Heike Heubach

Heike Heubach (born 14 December 1979 in Rottweil am Neckar) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag from Bavaria. She is the first deaf person to hold a seat in the parliament. A trained industrial clerk, she worked at E.ON and later at Bayernwerk Netz until 2024. She lives in Stadtbergen, on the western edge of Augsburg.

Heubach joined the SPD in 2019. At the 2021 federal election she was the party's candidate in constituency 253, Augsburg-Land and Aichach-Friedberg, and stood in 24th place on the Bavarian state list. The SPD candidate there received 14.5 percent of the first votes, and she narrowly missed entering parliament. Ulrich Peter Grötsch resigned his mandate with effect from 15 March 2024 after his appointment as federal police commissioner. The Bavarian Land returning officer named Heubach, from 24th place on the SPD list, as successor; she signed the declaration of acceptance in Fürth on 20 March 2024 and with that signature became a member of the 20th Bundestag. The next day, Bundestag president Bärbel Bas welcomed her at the opening of the sitting and said the house was writing history.

On 10 October 2024, in the debate on a draft reform of the federal building code, Heubach gave the first speech in the Bundestag in German Sign Language. A simultaneous interpreter rendered her signs as spoken German. Vice-president Aydan Özoğuz said the occasion showed that parliament could represent society a little more fully, and then called Heubach for that first speech. Heubach argued for climate-adapted urban planning, including unsealed surfaces, greenery on buildings and local rainwater infiltration, and closed with the line that more climate protection would save lives and relieve the federal budget of the cost of natural disasters, and that doing nothing would be the most expensive course. Members answered with the sign-language applause of raised, waving hands, and some stood. In December 2024 the Seminar for General Rhetoric at the University of Tübingen named the address Speech of the Year.

At the 2025 federal election she was again the SPD candidate in the Augsburg-Land constituency, now numbered 252, and returned to the 21st Bundestag through the Bavarian state list. The SPD candidate in that constituency received 25,217 first votes, 12.7 percent. On election night in Stadtbergen she called the SPD result bitter and sad, and linked the loss of trust to the collapse of the governing coalition of SPD, Greens and Free Democrats. In the 21st term she is a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government, and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. When she entered parliament she named affordable housing, equality of women and men, environmental protection and the visibility of people with disabilities as the subjects she intended to pursue.

Early life and education

Childhood and hearing loss

Heike Heubach was born on 14 December 1979 in Rottweil am Neckar, in Baden-Württemberg. She grew up in Oberndorf am Neckar, in the same district; her family still lives there and in nearby Dornhan.

Her parents returned to work soon after the birth, and she was looked after chiefly by her grandmother. In a March 2024 interview she said the cause of her deafness was not certain. At about six months, she recalled, her grandmother noticed that she did not react when called, although a doctor at first found her development unremarkable. At about eighteen months she was examined at the university hospital in Tübingen and found to be deaf. The explanation she then called most likely was meningitis at roughly two weeks of age, which might have caused the hearing loss; she also said she might have been born deaf. Later interviews state the cause more narrowly. In February 2025 she spoke of "the deafness that arose in me after a middle-ear infection," and in May 2025 she was reported as attributing the loss of hearing, presumably, to a middle-ear infection at two weeks, which her grandmother and parents noticed only when she was already one and a half.

She has described the childhood that followed as, at first, like that of a hearing child: she played without difficulty with hearing children, and her parents took her with them wherever they went. In puberty, she has said, spoken communication stopped working, and she fell into what she called a real identity crisis.

Schooling

On her curriculum vitae she dates kindergarten, primary school and Hauptschule from 1983 to 1996 at a convent school for deaf pupils in Heiligenbronn, near Schramberg, ending with the Hauptschulabschluss. The Bundestag biography, compiled from members' own statements, lists primary school and Hauptschule from 1986 to 1996 and the same certificate, without naming the institution; the earlier year on her vita is the start she gives for kindergarten at that school. In a 2025 interview she placed the schooling at an institution for deaf children in Schramberg-Heiligenbronn and the Hauptschulabschluss in 1996.

In kindergarten and at school, she has said, teaching followed the oralist method. Deaf children were to learn by lip-reading and by forming speech sounds, "above all," as she later put it, so that they would "learn to adapt well to society." Subject matter, she has said, hardly came into it, because following lessons delivered in spoken language is exhausting and difficult. She has put the share of speech that can be read from the lips at about 20 percent, with the other 80 percent having to be pieced together from context. Words such as Butter and Mutter, she noted, make the same mouth shape, and only the surrounding sense shows which is meant — "an enormous challenge," in her account, "above all for children who still lack knowledge of the world."

From 1996 to 1999 she attended the Wirtschaftsschule für Hör-Sprachgeschädigte in Heidelberg-Neckargemünd, a commercial school for pupils with hearing and speech impairments, and left with the Mittlere Reife. She lived in the boarding school. "There the world was a different one," she told the Schwarzwälder Bote. "I lived in the boarding school. And only there did I then also find my identity."

The Bundestag biography records a further year at a Gymnasium, in 2000–2001, and then a Fachoberschule from 2001 to 2003, completed with the Fachabitur, the qualification for entry to a university of applied sciences. Her curriculum vitae names the Gisela-Gymnasium in Munich for that Gymnasium year and a Fachoberschule in Munich-Pasing for the Fachabitur. She has said that interpreters for German Sign Language first supported her in class only during her later training as an industrial clerk, and that communication "suddenly was no problem at all," an experience she described as opening her eyes. She has since argued that deaf children should have the chance to learn in German Sign Language from the start.

Professional career

Vocational training

The Bundestag lists Heike Heubach’s occupation as Industriekauffrau, the German qualification of industrial clerk. In the biography it publishes from members’ own information, she trained from 2008 to 2011 at e.on Energie, part of the E.ON group, and qualified as an Industriekauffrau; the parliament notes that this narrative rests on self-disclosure. Her own site gives the same years but refers only to an apprenticeship “in einem Energiekonzern,” an energy company, without naming the firm, and says she last worked as a clerk in installer support.

Bayerischer Rundfunk, in a July 2024 profile, reported that she had begun that apprenticeship at E.ON Energie in Munich before 2008 and had worked in the group since. On Abgeordnetenwatch she wrote that she learned the occupation at an energy company in Munich. The dated account in the Bundestag biography remains 2008 to 2011. Under the training ordinance in force from 2002 until 2024, Industriekauffrau was a state-recognised apprenticeship in the dual education system, and the prescribed length was three years.

Employment in the energy sector

The Bundestag biography records two salaried posts after the apprenticeship. From 2011 to 2013 she worked in procurement strategy at e.on Facility Management GmbH, as key user and the person responsible for the purchasing platform. From 2013 to 2024 she worked in installer support at Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, as a clerk in the registration team and the person responsible for ZMI, which the biography expands as meter installation by installers (Zählermontage durch Installateure). Bayerischer Rundfunk’s account of continuous employment inside the E.ON group sits alongside that later change of employer.

In the mandatory disclosures on her Bundestag page, the occupation before membership is entered as clerk (Sachbearbeiterin) at Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, Regensburg, with a right of return (Rückkehrrecht). Abgeordnetenwatch carries the same line, captured on 11 June 2025, as activity before membership in the field of energy. That entry names the employer as Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, Regensburg; it does not say whether Regensburg was her daily workplace.

The content of the work is described more fully, and not always under one company name. In a Süddeutsche Zeitung profile of 21 September 2021, while she still held the post, she drove to work each morning at “die Bayernwerke,” where as an industrial clerk she coordinated technicians’ assignments and made many calls through a telephone interpreting service. She told the paper she had had to fight for public funding of that service, so that cost would not deter the firm from hiring other people with disabilities. On Abgeordnetenwatch she wrote that she looked after installers from Upper Bavaria and guest installers from across Germany, maintained the installer register, and handled hotline calls and callbacks with the same interpreting service, on the same footing as hearing colleagues. The Augsburger Allgemeine, on 21 March 2024, described her as a trained industrial clerk who had worked at a Bavarian energy company and administered the installer register there.

Alexander Simon, identified by Bayerischer Rundfunk as her supervisor, said she had covered a range of tasks over many years, that her leaving opened a gap which was not easy to fill, and that the departure was not final: colleagues would be glad if she returned, even while hoping her time in parliament would last. She took her seat on 20 March 2024; the biography dates the Bayernwerk role through 2024, in line with the return right in the disclosure.

Political career before the Bundestag

Entry into the SPD

Heike Heubach joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in November 2019, while living in Stadtbergen, in the district of Augsburg in Bavaria. The biography she later supplied to the Bundestag records the same year of entry and a run of local offices: from 2022 an assessor of the SPD women in the Unterbezirk Augsburg-Land, the party organisation below the Bavarian regional level; from 2023 joint chair of the Stadtbergen branch with Dieter Fromm, and representative of the SPD women in that Unterbezirk; and from 2024 an assessor of the SPD women in the Bezirk Swabia. The Bundestag notes that these biographical details rest on the member's own statements.

Candidate selection began earlier than those offices. In the summer of 2020 the Unterbezirk chairs Fabian Wamser, for the district of Augsburg, and Sandra Lederer, for Aichach-Friedberg, asked members to come forward for the next federal election. Seven expressed interest; by autumn Heubach and Michael Haupeltshofer were the two left, and both were introduced to members in three online rounds. Roland Mair, chair of the SPD group on the Stadtbergen council, later said he had encouraged her to stand.

Municipal and district candidacies

Her first candidacy was the Bavarian municipal election of 15 March 2020, for the Stadtbergen town council, in eighth place on the SPD list. The official result gives her 948 votes and twelfth place in the SPD order of votes, with the status Nachrücker: a substitute, not a sitting councillor. The SPD received 23,800 votes, 16.8 percent of valid votes, and four seats, taken by Roland Mair, Jürgen Brendel, Matthias Künzel and Bärbel Schubert. Turnout was 54.5 percent. The Augsburger Allgemeine later reported that, during that campaign, she canvassed about 1,000 households with other candidates and an introductory video.

She stood again, after the 2021 federal election, in the Bezirkstag election in Swabia on 8 October 2023. She was fifth on the SPD list for the Bezirk and the party's candidate in Stimmkreis 705, Augsburg-Land-Süd. The final count gave her 6,295 first votes and 1,942 second votes, 8,237 in all, short of a seat. Across Swabia the SPD took 7.01 percent — 69,743 first votes and 65,541 second votes — and two seats, both from the list, filled by Petra Beer and Volkmar Thumser. The Stimmkreis seat itself went to Klaus Förster of the CSU, elected directly with 34,267 first votes.

2021 federal election

On 24 February 2021 a digital nominating meeting for the constituency, held on Zoom with sign-language interpreters because Heubach is deaf, gave her 53 of 67 delegate votes against Haupeltshofer. A postal ballot of the delegates then confirmed her as the direct candidate.

By 15 March 2021 the Augsburger Allgemeine reported that she had been placed 24th on the Bavarian SPD state list, which the paper then described as containing 46 names, and third among the party's candidates from Swabia, behind Christoph Schmid and Ulrike Bahr. Her Bundestag biography likewise records place 24 and the constituency under its 2021 numbering: Wahlkreis 253, Augsburg-Land and Aichach-Friedberg. The Federal Returning Officer's delimitation of constituency 253 comprised specified municipalities in the districts of Aichach-Friedberg and Augsburg, including Stadtbergen, and not the city of Augsburg, which formed constituency 252.

At the 2021 German federal election on 26 September, 204,737 of 249,372 eligible voters in the constituency cast ballots, a turnout of 82.1 percent. Heubach received 29,435 first votes, 14.5 percent, 0.3 points above the SPD share there in 2017, and finished second. The seat went to the Christian Social Union in Bavaria with 82,423 votes, 40.6 percent; Hansjörg Durz sat in the 20th Bundestag as the member directly elected for Wahlkreis 253, a result the Bundestag's own election report listed at 40.6 percent.

Second votes in the constituency gave the SPD 33,405, or 16.4 percent. In Bavaria as a whole the party polled 1,361,242 second votes, 18.0 percent. In the final seat calculation the Bavarian SPD was allocated 23 seats and no constituency seats, so the candidate in 24th place on the state list was the first not elected. The count on the night was less settled. The Augsburger Allgemeine reported that projections for much of the evening pointed to 25 Bavarian SPD seats, which would have included her, and that the figure of 23 became clear only in the early hours of 27 September. At 6:30 that morning she wrote to party colleagues, "Ich ziehe nicht ein." She told the paper she was proud of second place and referred to 29,438 voters; the final official first-vote total was 29,435.

Bundestag membership

Succession in March 2024

Ulrich Peter Grötsch, known as Uli Grötsch, gave up the seat he held in the 20th Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) on the Bavarian state list with effect from 15 March 2024. The day before, on a proposal from the coalition groups of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democrats, the Bundestag had elected him in a secret ballot as the first Police Commissioner of the Federation at the German Bundestag (Polizeibeauftragter des Bundes beim Deutschen Bundestag), with 416 votes in favour, 215 against and 38 abstentions, above the absolute majority of 368 that was required. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas appointed him on 15 March 2024. Grötsch had sat in the Bundestag since 2013 and, before that mandate, had been a Bavarian police officer for 19 years; before accepting the new office he resigned his seat before the President. For the length of the term, the statute bars the commissioner from activities incompatible with the office and, in particular, from belonging to a government or to a legislative body of the Federation or of a Land. The commissioner is an auxiliary organ of the Bundestag, independent and subject only to the law, and examines complaints of misconduct by staff of the Federal Police, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Bundestag Police.

Bas informed the Bavarian Land returning officer, Dr Thomas Gößl, of the resignation by letter. Gößl then determined that the vacant list seat passed to Heike Heubach, who had been placed 24th on the SPD state list for Bavaria at the 2021 federal election. On 20 March 2024, in Fürth, she signed the declaration of acceptance in person and by hand; with that declaration, received in due form and time, she acquired membership of the 20th Bundestag. The Bavarian statistical office announced the succession the same day, in press release 02/2024/BTW/B-VII, and released photographs of the signature and of Heubach with deputy Land returning officer Köhne. The archived biography for the 20th electoral term dates her membership from 20 March 2024 as successor to Grötsch, records the seat as one held through the Bavarian state list, and associates her with constituency 253, Augsburg-Land, the district in which she had been the SPD candidate in 2021 under the longer name Augsburg-Land and Aichach-Friedberg.

Bas opened the 160th sitting at 9:00 on 21 March 2024 by welcoming Heubach as the member who had succeeded Grötsch. She then told visitors in the galleries that the applause included applause given in sign language, and that the House was, in her words, writing history, because it now had its first deaf member, who would take part for her constituency. Bundestag reporting uses the same description. The account of the plenary address Heubach gave in German Sign Language on 10 October 2024, which is treated separately, calls her the first deaf member of the Bundestag, and a post by Bas reproduced on the Bundestag website does likewise, noting that sign-language interpretation in the chamber had been prepared so that she could exercise the mandate.

2025 federal election

At the federal election of 23 February 2025 Heubach was the SPD direct candidate in the Augsburg-Land constituency, renumbered 252, and stood in 14th place on the party's Bavarian state list. The Land office's register of nominations, published in February 2025, lists her — born in 1979, resident in Stadtbergen, and described there as a member of the Bundestag — both at list place 14 and as the SPD constituency nominee in 252.

The final result published by the Federal Returning Officer gives constituency 252 232,095 people eligible to vote and a turnout of 86.0 percent, 4.2 percentage points above 2021. The SPD candidate received 25,217 first votes, 12.7 percent, 2.2 percentage points fewer than in 2021. The direct mandate went to Hansjörg Durz of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), with 88,388 first votes, or 44.5 percent. The runner-up was Gabrielle Mailbeck of the Alternative for Germany, on 18.9 percent. On second votes in the constituency the SPD took 21,263 ballots, 10.7 percent, and the CSU led with 39.7 percent. Heubach therefore did not win the constituency seat. The Bundestag records her membership of the 21st electoral term as a seat won on the state list of Bavaria, together with a constituency candidacy in 252, Augsburg-Land.

The 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting at 11:00 on 25 March 2025 in the plenary chamber of the Reichstag building in Berlin. The sitting fell on the 30th day after the election, the latest date Article 39 of the Basic Law allows.

Constituency and offices

In the biography for the 21st term, the Bundestag lists Heubach as elected on the Bavarian state list and as the candidate for Wahlkreis 252, Augsburg-Land, in Bavaria. The SPD parliamentary group gives the same list and constituency and states that the areas she attends to locally also include constituency 251, Augsburg-Stadt, and constituency 257, Ostallgäu. Those are responsibilities inside the group, not further electoral mandates. As drawn for 2025, constituency 252 takes in municipalities of the districts of Aichach-Friedberg and Augsburg, among them Stadtbergen, Friedberg, Gersthofen, Königsbrunn and Neusäß; the independent city of Augsburg is constituency 251.

The Bundestag publishes two offices. The Berlin office is Deutscher Bundestag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin. The constituency office is Dieselstraße 8 1/2, 86154 Augsburg. Her membership of the 20th Bundestag ran from the acceptance of the successor's seat on 20 March 2024 until that term ended when the new Bundestag was constituted; the 2025 election then returned her, again via the Bavarian list, for the 21st term.

Speech in German Sign Language

Plenary address of 10 October 2024

On Thursday, 10 October 2024, in the 191st sitting of the 20th German Bundestag in Berlin, Heike Heubach of the Social Democratic Party of Germany gave her maiden speech from the plenary lectern in German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache). The Bundestag's account called it a premiere for the chamber as well as for her, the first speech delivered there in sign language, and the first by a deaf member of the house.

The occasion was the first reading of the federal government's draft law to strengthen integrated urban development, printed paper 20/13091, amending the Building Code (Baugesetzbuch). Lead consideration lay with the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government, on which Heubach sat for the SPD. A simultaneous interpreter in the chamber rendered the signs as spoken German. The stenographic minutes label the contribution "Gebärdensprachdolmetschung" and preserve that spoken text, not a transcription of the signs. Tagesschau reported that the speech lasted just under five minutes.

She thanked the chair and the house, then set three aims for the revision: more affordable housing; simpler and faster building for households and municipalities; and, as the reason for urgency, stronger climate protection in urban development. The amendment, she said, concerned tenants, people building their own homes and the construction industry, which she called the engine of Germany as a place of business. The effects of climate change, she said, "meet us all," and no part of the country was now beyond drought or heavy rain. She cited the Baltic storm surge of autumn 2023, Christmas flooding in northern Germany, floods in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in June 2024, and floods in Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland a month earlier that had also reached Germany. Climate change could no longer be stopped, she argued, but building law had to limit the harm from disasters and extreme weather; the draft would strengthen towns against heat, floods and heavy rain.

The practical core was a water-storing "sponge city" (Schwammstadt): infiltration, retention and evaporation to cut both flash flooding and summer heat and drought. She named unsealed ground and greening of buildings, which would cool the surroundings; water held in decentralised systems such as swales (Wassermulden) and then evaporated; and multiple use of land, so that "the sports ground at the same time becomes a flood area." That multiple use, she said, would become a planning principle, with building-ministry programmes to pay for it. She rejected what she called a CDU/CSU claim in the budget debate that more climate protection was a burden. The close, later singled out in Tübingen, was: "More climate protection will save lives and relieve the federal budget of the costs of natural disasters. It will be most expensive if we do nothing."

Interpretation and chamber response

Vice-President Aydan Özoğuz, also of the SPD, told members before giving Heubach the floor that this was "already quite a special moment, because at this point we show that we can represent our society in the German Bundestag a little better." The minutes record applause from the whole house after that introduction and again after her thanks.

The Bundestag's report said most members used the sign-language applause of raised, waving hands, and that the speech drew both silent and audible applause. Spiegel wrote that only a few clapped in the ordinary way and that most waved open palms "out of solidarity and respect," and headlined the scene as silent applause for the sponge-city case. At the end the minutes record applause from the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens, the Free Democratic Party and Die Linke, and from some CDU/CSU members, and note that members of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP stood. Tagesschau spoke of occasional standing ovations; Spiegel reported standing ovations.

Caren Lay of Die Linke, the next speaker, congratulated Heubach and called the speech moving and historic, then criticised the bill on affordable housing. Her congratulations drew applause from Die Linke, the coalition parties and some Union members. Anja Liebert of the Greens and Verena Hubertz of the SPD both took up her case for adapting towns to the climate.

Sign-language coverage of debates already existed. In sitting weeks, parliamentary television generally interprets the main Thursday and Friday morning debates, the core-time debates, live into DGS from about 9 a.m., and selected events such as commemorations, and keeps the recordings online. Citing the German Deaf Association (Deutscher Gehörlosen-Bund), the Bundestag put the number of deaf people in Germany at about 80,000; the association says it works for the rights of about that many people. That estimate is background to the broadcasts and does not appear in the 10 October speech. Interpreters also accompany Heubach, putting colleagues' speeches into sign and her signs into spoken language.

Speech of the Year award

On 12 December 2024 the Seminar für Allgemeine Rhetorik at the University of Tübingen named the address Rede des Jahres 2024. The seminar has chosen a Speech of the Year each year since 1998. Earlier selections reported with the 2024 decision included Robert Habeck's 2023 video against antisemitism, speeches by Luisa Neubauer and Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen's 2019 European Parliament address, Pope Benedict XVI and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

The seminar described the address as a moving example of a speech culture changed by inclusion, and as an enlargement of debate in Germany. Tagesschau and ZDF reported its judgement that the speech was a rhetorical high point: clearly arranged, vivid, a plea for climate protection that brought the Building Code into ordinary life, and a sign of practised inclusion. The citation praised the rising list of those affected, from self-builders to Germany as a business location, the sports-ground example, and the answer to the cost objection, and it highlighted the closing lines on lives, disaster costs and the price of doing nothing.

On delivery, the jury wrote that she used sign and posture deliberately: eye contact on the way to the lectern, a turn toward each group she greeted, and an upright, calm stance taking in everyone from the president to the gallery. The citation described the chamber's answer as the applause gesture and standing ovations, and treated that answer as inclusion; the minutes record which groups applauded and which stood.

Committee work and party offices

Committees

In the 20th Bundestag, Heike Heubach’s only recorded committee seat was as a full member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government. The biography archived for that term lists no other full or substitute membership, and Abgeordnetenwatch likewise records only that committee for 2021–2025. She took the place of Uli Grötsch, who had left the committee after his election as federal police commissioner. At the sitting of 10 April 2024 the chair, Sandra Weeser, welcomed her and stated that, because she is deaf, at least two sign-language interpreters would accompany her at the committee’s meetings. Der Tagesspiegel, citing dpa, had reported that an interpreting arrangement like the one planned for the plenary—rendering debate into German Sign Language and her contributions into spoken German—was also foreseen for that committee.

Standing committees are the Bundestag’s preparatory decision-making bodies, and the parliamentary groups assign their members. Each full member has one vote; a substitute may attend every sitting but may vote only when standing in for an absent full member of the same group.

The committees of the 21st Bundestag were constituted on 21 May 2025. Heubach became a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs, one of eight members from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) on a body of 42. The Bundestag describes that committee’s field as pensions, labour-market policy, support for unemployed people and the inclusion of people with disabilities. She remained a full member of the housing committee, one of six SPD members of a committee of 30 whose chair, elected that day, was Caren Lay of Die Linke. She was not among the seven SPD full members of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, constituted the same day with 38 full members. The Bundestag biography, the SPD group’s member page and Abgeordnetenwatch list her there as a substitute from 21 May 2025.

The SPD group mirrors those portfolios in working groups. From 21 May 2025 she has been a member of the groups on labour and social affairs and on housing, urban development, building and local government, and a deputy member of the group on the environment, climate action, nature conservation and nuclear safety. The faction says its working groups draft bills, motions and questions to the government, assess other drafts, and prepare the corresponding committee sittings.

Disability and homelessness briefs

On 24 June 2025 the SPD Bundestag group appointed Heubach its commissioner for the concerns of people with disabilities (Beauftragte für die Belange von Menschen mit Behinderungen). The Bavarian Landesgruppe reported the next day that she succeeded Takis Mehmet Ali, who had held the brief in the previous term and left the Bundestag at the turn of 2024/25. The group’s list of offices dates the post from 25 June 2025. It is an internal faction office, not a statutory Bundestag mandate. In the Landesgruppe’s account, the commissioner follows participation legislation in the labour and housing committees and carries the subject into other fields. Heubach said her priority was implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, beginning with the amendment of the Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz.

The same member page records her, from 7 July 2025, as the group’s commissioner on homelessness (Wohnungslosenbeauftragte). That appointment was not in the press notice of commissioners issued on 24 June. The brief already existed in the 20th term: naming Brian Nickholz to it in September 2023, the group called homelessness a cross-cutting subject that needed several portfolios and said the post was meant to give it priority inside the faction.

Faction and party roles

On 3 June 2025 the group elected 25 additional members to its extended executive (erweiterter Fraktionsvorstand), Heubach among them. That body is the managing board—the chair, deputy chairs, parliamentary business managers and legal adviser—plus further members chosen by the faction. It plans and coordinates the group’s work and, on Monday afternoons in sitting weeks, prepares decisions that the full membership takes on Tuesday after the working groups have reported. The group states that those decisions are made by the membership, not by the executive alone.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members’ own statements, lists offices in the SPD women’s organisation: assessor (Beisitzerin) of the SPD Frauen in the Augsburg-Land sub-district since 2022, representative of the SPD Frauen in that sub-district since 2023, and assessor of the SPD Frauen in the Swabia district organisation since 2024. From 2023 she was joint chair of the SPD branch in Stadtbergen with Dieter Fromm. On 19 April 2026 the branch elected Jan Dengel to succeed that joint leadership; Heubach and Roland Mair became deputy chairs, and Fromm an assessor.

Policy positions

Disability rights and inclusion

Heike Heubach, of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, has described disability as the product of barriers rather than of the person. At a discussion on workplace inclusion in Füssen in February 2026 she said, “Ich bin nicht behindert, sondern die Gesellschaft behindert mich” (“I am not disabled; society disables me”). In a March 2024 interview she asked not to be reduced to deafness, and ranked how she wanted to be seen: first as a person, then as a member of the Bundestag, and only then as a deaf person. She has treated the shortage of German Sign Language interpreters as part of that barrier. Set against about 80,000 deaf people, she said the wider Augsburg area had 13 interpreters and Munich 69, and that some people had stopped asking for short-notice help, so recorded demand understated the need.

In the September 2025 budget debate she argued that inclusion costs money but that cutting it would disregard fundamental rights. The budget, she said, had to pay for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Germany ratified in 2009, and for reform of the Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz and the Bundesteilhabegesetz. “Mobilität und Teilhabe sind Menschenrechte” (“Mobility and participation are human rights”), she said.

She has opposed the shape of her own coalition’s equality-act bill. Drafted under Labour Minister Bärbel Bas, it was agreed in cabinet in February 2026 and had a first reading in May; the taz reported in October that it had then stalled. Federal authorities would have to be accessible by 2045, and private suppliers of goods and services would for the first time owe reasonable accommodations unless these were a disproportionate and undue burden. The text classed every structural change, and every change to goods or services, as such a burden. Heubach called that “wie eine Erlaubnis zum Nichtstun” (“like a licence to do nothing”): if, “as the CDU/CSU wants,” all building work counted as undue, a firm need not fit even a handrail or a mobile ramp. Wilfried Oellers, the CDU/CSU disability spokesperson, denied blocking the bill and said the clause still exceeded a law that barely bound private providers; Marc Biadacz had defended a limited duty given firms’ finances. Activist Raúl Krauthausen wanted case-by-case tests instead of a blanket building exemption, plus damages, which the draft excluded, and warned that a weak act could close the subject for years.

Housing, labour and climate

On housing, she said in 2024 that barrier-free living included wheelchair-accessible flats and, for her, a light instead of a bell. In 2025 she added that buildings should be planned from the start with contrast and audiovisual cues.

On homelessness in Germany she has separated rough sleeping from insecure or shared lodging. On 26 March 2026, on a Die Linke motion about homeless women (Drucksache 21/4872), she said more than one in three homeless people was a woman, often without a tenancy and absent from the statistics. She rejected a claim she attributed to Chancellor Friedrich Merz that the violence came mainly from migrants, and said domestic violence often caused the loss of housing and then continued. Citing figures she called intolerable—more than a third of homeless women had suffered sexual assault or rape, and half of those without shelter—she said services were built for men and that refuges were uneven. She pointed to the Violence Assistance Act, with a right to free protection from 2032, as a means of applying the Istanbul Convention, and asked for women-specific, trauma-sensitive help and flats reserved for women and families in housing need. Sylvia Rietenberg of Alliance 90/The Greens said the national plan’s aim of ending homelessness by 2030, including Housing First, still had to be carried out.

In Füssen she said that, with the Abitur and commercial training, more than 100 applications produced one answer, against three for a non-disabled colleague, which she called “unheimliche Diskriminierung” (“incredible discrimination”). She objected to slow grants and paperwork, said the degree of disability was often fixed only on appeal, and wanted passage both ways between sheltered workshops and the open market, with jobcentres offering every option through one digital form. In August 2025 she wrote that interpreters under sections 82 and 112 of Book IX of the Social Code were tied to the timetable, so class trips needed another uncertain application; she backed clearer wording of section 112 and less bureaucracy in the Bundesteilhabegesetz.

On 10 October 2024, in the first reading of the urban-development bill (Drucksache 20/13091), she said climate change could no longer be stopped but building law should blunt heat, flood and heavy rain. A sponge city—water held and evaporated, ground unsealed, buildings planted, a sports field doubling as a flood basin—should become the planning rule. Where the CDU/CSU had called more climate protection a budget burden, she said it would save lives and disaster costs, and that inaction would cost most. Michael Kießling, for the CDU/CSU, said the draft would make building slower and dearer; Caren Lay of Die Linke said quicker permits were not reserved for social housing.

Public reception and personal life

Media coverage and debate

Heubach’s arrival in the Bundestag on 21 March 2024 was reported in Germany and abroad as a parliamentary first. The Associated Press wrote that President Bärbel Bas told the house, “Today we are actually writing history,” because it now had “the first deaf lawmaker who will work here for her constituency.” Members applauded and raised waving hands, a visual form of applause in German Sign Language; an interpreter stood by the podium, and she received a fixed seat with interpreters nearby.

In an interview that day with the Augsburger Allgemeine, she said the attention had begun before she formally took the mandate and asked not to be reduced to deafness: first a person, then a member, and only then “eine taube oder gehörlose Person.” She called sign-language interpreters, plus a telephone relay service, the main addition to other members’ support. On heckling she said interpreters would relay every interjection and that she would answer or ignore it. SPD group leader Rolf Mützenich had wondered how the Alternative for Germany would react, citing remarks on inclusion by the Thuringian AfD politician Björn Höcke. She said hostility would come, but that she would not be diverted by what she called Störfeuer.

Coverage of her first plenary speech, on 10 October 2024, again framed a milestone. Der Spiegel wrote that few members clapped in the usual way, that most waved open palms, and that standing ovations followed. The Bundestag quoted Vice-President Aydan Özoğuz calling it a moment of better representation, with silent and audible applause for the first plenary speech in sign language. The Augsburger Allgemeine described the arrangements around her: a fixed place in the SPD block, chairs by the stenographers, a light instead of a fire-alarm tone, and a signal lamp instead of the voting bell. The speech itself did not discuss her deafness.

When the University of Tübingen named the address Speech of the Year 2024, tagesschau reported the jury’s praise for its rhetoric and for inclusion. On 13 December 2024 NIUS headlined “Taubstumme erhält Preis für Rede des Jahres … und natürlich geht es um Klimaschutz,” using the outdated word taubstumm and a sarcastic turn on climate policy. It wrote that, apart from the prize speech, only two of her speeches were documented in about nine months.

In an April 2025 interview with the Sozialverband VdK she again ranked person, then member, then deafness. She said heckling had unsettled her picture of parliament: wording that was partly disrespectful and personal, with shouts such as “Stimmt nicht,” “Ist doch Quatsch” and “Du hast keine Ahnung,” which then drew replies from other benches. In April 2026, debating a leaked list of possible cuts to disability benefits and to child and youth services, she said the argument frightened and angered her because it priced participation, and warned against measuring a human life in costs. Union speakers called the paper an internal note, not a bill.

Family, residence and affiliations

She lives with her family in Stadtbergen, in the district of Augsburg. The Bundestag biography, from her own disclosure, records daughters born in 2002 and 2005 and membership of the Deutscher Alpenverein, the union ver.di and the Parlamentarische Linke. A February 2025 Bunte profile reported that she is married to a deaf man and has two hearing daughters, the elder of whom accompanied her in her first parliamentary week. In April 2024 she confirmed that her sign name is “Lächeln,” said she had not yet had reason to lose that smile, and said she still wanted to be discussed as a person and for her politics.

At the Bavarian local elections on 8 March 2026 she entered the Stadtbergen council for the SPD from second place on the list, with more than 2,530 votes; the SPD kept four of 24 seats. She said she would combine the council seat with the Bundestag and use it to make municipal problems visible in Berlin. The town lists her as an SPD councillor. Other councillors were sworn in at the start of May 2026; she took the oath only at a meeting at the end of July. She wrote, and then said in the meeting, that required attendance in Berlin had ruled out a short trip, and that she had raised the point because she sensed irritation. CSU group chair Tobias Schmid denied any irritation and joked that one fewer SPD vote suited his party. The SPD group then moved that meetings allow hybrid participation.