Franziska Brantner

Franziska Brantner (born 24 August 1979 in Lörrach, Baden-Württemberg) is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens. The German National Library lists her as a politician, political scientist and social scientist, and records Franziska Katharina Brantner as a name variant. She has been a member of the Bundestag since 22 October 2013, across the 18th to the 21st electoral terms, and since 16 November 2024 one of the party's two federal co-chairs, with Felix Banaszak.

She attended the German-French Gymnasium in Freiburg im Breisgau and studied at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and at Columbia University in New York, according to the biography she filed with the Bundestag. That account also lists work for the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the University of Mannheim. The national library describes her as a research associate at Mannheim and as a consultant to the UN women's fund and to the European Union. Her English-language dissertation, The Reformability of the United Nations: Distributional Asymmetries and the Reform of International Institutions, was examined orally in 2009 with Thomas König as examiner and is catalogued by the university as a 2010 dissertation; the authority file records the degree Dr. rer. pol. She was a member of the European Parliament from 14 July 2009 to 21 October 2013, sitting with the Greens in the Greens/European Free Alliance.

From December 2013 to September 2017 she was the Green Bundestag group's spokesperson on children and family policy, and from March 2014 to September 2017 she chaired the subcommittee on civilian crisis prevention, conflict management and integrated action. From 2017 until October 2021 she was the group's European-policy spokesperson and its parliamentary secretary. At the 2021 federal election the Green candidate in Heidelberg took 30.2 percent of the first votes (53,288) and won the seat; contemporary reporting identifies that mandate as hers. From 8 December 2021 to 6 May 2025 she was parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action under Minister Robert Habeck, in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In 2022 she was also the federal government's special representative for implementing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.

A Green congress in Wiesbaden elected her co-chair on 16 November 2024 with 78.15 percent of the vote, after Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour stepped down following losses in three state elections. Tagesschau described her as a pragmatic politician close to Habeck, and she kept the state-secretary post through the rest of the legislative period because those jobs were not being refilled before the snap election. On 23 February 2025 the Greens' national share of second votes fell to 11.6 percent, from 14.7 percent in 2021. In Heidelberg, Alexander Föhr of the CDU led the first-vote count, 29.2 percent to her 27.7 percent, but the constituency seat was left vacant for lack of second-vote coverage, and Brantner returned on the Baden-Württemberg state list. Her government post ended on 6 May 2025, the day Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor of a CDU/CSU–SPD coalition.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Franziska Katharina Brantner was born on 24 August 1979 in Lörrach, in southwestern Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The Integrated Authority File uses Franziska as the preferred forename and lists Franziska Katharina only as a variant; the Bundestag biography gives the shorter form.

She grew up in Neuenburg am Rhein, on the Rhine near the borders with France and Switzerland, not in Lörrach. A 2019 University of Mannheim profile, drawn from an interview, places that childhood in the tri-border area near Freiburg im Breisgau and quotes her as saying the intercultural experience had made her "a convinced European." Both parents were lawyers, she told Bunte in an interview reported in January 2025, and schooling was treated as extremely important at home; she also said she had been a good pupil and speaks English, Spanish, and French fluently.

She passed the Abitur in 1999 at the Deutsch-Französisches Gymnasium in Freiburg, a German-French secondary school. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, lists the same school. She then spent a year with the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. The Mannheim profile describes that year as foundation work before she chose a degree, and says a political career was not yet her aim.

University and doctorate

In 2004 she completed a dual programme in political science, concentrated on international relations, at Sciences Po (the Institut d'études politiques) in Paris and at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in New York City. In the Mannheim interview she described it as a double course focused on European policy.

The university library catalogues the doctorate as the English dissertation The reformability of the United Nations: distributional asymmetries and the reform of international institutions, a 2010 thesis in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Thomas König is named as examiner, the oral examination is dated 2009, and the subjects are political science and public administration. The authority file records the degree as Dr. rer. pol.; German notices shorten the topic to the reformability of the United Nations.

She later said she had met König at conferences, had been impressed by his research, and had chosen Mannheim while she could still imagine an academic career. By her account the manuscript was finished before the 2009 European election, leaving only the defence, and the research included an interview with John Bolton.

Research and consulting

As a doctoral student she was a research associate at the Mannheim chair of political science. The authority file also records consultancy for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and for the European Union, and the Bundestag biography adds the Bertelsmann Stiftung to that list.

In 2006–07 she was a visiting fellow at the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, University of Oxford. The centre's list, which also spells her surname "Bratner," says she helped launch "Rethinking Europe in a non-European world," organized a June workshop under RAMSES2 on "Gender, Conflict and Memory in the Mediterranean," contributed to a European Parliament study of the EU's neighbourhoods, and travelled to Israel and Palestine for research in May 2007.

Her own site adds that the UNIFEM work included the EU action plan for United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, on women, conflict, and peace. In September 2008 she and Richard Gowan published A Global Force for Human Rights? An Audit of European Power at the UN for the European Council on Foreign Relations. It called the EU's position at the UN a "slow-motion crisis," with support for European human-rights votes in the General Assembly down from as high as 72 percent in the 1990s to 48 and 55 percent in the two latest sessions.

On 4 June 2009 the Bertelsmann Stiftung issued Spotlight Europe 2009/05, "Europakritik wird schick," by Isabell Hoffmann and Brantner, naming both as foundation authors. She later described project-manager work for the foundation in Brussels as the moment she chose to carry political ideas herself, the step into her 2009 European Parliament candidacy.

Early party activity

Green Youth

Brantner, born in 1979, was described in January 2009 by the Badische Zeitung as active for Alliance 90/The Greens since the age of 15. Her Bundestag biography states that she sat on the state executive of the Green Youth (Grüne Jugend) in Baden-Württemberg from 1996 to 1997 and on the federal executive from 1997 to 1999.

The association’s chronology, which still used the name Grün-Alternatives Jugendbündnis alongside Grüne Jugend, gives the posts. At its 9th federal youth congress in Nuremberg on 7–9 November 1997 she was elected an assessor (Beisitzerin) and a delegate to the Federation of Young European Greens, and she was re-elected an assessor at the 10th congress in Schwerin on 22–24 May 1998. At the 11th congress in Kassel on 16–18 October 1998 that record lists her only as a delegate to the European federation; at the 12th congress in Bielefeld on 12–14 March 1999 she was again an assessor. She was not continuously an assessor from 1997 to 1999.

European student organizing

The Bundestag biography places her studies in political science and economics at Sciences Po in Paris and at Columbia University in New York, with a diploma and a Master of International Affairs. In October 2009 Le Taurillon, the magazine of Jeunes Européens–France, wrote that she had been a member of Jeunes Européens at Sciences Po. A video published with that article describes her as a member of the Paris section in 2003, recounting a project from the period of the Convention on the Future of Europe chaired by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Claims that she also founded a Green campus group there, or co-organized a European students’ convention in 2001–02, do not appear in that interview or in the Green Youth chronology.

Candidacy for the European Parliament

On 13 September 2008 the Badische Zeitung, in a report on younger women in Green politics in Freiburg im Breisgau, presented her as a candidate for the European election. Her campaign site called her the candidate for the Rhine-Neckar and Palatinate area and for Freiburg. German members of the European Parliament are chosen on national lists, so this was a campaign base in southwestern Germany. In May 2009 she told Le Taurillon that the Greens were campaigning on a common European manifesto, including in southern Germany.

Delegates ranked the federal list at the party’s 29th conference in Dortmund on 23–25 January 2009, and adopted the European programme. Der Spiegel reported that Brantner, then 29 and described as a women’s-policy politician, took 11th place, one ahead of former Green Youth leader Jan Philipp Albrecht; Ska Keller took seventh. A Rosa Luxemburg Foundation list dated 27 January 2009 gives the same 11th place, below Rebecca Harms and Reinhard Bütikofer. The Badische Zeitung called it nearly a certain ticket to Brussels and Strasbourg.

The election was on 7 June 2009. The Greens received 3,194,509 votes, 12.1 percent, and 14 seats. They had held 13 seats after 11.9 percent in 2004. The Federal Returning Officer’s list of those elected records Franziska Katharina Brantner at list place 11. On 8 June the Badische Zeitung reported that she was entering the European Parliament.

Member of the European Parliament

Election and mandate

In the European Parliament election of 7 June 2009, Alliance 90/The Greens won 3,194,509 votes in Germany, 12.1 percent, and 14 of 99 seats; turnout was 43.3 percent. At the January 2009 congress in Dortmund she took eleventh place on the federal list, one ahead of Jan Philipp Albrecht, with Rebecca Harms and Reinhard Bütikofer as lead candidates. She sat for the Greens–European Free Alliance from 14 July 2009 to 21 October 2013; the Bundestag biography, from her own information, records July 2009 to October 2013.

She was a full member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs from 16 July 2009 to 18 January 2012 and again from 19 January 2012 until she left. The group called her a foreign-policy coordinator and later its foreign-affairs spokesperson; she has described herself as its coordinator there and as a substitute on security and defence, women’s rights and gender equality, and budgets. She sat on the Delegation for relations with Israel until 12 February 2012, and as a substitute on the Union for the Mediterranean assembly and, until 31 July 2011, the Special Committee on the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis.

Foreign affairs and the External Action Service

The Treaty of Lisbon created the High Representative and the European External Action Service. On 2 December 2009, which the Greens/EFA called only her second day in office, Catherine Ashton met the Foreign Affairs Committee. Brantner and Ulrike Lunacek asked for priorities by January 2010 and for a service centred on disarmament, non-proliferation, peace-building and civilian crisis management. Early in 2010 she joined the informal “Friends of the EEAS”, with Elmar Brok, Alexander Lambsdorff and others, because Ashton’s advisory group included the European Commission and the Council but not Parliament. Members said they wanted to support her; from 16 February a committee official attended.

On procedure 2010/0816(NLE), Brok was the Foreign Affairs rapporteur and Brantner the rapporteur for the women’s-rights opinion, appointed on 2 March 2010.) The resolution of 8 July 2010 passed by 549 votes to 78, with 17 abstentions: at least 60 percent permanent EU officials at administrator level, at least one third from member states, and recruitment on merit with geographical and gender balance. Brantner said Parliament had gained a human-rights structure, development safeguards, scrutiny, budget transparency and gender balance, but not a clear civilian crisis-management design, permanent deputies or broad consular services, and she blamed French resistance for that gap. The Council of the European Union adopted the act on 26 July 2010.) In August, citing figures her group attributed to the Polish Institute for Foreign Relations (PISM)—11 of 115 planned ambassadorial posts for women, and two for Eastern Europe—she said the group would seek to freeze the service’s funding unless later appointments met that balance.

Human rights, stability and budgets

Appointed on 16 September 2009, she was Foreign Affairs rapporteur on the Commission proposal of 21 April 2009 to amend Regulation (EC) No 1717/2006, the Instrument for Stability (2009/0058(COD)), which she has described as the work of standing rapporteur.) It followed the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case 91/05 on small arms, widened some crisis-preparedness contracts beyond the EU and the EEA, and raised the Article 4(1) ceiling from 7 to 10 percent. Report A7-0066/2009 was tabled on 13 November 2009.) On 21 October 2010 Parliament adopted a first-reading position by 564 votes to 41, with 6 abstentions, adding long-term civil-society support, including women’s political role and independent media, a Peace-building Partnership reference, a 10 rather than 5 percent ceiling for Article 4(3) subject to review, delegated acts for strategy papers, and consultation on measures above €5 million (€20 million for exceptional assistance). The Commission withdrew the proposal on 21 May 2014, so those changes were not enacted.) Bütikofer, appointed on 5 October 2011, carried the 2014–2020 successor; the first reading was on 11 December 2013, after Brantner had left.)

On 18 June 2012 she was appointed rapporteur for a recommendation to the Council on the United Nations responsibility to protect (2012/2143(INI)), adopted on 18 April 2013.) It restated the 2005 pillars—state duty, assistance, and collective action if a state fails or is the perpetrator—and cited Sri Lanka, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and Syria. It asked for a “Consensus on R2P”, a chapter in the annual Common Foreign and Security Policy report, an EU focal point in the service, an autonomous European Institute of Peace, lessons from Libya and from inaction over Syria, a voluntary limit on Security Council vetoes in mass-atrocity cases, and respect for International Criminal Court clauses.

On 11 May 2011 she was appointed rapporteur for the Foreign Affairs opinion on the recast of the financial rules for the annual budget (2010/0395(COD)); opinion PE466.996 is dated 24 June 2011, and the recast was concluded in October 2012.) The opinion accompanied her substitute seat on the Budgets Committee and the group’s demand, in the service negotiations, for scrutiny of that budget.

Bundestag career before government

Elections and the Heidelberg constituency

Brantner entered the Bundestag on 22 October 2013, at the opening of the 18th legislative period, as a deputy of Alliance 90/The Greens. She had stood in constituency 274, Heidelberg. For the 2021 election the federal returning officer defined that district as the city plus eleven municipalities of the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, among them Weinheim, Ladenburg and Schriesheim.

In the 2013 federal election the Green first-vote total in the constituency was 20,392, or 12.3 percent, third behind the Christian Democratic Union on 40.9 percent and the Social Democratic Party on 30.6 percent. She did not win the district. The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported that ninth place on the Green state list in Baden-Württemberg was enough for her to take a seat.

At the election of 24 September 2017 she again finished third, with 29,664 first votes (16.7 percent), behind the CDU on 32.7 percent and the SPD on 26.0 percent. The Statistical Office of Baden-Württemberg lists her among the deputies elected from state lists, in ninth place on the Green list.

On 10 April 2021 a state delegates' conference in Heilbronn chose her as the Baden-Württemberg Greens' lead candidate for the Bundestag election. She defeated Agnieszka Brugger, who received 35.6 percent; the Schwäbische Zeitung reported that about two-thirds of the delegates backed Brantner. She and Cem Özdemir headed the list, and Brugger was then placed third, with 96 percent.

On 26 September 2021 Brantner won the district. In the federal returning officer's final result the Greens received 53,288 first votes (30.2 percent), the CDU 24.1 percent and the SPD 20.2 percent; on the second vote the Greens led with 25.6 percent. Turnout was 81.4 percent of 218,431 eligible voters. The Süddeutsche Zeitung named Alexander Föhr of the CDU as the runner-up. The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung described the outcome as the first time the Greens had taken the Heidelberg constituency at a Bundestag election. In Baden-Württemberg the party won four districts that year: Heidelberg, Stuttgart I, Freiburg and Karlsruhe-Stadt.

Family policy and civilian crisis prevention

From December 2013 she was spokesperson on children and family policy for the Green Bundestag group and a full member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. The Green-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation dates the spokesperson role to September 2017.

In a taz interview published on 20 November 2014, the 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, she argued for writing children's rights into the Basic Law, so that the best interests of the child could be invoked in statutes such as planning law, and said the CDU had blocked that change. Before a Green party congress, a Tagesspiegel guest commentary dated 9 November 2016 set out her case for a needs-based child basic income, a Kindergrundsicherung, as a means of tackling child poverty.

From 2014 she chaired the Subcommittee on Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Management and Integrated Action, a subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The Bundestag biography for the 18th term also lists her as the Green group's Obfrau on that subcommittee, and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, with those roles recorded through 24 October 2017. On 5 May 2014 the subcommittee met in public, under her chair, to mark the tenth anniversary of the federal government's action plan on civilian crisis prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

European policy spokesperson

In the 19th legislative period, from 24 October 2017 to 26 October 2021, she was a full member and the Green Obfrau of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, and again a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The Bundestag biography for that term, which the parliament notes is based on members' own information, describes her as European-policy spokesperson and parliamentary secretary (Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin) of the Green group, and as a member of the board of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly. The Böll Foundation dates the spokesperson and parliamentary-secretary posts from February 2018 to 2021.

After a European Council decision in March 2019 to postpone Brexit by several weeks, she told the Bundestag weekly Das Parlament, in an interview published on 25 March, that the delay was preferable to a withdrawal without an agreement. In a taz interview published on 21 July 2020, after the European Council settled a recovery package whose headline size she put at €750 billion, including €390 billion in grants, she said the volume would help economically but that cuts to climate, health, research and digital programmes hit future-oriented spending while agricultural subsidies were left intact. On tying EU funds to the rule of law, she called the summit language vague, said the question had been deferred, and argued that leaving the design to the European Council preserved a veto for Viktor Orbán, because that body decides by unanimity, whereas the ordinary legislative procedure would not.

Those opposition posts ended with the 19th Bundestag in October 2021.

Parliamentary State Secretary

Appointment and portfolio

On 8 December 2021, the day Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party of Germany was elected chancellor, the president of the Bundestag announced the ministers and parliamentary state secretaries of the government of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party. At the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action they were Brantner, Michael Kellner and Oliver Krischer, all Greens, supporting Vice-Chancellor and minister Robert Habeck. The Bundestag biography, drawn from the member's own statements, records her in that post from December 2021 to May 2025.

Handelsblatt reported in September 2024 that she handled European policy, foreign trade and digital policy, and that Habeck called her internally the federal government's toughest negotiator. On 5 January 2022 the government appointed her special representative for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in Germany, an international scheme for transparency in the extractive sector, succeeding Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker. Her disclosure lists two ex officio corporate offices that outlasted the ministry post: chair of the supervisory board of Germany Trade and Invest until 25 June 2025, and member of the supervisory board of the federal innovation company SPRIND until 31 May 2026.

Trade, raw materials and supply chains

In September 2024, after Habeck's ministry and Finance Minister Christian Lindner had argued over loans versus equity, they instructed the state bank KfW to set up a fund of about €1 billion that could take stakes in raw-material projects and so reduce Germany's reliance on a few suppliers, especially China. Brantner said equity in extraction, processing and recycling, at home and abroad, was a step other countries had already taken. On 2 October 2024 KfW said it would generally invest €50 million to €150 million a project in mining, processing and recycling of the 34 raw materials the European Union lists as critical, with the federal government hedging the risk, provided the projects secured long-term supplies for sites in Germany and the EU.

Criticism came from opposite sides. In January 2024 the Federation of German Industries surveyed the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, which had covered large firms since 2023 and, from January 2024, companies with at least 1,000 employees. The federation called the bureaucracy a burden that was driving smaller suppliers to despair and a "geopolitical own goal" that hindered diversification: 92 percent of directly affected firms rated the extra work high or very high, nearly a quarter were cutting suppliers, and 14 percent were considering exit from high-risk countries. In October 2024 an alliance of 28 human-rights, development and environmental groups, including Germanwatch, said the German and EU debate was fixed on Europe's own security of supply and set out seven demands for a different raw-materials policy.

Lithium in Serbia was the most contested case. Brantner told taz in August 2024 that climate policy substituted metals and minerals for fossil fuels, that lithium was mined mainly in Chile and Australia and processed in China, and that a Serbian project could help reduce that dependence. She said Rio Tinto's original plans had missed Berlin's environmental standard, that the protests had been justified, and that Germany and the European Commission had required stricter protection of water and soil. She was with Scholz in Belgrade on 19 July 2024 for an EU–Serbia raw-materials memorandum and met opponents of the Jadar mine; on 10 August about 30,000 people marched in the city against reopening it. She said there would be "no discount for lithium" on the rule of law, Kosovo or Bosnia and Herzegovina, and doubted a Serbian–Chinese partnership would serve democracy, the environment or local residents better, while enforcement stayed with the Serbian state under President Aleksandar Vučić.

European economic policy and the end of the coalition

On EU trade she pressed for an agreement with Mercosur—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay—that she presented as joining commerce to sustainable development. On Deutschlandfunk on 6 December 2023 she said talks continued after Argentina's outgoing president declined to sign, that deforestation had fallen under Brazil's President Lula, and that tariffs should fall on goods from sustainable rainforest use while duty-free soya stayed as it was. Asked about Misereor adviser Armin Paasch's objections—soya-driven clearance, damage from extraction, and EU exports of pesticides banned in Europe—she said the deal would not worsen the soya regime and that processing nearer the mine was meant to stop ore going to China for refining. She added that critics saw the text as aggravating the climate crisis and that Berlin was still trying to improve it with its partners.

The coalition broke up on the evening of 6 November 2024 in the coalition committee, after Scholz, Habeck and Lindner failed to agree a budget and economic package including an exception to the constitutional debt brake. After her election as a Green co-chair on 16 November, she told the German press agency she would keep the state-secretary post: with the snap election set for 23 February 2025 the government would not refill such vacancies, and Habeck had asked her to stay until the end of the legislative period. On 16 December Scholz lost a confidence vote, 207 to 394 with 116 abstentions; all 115 Greens present abstained. Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor on 6 May 2025, on a second ballot, with 325 of 618 votes, and the Bundestag records Brantner's state-secretary term as ending that May with the change of government.

Federal party leadership

Election as co-chair

Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour announced that the federal executive of Alliance 90/The Greens would resign after the party lost support in three state elections at the end of September 2024. On 16 November 2024, delegates at a federal party congress in Wiesbaden elected Brantner and Felix Banaszak co-chairs for a two-year term. Brantner received 78.15 percent. A challenger from Bayreuth received 14.44 percent, with 4.2 percent voting no and 3.21 percent abstaining; Banaszak received 92.88 percent, and four other candidates together 3.72 percent. More than 800 delegates attended. Reporting placed Brantner, state secretary to Economy Minister Robert Habeck and a Bundestag member since 2013, in the realpolitik wing, and Banaszak, a member from Duisburg since 2021 and former Green chair in North Rhine-Westphalia, on the left.

Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak at the Greens' federal party congress in Wiesbaden on 16 November 2024, after their election as co-chairs.

In her candidacy speech Brantner said the Greens should hold a climate course if others retreated, called for investment, and urged a street campaign, in snow or rain, for the snap Bundestag election of 23 February 2025. She said there should be no further "standstill grand coalition" of the Union and the Social Democratic Party. Banaszak asked the party to be a "force of confidence" and to campaign to remain in government as its "engine," not its corrective or its press office. Brantner kept the state-secretary post: she told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that those jobs would not be refilled before the election and that Habeck had asked her to stay so the ministry could function, and the Bundestag biography records her in the office until May 2025. The congress was due the next day to name Habeck the candidate for chancellor and Annalena Baerbock the other lead figure of the campaign. Friedrich Merz, then the Union's chancellor candidate, congratulated the new chairs.

The 2025 federal election

On 7 December 2024 a state congress in Reutlingen placed Brantner first on the Baden-Württemberg list with 92.35 percent (181 yes, seven no, eight abstentions); Lang was second with 94.36 percent. Brantner had led that list in 2021 and again stood in constituency 274, Heidelberg.

On 23 February 2025 the Greens took 11.6 percent of second votes, down from 14.7 percent in 2021, and 85 seats in a 630-member Bundestag, down from 118, of which 12 were constituency seats. Turnout was 82.5 percent. The Christian Democratic Union received 22.6 percent and 164 seats, Alternative for Germany 20.8 percent and 152, the SPD 16.4 percent and 120, Die Linke 8.8 percent and 64, and the Christian Social Union 6.0 percent and 44. The Free Democratic Party, at 4.3 percent, and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, at 4.981 percent, missed the five-percent threshold.

In Heidelberg, CDU candidate Alexander Föhr led Brantner by 29.16 to 27.74 percent of first votes, but the electoral-law reform kept Föhr out of the Bundestag. Brantner called the evening difficult, said the Greens had fallen short of what they wanted, and said she regretted Habeck's withdrawal; she argued that the state party had to analyse the result before the next Landtag election, and she returned via the state list. The Greens remained in a minority cabinet and then the caretaker government until Merz took office in May 2025.

Opposition since 2025

On 24 March 2025 the Bundestag group, rather than the party chairs, re-elected Britta Haßelmann and Katharina Dröge to lead it in opposition, each with 90.4 percent. Brantner sat in the 21st Bundestag from the Baden-Württemberg list, as the candidate in constituency 274, and as a deputy member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation and of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly.

The next large federal congress opened in Hanover at the end of November 2025. Brantner told delegates it was not good for the country to have so poor a government, and said of the chancellor, "Merz can't do it." Banaszak said a clear profile and the ability to win majorities could go together, and that after painful compromises in government the party had to rebuild trust without becoming vague. Tagesschau reported that the Greens were then polling between 11 and 12 percent and had not gained from the federal government's weakness.

In 2026 the Greens won in Baden-Württemberg with 30.2 percent, narrowly ahead of the CDU, and Cem Özdemir became minister-president. In Saxony-Anhalt the party rose from 5.9 to 8.9 percent, and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern it re-entered the Landtag, while in the Berlin House of Representatives election it lost more than four percentage points. On 27 September 2026 the co-chairs said they would run together again at the federal congress set for 4–6 December 2026. Banaszak wrote to members that he was standing "to prepare our party, with all of you, for the next Bundestag election," and Brantner wrote that together they could be the party people would trust to move the country forward. An ARD-DeutschlandTrend put the Greens at 15 percent, and correspondent Oliver Neuroth said another term was not assured, though no alternative pairing was apparent. The December vote had not yet been held.

Political positions

Europe and foreign affairs

Within Alliance 90/The Greens, Brantner has argued for a more integrated European Union kept under parliamentary control. As a member of the European Parliament for the Greens–European Free Alliance, she negotiated the European External Action Service created under the Treaty of Lisbon. In 2010 she said the service had to stay inside the "community method," with budgetary accountability like the Commission's, and that development funds should not be subordinated to other foreign-policy aims; her group also secured human-rights focal points in EU delegations after High Representative Catherine Ashton's draft omitted human rights.

After the 2021 election she said Germany should abandon what she called Angela Merkel's habit of running Europe through the heads of government. Priorities she gave the Heinrich Böll Foundation were the European Green Deal, the rule of law and a more capable EU, including coalitions of the willing, with an expected fight against the Free Democrats over humane asylum rules.

By April 2025 she treated defence as that step. She told taz that Europe needed "a massive step of further European integration, a European defence union, with joint procurement," and that if Viktor Orbán blocked the full Union an "alliance of freedom," with Britain or Norway, should go first, in the line of Joschka Fischer's European federal republic. In a 2026 conversation with the Green European Journal she said that, for the Greens, defending Europe meant safeguarding peace and freedom, so "Europe's defence can only be European": a common budget inside the treaties if possible, otherwise ad hoc bodies; a nuclear doctrine discussed with France and Britain but no shared decision to fire; and no German national deterrent, which she called unconstitutional.

Climate, industry and trade

On 16 November 2024 in Wiesbaden she was elected co-chair, with 78.15 per cent, beside Felix Banaszak of the party left. She treated climate policy as industrial policy, accusing the CDU/CSU of "Klimaschutzverweigerung" and of endangering prosperity by questioning steps firms had already taken. If climate protection was not "technocratic minutiae," she said, it was "the best chance for a strong economy," and she preferred investment to austerity: "Tightening the belt does nothing if the trousers are already missing." Banaszak's speech instead stressed child and pensioner poverty.

As state secretary to Robert Habeck, she defined policy on China as reducing vulnerability, not decoupling. In April 2023, n-tv reported her saying Germany was not turning away from China but lowering risks, and quoted her hope that the SPD had "learned from the dependencies on Russia." After Chinese controls on gallium and germanium she said, in July 2023, that the government was working "to secure the supply of critical and strategic raw materials in the long term and to reduce problematic dependencies." The same report noted the engineering association VDMA warning that trade deals loaded with climate and human-rights conditions would find fewer partners.

In 2026 she named resilience, innovation and sustainability as the pillars of European competitiveness. She told taz that supporting the 2025 change to the debt brake had been right if the money bought European arms rather than American ones. She later said defence could not be debt-financed indefinitely, citing €80 billion a year in debt service.

Security, migration and social policy

On the use of force she moved from a dissent inside the Green Bundestag group to open support for arming Ukraine. In June 2015, as chair of the subcommittee on civilian crisis prevention, she told taz that Bashar al-Assad needed military pressure and a political framework, but not a place in a transitional government. On 4 December 2015 she abstained, with Cem Özdemir and Marieluise Beck, on sending up to 1,200 Bundeswehr personnel against the Islamic State in Syria. Their explanation said abstention marked the dilemma of solidarity with France, and of accepting that the Islamic State also had to be fought militarily, against a mandate whose politics remained unclear. Most of the Green group voted no; its chair, Anton Hofreiter, called the mandate activism.

In the 2015 arrivals she argued for tackling causes, not only returns. On Deutschlandfunk she criticised Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier for stressing deportations from the western Balkans instead of an EU strategy for the region, rejected benefits in kind for suspected economic migrants, and called basic provision under the Basic Law "a question of human dignity."

After the full-scale invasion she described weapons for Ukraine as defence of the ban on changing borders by force. In April 2025 she would not join a Heidelberg Easter march against arms deliveries: "to be on the left means to be anti-imperialist," standing with the attacked rather than with Vladimir Putin. The party was "very closed" on Russia, she said, but still divided over a European army, conscription and the Middle East. Answering Green Youth criticism that the party had been too quiet on Israeli breaches of law, she said a breach was a breach whoever committed it. Annalena Baerbock had named war crimes, and German arms for Israel had, because of the Greens, been tied to lawful use.

In opposition she made the Taurus KEPD 350 a test of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. In May 2025 she told Der Spiegel that Merz had demanded the missile from Olaf Scholz and was now "scholzing around"—"full cheeks and then only hot air"—called a reported need for US approval a pretext, and said delivery had to be agreed in NATO, because empty threats invite more violence. On 28 November 2025 in Hanover she called a 28-point US plan a "subjugation pact," "betrayal" and "Munich II." The same speech said pensions could not be kept without fundamental reform and longer working lives for some, and that immigration was "a necessity and very often a gift, sometimes also exhausting." In January 2026 she demanded an immediate stop to deportations to Iran; Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt refused a general halt so that offenders could still be removed.

Reception and controversies

Assessments inside and outside the party

On 16 November 2024, delegates of Alliance 90/The Greens elected Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak co-chairs. Brantner, a Realo close to Robert Habeck, received 78.15 percent; Banaszak, from the left, received 92.88 percent. Der Spiegel called his share clearly stronger; the taz called hers middling and read the gap as discontent over traffic-light compromises. Spiegel described left-wing scepticism of her and headlined her line that she was not "Robert Habeck's mouthpiece."

In June 2026 the Green Youth accused her of splitting the party over younger Realos. The Süddeutsche Zeitung and t-online reported a Berlin meeting she attended, and said the head of her Bundestag office had coordinated the network before giving up the role. Co-chairs Henriette Held and Luis Bobga said her job was to hold the party together and that she was not doing it; Held asked whether offices had misused money, time and equipment for "parallel structures." Brantner said the work was voluntary, "at no point on my instructions," and that she had not organised the academy.

After Green members of the European Parliament voted in January 2026 to send the EU–Mercosur agreement to court, Tagesspiegel commentator Caspar Schwietering wrote that Brantner "lacks authority" and that the ballot was a "fatal failure of leadership." She had failed to carry MEPs for a deal she helped negotiate, he wrote; unlike Manfred Weber they had not sought a far-right majority, but still faced a firewall charge.

Public disputes

At the Hannover congress on 28 November 2025, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported, Brantner used drastic language, including a Nazi-era comparison, in a speech the agency described as cheered. A United States 28-point plan on the war in Ukraine was, she said, a "subjugation pact" and "betrayal" — "That is Munich II," a reference to the 1938 Munich Agreement. The government, she said, was showing "young people the middle finger," Chancellor Friedrich Merz "can't do it," and the Alternative for Germany were "fellows without a fatherland and not patriots."

On 13 November 2025 the Parliament voted 382 to 249 to limit the EU supply-chain due-diligence law to firms with at least 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in turnover. Far-right votes made the majority after the European People's Party group rejected compromises with liberals and Social Democrats. Green MEP Anna Cavazzini called it the first time conservatives had deliberately passed a law with the extreme right; Weber called the outcome a "good day for Europe's competitiveness." In a video, Brantner said they had "for the first time, really cooperated with the radical right," a "dam breach in Brussels."

On 21 January 2026 the Parliament voted 334 to 324 to refer the EU–Mercosur agreement to the Court of Justice. Eight Green MEPs from Germany were among those voting with the left and the far right. Jürgen Trittin wrote that they and three German Left MEPs had, "without a compass," helped a "right-wing farmers' lobby and anti-Europeans" block a step toward EU sovereignty by ten votes. Cem Özdemir said many had missed "the seriousness of the situation." Brantner told t-online the vote "was a mistake" and the wrong signal toward Donald Trump, though the Greens still wanted the revised text applied provisionally and said far-right majorities must not recur. CDU/CSU group chair Jens Spahn said they had voted "against a strong EU." Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democratic Party called them "hypocritical to the core," the firewall being irrelevant "when it is against free trade"; leader Christian Dürr called it a "scandal."

Two viral claims were rated false. In October 2024 Deutsche Presse-Agentur found that a video of a supposed California mansion showed a Coto de Caza house still owned by developer William Lyon's family; Brantner called such clips an attempt "to unsettle people and harm democratic politicians." In March 2026 Mimikama rejected posts claiming that, in a ZDF debate, she demanded democracy "stop" and praised China's system. Its transcript has her calling China a competitor whose five-year plan set "drastic next goals" — a circular economy and energy independence, "technologies I would like to have in Germany" — not a model of rule.

Personal life

Family

The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own statements, lists Franziska Brantner as unmarried and as the parent of one child. Until 2013 she was in a relationship with Boris Palmer, lord mayor of Tübingen; they have a daughter born in 2010. She has kept most of that family life out of public view. In a 2025 interview with the magazine Bunte, she described herself as a single mother, said she had a close relationship with her daughter and made time for her, and called combining a child with a career "an art." She added that she had always found it strange that women, and almost never fathers, were asked how they managed.

Residence and affiliations

Brantner has said that she lives in Heidelberg and Berlin. The Bundestag gives her constituency office as Bergheimer Straße 147, 69115 Heidelberg. A December 2009 profile in the Badische Zeitung listed her languages as fluent French, English and Spanish, with a basic knowledge of Hebrew; in 2025 Focus again described her as fluent in French, English and Spanish.

Her published register of outside activities lists several unpaid posts: a seat on the board of the Franco-German Institute in Ludwigsburg, which the institute also names; membership of the board of trustees of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, where the council's profile marks her as currently on leave; a trusteeship at Friends of Europe in Brussels; a place on the board of trustees of the Heidelberger Club für Wirtschaft und Kultur; a board seat at Tu was für Europa in Berlin; and membership of the political advisory board of the Wirtschaftsvereinigung der Grünen. The same filing records two posts held by virtue of office around her time as a parliamentary state secretary: chair of the supervisory board of Germany Trade and Invest until 25 June 2025, and a supervisory-board seat at the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SprinD) until 31 May 2026. She is also listed as a deputy member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly.