Gerda Hasselfeldt

Gerda Hasselfeldt (née Rainer; born 7 July 1950 in Straubing, Lower Bavaria) is a German economist and politician of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU). She was a member of the Bundestag from 1987 until the federal election of 2017 and, in the 18th electoral term, held the direct mandate for constituency 216, Fürstenfeldbruck. In the cabinets of Chancellor Helmut Kohl she was federal minister for regional planning, building and urban development from 1989 to 1991 and federal minister of health from 1991 to 1992. She was a vice president of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2011 and, from March 2011, chair of the CSU Landesgruppe and first deputy chair of the joint parliamentary group of the CSU and the Christian Democratic Union.

She grew up in a household in which CSU meetings were held in the family inn. Her father, Alois Rainer, was for decades an honorary mayor and a member of the Bavarian Landtag, and sat in the Bundestag from 1965 to 1983. She took the Abitur in 1969, studied economics at the universities in Munich and Regensburg, and passed the Diplom examination in 1975. From 1975 to 1987 she worked for the Federal Employment Agency, lastly as head of vocational guidance at the labour office in Deggendorf. She joined the CSU in 1969, sat on the district council in Regen from 1978, chaired the CSU district association in Fürstenfeldbruck from 1995 to 2005, and was a district councillor from 1996 to 2004.

She entered the Bundestag in 1987 as the successor to Franz Josef Strauß, who had led the CSU list in that year's election and then remained minister-president of Bavaria. As building minister she negotiated with the GDR construction minister Gerhard Baumgärtel; their joint declaration of 5 January 1990, published on 11 January, set out cooperation on construction, urban planning and housing, including pilot renewal schemes and changes to tenancy and property law. She left the health ministry in 1992. Der Spiegel reported that she resigned, worn down by dispute with Kohl, while her closest adviser was suspected of having worked for Polish intelligence; she later said she had been ill, unhappy with staffing in the ministry, and too inexperienced for what she called the "shark pool" of health policy. She then joined the transport committee and in 1995 became finance-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU group, noting that no woman from the CSU had previously sat on the finance committee. From 2002 to 2005 she was a deputy chair of that group.

As chair of the CSU Landesgruppe during the 2015 refugee arrivals, she told Die Welt that she was going into talks with the CDU and the SPD wanting deterrent signals toward refugees, and that Christian charity had to give way to what the country could manage. In April 2016 she announced that the term then under way would be her last, after 30 years in parliament; she was 67 and said younger politicians should take over. On 1 December 2017 the general assembly of the German Red Cross elected her president unanimously, the first woman in the post. She held the office for eight years; on 29 November 2025 the assembly elected Hermann Gröhe as her successor and named her honorary president. Since 5 July 2024 she has chaired the television council of ZDF, which adopts programme guidelines, supervises compliance and advises the director-general. On 9 October 2023 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded her the Grand Cross with star and sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Early life and education

Family in Haibach

Gerda Hasselfeldt was born Gerda Rainer on 7 July 1950 in Straubing, in Lower Bavaria, and grew up in Haibach, a village of woods and low hills on the edge of the Bavarian Forest. The Rainer household combined a farm with a butcher's shop and an inn, a business her parents ran in the village.

Her father, Alois Rainer, was born on 16 June 1921 in Untergrub near Haibach and died in Haibach on 14 May 2002. After the Second World War he trained as a butcher, and in 1947 he married Berta Wagner, daughter of the Haibach innkeeper, and took over the butcher's shop, the inn and the farm. He was mayor of Haibach from 1948 and a member of the Landtag of Bavaria for the Christian Social Union from 23 November 1958 until 21 October 1965. He then sat in the Bundestag from 1965 to 1983 and stayed on as unpaid mayor; Hasselfeldt later said he remained in that local office, which he had held since 1948, until he failed to be re-elected.

A photograph taken when she was about seven shows her with three sisters; another sister and a brother, Alois, were born later. Alois Rainer, born on 7 January 1965 in Straubing, qualified as a master butcher, took over the parental business in 1987, was mayor of Haibach from 1996 to 2014 and entered the Bundestag in 2013. On 6 May 2025 he became federal minister for agriculture, food and homeland.

Hasselfeldt has described the inn as the place where she first met politics. Discussions went on for as long as she could remember, CSU meetings were often held in the public room, and she called the household her political starting point, although her mother tried to keep the father's political work from taking over family life. She has also said that her father had little regard for women in politics and that his attitude was one reason she wanted to show she could earn her own living and study. A biographical entry assembled for the archive of former chancellor Helmut Kohl lists her as Roman Catholic.

School and economics studies

She completed the Abitur in 1969 at the Ursuline grammar school in Straubing, then a girls' school, where she was the student spokesperson. At about sixteen she organized a political working group because she found social-studies lessons dull; interested girls from several classes met politicians from the region.

After leaving school she studied economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre) in Munich and at the University of Regensburg, and passed the diploma examination in 1975 as a Diplom-Volkswirtin. Her parents did not pay for the degree. In 1969 and 1970 she lived in Munich with an aunt and the aunt's husband, and for half a year during her studies she worked part-time in a bank. Through secondary school and university she also worked at home with her sisters, serving in the inn, cleaning rooms for holiday guests and helping on the farm.

Federal Employment Agency

From 1975 until 1987 Hasselfeldt was employed by the Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, the federal employment service later renamed the Bundesagentur für Arbeit. The Bundestag's official biography records her last post as head of the vocational-guidance department at the employment office in Deggendorf. A chronology kept for the Kohl archive dates a 1975 appointment with the agency in Nuremberg and places the Deggendorf department headship in 1985. In a 2017 Bundestag profile she described her first job as a graduate economist as a post at the employment office in Munich. She later said that after her children were born, in 1977 and 1983, she continued full-time work at the Munich and Deggendorf offices, keeping a small flat in Munich for a time and travelling home for party and local meetings. She left the agency in 1987, when she entered the Bundestag.

Local politics and entry to the Bundestag

Junge Union and the CSU

Hasselfeldt joined the Junge Union in 1968 and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) in 1969. The CSU historical archive also lists her, still in 1968, as chair of the party's local association in Haibach, in Lower Bavaria. She later recalled taking a local chair at 18 and described that office as the chair of the Junge Union: while serving at a meeting of the youth branch in the family inn, she objected when older members proposed to dissolve it because nobody would lead it, and she was elected at the following meeting. CSU membership, she said, followed from the youth post, and as chair she held a public meeting on lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, a change she had already argued for with her father. A Bundestag profile published when she left parliament gives the same sequence: entry into the Junge Union at 18, immediate election as local chair, and membership of the CSU.

District councils

While working full time for the federal employment service she was a CSU member of the district council of Regen. Her curriculum vitae dates that mandate from 1978 to 1989. The party archive lists her as a Regen district councillor from 1979, as chair of the CSU district association there from 22 May 1987 to 18 November 1989, and as founder, in 1975, of the Regen district branch of the Frauen-Union, the CSU's women's organization. From 1991 to 1995 she was state chair of the Frauen-Union in Bavaria. In the Fürstenfeldbruck area, where she later held a Bundestag constituency, she chaired the CSU district association from 1995 to 2005 and sat on the district council from 1996 to 2004.

Succession to Franz Josef Strauß

The election to the 11th Bundestag was held on 25 January 1987. Franz Josef Strauß, then Bavarian minister-president, ran as the CSU's lead candidate but decided after the election to remain minister-president in Munich. Hasselfeldt entered the Bundestag on 24 March 1987 in succession to him, sitting from 1987 to 1990 on the CSU state list rather than as the directly elected member for Fürstenfeldbruck. That constituency's direct mandate in 1987 went to Eicke Götz of the CSU. She later said the interval of about two months was taken up by coalition negotiations and that Strauß's decision to stay in Munich had been largely foreseeable. On arrival she was one of three women in a CSU state group of a little over 50 deputies, and the only one of the three with young children.

From the 1990 election she won Fürstenfeldbruck herself and held the direct mandate at each federal election through 2013. For the elections from 1990 through 2009 the district authority's compilation describes the constituency as the districts of Fürstenfeldbruck and Dachau; its note for 2013 excludes the Dachau municipality of Petershausen. In the 18th Bundestag the seat was constituency 216, and the chamber's biography records her as directly elected. She told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that she had not known the area before seeking the 1990 nomination and had to campaign through its local branches. In the district compilation her first-vote share was 53.23 percent in 1990 (89,561 votes), 55.58 percent in 1994 (98,659), 52.63 percent in 1998 (97,472) and 59.35 percent in 2002 (118,097). The federal returning officer recorded 55.5 percent in 2005 (108,897 votes), 48.9 percent in 2009 (91,947 votes) and 55.6 percent in 2013 (103,904 votes).

Federal ministries

Regional planning, building and urban development

On 21 April 1989, in a reshuffle of Helmut Kohl's third cabinet, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker dismissed Oscar Schneider and, on the chancellor's proposal, appointed Gerda Hasselfeldt of the Christian Social Union federal minister for regional planning, building and urban development. She took the oath the same day in the Bundestag.

Gerda Hasselfeldt in her office at the Federal Ministry for Regional Planning, Building and Urban Development in Bonn, August 1990.

A shortage of housing in the west already dominated the portfolio. Der Spiegel reported in October 1989 that completions of social rental dwellings had fallen from 55,000 in 1983 to 14,000 in 1988, and that Kohl now called housing the chief domestic issue while Hasselfeldt called it a task of national importance. On 6 November she told a CSU congress that 100,000 social dwellings would be built the next year and that direct subsidies had been raised to 1.6 billion marks. Ingrid Matthäus-Maier, deputy chair of the SPD parliamentary group, answered that those funds had been cut from 2.3 billion marks in 1983 to 450 million in 1988. Die Tageszeitung reported an "immediate programme" of 2 billion marks a year until 1993, against an Ifo Institute estimate of about 1.7 million missing homes, and criticised write-offs of 85 per cent within ten years, after which the social tie ended. At the end of 1989 Der Spiegel wrote that arrivals from the German Democratic Republic and ethnic-German resettlers had turned the shortage into an emergency the government's programme would do little to change.

In a Spiegel interview of 2 September 1990 she rejected the blanket label "housing emergency", but conceded that big-city rents were already beyond normal earners and said a temporary cap on rises in the worst areas had failed against the Free Democratic Party.

On 5 January 1990 in Berlin she and the GDR construction minister, Gerhard Baumgärtel, agreed to expand cooperation in building, urban development and housing, following talks between Kohl and Prime Minister Hans Modrow. A joint commission was to cover urban and village renewal, housing, the building industry and building technology, with pilot schemes proposed for Meißen, Weimar, Brandenburg and Stralsund. Hasselfeldt argued that GDR housing, tenancy and property law should be reformed and private ownership strengthened. At the end of 1990 Der Spiegel described the eastern stock as a separate crisis: nearly half of almost seven million dwellings predated 1919, about one in five was by western standards neither habitable nor worth repairing, and rents still ran from 35 pfennigs to 1.85 marks a square metre, about the 1936 level. Owners, it wrote, faced increases of several hundred per cent or subsidies of 20 to 25 billion marks a year, and Bonn had no coherent concept. The same article said the building post was widely unwanted in the coalition talks, and quoted a CSU complaint that the FDP had asked the CDU to leave Hasselfeldt in place.

When Kohl presented his fourth coalition on 18 January 1991, the building ministry nevertheless passed to Irmgard Adam-Schwaetzer of the FDP, and Hasselfeldt became health minister.

Health ministry

The department joined the statutory-insurance staff, taken from Norbert Blüm's labour ministry, to the existing health ministry. Die Zeit later wrote that the two sets of officials had been antagonists: Blüm's staff had fought drug firms, office doctors and hospitals, while the old ministry was regarded as closer to those interests. In the first half of 1991, Der Spiegel reported, fund spending in the old Länder rose 10 per cent against a wage base of barely 5 per cent, a gap of about 5 billion marks. Hasselfeldt called it an inherited burden that existing controls would probably not remove. Fixed drug prices covered about 30 per cent of the market and were saving roughly a billion marks a year, but had not been extended as hoped.

In May 1991 she proposed replacing hospital per-diem charges with case flat rates and special fees, citing a 7 per cent rise in hospital costs in 1990, and spoke of capping a patient's share of drug costs at 10 marks. In October she warned of a 1991–92 hole above 10 billion marks. At the Concerted Action in Health Care that December, doctors, pharmacists, hospital operators and the drug industry rejected "contribution-rate stability at any price", including fee freezes or a drug-price stop, and called pure cost containment conceptually empty. She answered that spending must not outrun wages. For 1991 Der Spiegel put dentists' fees up 8.7 per cent, doctors' 7.2 per cent, dentures 13.7 per cent and hospitals 7.7 per cent, against revenue up barely 5 per cent, and reported that proposals due on 23 April 1992 would touch providers lightly and put the main burden on the insured. Die Zeit reported that the presentation was cancelled.

In March Der Spiegel noted a reply to the journalist Matthias Hoppe, who had asked why packs still carried a warning from "the federal health minister". She wrote that the wording dated from Antje Huber's tenure (1976–1982) and that new printing plates would impose "not inconsiderable costs" on the cigarette industry; the magazine read that as accommodation of the firms.

Resignation in 1992

In late April 1992 Ministerialrat Reinhard Hoppe, head of the policy department and her closest aide, was arrested on suspicion of spying for the Polish intelligence service. Der Spiegel wrote that she resigned at the same time as Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, worn down by conflict with Kohl and with her principal adviser under suspicion. Die Zeit called the arrest a pretext. It reported that the Federal Prosecutor's Office saw no urgent suspicion within the five-year limitation period, so Hoppe, already released, was regarded as clean during her tenure, and judged that she had not controlled the ministry or left a substantial reform. The same article credited her building ministry with having revived social housing. In a 2017 Bundestag interview she gave another account: health problems, unhappiness with some staffing, and being "young and too inexperienced to set things straight in the shark tank of health policy."

Horst Seehofer, parliamentary state secretary in the labour ministry and of the CSU, succeeded her. The Federal Agency for Civic Education dates his tenure from 6 May 1992. Reviewing the 1992 changes in January 1993, Kohl said Seehofer had become health minister on 7 May as her successor.

Finance and parliamentary group roles, 1992–2005

Transport committee and finance spokesperson

After leaving the Federal Ministry of Health in 1992, Hasselfeldt remained a member of the Bundestag. A 2017 profile by the parliament's internet desk, drawn from an interview with her, records that she then joined the transport committee and in 1995 became finance-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU group, the joint parliamentary group of the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union. The profile presents that step as a novelty: until then, no woman from the CSU had sat on the Finance Committee. Official biographies date the spokesperson's role from 1995 to 2002, spanning the last years of the Helmut Kohl government, with Theo Waigel as finance minister, and the opposition years after 1998. In the plenary she was the group's lead speaker on major tax bills, including the ecological tax reform debated in Bonn on 3 March 1999.

Deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group

The 2002 election left the Union in opposition. On 23 October 2002 the group, under Angela Merkel, chose a new leadership. The CSU Landesgruppe received an extra deputy chair and had named Hasselfeldt the evening before, for consumer protection, agriculture, local government and tourism. Michael Glos stayed first deputy and Horst Seehofer kept health and social security. The finance brief moved in the same ballot: Friedrich Merz became deputy for the economy, finance, taxation and the labour market, Michael Meister (CDU) finance-policy spokesperson, and Dietrich Austermann (CDU) remained budget spokesperson. Biographies date Hasselfeldt's deputy chairmanship to 2002–2005.

On agriculture she led the attack on the bill implementing the June 2003 reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy. A CDU/CSU motion of 31 March 2004, naming Hasselfeldt with Peter Harry Carstensen and Albert Deß, said the government's negotiating line had not represented German farming and the food industry, and that the draft took the worst options left by the Luxembourg agreement. It warned of structural breaks in milk and beef and said the new premia favoured giving up production, with a redistribution inside Germany hitting indebted livestock farms.

Tax and budget positions

While the Union was still in office she defended its tax programme on the floor. When the Bundestag passed the coalition's tax-reform laws for 1998 and 1999, the taz reported her line as finance-policy spokesperson: "Wir schließen heute eine Reform ab, die zu mehr Wachstum und Beschäftigung führen wird." The opposition laughed. Group chair Wolfgang Schäuble said he was not claiming the reform would solve the labour-market problem, and Christine Scheel, finance spokesperson of Alliance 90/The Greens, argued that a higher value-added tax would leave ordinary taxpayers worse off despite talk of a net relief of about 30 billion marks.

In the budget debate of 9 September 1997 she called abolition of the wealth tax a signal for investment, and said it had taken five years against the Social Democratic Party. She accused the SPD of also blocking a cut in trade-earnings tax for the Mittelstand, and quoted the German Economic Institute: without the Petersberg reform, federation, Länder and municipalities would lose 135 billion marks over four years as legal allowances eroded the tax base. Lower rates with fewer allowances, she said, were the more social design.

Against Finance Minister Hans Eichel she set out the opposition alternative in a Welt interview on 8 January 2000, during the CSU meeting at Kreuth. The Landesgruppe wanted a top income-tax rate of 35 percent, against a CDU figure of clearly under 40 percent, and a net relief of 50 billion marks, shared by corporations, partnerships and employees in that legislative period rather than from 2003 or 2005. She preferred a 20 percent cut in the trade-tax base figure to crediting trade tax against income tax, which she called constitutionally doubtful, and wanted to keep dividend imputation instead of the half-income system. The Union, she said, did not intend to act as the blocker, but it would not accept a reform unworthy of the name.

On the ecological tax she was blunter. At the second and third reading on 3 March 1999 she told Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine the bill was only a higher burden on consumers and business — "ein Abkassieren auf breiter Front" — because the coalition would not reform social insurance and was using tax revenue to fill holes of its own making. Pensioners, students and people on social assistance or unemployment pay, she said, would gain little from lower contributions, and the special regime for manufacturing was arbitrary. The CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party opposed the law. On 15 September 2000 she co-sponsored, with Peter Rauen, Austermann and the group, a bill to reverse the mineral-oil-tax rises and abolish the electricity tax from 1 January 2001, returning petrol duty to 98 pfennigs a litre.

At a Mittelstand forum of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on 18 October 2001 she said Eichel had not advanced a step on consolidation: the stability programme's ceiling, a deficit of 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, would be missed, the German Institute for Economic Research put the ratio at 2.1 percent, and the tax ratio was still 23 percent of GDP, as in 1998. Unemployment, up by about 100,000 since January and nearly 3.1 million in September, she blamed not on the attacks of 11 September but on "falsche Weichenstellungen in drei Jahren rot-grüner Politik."

Vice-presidency of the Bundestag

Elections in 2005 and 2009

At the constitutive sitting of the 16th Bundestag on 18 October 2005, the CDU/CSU group nominated Gerda Hasselfeldt for a vice-presidency. In a separate secret ballot she received 510 votes in favour, 47 against and 47 abstentions, with one invalid paper among 605 cast, and she accepted. The number of vice presidents was set at six, with separate ballots in order of the groups' strength. The proposal of Die Linke did not obtain a majority that day; a candidate of the group was elected only on 7 April 2006. Hasselfeldt served under President Norbert Lammert, elected earlier the same sitting, until the end of the term on 27 October 2009. Bundestag accounts record two earlier women from the group in the office: Maria Probst of the Christian Social Union, chosen in 1965 as the first woman vice president, and Michaela Geiger, also of the CSU, who served from 16 January 1997 to 26 October 1998.

The 17th Bundestag re-elected her on 27 October 2009. By agreement all five nominees stood on one paper, each with a separate vote. Of 618 cards, all valid as cards, she received 496 votes in favour, 66 against and 52 abstentions, with four invalid marks on her name, and she accepted. Wolfgang Thierse, Hermann Otto Solms, Petra Pau and Katrin Göring-Eckardt were elected with her, one vice president for each group, with Lammert remaining president.

On 14 March 2011 the CSU deputies elected her chair of the party's Landesgruppe, with 37 votes in favour and three invalid ballots. That office also made her first deputy to Volker Kauder, chair of the joint CDU/CSU group. The data handbook ends the vice-presidency on 16 March 2011. On 23 March Lammert told the House that she had resigned and thanked her for the way she had held the office. The Bundestag then elected Eduard Oswald of the CSU, nominated by the CDU/CSU: 504 of 570 votes were in favour, 39 against and 27 abstentions, and he accepted.

Presiding duties and the Council of Elders

Vice presidents are chosen with the president for the electoral term. Since a 1994 change to the rules of procedure, each group has been entitled to at least one seat in the Presidium, which the president and the vice presidents form. The Bundestag's account of the office quotes those rules: the president represents the House and directs its proceedings fairly and impartially. In the chamber the president and the vice presidents normally take the chair in turn, about every two hours, and whoever is presiding calls speakers and keeps order.

The Presidium meets in each sitting week on staffing, contracts and the public work of the House. Its members also sit on the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat), with further members named by the groups according to strength, among them the parliamentary business managers. The Council supports the president, fixes the sitting weeks and the plenary agenda, and takes up disputes among the groups. On internal affairs not reserved to the president or the Presidium it decides, and the commissions it appoints prepare that work. Hasselfeldt chaired the Council's commission for internal affairs through the 16th term and in the 17th until 16 March 2011; Oswald took the chair on 23 March, when he joined the Presidium.

The vice-presidency was not a post in the group. After the 2002 election Hasselfeldt had been a deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group, and she left that role on entering the Presidium in 2005. When in March 2011 she took the CSU Landesgruppe, and with it the deputy chair of the joint group, the vice-presidency ended.

Chair of the CSU Landesgruppe

Election in 2011 and the 2013 campaign

On the evening of 14 March 2011 the CSU deputies in the Bundestag elected Gerda Hasselfeldt chair of the Landesgruppe. Of the 43 members present, 37 voted for her, three against her and three ballots were invalid. She was the first woman in the post, succeeding Hans-Peter Friedrich, who had become federal interior minister after Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned as defence minister and Thomas de Maizière of the CDU moved from the interior to defence. The chairmanship made her first deputy chair of the joint CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Her biography for the 18th electoral term lists both offices from March 2011 and dates the vice-presidency she gave up to 2005–2011.

The vote ended a deadlock. Parliamentary state secretaries Gerd Müller and Christian Schmidt, and deputy chair Stefan Müller, had found no clear majority, and general secretary Alexander Dobrindt was treated as unavailable to leave the party headquarters in Munich. Party chair Horst Seehofer then proposed Hasselfeldt, an unusual intervention in the deputies' own choice, accepted because the field was blocked. Die Welt reported that Friedrich had also favoured her and described the result as a transitional chairmanship that might end after the next election. Hasselfeldt said she would keep Friedrich's moderate course, argue in substance rather than slogans, and defend the group's independence from the Munich party line. Seehofer called her experienced and able to hold the deputies together.

On 13 April 2013 a delegates' assembly in Munich named her lead candidate for the Bundestag election of 22 September, the first time the CSU had put a woman at the head of a federal list. She received 98.7 percent of the valid votes. She attacked the SPD and chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück for what she called an "Abkassierorgie" and a declaration of war on medium-sized and family firms.

She again contested constituency 216, Fürstenfeldbruck, covering the districts of Fürstenfeldbruck and Dachau. The federal returning officer recorded 103,904 CSU first votes, 55.6 percent, against 20.1 percent for the SPD, and turnout of 75.0 percent. The CSU's second-vote share was 50.4 percent in the constituency and 49.3 percent in Bavaria. The Süddeutsche Zeitung named Hasselfeldt the winner, on 55.56 percent, for the seventh time. On election night she was in Berlin beside Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the CDU's Konrad-Adenauer-Haus and in the ARD and ZDF Berliner Runde, then flew to Munich to meet Seehofer.

Asylum and migration policy

The arrivals of 2015 placed her between Merkel and the CSU in Munich. At her summer press conference on 31 August, Merkel said Germany was a strong country and that the approach had to be "Wir haben so vieles geschafft – wir schaffen das." At the Landtag group's retreat at Kloster Banz later that September, deputies directed at Hasselfeldt the charge that Bavaria was being left alone and that Berlin had no plan. Former justice minister Alfred Sauter was among the critics. Participants said the meeting turned sharp when she refused to call refugee numbers open at the top either right or wrong; one Munich deputy afterwards described her manner as "almost shamelessly arrogant."

Before coalition talks on 5 November 2015 she told Die Welt that policy had to cut the numbers. People from safe countries of origin, repeat arrivals and those who would not help with registration should be returned quickly, preferably in border procedures lasting no more than four weeks including legal protection. Germany, she said, had to show it was not a country inviting immigration. The CSU's point was the transit-zone principle, not the label: unlike an SPD plan to register people at inland centres, the separation of those needing protection from those without a prospect of staying had to come before entry. Applicants would not be imprisoned, but they would have to wait out the procedure and could leave only toward their country of origin or the state from which they had tried to enter. Family reunification, she said, was more than society, jobs and housing could absorb and had to be suspended for a time, also as a signal abroad.

That evening Merkel, Seehofer and SPD chair Sigmar Gabriel dropped zones under that name. An accelerated procedure, modelled on the airport procedure and meant to finish within a month, would apply to applicants from safe countries of origin, people barred from re-entry, repeat applicants and those who would not cooperate. It was to be concentrated in reception centres, the first in Bamberg and Manching, with a stricter ban on leaving the district. Family reunification for people with subsidiary protection would be suspended for two years. Gabriel said transit zones and detention were off the table; Seehofer said the CSU had never proposed detention and summed the deal up as humanity, integration of those in need of protection, and limitation and reduction of the numbers.

Der Spiegel wrote in April 2016 that she backed Seehofer's demands in substance but thought public confrontation the wrong method, and that this — she was widely seen as close to Merkel — led him to draw away from her. The same report said CSU Bundestag members increasingly criticized that restraint, and that the group had long complained it was not visible enough under a chair who preferred consensus. In June 2016 she argued the other way. She told Die Welt that Merkel's chancellorship since 2005 had been a success and that the refugee dispute was no reason to discard it, answering Seehofer and Bavarian finance minister Markus Söder. She called her tie to the chancellor trusting.

Departure from parliament

On 5 April 2016 Der Spiegel reported that Hasselfeldt, then 65, had told Seehofer she would not stand in 2017, would say so in her constituency, and would keep the chair until the election. She told the Rheinische Post, as quoted by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, that after 30 years younger people should take over and that until then she would stay "on deck." A Bundestag profile in 2017 recorded her saying this was her last term, that the decision had not been hard, and that at 67 she thought younger politicians should lead. Spiegel saw no clear successor: Dobrindt was transport minister, and general secretary Andreas Scheuer was judged too inexperienced.

She remained until the end of the term. On 24 September 2017 the CSU in Bavaria fell 10.5 points to 38.8 percent, and the Landesgruppe shrank from 56 deputies to 46. On 26 September the new members elected Dobrindt chair with 41 yes votes, three no votes, one abstention and one invalid ballot. He succeeded Hasselfeldt, who had not stood and left parliament with the 18th Bundestag.

German Red Cross and welfare organizations

Presidency, 2017–2025

Gerda Hasselfeldt was president of the German Red Cross (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, DRK) from 1 December 2017 until 29 November 2025, when the federal assembly (Bundesversammlung) in Berlin named her honorary president and chose a successor. The unpaid president chairs the honorary Präsidium, which sets strategy and supervises the executive management.

The vote on Friday, 1 December 2017, was unanimous. She was the only candidate and the first woman to lead the society, succeeding Rudolf Seiters, a former federal interior minister, after 14 years; Seiters was made honorary president. Interior minister Thomas de Maizière called her an outstanding public figure and thanked the DRK for its part in the refugee crisis and as a partner of the authorities in civil protection. She had just left the Bundestag as chair of the Christian Social Union parliamentary group. The DRK then reported three million members, more than 400,000 volunteers and 165,000 paid staff.

The assembly confirmed her unanimously for four more years on 20 November 2021. She did not stand in 2025. Delegates unanimously elected Hermann Gröhe of the Christian Democratic Union—federal health minister from 2013 to 2018 and a Bundestag member from 1994 to 2025—for a four-year term, and thanked Hasselfeldt especially for the Ahr Valley flood, the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and aid linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By 2025 the DRK reported more than 457,000 volunteers, more than 211,000 employees and about three million members, and described itself as Germany's national society in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, with an auxiliary role in civil protection and the rank of a peak association of free welfare.

Crises: pandemic, floods and Ukraine

On the day of her re-election Hasselfeldt urged faster vaccination. She told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that no time could be lost and that the DRK would support the authorities with vaccination centres, sites and mobile teams, so that people would not queue for hours or be turned away. In the Rheinische Post at the end of December 2021 she said she now favoured a general mandate—"We are all constantly learning in this pandemic"—while adding that it would not replace distance, hygiene, testing or limits on contact. She did not expect mass resignations under the facility-based mandate the Bundestag had passed for nursing and health staff, though she said individual cases could not be excluded; most DRK staff were already vaccinated, and the shortage of nurses predated the pandemic.

The flood of 14–15 July 2021 killed 136 people in Rhineland-Palatinate and 49 in North Rhine-Westphalia. Visiting Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler on 22 July, Hasselfeldt said help would continue for months, for as long as it was needed. About 3,500 DRK helpers from across Germany were then deployed in the two states, supplying drinking water, power and hygiene items and running mobile surgeries after practices had been destroyed; donations had passed 15 million euros. She asked for ten federal depots of beds, blankets, hygiene goods, water-treatment gear and generators—two had been approved—and said crisis-intervention teams were supporting residents and helpers psychologically. In September 2023 she told the Augsburger Allgemeine that the 2024 draft budget still failed to fund the planned mobile disaster-protection centres, although the Ahr damage was not cleared. Of ten modules, each meant to care for 5,000 people, she said only one was fully financed, at about 30 million euros a module against 9 million euros in the draft, and argued that civil protection required prevention rather than hoping nothing would happen.

On 29 November 2022 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited the DRK logistics centre at Berlin Brandenburg Airport and, citing damage to Ukraine's energy system, said millions faced a winter of need, darkness and cold. He urged municipal partnerships with Ukrainian communities and cash donations for generators and heaters; Ambassador Oleksii Makeiev thanked the DRK, whose shipments were also going to warming points.

Federal association of independent welfare

From the start of 2019 until the turn of 2020/21 Hasselfeldt was also president of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege (BAGFW). The statutes of 22 September 2022 name six member peak associations, which have worked together since 1924: the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, the German Caritas Association, the Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband, the DRK, Diakonie Deutschland and the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland. The members' meeting elects a president and two vice-presidents for two years. The president is proposed by the association holding the rotating lead (Federführung); the vice-presidents come from the associations that held it last and will hold it next. The BAGFW's stated aim is to secure and develop social work through joint initiatives.

She succeeded Prälat Peter Neher of Caritas, who had served two years, so the DRK became the lead association. She named long-term care, digitalization of the social economy and the standing of voluntary work as the tasks ahead; the vice-presidents were Ulrich Lilie of Diakonie Deutschland, due to take the presidency in 2021, and Neher. At the new year 2021 Lilie took over and Diakonie assumed the lead, with Hasselfeldt remaining a vice-president alongside Jens Schubert of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, in line for the presidency from 2023. Lilie said the pandemic had exposed weaknesses in the welfare state and called for steadier financing and reform of long-term-care insurance; the BAGFW counted 1.94 million employees in free welfare, including care homes, daycare and facilities for disabled people.

Later offices, honors and personal life

ZDF Television Council and foundations

On 5 July 2024 the Television Council of ZDF elected Hasselfeldt chair for its 17th term in a secret ballot in Mainz, by 49 votes to two with two abstentions; she succeeded Marlehn Thieme, had sat since 2019 as the representative of the German Red Cross, and had been a deputy chair since 2022. On 19 June 2026 she was confirmed with 43 of 46 valid votes; the presidium serves two years and the council four, and its 60 members supervise the programme, approve the budget adopted by the Administrative Council and elect the Intendant.

ZDF describes the council as representing the general public rather than as a panel of specialists; plenary sessions are public, and the council sets programme guidelines and advises the Intendant. Under the ZDF State Treaty each Land government has one seat, the federal government two and the municipal associations two, while other members are sent by named organizations, including the German Red Cross as one of four free-welfare bodies that appoint their own representatives, so her seat is that Red Cross seat, not a seat of the Christian Social Union or of a government.

She is deputy chair of the trustees of the Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl Foundation, created by a Bundestag law in 2021, on a five-member board appointed by the Federal President and chaired by Volker Kauder; the foundation describes its work as historical-political education and research on the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. In the 18th electoral term the Bundestag's disclosure register listed an unpaid board seat at the Hanns Seidel Foundation and trusteeships of the Deutsches Museum, until 9 May 2016, and of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Decorations

On 20 June 2001 Minister-President Edmund Stoiber conferred the Bavarian Order of Merit, which Die Welt called Bavaria's highest decoration, on 69 people, including Hasselfeldt. In July 2011 Barbara Stamm, president of the Bavarian Landtag, presented the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in Gold for service to the Bavarian constitution, the Münchner Merkur reported. On 9 October 2023, German Unity Day, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded Hasselfeldt, listed at Fürstenfeldbruck, the Grand Cross with Star and Sash (Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany at Schloss Bellevue, one of 23 recipients that day. The citation noted thirty years in the Bundestag and senior posts in which, it said, she had often been the first woman, and, from 2017, the Red Cross presidency, including her case for better crisis preparation and her references to climate change and extreme weather.

Family and public persona

Bundestag biographies record her as Gerda Rainer, born on 7 July 1950 in Straubing, Roman Catholic, with two children. In 2016 she told SZ-Magazin that her first husband had done much of the childcare in the 1980s and that cabinet office had damaged that partnership; the interview treated the first marriage as having ended after reunification. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that in 1991, when she became health minister, her daughter was eight and her son fourteen. In 2004 she married Wolfgang Zeitlmann, a CSU member of the Bundestag from 1987 to 2005; in January 2020 he told Bild that they had been divorced for nearly a year, had no further contact, and that she had left their house in the Gern district of Munich. In September 2017 she spoke of fourteen grandchildren.

A Bundestag profile that year said colleagues across parties valued a calm, mediating manner, and that she had led the CSU Landesgruppe "with a quiet hand." In SZ-Magazin she said she was not someone who immediately shouts "Here!", had never contested a post, and held that the office mattered more than she did; the interviewers likened that reserve to Angela Merkel. The Süddeutsche Zeitung called her the link between Merkel and Horst Seehofer and noted CSU complaints that she was too quiet. The Münchner Merkur described a deliberate diplomat whom some in the CSU thought too close to Merkel: colleagues felt disputes with the chancellor were left to Seehofer, though critics credited her with holding the CDU/CSU group together in 2015.