Hendrik Bollmann

Hendrik Bollmann (born 10 September 1982 in Herne) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and a member of the Bundestag for constituency 140, Herne – Bochum II, in North Rhine-Westphalia. He has sat in the 21st Bundestag since 25 March 2025, after winning that seat at the 2025 German federal election. The Bundestag lists his occupation as Oberstudienrat. Its biography, compiled from the member’s own information, describes him as Protestant and partnered.

He has said that he grew up in the Herne district of Röhlinghausen and has not left it. He took the Abitur in 2002 at the Gymnasium Eickel and, in 2002–2003, did civilian service at a German Red Cross home for older people in Herne-Röhlinghausen. He trained as a teacher for vocational colleges at the Technical University of Dortmund, passing the first state examination in 2013, and completed the teaching traineeship and second state examination in 2014 at the Emschertal Berufskolleg. From 2014 he taught at a Hauptschule in Dortmund-Scharnhorst. From 2020 he was a Studienrat, and from 2022 an Oberstudienrat, at the Emschertal Berufskolleg in Herne.

Bollmann has chaired the SPD local branch in Röhlinghausen since 2012 and the SPD sub-district of Herne since 2022. He represented the ward Röhlinghausen-Nord on Herne city council from 2014, was re-elected in 2020, and from that year was deputy chair of the SPD council group and a member of the assembly of the Regionalverband Ruhr. He gave up the council seat after his election to the Bundestag. In a December 2024 interview he described a political family, said his father had long been active in politics, and presented himself as the SPD candidate to succeed Michelle Müntefering in Herne – Bochum II.

On 23 February 2025 he won the direct mandate with 43,832 first votes, or 33.5 percent, ahead of Christoph Bußmann of the Christian Democratic Union on 23.7 percent and Daniel Zerbin of the Alternative for Germany on 21.5 percent. Turnout in the constituency was 77.5 percent of 170,434 eligible voters. The SPD’s first-vote share was 9.9 percentage points lower than in 2021, and the party’s second-vote share was 25.9 percent. In the 21st Bundestag the parliament lists him as Obmann and as a full member of the committee for housing, urban development, construction and municipalities, as a full member of the parliamentary advisory council on sustainable development and future questions, and as a deputy member of the committee for education, family, senior citizens, women and youth. The SPD parliamentary group lists him, from 21 May 2025, as spokesperson of its working group on that housing committee.

Early life, education and sport

Family and upbringing in Röhlinghausen

Hendrik Bollmann was born on 10 September 1982 in Herne, North Rhine-Westphalia. He grew up in Eickel-Röhlinghausen and has said that he never left the district.

In a December 2024 interview he described Röhlinghausen as a former industrial neighbourhood that had gained green space and a better quality of life, and as a surveyed geographic centre of the Ruhr. He has written that his own schooling there ran from the Hofstraße kindergarten to the Görresschule, and that his parents brought him up in the Röhlinghausen branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which he joined in 1997.

He has called the family "very political" and said that his father was long active in politics, for many years in district politics and briefly on the city council. That father was Gerd Bollmann, a graduate engineer and vocational-school teacher born in Wanne-Eickel. Gerd Bollmann was directly elected for the SPD in the constituency Herne – Bochum II in 2002 and stayed in the Bundestag for eleven years, stepping down in 2013; he later said that he owed the party a great deal and that he had regarded the Agenda 2010 labour-market reforms as right. He died on 17 September 2017, aged 69, after collapsing while swimming at the Wananas baths in Herne, where he had apparently gone to earn a sports badge, and left a wife and three children. In a letter to party members, Michelle Müntefering described him as a municipal politician in the district and on the city council as well as in the Bundestag, and as someone who remained rooted in Röhlinghausen and in local sport.

School, civilian service and university

Bollmann took the Abitur in 2002 at Gymnasium Eickel in Herne. The Bundestag prints the date from the member's own biographical return.

From 2002 to 2003 he did Zivildienst, then the civilian alternative to military conscription, at the German Red Cross Altenhilfezentrum in Herne-Röhlinghausen. He afterwards studied for the teaching qualification for vocational colleges (Lehramt Berufskolleg) at the Technical University of Dortmund. The parliamentary biography records a master's degree and the first state examination in 2013; Bollmann has given the subjects as Protestant theology and sport. In 2014 he finished the Referendariat, the preparatory teaching service, and the second state examination at the Emschertal Berufskolleg in Herne.

Competitive sport

Bollmann has written that sport shaped him from childhood: he moved from handball to middle- and long-distance running, first with DSC Wanne-Eickel, then with the Recklinghäuser LC, and from 1999 with TV Wattenscheid 01 at an Olympic training centre in Wattenscheid; the years up to 2008, he has said, included results at Westphalian, West German and German championships but cost him several university semesters, after which he coached young athletes at the club until 2012 and then concentrated on politics.

Local reporting does document him as a distance runner. Previewing the 2011 Herner Silvesterlauf, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung called him the local favourite and said he meant to run near the front again. A 2024 preview of the same race, held in Gysenbergpark, noted that the fastest man from Herne in 2023 had been Bollmann. In the December 2024 interview he said he had been active for years as an athlete and later as a coach at TV Wattenscheid, and that he had followed VfL Bochum for about thirty years.

Teaching career

Training and the Hauptschule Dortmund-Scharnhorst

Bollmann trained for the teaching qualification for vocational colleges (Lehramt Berufskolleg). The Bundestag and the SPD parliamentary group record a master's degree and first state examination in 2013, entered as "Master/Erstes Staatsexamen", at the Technical University of Dortmund. In North Rhine-Westphalia admission to the preparatory service requires a bachelor's degree and a Master of Education. He has given the subjects of that examination as Protestant theology and sport; the biographies do not separately name what he later taught.

The second phase, the Referendariat, is the school-based preparatory service that follows the university course. Both official biographies, which the Bundestag says rest on the member's own information, place his Referendariat and second state examination in 2014 at the Emschertal Berufskolleg.

From 2014 he was a teacher at the Städtische Gemeinschaftshauptschule Scharnhorst, a municipal Hauptschule in the Scharnhorst district of Dortmund. The state school directory lists it at Meuselwitzstraße 40, 44328 Dortmund. In North Rhine-Westphalia a Hauptschule covers years 5 to 10, is meant to give a basic general education and an orientation toward work, and can award every lower-secondary qualification. He describes the Dortmund post as five years, ending in February 2020. The Abgeordnetenwatch profile also gives five years there, before the college post that began in 2020.

In December 2024, interviewed by the local magazine halloBO while he was still teaching, he said those Hauptschule years had shown him what pupils can go through. He was by then also an honorary municipal politician in Herne, and described a day of lessons followed by evening committees, council sittings and other appointments.

The Bundestag and SPD biographies list membership of the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW), the education union.

Emschertal Berufskolleg

In February 2020 he returned to the Emschertal Berufskolleg der Stadt Herne as Studienrat, and from 2022 as Oberstudienrat. He dates that appointment from February 2020 to March 2025. Abgeordnetenwatch's text matches the outline: teacher at the college from 2020 to 2025, after five years at the Hauptschule in Dortmund-Scharnhorst. The Bundestag continues to give his occupation as Oberstudienrat. In the register of members' interests, the activity before his parliamentary membership is entered as Oberstudienrat at the "Emschertal Berufskolleg der Stadt Herne mit beruflichem Gymnasium für Sozialpädagogik und Technik".

On the North Rhine-Westphalian scale for teachers taken into the civil service, Studienrat or Studienrätin is the entry office for someone qualified to teach at Gymnasien and Gesamtschulen or at Berufskollegs, in salary group A 13 plus a pensionable structural allowance. Oberstudienrat or Oberstudienrätin is a higher office in group A 14 of the Landesbesoldungsordnung A, including for holders of the qualification for the Lehramt an Berufskollegs. It is not the grade at which that career starts.

The state directory and the college itself give the main site as Steinstraße 22, 44652 Herne, and a branch (Nebenstelle) at Westring 205–213. Bollmann's biography places his teaching at the Steinstraße site and calls that site a Dependance. Under the state school act a Berufskolleg comprises the part-time vocational school, the Berufsfachschule, the Fachoberschule and the Fachschule; it provides vocational education and can also award upper-secondary general qualifications, from the Fachhochschulreife to the general higher-education entrance qualification, and lower-secondary certificates can be made up. The college's site presents routes from dual apprenticeships and pre-vocational courses through the Fachabitur to further training in social pedagogy.

In the December 2024 halloBO interview, given while he was the Social Democratic Party of Germany candidate and still in the classroom, he said the Berufskolleg put him in contact with firms and young people. For a salaried civil servant elected to the Bundestag, section 5 of the Members of the Bundestag Act suspends the rights and duties of that service relationship for the duration of membership, apart from official secrecy and the ban on accepting gifts, and allows the office title to be used with the addition außer Dienst.

Municipal politics in Herne

SPD offices

Hendrik Bollmann has written that he grew up in the Social Democratic Party of Germany through his parents in its Röhlinghausen local branch and joined the party in 1997. He has also said that he took part in that branch and in the Herne Young Socialists, while competitive sport occupied most of his twenties.

He has been chairman of the SPD Ortsverein Röhlinghausen since 2012. On his own account he was elected in 2014 to the board of the SPD in Herne. The biography published by the Bundestag, which notes that such entries rest on members' own information, dates his election as deputy chairman of the SPD-Unterbezirk Herne — the party organisation for the city — to 2018, as does the SPD Bundestag group's profile; his website dates that deputy chairmanship to 2016.

On the evening of 24 August 2022 a party congress in the Volkshaus Röhlinghausen elected him chairman of the SPD Herne in succession to Alexander Vogt. Radio Herne reported 111 votes in favour, 16 against and two abstentions, which it described as 87 percent approval, and wrote that Vogt had stood down because he was deputy chairman of the SPD group in the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament; the same congress elected Vogt deputy chairman of the Herne Unterbezirk. The Bundestag biography records Bollmann as Unterbezirk chairman from 2022.

City council

From the municipal election of 25 May 2014 until he entered the Bundestag, Bollmann represented the ward Röhlinghausen-Nord on the council of the City of Herne. He has described school and sports policy as the focus of that work.

The council chamber in Herne's town hall.

The city's council information system lists him as a member of the school committee and the sports committee from 24 June 2014 until 24 March 2025, and of the main and personnel committee from 3 November 2020. At the council election of 13 September 2020 he was again returned for Wahlbezirk 6, Röhlinghausen-Nord. The official documentation records 843 votes for the SPD there, 57.08 percent of 1,477 valid votes, on a turnout of 36.07 percent; the CDU followed with 14.08 percent. The same return compares the ward with 2014, when the SPD had 798 votes (48.45 percent), a rise of 8.63 points, and notes that the ward boundaries had changed. In the city as a whole in 2020 the SPD took 21,560 votes, 44.1 percent, and 28 of 62 seats, after 44.8 percent and 27 of 60 seats on 25 May 2014; turnout was 41.5 percent in 2020 and 42.2 percent in 2014.

From his re-election in 2020 he was deputy chairman of the SPD council group. The city's official gazette records that he gave up the council mandate with effect from the end of 24 March 2025. On the SPD reserve list, the returning officer declared Vanessa Thiel elected as his successor from 25 March 2025.

Ruhr parliament and municipal companies

For the first direct election of the assembly of the Regionalverband Ruhr — the Ruhr parliament — on 13 September 2020, Bollmann stood in 17th place on the SPD list, entered in the official notice as a teacher born in 1982 and living in Herne. The Regionalverband reported that the SPD, with 29.38 percent, won 29 of the 91 seats, ahead of the CDU with 27, the Greens with 20, the AfD with seven, the Left with four and the FDP with four, and that the new assembly would meet on 11 December 2020. In Herne the SPD received 24,365 votes in that election, 50.03 percent of the valid votes, on a turnout of 41.39 percent. The Bundestag biography records his membership of the assembly from 2020.

The city's participation reports place him on the boards of several municipal companies, with the appointments changing around council terms. The report for 2018 lists him on the supervisory boards of the Herner Gesellschaft für Wohnungsbau (HGW) and of its subsidiary, the Herner Bau- und Betreuungsgesellschaft; the report for 2020 lists him on both until 10 November 2020. He was a supervisory-board member of the Herner Bädergesellschaft until 1 March 2021 and, until the same date, a member of the shareholders' meeting of Revierpark Gysenberg Herne GmbH, a company owned in equal parts by the city and the Regionalverband Ruhr; the 2021 report then lists him on that company's supervisory board. From 10 November 2020 the reports list him on the supervisory boards of Stadtwerke Herne AG and the Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft Herne, and as a deputy member of the administrative board of the Herner Sparkasse. The 2024 participation report and the Stadtwerke annual report for 2024 still name him on the Stadtwerke supervisory board; the city report also still names him at the Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft, as a deputy member at the Sparkasse, and as a full member at Revierpark Gysenberg. Through 6 December 2020 he had been a substitute member of the supervisory board of Stadtmarketing Herne.

In the register of members' interests the Bundestag lists the Stadtwerke and Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft seats as ending on 31 October 2025, and still lists a supervisory-board seat at Revierpark Gysenberg and one at AGR Abfallentsorgungs-Gesellschaft Ruhrgebiet, in Herten. The same register records gross remuneration of 1,190 euro for the AGR seat in 2025 and does not publish a figure for the Herne company seats.

The 2025 federal election

Nomination after Michelle Müntefering

Michelle Müntefering of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), directly elected for Herne – Bochum II since 2013 and a minister of state in the Federal Foreign Office from March 2018 during the 19th Bundestag, said on 11 June 2024 that she would not stand again for the Bundestag. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel she linked the decision to time with her husband, the former SPD chairman Franz Müntefering, and said that shared time could not be made up later.

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported the same day that a young member, until then little known in the Herne SPD, would challenge the local party chairman, Hendrik Bollmann, for the succession. On 16 September 2024 the paper reported that Bollmann had defeated Sarah Jansen and that the party meeting had also heard internal dissent. Bollmann had chaired the SPD sub-district of Herne since 2022 and worked as a teacher.

On 10 November 2024 the Westdeutsche Allgemeine reported that an SPD constituency conference at the Mondpalast in Wanne had nominated him with 91 percent of the vote, at a meeting that also marked Müntefering’s departure. Parties were still nominating for an autumn 2025 election. The Herne Christian Democratic Union (CDU) selected Christoph Bußmann, runner-up in the constituency in 2021, and Alliance 90/The Greens had already chosen Anna di Bari.

Campaign and result

The Federal Returning Officer recorded the contest as a snap election to the 21st Bundestag, held on 23 February 2025.

In constituency 140, 170,434 people were eligible to vote and 132,167 did so. Turnout was 77.5 percent, 6.8 percentage points higher than in 2021. There were 130,681 valid first votes and 131,164 valid second votes. Bollmann received 43,832 first votes, 33.5 percent, down 9.9 points. In 2021, when the seat was numbered 141, Müntefering had won it with 43.4 percent of the first vote, ahead of Bußmann on 19.8 percent, at a turnout of 70.7 percent.

Bußmann, named by the returning officer as runner-up, took 31,032 first votes, 23.7 percent, up 4.0 points and 12,800 votes behind Bollmann. Daniel Zerbin of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the party’s constituency candidate, received 28,088 votes, 21.5 percent, up 11.7 points, and finished 2,944 votes behind the CDU. The Greens, with di Bari as their candidate, polled 11,111 votes (8.5 percent, down 3.2 points). Die Linke took 10,878 (8.3 percent, up 4.5), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) 2,948 (2.3 percent, down 4.7), Volt 1,267 (1.0 percent), Bündnis Deutschland 1,159 (0.9 percent) and the MLPD 366 (0.3 percent).

On the second vote the SPD led with 33,909 votes, 25.9 percent, down 12.4 points. The CDU followed with 29,840 (22.8 percent, up 3.7), the AfD with 27,453 (20.9 percent, up 11.2), Die Linke with 12,576 (9.6 percent, up 5.5) and the Greens with 11,719 (8.9 percent, down 3.7). Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which fielded no constituency candidate, received 6,110 second votes (4.7 percent). The FDP took 3,893 (3.0 percent, down 5.8).

Since the electoral reform of 2023, a candidate of a party receives a constituency seat only by winning the most first votes and by having that seat covered by the party’s second votes in the Land, the rule known as Zweitstimmendeckung. Leaders are ranked by their share of valid first votes; where a party has more constituency leads than seats in that Land, the lowest shares stay vacant. The Bundestag is fixed at 630 members, and the former overhang and balance seats no longer apply. The final seat calculation marked Bollmann’s 33.5 percent as covered. He ranked third among SPD constituency leaders in North Rhine-Westphalia, behind Duisburg I at 39.0 percent and Wuppertal I at 33.6 percent. The SPD led in 17 constituencies in the state and was allocated 31 seats there from 2,108,434 second votes, so every one of those 17 leads was covered. Across Germany, 23 constituency pluralities did not become seats. Zerbin was not elected for the district. He entered parliament from place 13 on the AfD state list in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The constituency and the Ruhr vote

Constituency 140 is the whole city of Herne plus, from Bochum, urban districts 3 (Bochum-Nord) and 4 (Bochum-Ost). The remaining Bochum districts form constituency 139, Bochum I. At the end of 2023 the seat covered 93.8 square kilometres and 241,400 inhabitants, about 2,575 people per square kilometre, and foreign nationals were 17.8 percent of the population.

Unemployment in the constituency was 10.7 percent at the end of November 2024. Disposable income of private households in 2021 was €20,143 per inhabitant, and at the end of August 2024 there were 138.7 recipients of benefits under Book II of the Social Code for every 1,000 inhabitants. Turnout of 77.5 percent remained below the 82.5 percent recorded for Germany and the 82.2 percent for North Rhine-Westphalia.

The party order also differed from the state and the country. Nationally the CDU took 22.6 percent of second votes, the AfD 20.8 percent and the SPD 16.4 percent, the SPD share down 9.3 points. In North Rhine-Westphalia the CDU led on 30.1 percent, the SPD had 20.0 percent (down 9.1) and the AfD 16.8 percent. In Herne – Bochum II the SPD was still first, at 25.9 percent, above both its national and its state share, but the fall of 12.4 points was steeper than either. The local AfD share, 20.9 percent, was close to the national figure and above the state figure, while the CDU, first in the Land, was second in the constituency.

In the Ruhr as a whole, the Regionalverband Ruhr’s chart of second votes showed the CDU ahead of the SPD. Neighbouring constituencies divided differently. In Gelsenkirchen (constituency 122) the AfD led the second vote with 24.7 percent to the SPD’s 24.1 percent, and turnout was 74.5 percent. In Bochum I the SPD took 24.2 percent of second votes and the AfD 13.8 percent, with turnout at 81.7 percent; the SPD first-vote share there was 32.7 percent. In Dortmund I the second vote split 23.0 percent SPD to 15.7 percent AfD. In Duisburg I, where the SPD’s first-vote share of 39.0 percent was its highest constituency lead in the state, second votes were 25.7 percent for the SPD and 17.3 percent for the AfD. The SPD therefore still led both ballots in Herne – Bochum II, while the AfD’s second-vote share was higher than in Bochum I, Dortmund I or Duisburg I.

Membership of the Bundestag

Entry and parliamentary group roles

Hendrik Bollmann entered the Bundestag when the 21st electoral term held its constitutive sitting on 25 March 2025 in the plenary chamber of the Reichstag building in Berlin. The biography published by the Bundestag records the mandate as beginning on that date. He sits for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) with a direct constituency mandate for Wahlkreis 140, Herne – Bochum II, in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the final official result he won the seat with 33.5 per cent of the first votes (43,832), ahead of Christoph Bußmann of the Christian Democratic Union on 23.7 per cent (31,032).

Within the SPD parliamentary group, subject work is organised in working groups that correspond to Bundestag committees. On 20 May 2025 the group elected its spokespersons — whom its press notice also calls Obleute — for those working groups, and assigned Bollmann housing, urban development, construction and local government. The working-group page lists him as spokesperson, and as a full member, from 21 May 2025; Angelika Glöckner and Philipp Rottwilm are deputy spokespersons from 3 June 2025.

An Obmann or Obfrau is not the committee chair. Each parliamentary group names one for each committee as the group leadership’s main contact: the Obleute help set the group’s line, act as a point of settlement when negotiations conflict, and, in the Bundestag glossary, also agree agendas and follow the detail of the committee’s work. The Bundestag biography lists Bollmann both as Obmann and as an ordinary member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government. It does not list him as a deputy member of that committee.

Committees and other bodies

The housing committee was constituted on 21 May 2025, with Bundestag vice-president Bodo Ramelow in the chair for the opening. It has 30 ordinary members, divided by group strength into ten for the CDU/CSU, seven for the AfD, six for the SPD, four for Alliance 90/The Greens and three for Die Linke. Caren Lay (Die Linke) was elected chair. The Bundestag’s account names the SPD members as Bollmann, Jürgen Coße, Angelika Glöckner, Heike Heubach, Philipp Rottwilm and Dirk Vöpel. The SPD group dates his ordinary membership of the committee from 21 May 2025.

He is a deputy member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. The Bundestag biography records that status; the SPD group dates the deputy membership, of both the committee and its working group, from 4 March 2026. Deputy members may attend every committee meeting, but they have a vote only when they stand in for an absent ordinary member of their own group. Each ordinary member has one vote.

The Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and Future Issues was constituted on 11 September 2025. It has 18 members, chaired by Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker (CDU/CSU), and was established on a joint motion of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and Left to follow federal sustainability policy, and related future questions, across departmental boundaries. At the constitutive sitting the SPD’s ordinary members were Sanae Abdi, Dunja Kreiser, Kathrin Michel and Stefan Zierke; Bollmann was not among them. On the SPD working group for the council he was a deputy member only from 9 to 15 September 2025 and an ordinary member from 15 September 2025. His personal group profile still notes only that six-day deputy membership. The minutes of the council’s sitting of 8 July 2026 list him under the ordinary members and Zierke under the deputies, and the Bundestag biography likewise lists him as an ordinary member of the council, not as a deputy.

The SPD group lists him from 4 June 2025 as a deputy member of the building and premises commission of the Council of Elders (Ältestenratskommission für Bau- und Raumangelegenheiten). The Council of Elders appoints commissions to support its work. In the self-supplied biographical text on the Bundestag website he is called a member of that commission, without the word “deputy”; the structured list of Bundestag offices on the same page does not include the commission.

On 25 September 2025 the Bundestag elected him an ordinary member of the board (Stiftungsrat) of the Federal Foundation Bauakademie, in succession to Brian Nickholz for the remainder of the term, with Franziska Kersten as substitute. Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke abstained. The foundation is intended to carry the reconstruction, in central Berlin, of the Bauakademie designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The foundation’s own board list names Bollmann as a member and Kersten as substitute. On 14 October 2026 the CDU/CSU and SPD again proposed him as an ordinary member. The register of notifiable activities on his Bundestag page records board membership from 15 October 2026. The SPD group profile dates the same office from 25 June 2025, before the September election.

That profile also lists him as deputy chair of the German–Greek parliamentary group from 15 September 2025. The Bundestag’s page on parliamentary groups, which maintain contacts with other parliaments including that of Greece, shows Felix Döring rather than Bollmann as the SPD member of the German–Greek group. Döring’s group profile dates his deputy chairmanship from 7 September 2026.

Constituency office

The Berlin office given on the Bundestag biography is the parliament’s address, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin. The SPD group gives the telephone number 030 227-70110 for that office. Both the biography and the group profile give the constituency office as Bochumer Straße 26, 44623 Herne, telephone 02323 949135.

Housing, construction and municipal affairs

The housing committee and the Bau-Turbo

Since 21 May 2025 Bollmann has been the SPD group's spokesperson, or Obmann, on the Bundestag committee for housing, urban development, construction and municipalities. The first large bill in that brief was the Law on Accelerating Housing Construction and Securing Housing, given a first reading on 10 July 2025. Bollmann said the "Bau-Turbo" would let cities build faster by rooftop extension, infill or new construction, "with full respect for municipal planning sovereignty. Without the consent of the municipalities, nothing happens." Schools and day-care centres, he said, would benefit too.

The instrument is temporary section 246e of the Building Code. On 8 October 2025 the committee adopted the amended draft: the CDU/CSU and the SPD for, the AfD, Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke against. With municipal agreement a scheme may skip a full land-use plan. Silence counts as consent after three months, raised from two after the municipal associations were heard, and the clause lasts five years. The plenary passed it on 9 October; it took effect on 30 October 2025. It runs as an experiment until the end of 2030 and is to be evaluated by the end of 2029. A departure needs a rough check showing no significant extra environmental effects. The Act also extended, to the end of 2030, limits on converting rentals into condominiums in tight markets; the rent brake runs until 2029.

On 20 June 2025, before that change of deadline, Bollmann told a Herne site that procedures could fall from years to two months, that Herne and Bochum would still choose the sites, and that environmental checks would be shortened, not dropped. Regional rents were lower than in Munich or Hamburg, he said, but so were incomes. At first reading Stefan Petzold of NABU warned that cooling green space could go, citing nearly two million vacant homes, and Katalin Gennburg of Die Linke called shorter participation an attack on planning democracy; Construction Minister Verena Hubertz said cities could still organise it. In committee the Greens demanded deletion of section 246e as a spur to speculation and land take, Die Linke feared higher rents and sprawl, and the AfD called the draft "hot air". At the final vote Green spokesman Kassem Taher Saleh said quotas for social housing and a duty to build were missing. Germany had completed 251,900 homes in 2024, 14.4 percent fewer than in 2023, against an unmet former target of 400,000 a year.

Social housing, apprentices and problem properties

On 1 August 2025 Bollmann said training pay often could not meet big-city rents, and asked for Junges Wohnen to be doubled to one billion euros in that year's budget. The ministry later described a slower path: 500 million euros a year since 2023 for student and apprentice halls, rising to one billion only from 2027. On 20 February 2026 he repeated that case for the programme Junges Wohnen. On 14 October 2026 the ministry opened a Federal Advisory Network on Apprentice Housing. Bollmann said housing must not be "a stop sign on the way to a dream job". The group's release said tens of thousands of apprentice places were missing, a party claim rather than an official count.

The Weißer Riese, a white concrete high-rise housing block in Duisburg.

On 16 January 2026 the Bundestag debated Green and Left motions on neglected properties. Bollmann called them an alarm for trust in the state and named the Weißer Riese in Duisburg as a symbol of the Ruhr. Herne, he said, already scores "risk" and "problem" buildings across its building and social departments. Stronger pre-emption was "not socialism through the back door"; a right a poor city cannot use was a "paper tiger". He rejected a general ban on demolition, and the coalition voted both motions down. CDU colleague Wilhelm Gebhard called the Greens' proposed right to buy at earning value, after an ignored repair order, an interference with property beyond pre-emption, and said the coalition would strengthen pre-emption in the Building Code instead. In vorwärts on 13 February Bollmann still wanted pre-emption at auctions and, in the worst cases, compulsory purchase, which he conceded pointed toward expropriation, judged building by building. On 27 May he and Esra Limbacher presented a Building Code "upgrade" as that vehicle. He had told the House that urban-development aid would pass 1.5 billion euros by 2029. The federal-state agreement of 14 April 2026 sets one billion for 2026, 1.2 billion intended for 2027, and a planned 1.58 billion by the end of the parliament.

Rents, planning law and local housing companies

Herne's qualified rent index, surveyed in January 2024 and valid to the end of 2026, states net cold comparative rents. For flats of 60 to under 115 square metres the base figures, before surcharges, run from 5.19 euros per square metre for buildings of 1908–1939 to 7.86 euros for those finished in 2015–2021. Disposable income per head in 2023 averaged 27,754 euros in North Rhine-Westphalia. Bochum stood at 24,836 euros, rank 364 of 396 municipalities, and Herne at 21,927 euros, rank 391. Duisburg (21,102) and Gelsenkirchen (20,138) anchored the bottom of the Land.

In an interview the property body IVD published on 15 October 2026, Bollmann traced the brief to the board of Herne's municipal housing company. Municipal companies and private capital both had a role, he said: restraint on rent rises against maximum simplification. The open items were the Building Code amendment and Gebäudetyp E, a simpler standard he said was too slow and had to be safe in court for smaller firms, plus quicker clarity on KfW terms. He refused a one-sided freeze in tenancy law, called some furnished lettings an "excess", and treated transfer tax as part of access to ownership, limited by public budgets. The conversion ban, he said, hangs over some tenants as a sword of Damocles even as owners want to decide the use of their property. In the 2025 summer recess Haus & Grund Rheinland Westfalen, meeting him in Herne, reported agreement on the Bau-Turbo and argued that small landlords, the largest group of suppliers, often hold rents steady and need help with energy renovation.

Other political positions

Education, sport and structural change

Since 4 March 2026 Bollmann has been a deputy member of the Bundestag Committee on Education, Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. A vocational-school teacher, he told Radio Bochum in February 2025 that education and schools, and municipal finances in the Ruhr, were the fields in which he considered himself expert. In December 2024 he said five years at a Hauptschule in Dortmund-Scharnhorst, and later work at the Emschertal Berufskolleg, had shown him what pupils go through and why the school system needed modernising, which he tied to money and resources, as well as contact with employers and young people.

In that questionnaire he called for a settlement of old municipal debt and better municipal finances so that Herne and Bochum could expand Kitas and improve everyday surroundings, and pictured Bochum in five years—if federal support lifted the burden—with artificial-turf pitches, renovated sports halls and schools, nearby Kitas and usable pavements. On structural change he pointed to the former Opel works: after the plant’s final departure, he said, Bochum had developed the Mark 51°7 site, where jobs across qualification levels were appearing again. He had already told halloBO that upheaval in the Ruhr, “for example around the Opel plant,” was why cities still needed the money to keep places liveable.

Migration, labour and government policy

In the 2025 campaign the Westdeutsche Allgemeine reported that Bollmann was calling for an “Agenda Migration,” quoting him that he could “bring a different approach into politics.” Four days earlier he told Radio Bochum that, on polarising subjects such as migration, politics should leave “polarised piecemeal debates” and put forward an overall strategy, from the SPD or across parties: control and security, local coexistence, and “more chances than hurdles” for newcomers. That, he said, would orient people, rebuild trust and guard against populism and extremism.

On 23 April 2026 he spoke in the Bundestag against an AfD motion for a municipal veto on compulsory allocation of refugees (Drucksache 21/5485), taken with the AfD’s “mass-migration management” bill (Drucksache 21/5476). He called allocation a central task of recent years, conceded that not everything had gone well, and cited an all-party Herne working group on housing new arrivals from 2015 and his teaching in integration classes. He rejected talk of failure: diversity was strenuous but worthwhile, and the aim was planability and integration with the municipalities, not sealing Germany off. Germany, he said, was already an immigration country—about 22 million people with a migration history—and asylum applications had fallen markedly in 2026. The motion misstated responsibilities, he argued: the Federation distributes by the Königsteiner Schlüssel and the Länder assign people to municipalities, which needed social workers, schools and equipped foreigners’ authorities.

On the federal government’s July 2026 reform package, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine reported that he saw “viele gute Punkte” but rejected some plans. Its title presented him as opposed to a sick note from the first day of illness and to long fixed-term contracts; the caption attributed to him the line that a first-day certificate “geht gar nicht.” The web address uses the headline “Nicht die Handschrift der SPD.” As a candidate he had opposed any further cut in the pension level, backed a pension without deductions after 45 years and tax relief for low and middle incomes, and preferred an investment bonus and capped grid fees to an across-the-board corporate-tax cut.

On 5 August 2026 he wrote on abgeordnetenwatch that any amendment of the Freedom of Information Act would depend on the draft: he would not narrow access rights for citizens, the press and civil society, and the SPD group would not accept a lower level of transparency, though he favoured digital handling instead of redacting files by hand. On 31 July 2026, on a majority in the European Parliament, he wrote that child-sexual-abuse material had to be fought effectively but must not become comprehensive chat control. The interim rule, he said, was time-limited and left end-to-end encryption untouched, which was why a majority of the Socialists and Democrats had agreed; the SPD rejected suspicionless mass surveillance and scanning of encrypted content.

Personal life and civic memberships

Hendrik Bollmann was born on 10 September 1982 in Herne, the city he gives as his place of residence. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on the member’s own information, describes him as Protestant (evangelisch) and verpartnert. A self-description on Abgeordnetenwatch uses different words and an age that dates the text: “42 Jahre alt, verheiratet. Wohnhaft in Herne” (“42 years old, married. Resident in Herne”). In a Radio Bochum questionnaire published on 14 February 2025, when he was 42, he again gave that age. Neither account names a spouse or partner, and the published sources do not explain the difference between verpartnert and verheiratet.

The Bundestag biography and the profile of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) parliamentary group list the same voluntary memberships: the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW); the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO); the Förderverein Lukas-Hospiz Herne; the Freundeskreis Synagoge Bochum–Herne–Hattingen; the support association of the Hauptschule Dortmund-Scharnhorst; the Kleingartenverein Röhlinghausen; the Spielvereinigung Röhlinghausen; the Baukauer Turnclub; and the Herner Karnevalsgesellschaft. Both official texts, and Bollmann’s own site, insert a “für” into the union’s name; he writes that he joined during his teacher-training studies. The Abgeordnetenwatch text mentions only the GEW.

The GEW is the education union in the German Trade Union Confederation. It describes itself as politically independent and as organising nearly 280,000 people in schools, day-care centres, higher education and other educational work, including students and unemployed educators. The AWO, founded on 13 December 1919 on the initiative of Marie Juchacz, describes itself as one of Germany’s oldest welfare associations, with about 270,000 members and more than 18,000 facilities and services, and states the values freedom, equality, justice, solidarity and tolerance. The friendship circle is registered as Freundeskreis Bochumer Synagoge e.V. and uses the motto “Verbindungen schaffen” (“creating connections”). The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported in 2012 that it had supported the Jewish community of Bochum, Herne and Hattingen since 2003; the community, which states that it has more than 1,000 members, also records the circle’s Dr.-Otto-Ruer-Preis, a school competition on Jewish life begun in 2015.

The other bodies are local. The Förderverein Lukas-Hospiz Herne, founded on 5 September 2002, supports the Lukas-Hospiz, an inpatient hospice with 14 single rooms. The Baukauer Turnclub 1879 calls itself a recreational sports club in Herne, and the 1. Herner Karnevalsgesellschaft, the carnival society of that name, dates its founding to 8 July 1953. On his own site he writes that he keeps an allotment at the Kleingartenverein Röhlinghausen, jogs through the district and, when time allows, plays football for the veterans of Spielvereinigung Röhlinghausen; in the 2025 Radio Bochum questionnaire he also said that he holds a season ticket for VfL Bochum and watches from the Ostkurve.