple citizenship would import foreign conflicts. Polat, who holds dual citizenship, asked whether he was denying her loyalty as a member of parliament; he answered, “Selbstverständlich nicht,” but said the law must test who fitted permanently, not be applied “mit der Gießkanne.” Stefan Heck (CDU) spoke of legislating “im völligen Blindflug” and of draft language under which dual citizenship could mean 2.5 million naturalizations. He said Polat had told the interior committee, two days earlier, that a religious refusal to shake a woman’s hand should not bar naturalization. The FDP’s Ann-Veruschka Jurisch said opposition to sexual equality ruled it out, but that a rabbi or imam who withheld a handshake need not be excluded if commitment to the Basic Law was otherwise clear; Andrea Lindholz (CSU) called that a scandal. Christian Wirth of the Alternative for Germany called the bill a “Turboeinbürgerung” that would “verramschen” citizenship.

The Bundestag passed the bill by 382 votes to 234, with 23 abstentions; it entered into force on 27 June 2024. Reem Alabali-Radovan, minister of state to the Federal Chancellor, defended multiple citizenship for people resident five years who spoke German, supported themselves and accepted the free democratic basic order. Green deputy Schahina Gambir thanked Polat by name among the negotiators who had taken the compromise “bis zur Schmerzgrenze.”

On 9 September 2024 Friedrich Merz, Alexander Dobrindt and the CDU/CSU introduced a bill against the coalition’s migration course. It would restore “Begrenzung” in the Residence Act, removed in November 2023, and end family reunification for people with subsidiary protection, which the group said parliament may restrict because that status is temporary. The draft cited 11,630 visa approvals in 2023 under the monthly quota of 1,000 in force since August 2018, and said integration capacity was exhausted. On removal it set 226,882 people obliged to leave on 30 June 2024, 44,155 without a toleration, against 9,465 deportations in the first half of 2024, and sought federal-police powers to start such measures.