Jakob Blankenburg

Jakob Blankenburg (born 5 August 1997 in Uelzen) is a German political scientist and a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from Lower Saxony. He has sat in the Bundestag since the 20th legislative term, which opened on 26 October 2021, and was returned for the 21st term. He holds the direct mandate for constituency 37, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg.

He studied political science at Leibniz University Hannover from 2015 to 2021. During and after that degree he worked as a student assistant to the SPD member of parliament Kirsten Lühmann, in digital campaigning, on the SPD campaign for mayor of Hannover, and as social-media manager and then press officer of the SPD group in the Landtag of Lower Saxony. A school project on hydraulic fracturing, he later told a local newspaper, led him through the environmental association BUND and a Bundestag internship to the Young Socialists in the SPD; in June 2017, aged 19, he was elected co-chair of the Lower Saxony Jusos with Amy Selbig. The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own statements, lists him as state chair of the Jusos from 2017 to 2021.

In the 2021 German federal election he won Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg with 28.2 percent of the first votes, ahead of Julia Verlinden of Alliance 90/The Greens on 25.1 percent. Of the members then under 25, he was the one who entered by a direct mandate rather than a state list. He held the seat at the 2025 German federal election with 42,910 first votes (27.8 percent), 2,347 ahead of Marco Schulze of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (26.3 percent), while the SPD's second-vote share in the constituency fell to 21.0 percent.

In the 20th Bundestag he was a full member of the environment committee and an SPD group coordinator (Obmann) on the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and on the second committee of inquiry. Since 21 May 2025 he has been a full member and Obmann of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Protection, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and spokesperson of the SPD working group for that portfolio, and since 3 June 2025 a member of the SPD parliamentary group's executive. From 21 May 2026 he has been a member of the board of trustees of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt.

Early life and education

Upbringing in Bienenbüttel

Jakob Blankenburg was born on 5 August 1997 in Uelzen, the administrative town of a rural district in northeastern Lower Saxony. Local reporting places his home in Steddorf, a locality of the municipality of Bienenbüttel in that district: in 2017 the Allgemeine Zeitung described the then 19-year-old as a politics student from Steddorf, and in 2021 it again identified him as coming from there. Public biographies do not name the school he attended.

He has dated his turn to politics to those school years. In June 2017 he told the Allgemeine Zeitung that a politics teacher had required the class to watch the news and that the class had carried out a project on fracking. The paper reported that opposition to the extraction method took him first to the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) and then, through an internship in the Bundestag, to the Young Socialists in the SPD (Jusos).

Later retellings name the people and the district more precisely. In a 2022 Bundestag profile he said that, when gas was to be sought in Lüchow-Dannenberg by what he called the environmentally harmful fracking process, he joined a citizens' initiative that wanted to stop it. He said the protests showed him that an initiative could draw attention but that the decisions affecting people locally were taken by politicians, and that meeting Lars Klingbeil—then a Bundestag member also campaigning against the method—was when he decided to go into politics. The profile records that he carried that out during his Abitur years, joining the Jusos at nearly 17. In an interview with the SPD magazine Vorwärts published on 20 October 2021, he said an email offered him two weeks in Berlin during the school holidays; he spent an autumn break as an intern in Klingbeil's Bundestag office and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany afterward.

The argument coincided with a change in federal law. A package that the federal government said had fully entered into force by February 2017 left commercial unconventional fracking inadmissible for the time being, at least until a Bundestag review set for 2021, after which the restriction would continue unless parliament decided otherwise. Only four scientific test drillings in shale, clay, marl or coal-seam rock were allowed nationwide, each needing the consent of the Land government concerned, while conventional fracking—used in Germany since the 1960s—was kept under tighter rules, including a mandatory environmental impact assessment and bans in specified protected areas.

Studies and early employment

From 2015 to 2021 Blankenburg studied political science at Leibniz University Hannover. The Bundestag lists his occupation as Politikwissenschaftler (political scientist). A 2022 parliamentary profile refers to his political-science studies and a bachelor's degree, and on his own website he states that he completed the bachelor's in 2021. The chamber notes that the biographical entries are the members' own declarations.

Those declarations, partly corroborated by local reporting, list a sequence of campaign and communication jobs before he entered parliament. From February 2016 to August 2017 he was a student assistant to the SPD Bundestag member Kirsten Lühmann. In June 2017 the Allgemeine Zeitung reached him in that job at Lühmann's constituency office in Celle, where he said he had seen how tightly a member's day is scheduled and how carefully each appointment has to be prepared.

From February to July 2019 he worked full time in "Digital Campaigns and Strategy" at Cosmonauts and Kings GmbH. From July to December 2019 he was again full time, on online communication and social media for the SPD city association of Hanover during that year's mayoral campaign. From January 2020 he worked on a freelance basis as a consultant for online communication. In 2020–21 he was social-media manager for the SPD parliamentary group in the Landtag of Lower Saxony, and in 2021 the group's press officer, the post recorded immediately before his move to the Bundestag.

Local government

Bienenbüttel and the Uelzen district

Blankenburg entered municipal office at the Lower Saxony local elections held on the Sunday before 13 September 2016, when he was 19. The Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) candidate — the paper first spelled the surname Plankenburg — had been elected to the council of the unified municipality of Bienenbüttel and to the district council (Kreistag) of Uelzen. The official result gave that 42-seat council 15 seats to the CDU, 11 to the SPD and six to the Greens, the Unabhängige Wählergemeinschaft four, the AfD three, the FDP two and the Left one; the new council was to meet on 1 November 2016. In June 2017 he said he had sat on both bodies since November.

The Uelzen record placed him on the social-affairs and environment committees, in the assembly of the savings-bank purpose association, and as a deputy on the youth-welfare committee. The seats ended after he moved to Lüneburg. On 16 March 2021 LGheute reported that the district SPD had put him first on its list for electoral area 1, the north of the Hanseatic city, ahead of the election of 12 September. He said he had left Bienenbüttel on 1 March, had told the Uelzen council, and no longer had a vote there or in Bienenbüttel because the law requires residence in the area; the formal change would come on 24 March. That day the Kreistag, by 38 votes to none, found that his membership ended under section 52(1) No. 1 of the Niedersächsisches Kommunalverfassungsgesetz — a written resignation to the chief administrative officer — and that Hans-Peter Hauschild succeeded him and took the committee places. Landrat Dr. Blume thanked him especially for work on social and environmental questions. His Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own statements, dates both Uelzen offices to 2016–2021.

Lüneburg district council

On 12 September 2021 Blankenburg entered the Lüneburg Kreistag as a new member. The district announced the next day a council of 58 from November: the SPD 16 seats, the CDU 15, the Greens 14, the Left, the FDP and the AfD three each, the Independents two, and dieBasis and Die PARTEI one each. Thirty-one members had already served in 2016–2021.

He was also elected to Lüneburg's city council but declined that mandate. LGheute reported on 5 October 2021 that Jörg Kohlstedt took his place in the SPD group, while Blankenburg kept the district seat. The Kreistag, 58 councillors plus the Landrat, is elected every five years and decides district business not reserved to the Landrat or the district committee.

The Bundestag disclosure lists him as a Kreistag member, chair of the mobility committee, a member of the mobility-principles committee, and a member of the working group on the structural and mobility reports. The district prepares a local-transport plan every five years; the plan for 2026–2030 is published by the administration. When the district-owned operator Moin had problems in its first days of service in January 2026, with displays, prepaid cards and cashless tickets, Blankenburg, identified as committee chair, said the opening weeks would show where adjustments were needed and that a new company required some patience. Stop displays, he and the company said, depended on real-time data for which the district shared responsibility.

The disclosure states the pay as 210 euros gross a month from Landkreis Lüneburg, plus irregular payments of 950 euros gross in 2025. The archived biography of the 20th electoral period records the same monthly sum and irregular gross payments of 1,800 euros in 2022, 1,400 in 2023, 1,400 in 2024 and 350 in 2025. His own site describes a flat rate of 210 euros a month and 50 euros a meeting. A compensation bylaw adopted on 30 September 2026, in force from 1 November 2026, sets 240 euros a month and 50 euros for each council, committee, group, faction or working-group meeting. It gives no extra monthly payment to committee chairs; supplements are limited to deputy Landräte, faction chairs and their deputies, and the council chair.

Young Socialists and party offices

Jusos in Lower Saxony

At a state conference of the Young Socialists in the SPD (Jusos) in Hanover in June 2017, the sitting chair, Leonard Kuntscher, missed a majority for another term. Jakob Blankenburg, a 19-year-old politics student from Steddorf in Bienenbüttel who had been lined up for a deputy post, stood instead and, with Amy Selbig, 20, from Osnabrück, formed a dual leadership for one year. The Allgemeine Zeitung put the state organisation at about 6,000 members. He said the result had not been planned, argued that schools, infrastructure and local transport were youth issues, and pointed to the Jugendnetzcard due in the Hanover region in 2018 — 15 euros a month for pupils, students and apprentices in school-based training — as a Jusos demand he wanted extended across Lower Saxony. He called the Jusos' tie to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) one of critical solidarity: unlike the Lower Saxony SPD they favoured legalising cannabis, while still planning to back the party in the state campaign then under way.

Selbig and Blankenburg were confirmed in Bad Salzdetfurth in June 2018; Aljoscha Dalkner of Göttingen became state business manager with 92.2 percent. The board's stated work was SPD renewal and a critical watch on Lower Saxony's grand coalition. On 30 June 2019 in Osnabrück, Johanna Kuipers, 18, a pupil from Verden (Aller), replaced Selbig with 94.6 percent, and Blankenburg, then 21, was re-elected with 91.4 percent. Membership was about 7,000. On the federal leadership contest the state Jusos took no side. Blankenburg told dpa that members should decide whom to trust and that federal chair Kevin Kühnert had to choose whether to run. Interior minister Boris Pistorius attended without discussing any ambitions of his own.

His Bundestag biography gives the chairmanship as 2017 to 2021. He did not stand again after entering the Bundestag. At a conference in Vechta on 16 October 2021, Ronja Laemmerhirt, 21, and Besian Krasniqi, 24, were elected in their place; Johanna Kuipers had also stepped aside to concentrate on her studies. The new chairs called for more university funding and a faster expansion of local transport, and Krasniqi again put membership at about 7,000.

That 15-euro model was not copied statewide. From January 2026 the state instead subsidised 20 percent of a Deutschlandticket for apprentices and voluntary-service participants living or training in Lower Saxony: 50.40 euros against a 63-euro fare, or 31.50 euros with an employer share. The SPD–Green coalition agreement had originally promised an apprentice ticket at 29 euros.

SPD offices

From 2017 to 2021 Blankenburg sat on the executive of the SPD sub-district Uelzen/Lüchow-Dannenberg, and from 2019 to 2021 was its deputy chair. He has been on the SPD Lower Saxony state executive since 2018, elected an assessor (Beisitzer) at the congress of 14 April 2018 in Bad Fallingbostel. His Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes rests on members' own disclosures, also lists him on the state presidium from 2021 to 2023. He was returned as an assessor in Aurich in June 2023, when Stephan Weil was re-elected state chair, and in Wolfenbüttel on 24 May 2025, when Olaf Lies became state chair and Blankenburg was again among 18 assessors.

On 9 September 2023 a congress in Barum elected him and the Reppenstedt lawyer Karoline Feldmann dual chairs of the SPD in the district of Lüneburg for two years, after Andrea Schröder-Ehlers stood down following 14 years. Josephine Kicol and Philipp Meyn became deputies. In the party's account, carried locally, Blankenburg called affordable housing the social question of the time. Delegates sought 350 new homes a year in each of the city and the Hanseatic city, at least 30 percent socially subsidised under a "Lüneburger Modell". The pair said they wanted the SPD to remain the district's strongest force.

Civic work in Uelzen

Before the state Jusos post he was already organising against racism in Uelzen. On 26 August 2016 he spoke for the local Jusos about a "Festival gegen Rassismus" that day on Herzogenplatz, within the "Aufstehen gegen Rassismus" campaign: twelve organisations and six acts, from punk to the Berlin rapper Kobito. The Allgemeine Zeitung noted a dispute with the local Young Union over which groups took part. In 2017 he was also reported at protests against an appearance in the town by Alternative for Germany politicians Armin-Paul Hampel and Alexander Gauland.

In August 2018 Uelzen bleibt bunt, with Blankenburg as chair, held what organisers counted as the third festival since 2016, volunteer-run on Herzogenplatz, with about 400 people reported in the evening. He said the aim was to stand up against violence and agitation. Acts included Lena Stoehrfaktor, Prada Meinhoff and Razz; stalls brought the Jusos, Green Youth, party foundations, union youth and the local alliance for democracy and tolerance.

His biography for the 20th Bundestag called him the initiator, since 2016, of the annual festival and chair of Uelzen bleibt bunt e.V. That entry, like others, is the member's own information, and the biography for the next term no longer lists the office. By the eighth "Say it Loud!" festival on Herzogenplatz, reported on 8 September 2025, the association was still the organiser, and the Allgemeine Zeitung identified Malin Seedorf as its first chair.

Federal elections

Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg

Bundestag constituency 37, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg, consists of the districts of Lüchow-Dannenberg and Lüneburg in eastern Lower Saxony. At the end of 2023 the Federal Returning Officer counted 70 municipalities, an area of 2,555.2 square kilometres and about 226,200 inhabitants, a density of 88.5 people per square kilometre. Settlement and transport covered 10.2 percent of the land; vegetation and water covered 89.8 percent.

The seat joins the Hanseatic city of Lüneburg to the thinly populated Wendland on the Elbe. On 22 February 1977 Lower Saxony’s minister-president Ernst Albrecht named the Gorleben salt dome as the planned site of a nuclear-waste repository and a reprocessing plant, and local opposition began the same day. On 31 March 1979, at the end of a tractor trek from the Wendland, about 100,000 people demonstrated in Hanover. That anti-nuclear record still showed in federal voting. In 2021 the second-vote share of Alliance 90/The Greens in the constituency was 7.3 percentage points above the party’s national result, while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ran 3.7 points below its national share.

The direct mandate had remained with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In 2017 the CDU took 46,740 first votes (33.5 percent, down 6.3 points from 2013) to 39,169 (28.1 percent, down 5.6) for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and 20,604 (14.8 percent, up 2.7) for the Greens. Second votes put the CDU on 31.3 percent, the SPD on 23.5 percent and the Greens on 13.5 percent, with turnout at 78.0 percent of 180,865 eligible voters.

2021 direct mandate

The election to the 20th Bundestag was held on 26 September 2021. Of 182,673 eligible voters, 139,183 cast ballots (76.2 percent, down 1.8 points). Among 137,637 valid first votes the SPD received 38,784 (28.2 percent, up 0.1), the Greens 34,606 (25.1 percent, up 10.4) and the CDU 34,287 (24.9 percent, down 8.6). The Free Democratic Party (FDP) took 6.9 percent, the AfD 6.3 percent and Die Linke 3.9 percent. Spiegel named Jakob Blankenburg as the direct winner on 28.2 percent and Julia Maria Kornelia Verlinden of the Greens as runner-up on 25.1 percent.

Julia Verlinden, born on 18 January 1979 in Bergisch Gladbach, studied environmental science, completed a doctorate at the University of Lüneburg in 2012 and had sat in the Bundestag since 2013, including as the Greens’ energy-policy spokesperson until 2021. She had been a Lüneburg city councillor and a member of the Lüneburg district council, and from 2021 she was a deputy chair of the Green parliamentary group; her mandate was a state-list seat, not the constituency. The CDU candidate was Eckhard Pols, born on 14 March 1962 in Lüneburg, a master glazier in the Bundestag since 2009, a Lüneburg city councillor from 2007 to 2016 and a member of the Lüneburg district council from 2016. In February 2021 a delegates’ meeting in Hitzacker nominated him, by 68 votes to two, for a fourth direct candidacy; the Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung described the incumbent as the favourite against Blankenburg and Verlinden. A Bundestag profile later recorded that Blankenburg, 15th on the SPD state list and then 24, won the seat outright by more than three percentage points over Verlinden and over Pols.

Second votes were less close at the top. The SPD led with 41,262 (29.9 percent, up 6.4 points), ahead of the Greens on 22.1 percent (up 8.7) and the CDU on 21.0 percent (down 10.3); the FDP took 9.6 percent, the AfD 6.6 percent and Die Linke 4.6 percent. The same local paper’s election-night report called the SPD again the strongest party in the constituency and described the CDU’s losses as a landslide. The profile of April 2022 described Blankenburg as, from September 2021, the youngest member of the SPD group in the 20th Bundestag. That electoral term began with the chamber’s constituent sitting on 26 October 2021.

2025 re-election

On 27 December 2024 the federal president dissolved the 20th Bundestag, and the election to the 21st Bundestag was held on 23 February 2025. In constituency 37, 155,019 of 182,679 eligible voters took part (84.9 percent, up 8.7 points). Blankenburg held the direct mandate with 42,910 first votes (27.8 percent, down 0.3). The official result names Dr Marco Schulze of the CDU as runner-up, on 40,563 votes (26.3 percent, up 1.4), a margin of 2,347 votes. NDR described Schulze as 41, a graduate industrial engineer and 27th on the CDU state list, and reported that the list place did not elect him either.

Verlinden stood again as the Green direct candidate. The Greens’ first-vote share fell 8.7 points to 16.4 percent (25,297 votes). She returned through list place 3 in Lower Saxony rather than through the constituency. The AfD rose 9.3 points to 15.5 percent of first votes (23,895), Die Linke rose 3.2 points to 7.1 percent (10,937), and the FDP fell 4.4 points to 2.5 percent. Blankenburg was also placed 13th on the SPD state list; the register of those elected records the constituency result, 27.8 percent in Wahlkreis 037, as the basis of his seat.

Second votes produced a different ranking. The CDU led with 37,140 (24.1 percent, up 3.0 points), while the SPD fell 8.9 points to 21.0 percent (32,389). The Greens took 16.6 percent (down 5.5), the AfD 16.2 percent (up 9.6) and Die Linke 10.4 percent (up 5.8). Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which has no first-vote line in the constituency table, received 5,962 second votes (3.9 percent). The FDP’s second-vote share fell 5.9 points to 3.6 percent. NDR put the CDU about three points ahead of the SPD on the party vote in a constituency the SPD had again carried on the personal vote.

Twentieth Bundestag

In the 20th electoral term of the Bundestag, Jakob Blankenburg of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection and of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development. The archived roll of offices lists him as Obmann, the SPD group's coordinator, on the advisory council and on the term's second committee of inquiry.

Environment committee

The environment committee was constituted on 15 December 2021 with 38 full members. Harald Ebner of Alliance 90/The Greens was elected chair; Blankenburg was one of eleven SPD members. A Bundestag profile in April 2022 named him rapporteur for nuclear policy. He was the SPD rapporteur for the committee report of 9 November 2022 on the nineteenth amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, allowing limited continued operation (Streckbetrieb) of Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 until 15 April 2023. After a hearing that day the committee recommended the government bill, with the SPD, Greens and Free Democratic Party in favour, the CDU/CSU and Die Linke against and the Alternative for Germany abstaining, and recommended rejecting a CDU/CSU bill to run the plants at least until 31 December 2024. The report records the SPD as holding that the reasons for the 2011 nuclear power phase-out still applied, and the CDU/CSU as seeking a longer extension. On 21 February 2024, as SPD rapporteur on decommissioning at the Morsleben radioactive waste repository, he called the project "on track" and asked how residents were being involved.

Sustainable development

On 17 February 2022 the Bundestag unanimously set up the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development, first created in the 15th term. Twenty full and twenty deputy members were to follow the German Sustainable Development Strategy and sustainability policy at European and United Nations level. Helmut Kleebank (SPD) was elected chair on 16 March 2022, with Wolfgang Stefinger (CDU/CSU) as deputy; Blankenburg was one of six SPD members and the group's Obmann. The council regularly voted on the government's sustainability checks of draft laws. On 17 January 2024 Blankenburg, speaking first for the SPD, said earlier reform papers had often not been implemented. He argued for reviewing selected bills in substance, not only formally, and for later "spending reviews" of whether money had been used sustainably. Felix Schreiner (CDU/CSU) called that paper a minimal compromise and wanted the council turned into a full committee. It passed with the AfD abstaining; the day's check-list passed unanimously.

Energy-crisis inquiry

On 4 July 2024 the Bundestag established its second committee of inquiry, on a CDU/CSU motion, with CDU/CSU and AfD votes; the SPD, Greens and FDP, and the Left group, abstained. From Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 until the committee's creation, it was to reconstruct how the federal government adapted Germany's energy supply, what information it used, whether parliament and the public were told accurately, and whether the "open-ended review" economics minister Robert Habeck promised on 27 February 2022, of keeping the last three nuclear plants running, had taken place. Stefan Heck (CDU) chaired the eleven-member committee; Blankenburg was SPD Obmann, with Zanda Martens and Robin Mesarosch.

Blankenburg told Der Spiegel that a Union list of about 300 witnesses was an "absurdly high number" and could not be heard in the sittings left; about 45, he said, would do. The committee held eleven public evidence sittings from 10 October 2024 to 16 January 2025, about 121 hours, with 40 witness examinations and one expert hearing, and took in about 271.5 gigabytes of files. The term was shortened after Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on 6 November 2024, sought the dismissal of finance minister Christian Lindner and announced a confidence vote; the next election was set for 23 February 2025. On 10 October 2024 Blankenburg opened SPD questioning of an environment-ministry official on nuclear safety, taking him through a memorandum of 9 February 2022, written after Steffi Lemke's inaugural visit: an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, the missing periodic safety review, and a stated fuel lead time of at least 18 months. The witness said other units had drafted parts of the note and that no expert study of a safety review during continued operation had been ordered.

The groups agreed no joint findings. A procedural account drafted by the secretariat was adopted, and each group appended its own assessment. Printed paper 20/14600, with Blankenburg as a rapporteur, was adopted on 13 February 2025 and published on 19 February, without a plenary debate on the report. On 30 January 2025, as the evidence closed, he said the gain in knowledge had been "close to zero," called the inquiry "nothing other than an election-campaign manoeuvre by the Union" and "a rather embarrassing event," and defended the stretch operation and the chancellor's directive as necessary for the winter.

In the written assessments, the SPD said the phase-out had in hindsight been right and that Habeck's opposition to continued operation "was indeed confirmed" but was not a new finding justifying the inquiry. The CDU/CSU said the government had "boycotted" the committee with incomplete files, that no review without taboos had taken place, and that a longer extension had been technically and legally possible. The Greens called the phase-out "the right and responsible path." The FDP wrote that the promised open-ended review "never took place." The AfD attributed the decision to ideological motives. In the 30 January debate, Heck said that "no examination at all took place," Patrick Schnieder (CDU/CSU) alleged a breach of law over the files, and Lukas Benner (Greens) called the inquiry a "farce."

Twenty-first Bundestag

Environment spokesperson

The 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025. On 15 May 2025 it adopted a joint motion of the CDU/CSU and SPD groups, printed paper 21/150, to set up 24 standing committees, including the Committee on the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (Ausschuss für Umwelt, Klimaschutz, Naturschutz und nukleare Sicherheit) with 38 ordinary members. It passed with the votes of the CDU/CSU, the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens; the Alternative for Germany and Die Linke abstained.

The committee constituted itself on 21 May 2025 under vice-president Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke) and elected Lorenz Gösta Beutin (Die Linke) as chair, by 24 votes to three, with ten abstentions. Seats went 13 to the CDU/CSU, nine to the AfD, seven to the SPD, five to the Greens and four to Die Linke; Jakob Blankenburg was one of the seven SPD ordinary members named that day. The Bundestag biography published on 30 October 2026 lists him as an ordinary member and as the committee's Obmann, sitting on the direct mandate for constituency 037, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg, in Lower Saxony.

An Obmann or Obfrau is a parliamentary group's main contact with its leadership in a committee. Each group has one per committee; they help set the group's line, state its interests, settle the agenda and carry the detail of the committee's work back to the group. On 20 May 2025 the SPD group elected the spokespersons of its committee working groups, described in its notice as those groups' Obleute, and named Blankenburg for environment, climate action, nature conservation and nuclear safety. Its profile dates the spokespersonship, and his committee membership, from 21 May 2025. Isabel Mackensen-Geis and Daniel Rinkert have been the working group's deputy spokespersons since 3 June 2025.

The Bundestag says the committee deals with preserving the bases of life: instruments against climate change; responses to extreme weather such as floods, storms and droughts; conservation of biodiversity and nature; more efficient use of resources; and the disposal of nuclear waste.

Other parliamentary roles

Since 3 June 2025 Blankenburg has been a member of the SPD parliamentary group's board (Fraktionsvorstand), elected that day as one of 25 additional members of the extended board. That board joins the managing executive to the further elected members and conducts the group's business, plans its work, prepares group meetings and reports back to the group. Matthias Miersch has chaired the group since 7 May 2025.

Two deputy committee seats were limited in time and had ended before 30 October 2026. The SPD group records him as a substitute on the Ausschuss für Digitalisierung und Staatsmodernisierung from 21 May 2025 until 15 September 2025, and on the Ausschuss für Landwirtschaft, Ernährung und Heimat from 21 May 2025 until 21 April 2026. Substitutes may attend every committee meeting but may vote only when standing in for an absent full member of their own group.

Apart from constituency 037, the group lists constituency 044, Celle–Uelzen, as a betreuter Wahlkreis, a constituency it records him as looking after in addition to the seat he holds.

Disclosed outside offices

Under sections 45 onwards of the Members of the Bundestag Act, members file reportable posts within three months of joining and changes within three months; an item is published once the administration has checked that publication is required.

The disclosure of 30 October 2026 lists him on the Kuratorium of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) in Osnabrück from 21 May 2026, at 1,130.00 euros gross a month from 1 June 2026, plus irregular payments in 2026 of 400.97 euros gross. The Federal Cabinet appointed him on 20 May 2026 as one of six new members; the foundation described him as a Bundestag member and the SPD group's spokesperson on climate and environmental policy, and noted that Steffen Bilger left the Kuratorium with effect from 21 May 2026. Prof. Dr. Kai Niebert remained chair. The DBU, founded in 1990, states that since 1991 it has funded innovative model environmental projects, with particular regard to medium-sized firms, and it reported an endowment of three billion euros as of June 2026.

From 7 November 2025 he has been on the advisory board of Zukunft KlimaSozial ZKS gGmbH in Berlin, which presents itself as an institute for climate social policy and says the board advises it on a socially just, climate-neutral future. From 3 September 2025 he has sat on the political advisory board of Wirtschaftsforum der SPD e.V., also in Berlin, an association that describes itself as independent of any party in finance, staff and structure and as organised for exchange with Social Democratic office-holders. The filing also lists the advisory board of Initiative Jugendparlament e.V. in Hamm, without a start date or a published payment.

It records membership of the Kreistag of Landkreis Lüneburg, the chair of that council's mobility committee, and membership of its mobility-principles committee and of a working group on structural and mobility studies, at 210.00 euros gross a month plus 950.00 euros gross in irregular payments in 2025. He chaired the board of Kulturregion Elbe e.V. in Torgau until 14 November 2025.

Political positions

Climate and energy

As environment and climate spokesperson of the Social Democratic Party group in the Bundestag, Jakob Blankenburg has treated climate policy as a question of who can pay. In June 2025 he said Germany had met its 2024 emissions budget, but buildings and transport had again overshot, and those targets were still reachable “if we now adjust course consistently.” Replacing the previous coalition’s heating rules was a reform, not a repeal. Economy minister Katherina Reiche’s suggestion that gas boilers older than 30 years might keep running was “an interesting private opinion”; long further use would trap households in rising carbon prices. Subsidies for heat pumps, then up to 70 percent, should not fall and should favour poorer households.

He opposed reopening the European Union phase-out of new combustion engines, which parts of the CDU/CSU wanted. Synthetic fuels, he said, belonged in aviation and lorries, not cars; the path for passenger cars was electric, with French-style “social leasing” for people who could not buy an expensive vehicle. He wanted the European carbon price for fuel and heating kept, with graded relief rather than a flat climate dividend. New gas plants of up to 20,000 megawatts were “the upper limit, not a blank cheque.” In August 2025 he criticised Reiche’s draft to allow commercial carbon capture and storage at gas plants as well as industry: “CCS must not be a free pass for fossil energies,” and “we must not start declaring everything hard to avoid.” Green spokesperson Lisa Badum objected that no sector, not even power generation, was excluded.

On 26 February 2026, on a motion from Alliance 90/The Greens after a Federal Administrative Court ruling, he called climate protection “a right, an enforceable right,” and noted that the 2023 programme the court found wanting was adopted under a Green climate minister. Asked why coalition heating plans would hit tenants — unions called the deal “maximum disorientation,” and the tenants’ association said costs were being passed to renters — he answered that the paper was not yet law, that tenant protection still had to be written in, and that with subsidies the heat pump would win “in large parts” of the country. In October 2026 he and MEP Delara Burkhardt launched the party-aligned association Projekt 2045. They told the Frankfurter Rundschau that moral appeals would not answer a culture war over climate policy; the issues were affordable heating, rural buses and trains, and regional energy, “without demonising the car,” with public investment rather than carbon prices alone bearing the cost.

Nuclear safety and Gorleben

The constituency includes the Gorleben salt dome in the Wendland. In February 2022 Blankenburg called Gorleben “a symbol of repository planning of the kind that simply should not happen”: not from a desk in Hanover or Bonn, and not by a pin in the map, as in the 1970s. The local citizens’ initiative, he said, was still well informed after the site had on paper ceased to be a candidate.

A September 2020 report dropped the dome on geological grounds. In 2021 the waste-safety office and the environment ministry said the exploration mine would close; office president Wolfram König called the Gorleben repository “history.” Above ground, 113 casks remain. Operator BGZ said in June 2025 that the licence runs only to 2034 and that any extension would cover only those casks, a deep repository not being expected before the end of the century. On 29 June 2026 it applied to keep them until 2054. The office said it would agree only if Atomic Energy Act standards held for that period, with public objections and an environmental assessment.

Four days after the last three reactors closed on 15 April 2023, he told the Bundestag the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, decided in 2011 by a CDU/CSU–FDP government, was done: “no blackout” and “no end of the world,” contrary to warnings from the Union and the Alternative for Germany. More running, he said, would need new licences, a safety review and fresh fuel — “a nuclear power plant is not a coffee machine.” The waste would burden “30,000 generations,” and no site yet existed; he accused Länder of insisting it not be “in Bavaria, or in districts with a CDU government.” The citizens’ initiative Umweltschutz Lüchow-Dannenberg has rejected a 20-year extension as enough. Spokesman Wolfgang Ehmke told NDR the operator only wanted to “slip through”: no repository would exist in 20 years, so licensing should look 80 to 100 years ahead, and the hall was not built against drones. Independent district administrator Dagmar Schulz said those risks were being left out. BGZ said the shorter term was for closer checks of ageing casks.

Housing, mobility and the constituency

To Lüneburg’s senior citizens’ board in February 2025, Blankenburg called housing “a human right for me.” He wanted faster permits, more social housing, a rent brake with no end date, caps on index-linked leases, and limits on misuse, gouging and empty homes. In Lüneburg, hereditary building leases needed a deal “acceptable to all sides,” including for Vonovia’s blocks. CDU candidate Marco Schulze stressed cheaper construction and housing benefit; Green candidate Julia Verlinden pointed to federal social-housing funds and renovations that would not raise warm rents.

On transport he said “we want mobility for all.” The municipal operator MOIN was a first step; town and country needed one plan, with more buses and trains in rural areas, alongside walking, cycling and cars, because “in the near term, none of these will do without the others.” In 2022 he had drawn that line inside the constituency: the district of Lüneburg was debating a larger bus network, while neighbouring Lüchow-Dannenberg was still debating how to create one. In June 2025 he said the Deutschlandticket, then 58 euros a month, was beyond some households and should be graded by income, with cheaper tickets for people on low incomes and for older passengers available nationwide.

Public profile

National coverage

After the 2021 election, national profiles treated Jakob Blankenburg first as a demographic exception. On 29 September 2021 Der Spiegel presented the six members of the new Bundestag under 25, all from the SPD or Alliance 90/The Greens, and identified Emilia Fester, then 23, as the youngest. Blankenburg, listed as 24 and born on 5 August 1997 in Uelzen, was the only one of the six elected on a direct mandate rather than a state list. Spiegel described him as chair of the Young Socialists in Lower Saxony, a member of the SPD state executive and a press officer for the party's group in the Landtag of Lower Saxony, with priorities in regional development, housing, climate and social policy.

The Bundestag newspaper Das Parlament interviewed him on 4 October 2021 as the youngest directly elected member. He said seats on the Lüneburg district and city councils meant he was not starting from nothing, and that the mandate was for all ages, not only younger voters. An April 2022 portrait in the Bundestag text archive, “Klimaschutz muss sich jeder leisten können,” recorded list place 15, a direct win by more than three percentage points ahead of Julia Verlinden and the CDU incumbent Eckhard Pols, his surprise at being asked to stand at 23, and his role as the group's rapporteur on nuclear policy for a seat that includes the Wendland. A February 2023 feature on the federal portal deutschland.de repeated the “youngest directly elected” label and his account of a campaign against fracking, an anti-racism festival in Uelzen at 19, and the aim of meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

By mid-2025 the specialist press had moved from age to office. On 23 June Klimareporter interviewed him as the SPD group's spokesperson for environment and climate policy—recalling the anti-fracking citizens' initiative, the Juso chairmanship in Lower Saxony from 2017 to 2021 and his seat since 2021—and reported his argument that climate neutrality should mean affordable heat and transport rather than a list of bans.

Constituency reception

Local reporting has followed the margins more than any personal controversy. Final 2021 figures from the Federal Returning Officer gave him 28.2 percent of the first votes (38,784), ahead of Verlinden on 25.1 percent (34,606) and Pols on 24.9 percent (34,287), at a turnout of 76.2 percent; the SPD also led the second votes, on 29.9 percent. The Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung headlined landslide CDU losses as he took the direct mandate. The SPD newspaper Vorwärts noted that Pols had held the seat since 2009 and quoted Blankenburg saying he had not at first expected to win it.

On 2 November 2021 the Uelzen Allgemeine Zeitung reported that he rejected the role of “the young wild one,” planned to keep living in Lüneburg while spending about 22 weeks a year in Berlin, and also offered himself as a contact in the Uelzen district after Kirsten Lühmann did not stand and Dirk-Ulrich Mende narrowly missed election. In January 2022 the Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung billed a Berlin interview around his wish to bring “fresh wind.”

The 2025 defence was closer. NDR reported on 24 February that the 27-year-old had held the seat with 27.8 percent against Marco Schulze of the CDU on 26.3 percent, and quoted him calling the result “a great vote of confidence.” On second votes the CDU led the SPD, 24.1 percent to 21.0; Schulze missed the state list, while Verlinden remained on list place 3. The official final count is 42,910 votes to 40,563, a gap of 1.5 percentage points, with turnout at 84.9 percent.

The clearest documented local criticism was not an election row. On 21 March 2025, during the CDU–SPD coalition talks, Fridays for Future Lüneburg fixed removable notes to the window of his Lüneburg office. A statement carried by the local site Lüne-Blog said he sat in the working group on climate and energy and asked him to argue for climate neutrality and an exit from fossil gas by 2035. Beyond that appeal, coverage has stayed with the 2021 direct mandate and the narrow 2025 hold.