Jamila Schäfer

Jamila Anna Schäfer (born 30 April 1993 in Munich) is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens and a member of the Bundestag. She has sat in the Bundestag since the 2021 German federal election. From 2015 to 2017 she was federal spokesperson of the Green Youth (Grüne Jugend), and from January 2018 a deputy federal chair of the Greens, under co-chairs Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck. In October 2021 she said she would not stand again when the federal executive was elected the following January, so that she could spend more time in her constituency.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on the member’s own declarations, records schooling at the Grundschule am Canisiusplatz from 1999 to 2003 and at the Städtisches Bertolt-Brecht-Gymnasium in Munich from 2003 to 2011, completed with the Abitur. It lists law studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2012–2013 and, from 2013, sociology with philosophy as a minor at that university and at Goethe University Frankfurt. A 2021 profile reported that the bachelor’s thesis was still unfinished at the time she entered parliament.

In 2021 she won the Munich-South constituency, then numbered 219, with 47,256 first votes (27.5 percent), ahead of Christian Social Union candidate Michael Kuffer on 46,059 votes (26.8 percent). Bayerischer Rundfunk described the result as the first Bundestag direct mandate the Greens had won in Bavaria. At the 2025 German federal election, held on 23 February 2025, the renumbered Munich-South district (Wahlkreis 218) gave the CSU 54,859 first votes (30.4 percent) and Schäfer 53,775 (29.8 percent). The federal returning officer recorded that the constituency stayed vacant because the first-past-the-post winner lacked sufficient second-vote coverage, and the Bundestag lists Schäfer as returned on the Bavarian state list.

In the 21st Bundestag she is the Greens’ spokesperson on the Budget Committee and a full member of that committee, the Federal Financing Committee (Bundesfinanzierungsgremium) and the Confidential Committee (Vertrauensgremium), with deputy membership of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Finance Committee. The same biography records that she has one child. As Green Youth spokesperson in June 2016 she defended regional branches that had urged fans to put German flags away during the European Championship, telling Der Spiegel that feelings of national community were fundamentally dangerous; the interview reported that the posts had been followed by death threats.

Early life and education

Childhood in Munich

Jamila Anna Schäfer was born on 30 April 1993 in Munich and grew up in Großhadern, in the south of the city. Her parents, a physiotherapist and a computer scientist, were not politically active; she told taz that they did try to answer the questions she kept asking.

Before she started school, an exhibition on food production showed her children her own age working on a cocoa plantation, and images of slash-and-burn in the Amazon and of German slaughterhouses. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that her parents watched nature documentaries with her and took her to the Museum Mensch und Natur. She said she had been appalled, and that it had early been clear to her “that we are destroying our basis of life.” At primary school she proposed project days on fur farms and on plastic.

From 1999 to 2003 she attended the Grundschule am Canisiusplatz in Großhadern. When Peter Gauweiler, then the Christian Social Union in Bavaria member of the Bundestag for Munich-South, visited the school, she later said she had already felt poorly represented by the “CSU hardliner.”

She has dated that first demonstration to the primary years, with a small difference between accounts. In a July 2019 interview with Der Spiegel she said that in third grade she went with other children from her school to protest the clearing of a wood for housing, and that a compromise left part of the wood standing. An October 2021 taz profile described her, as a second-grader, taking her mother to a demonstration against tree-felling in the neighborhood.

Schooling and the G8 protests

From 2003 to 2011 she attended the municipal Bertolt-Brecht-Gymnasium, a girls’ Gymnasium named after the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, at Peslmüllerstraße 6 in Munich, and took the Abitur there in 2011, according to the biography she supplied to the Bundestag.

Her secondary years coincided with Bavaria’s shortening of the Gymnasium from nine years to eight, known as G8. In his government declaration of November 2003, Minister-President Edmund Stoiber tied school reform to spending cuts, reform and investment. Bayerischer Rundfunk dates the eight-year course to the 2004/05 school year and the first G8 leaving examinations to June 2011, taken alongside the last graduates of the nine-year course. The Süddeutsche Zeitung and taz both describe Schäfer’s year as the first cohort affected.

The compressed timetable drew protests while she was in the upper school. On 12 February 2010, Der Spiegel reported, about 5,000 pupils, teachers and parents demonstrated across Bavaria for a return to nine years. Some students dressed as laboratory rabbits, the “Versuchskaninchen” of the reform, and Education Minister Ludwig Spaenle was struck on the shoulder by a tomato. taz, which photographed the costumes that day, put the Munich crowd on the Odeonsplatz at about 2,000.

Schäfer told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the 2010 strike was what finally politicized her. She said she had got her own school to take part, and that finding she could change something with other people ended the powerlessness she had felt as a child. At a demonstration she met the Grüne Jugend, the youth organization of Alliance 90/The Greens, and joined, later calling that “one of the best decisions of my life.” What convinced her, she said, was a “complete package” of climate protection, social justice and equality of the sexes. In the 2019 Spiegel interview she said the strikes were a response to reforms decided over pupils’ heads by politicians she had not been old enough to elect.

University studies

After the Abitur she studied law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 2012 to 2013. From 2013 the Bundestag biography lists sociology with philosophy as a minor, at that university and at Goethe University Frankfurt. She told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that she moved to Frankfurt for the sociology and philosophy course. The biography records no law degree.

The sociology course was still unfinished when she entered parliament. In August 2021 she told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that she had the course certificates (Scheine) but not the bachelor’s thesis. That October taz reported the same missing thesis, which she hoped to write during the next parliamentary summer recess. As consulted in October 2026, the Bundestag entry still begins “seit 2013” (“since 2013”) and names no degree.

Green Youth

Local and federal roles

Schäfer joined the Grüne Jugend, the youth organization of Alliance 90/The Greens, in 2011, and the party in 2012. She has written that she met the organization during the 2009–10 school strikes against Bavaria’s accelerated G8 reform. A curriculum vitae she filed for the Greens’ 2019 federal conference lists her as spokesperson of the Grüne Jugend in Munich from 2012 to 2014. In May 2013 the Abendzeitung quoted her in that role after attacks on left-wing offices around the opening of the National Socialist Underground trial. After moving to Frankfurt to study sociology and philosophy, she has written, her work shifted to the federal organization from 2014.

The same application lists her as an assessor (Beisitzerin) on the federal board in 2014–15 and as federal spokesperson in 2015–17. taz reported that she was elected spokesperson at the end of October 2015. At the organization’s 49th federal congress in Dortmund a new board was chosen, and an announcement archived on 7 November 2017 named Ricarda Lang and Max Lucks as the new spokespersons. In June 2016 she joined Johanna Uekermann of the Young Socialists in the SPD and Josephine Michalke of the youth wing of Die Linke at a Berlin meeting on a red-red-green coalition after the 2017 Bundestag election. Schäfer said a higher minimum wage, a binding women’s quota, more development aid, a wealth tax and marriage equality could be won with the SPD and the Left, but not with the CDU.

Asylum policy and the 2016 flag debate

At the Greens’ November 2015 conference in Halle (Saale), as Green-led states were approving asylum restrictions negotiated by Angela Merkel’s grand coalition in the Bundesrat, n-tv reported Schäfer saying the youth wing did not understand why Greens let themselves be blackmailed, and that the compromises could not be split into “light and shadow.” The Grüne Jugend argued for a “free-choice” model, under which refugees would choose an EU country of residence, against the leadership’s European distribution key. Robert Habeck, then seeking the 2017 lead candidacy, answered that the “sound of self-righteousness” did not match the problem and that treating government as betrayal would make governing pointless. In January 2016 she told nd that Greens should stop “stroking Merkel’s belly,” including when Winfried Kretschmann sided with the chancellor. She called his vote for more “safe countries of origin” and for benefit cuts a conservative course, said Greens in the Bundesrat should block further restrictions, and rejected a CDU–Green coalition in Baden-Württemberg. In October 2017, during Jamaica-coalition talks, she told taz that a CDU/CSU figure of 200,000 people in need of protection set refugees against one another, that family reunification should again be unrestricted, and that such a coalition could “shred” the Greens.

On 10 June 2016, as UEFA Euro 2016 opened, the Grüne Jugend in Rhineland-Palatinate posted “Patriotism = nationalism. Football fans, flags down!,” arguing that a patriotic self-definition excludes others and stigmatizes an enemy. The Berlin branch likewise objected to the volume of black-red-gold. The post had been shared about 8,000 times by Sunday and had drawn more than 24,000 mostly hostile comments by Monday; state spokesperson Benjamin Buddendiek said criminal complaints would be filed. A follow-up denied any general suspicion of fans, and the branch restated its line as “joy in football rather than in the nation.”

Schäfer defended the position in a Spiegel interview on 13 June 2016. The organization did not want to spoil football, she said, but rejected loading tournaments with a positive reference to the nation: support for the team was not the problem, yet such events helped nationalism settle in society, and “one could also support the team with a DFB flag.” She opposed banning black-red-gold, calling display a free choice, but said mass use often meant enthusiasm for the fatherland and that national feelings of community were fundamentally dangerous. She said Johannes Rau’s distinction between patriot and nationalist could not be kept clean, and she set the argument against the AfD and Pegida.

Peter Altmaier, the CDU head of the Chancellery, wrote that the Grüne Jugend “doesn’t get it” and that fans’ flags symbolized an open, sympathetic Germany rather than the flags of the past. CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer told Bild am Sonntag that the national colours were healthy patriotism—“better a patriot than an idiot”—and SPD politician Johannes Kahrs said he would hang a German flag over his beach chair. Green Bundestag member Dieter Janecek called the youth wing “quite the killjoys.” Green state chair Katharina Binz said supporting the team with flags, including face paint, was fan culture rather than nationalism, while hate comments crossed the line of argument. Federal co-chair Simone Peter wrote more narrowly that dangerous nationalism grows in the shadow of “healthy patriotism.”

Federal party leadership

Election as deputy chair

On 27 January 2018, at a federal delegates' conference in Hanover, Alliance 90/The Greens chose a new executive. Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck took over the party leadership shortly after talks on a Jamaica coalition with the CDU/CSU and the FDP had failed. Baerbock won with 64.45 percent against Anja Piel's 34.78 percent, and Habeck, without an opponent, received 81.33 percent. Jamila Schäfer, then 24, defeated Anna Cavazzini, 55.03 percent to 43.21 percent, for a deputy chairmanship joined to the post of European and international coordinator. She told delegates that the party should win young people to the defence of Europe, and that participation was the best reply to disaffection and right-wing populism. Gesine Agena, the women's-policy spokesperson, took the other deputy chair with 92.07 percent; political director Michael Kellner received 74.19 percent and treasurer Benedikt Mayer 94.03 percent.

The Berlin daily taz read Hanover as a break in the usual split of the top jobs between Realos and the left. Both chairs were counted as Realos. Kellner, Agena and Schäfer — the last of them until recently a federal spokesperson of the Green Youth — were the left-wing presence in what the paper called the second row of a six-member board, and the congress had just allowed Agena and Schäfer to use the title of deputy chair.

On 16 November 2019 in Bielefeld she was re-elected with 85.4 percent and confirmed again as European and international coordinator. Ricarda Lang, another former Green Youth spokesperson, replaced Agena, who did not stand, as deputy chair and women's-policy spokesperson, with 87.8 percent. Baerbock and Habeck were returned the same day with 97.1 and 90.4 percent.

Delegates met online on 29 January 2022 to replace Baerbock and Habeck, by then federal ministers who were giving up the party chairs. That Saturday's session included farewell remarks for Schäfer as outgoing deputy chair. Lang and Omid Nouripour were elected co-chairs, with 75.9 percent of 727 valid votes and about 82.6 percent (621 of 752) in a digital ballot that still required postal confirmation. On 14 February 2022, still described as the outgoing deputy, she told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland that the party should think beyond the coalition agreement and resist what she called FDP demands for tax giveaways. She has dated the deputy chairmanship from January 2018 to 2022, overlapping the start of her Bundestag mandate in 2021.

Europe, migration and the 2019 European election

Schäfer later described the coordinator's work as contact with international partners and with the Green group in the European Parliament, and listed European affairs, development policy, flight and migration, and opposition to right-wing extremism as her priorities. The federal executive adopted on 30 August 2018 the preamble of the European election programme, "Europas Versprechen erneuern" ("Renew Europe's promise"), and tabled it for the November congress in Leipzig. At the election itself the Greens won 7,677,071 votes, 20.5 percent, 9.8 points more than in 2014, and 21 seats, second behind the CDU on 22.6 percent.

In December 2020, still deputy chair, she wrote that the Dublin Regulation, in force on her account since 2003, had loaded asylum procedures onto the state of first entry and overwhelmed the EU's external border. A former director of the Moria camp on Lesbos, she wrote, told her on a visit in summer 2019 that most people left sicker and more traumatized than they arrived. After the camp burned in September 2020 she visited the replacement site in October and described the hygiene as worse, with many of those held children lacking stable shelter, school or sanitation. She also wrote that Croatia's human-rights commissioner had shown her files on ill-treatment at the Croatian-Serbian border, and that reporting she cited linked systematic pushbacks from March 2020, including at sea, to Frontex and in at least one case to German federal police officers.

Right-wing extremism

Her account of the 2018–2022 portfolio includes co-leadership of the party's commission on right-wing extremism. The Oberbayerisches Volksblatt, introducing a speech she gave in Wasserburg am Inn on 23 February 2020, called her the commission's head. A party report of the commission, which brought together Green members of the Bundestag and state parliaments with outside civil-society experts, says that on 31 August 2018 it discussed racist violence in Chemnitz, the Alternative for Germany's entry into parliaments, and far-right organizing ahead of state elections in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia.

In Wasserburg, four days after the racist Hanau shootings, she joined a vigil and argued that remembrance of Nazi crimes was sliding, as witnesses died, from repression toward trivialization, and that a national "we" was being used to launder selected values. Democracy, she said, could not be ordered like a pizza; she closed with the Holocaust survivor Max Mannheimer's line that the audience was not responsible for what had happened, but was responsible for preventing its return.

Bundestag elections

2021 direct mandate in Munich-South

At the 2021 German federal election on 26 September 2021, Jamila Schäfer was the candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens in constituency 219, München-Süd, in Munich, and stood seventh on the party's Bavarian state list. The seat was held by the Christian Social Union (CSU) lawyer Michael Thomas Kuffer, who had won it in 2017. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate was Sebastian Jörg Roloff, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) candidate was Thomas Sattelberger.

Schäfer received 47,256 first votes (27.5 percent), 1,197 ahead of Kuffer's 46,059 (26.8 percent). Roloff was third with 33,924 votes (19.7 percent), and the FDP took 9.5 percent. Turnout was 80.6 percent of 214,606 eligible voters. On the constituency's second vote the Greens led with 26.4 percent, ahead of the CSU on 23.5 percent and the SPD on 19.2 percent. Bayerischer Rundfunk described the result as the first direct mandate the Greens had won in Bavaria. In Munich-Mitte/West, the Green candidate Dieter Janecek missed a further seat by 146 votes, and Kuffer lost the constituency he had held since 2017. Schäfer entered the Bundestag on that direct mandate rather than through the state list.

Coalition negotiations

Schäfer took part in the talks that produced the traffic-light coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP. The Munich Abendzeitung reported that, as a deputy federal chair, she had already joined the exploratory talks in the Greens' extended team. A Focus account of the party's lineup placed her among those preparing the soundings, not in the smaller delegation that sat at the table. In the formal negotiations she represented the Greens in the working group on Europe, one of 22 subject groups drafting the coalition agreement. The parties' stated timetable was to elect Olaf Scholz chancellor before Christmas 2021.

2025 election and the state list

For the snap 2025 German federal election on 23 February 2025, a Bavarian Green congress in Hirschaid placed Schäfer first on the state list. On 14 and 15 December 2024, 328 delegates gave her 90 percent of the vote; Anton Hofreiter was second, also with 90 percent, and Claudia Roth third. She stood again in Munich-South, renumbered constituency 218.

Map of Munich's Bundestag constituencies for the 2025 federal election, including constituency 218, München-Süd.

Claudia Küng of the CSU won the first vote with 54,859 votes (30.4 percent) to Schäfer's 53,775 (29.8 percent). Roloff, again the SPD candidate, was third with 26,461 votes (14.6 percent). Turnout was 84.3 percent of 214,947 eligible voters. Second votes in the constituency went 28.7 percent to the CSU and 24.1 percent to the Greens.

The constituency was not filled. The election used a law that fixes the Bundestag at 630 seats and abolishes overhang and compensatory mandates. A constituency plurality yields a seat only when it is covered by the party's second-vote entitlement in the Land; if a party wins more constituencies than that entitlement, those with the lowest first-vote shares stay vacant. The CSU carried all 47 Bavarian constituencies but, on 37.2 percent of the Bavarian second vote, was entitled to 44 seats. The three lowest shares—Sebastian Brehm in Nuremberg-North (30.2 percent), Küng in Munich-South (30.4 percent) and Volker Ullrich in Augsburg (31.1 percent)—did not produce seats. The Federal Electoral Committee determined on 14 March 2025 which constituency candidates would enter, and the official result records constituency 218 as unoccupied for lack of second-vote coverage (Zweitstimmendeckung). Küng told Bayerischer Rundfunk that she had won and at the same time lost.

Schäfer nevertheless entered the 21st Bundestag on the Bavarian Green state list. The federal returning officer lists her as elected in first place on that list, with a parallel candidacy in constituency 218, and the Bundestag records the mandate as won via the Bavarian list.

Parliamentary work

Committees in the 20th and 21st Bundestag

Jamila Schäfer has been a member of the Bundestag for Alliance 90/The Greens since 2021. In the 20th legislative period she held a direct mandate for Munich-South, constituency 219. In the 21st period her seat comes from the state list of Bavaria, and she again stood in Munich-South, renumbered constituency 218.

The archived biography for the 20th term lists her as a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Budget Committee, the Bundesfinanzierungsgremium and the Vertrauensgremium, and as chair of the Bundesfinanzierungsgremium. She was a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs and of that term's first committee of inquiry, on Afghanistan. On 13 January 2022 the plenary set up the debt-oversight body under section 3 of the Federal Debt Management Act. The Federal Ministry of Finance informs it on federal debt; its members must sit on the Budget Committee and are bound to secrecy. Schäfer was elected, clearing the majority threshold of 369 votes. On 17 February 2022 the House created the Vertrauensgremium under section 10a (2) of the federal budgetary code, which approves the secret spending plans of the intelligence services, and elected Schäfer to it with Sven-Christian Kindler for the Green parliamentary group.

In the 21st term the biography lists her as an ordinary member of the Bundesfinanzierungsgremium, the Budget Committee and the Vertrauensgremium, as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Finance Committee, and as the Green group's spokesperson (Obfrau) on the Budget Committee. The Budget Committee constituted itself on 21 May 2025 with 42 members, six of them Greens, including Schäfer. On 26 June 2025 the plenary re-elected her to the Vertrauensgremium, with 378 votes in favour, 144 against, 31 abstentions and 35 invalid ballots, and to the debt-oversight body, with 375 in favour, 144 against, 33 abstentions and 34 invalid. Her full seat on Foreign Affairs had become a deputy seat, and the Obfrau role on the Budget Committee was new.

Budget reporting and the Foreign Office

In both terms Schäfer was a Budget Committee rapporteur for the Federal Foreign Office chapter, Einzelplan 05. For 2024 the rapporteurs were Carsten Körber, Wiebke Papenbrock, Schäfer, Otto Fricke, Michael Espendiller and Victor Perli. On 31 January 2024 she said the committee had raised the Foreign Office total by 552 million euro, to 6.7 billion, and humanitarian aid by 500 million against the government draft, citing crises such as the Horn of Africa. She also reported more money for German schools abroad and youth exchanges, work toward a contact point for returning human remains, and funding for the Mercator Institute for China Studies. The committee's account matches that and adds the comparison with the year before: the Foreign Office was set at 6.71 billion euro, about 552 million above the draft of 6.16 billion but 770 million below the 2023 appropriation of 7.48 billion. Humanitarian aid abroad was set at 2.23 billion, up from 1.73 billion in the draft, after the committee had first gone to 2.43 billion and then cut 200 million in the same clean-up sitting. The minister for that chapter was Annalena Baerbock.

She kept the reporting brief after the Greens left office. At the second and third reading on 26 November 2025 the president named her first among the rapporteurs for Einzelplan 05, with Inge Gräßle, Jürgen Koegel, Esther Dilcher and Sascha Wagner. Schäfer said that, set against 2024, the Foreign Office would have 900 million euro less, a reduction of 13 percent, and that humanitarian aid was to be halved. She argued that raising it to 3 billion euro would match global needs and Germany's economic weight, and that the coalition was not using the exemption from the debt rules, adopted with the amendment of the Basic Law, to pay for humanitarian aid to Ukraine during the war. She pointed to hunger in Sudan, Russian attacks on civilians and heating plants in Ukraine, and additional needs in the Gaza Strip. Gräßle, for the CDU/CSU, said the humanitarian-aid title was being held at the previous year's level, that Germany was staying in as a donor while others withdrew, and that the Greens and The Left had proposed adding 2 billion euro without a way to finance it. She put the Foreign Office plan, after committee changes, at about 61 million euro above the 2025 budget. Foreign minister Johann Wadephul said about 1 billion euro less would be available, called that regrettable, and named Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan as tasks that a budget with large new borrowing still had to cover.

That day she was also a rapporteur for Einzelplan 23, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, with Gräßle, Mirco Hanker, Felix Döring and Sascha Wagner. She described an average cut of about 25 percent, from roughly 12 billion euro a year for the ministry under the previous coalition to a medium-term 9 billion. Nicolas Zippelius of the CDU/CSU answered that some falls while the Greens were in office had been steeper, including 12.51 percent from 2022 to 2023, against 7.5 percent and then 3 percent in the budgets under debate.

Bavarian Green group

Since 2021 Schäfer has been co-spokesperson of the Bavarian members of the Green parliamentary group, together with Sascha Müller. On 20 May 2025 the Landesgruppe, then comprising 14 members, re-elected both unanimously. In the state party's account of the meeting, the two said that in opposition the group would speak for Bavarian interests in Berlin and would identify failings of the Christian Democratic–Social Democratic coalition.

Political positions

Public finance and the debt brake

As a budget legislator for Alliance 90/The Greens, Jamila Schäfer has treated the constitutional debt brake as too narrow for public investment. In June 2023 she wrote that deficits must not be the only measure, blaming underfunded schools, damaged roads and missing climate spending on what she called a fixation on the “black zero,” and said the state had to act counter-cyclically in a crisis.

On 18 March 2025 the outgoing Bundestag amended the Basic Law by 512 votes to 206, exempting defence and security spending above 1 per cent of gross domestic product from the brake and creating a €500 billion, twelve-year special fund for infrastructure. In the bargain between the CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens, the exemption was widened to civil protection, the intelligence services and aid to states attacked in breach of international law, including Ukraine. Of the fund, €100 billion was reserved, through the Climate and Transformation Fund, for climate protection—twice what Friedrich Merz had first offered—and was to pay for additional rather than already planned projects; the Greens did not obtain their demand for a 1.5 per cent threshold.

In a statement under the Bundestag’s rules, Schäfer said she would vote for the package but still wanted a fuller reform. She welcomed the wider security definition, the climate tranche and Ukraine aid she said the Chancellery under Olaf Scholz had blocked, and objected that humanitarian aid, crisis prevention and development cooperation stayed inside the brake and that tax justice was untouched. Defence, climate finance and social fairness must not be set against one another, she wrote, and she called the rushed use of the old majority inadequate. Tagesschau reported that the only Green to vote no was Canan Bayram. In August 2026 she argued that a standing credit exemption for the military would crowd out education, infrastructure and climate protection, and that spending should follow capabilities inside NATO and Europe rather than a fixed share of GDP.

Climate, social policy and migration

In 2023 she said the ecological transformation required spending on climate-neutral technology at once, suggested unused room in the €200 billion Economic Stabilisation Fund for the heating transition, and called for cutting climate-harmful subsidies, naming the company-car privilege, the lower diesel tax and aviation support. In February 2025 she backed a wealth tax on very large fortunes, to close gaps favouring the very wealthy and to share the cost of climate neutrality, and in July 2026 she opposed tying the statutory retirement age automatically to life expectancy.

On asylum she broke with most of her group. On 12 April 2024 the Bundestag adopted, by a standing vote, a federal basis for a payment card under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act; the president recorded one opposing Green vote, from a member she called “die Kollegin,” against support from most of the coalition, the AfD and the BSW. Schäfer’s printed explanation states that she rejected the bill as a disproportionate limit on the liberty of people seeking protection and as no solution to migration or integration. She cited the Bundestag research service against the claim that benefits steer migration, and argued that less cash and more stigma could increase crime; other Greens also filed critical explanations. On 18 January 2024 she wrote that she rejected the Act to Improve Returns: exit custody of up to 28 days, wider entry into shared housing and routine reading of phones were disproportionate, and anti-smuggling clauses risked criminalising humanitarian help, including sea rescue, without speeding procedures or equipping municipalities.

Ukraine, defense and European security

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Schäfer argued that arms for Ukraine could serve a pacifist end. In May 2022 she wrote that she had voted for heavy weapons because a victory for Vladimir Putin would make a peaceful European order less likely, that Ukrainian military success was the condition for negotiations, and that Germany bore a particular responsibility after its dependence on Russian fossil fuels. Der Spiegel reported that in July 2022 she and Robin Wagener travelled to Kyiv and called for more heavy weapons, a line it called the party’s newer pragmatism. The Süddeutsche Zeitung set that view against the older pacifist tradition in an exchange with former Bundestag vice-president Antje Vollmer.

In March 2024 she said Ukraine should receive what its defence required, including the Taurus KEPD 350 for strikes on distant military targets such as ammunition stores. She blamed non-delivery on Scholz and rejected the claim that supply would make Germany a party to the war, noting similar deliveries by France and the United Kingdom. Illness kept her from the vote on a CDU/CSU motion demanding Taurus; she then joined a statement by Green colleagues who said Germany should supply the missile, including by ring exchange, but who voted against that opposition motion because a coalition text already sought long-range weapons.

She co-sponsored a Green motion of 24 June 2025 asking the government to press inside the G7 for frozen Russian state assets—put at more than €260 billion, about €210 billion of them in the European Union—to be made fully available to Ukraine in conformity with international law. On 5 December 2025 the Bundestag rejected it, 454 to 77, with 53 abstentions; the Green votes that were cast were in favour.

Israel, Gaza and antisemitism

After the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, Schäfer wrote in March 2024 that the killings and rocket fire were terrible crimes and that Israel had a right of self-defence, including strikes on Hamas military infrastructure, while calling civilian suffering in the Gaza Strip intolerable. She said Hamas used civilians as shields by placing military sites near them, and that Israel, unlike Hamas, was bound by the law of armed conflict and had not always minimised civilian harm, a criticism she also attributed to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Her stated aim was a two-state solution: a majority-Jewish state as a refuge against antisemitism, beside a Palestinian state, which she called difficult given what she termed radical-fundamentalist forces in the Israeli government and a radicalised Palestinian side.

In July 2025, as the Green rapporteur for humanitarian aid on the Budget Committee, she said she had pressed since 2024 for more funds and for access by groups such as Cadus, described limits on aid as breaches of humanitarian law and Israel’s blockade of aid as unacceptable, and said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation fell short of humanitarian standards. She asked Berlin to stop supplying weapons for use in Gaza while keeping protection for Israeli civilians, including against Iranian missiles, endorsed Baerbock’s push for guarantees or export limits, and called for a sustained ceasefire and steps toward two states. Her stated aim was to protect Jewish life in Israel and worldwide, uphold international law and enable Palestinian self-determination. In February 2025 she called plans attributed to the incoming Trump administration to annex Gaza illegal, and wrote that recognition of Palestine should follow a peace process rather than come while a group seeking Israel’s destruction led a Palestinian polity.

Reception and controversies

Patriotism debate, harassment and threats

During UEFA Euro 2016, the Rhineland-Palatinate Green Youth posted “Patriotismus=Nationalismus. Fußballfans Fahnen runter!”, arguing that patriotism excludes others and can stigmatize them as enemies. By the next Monday it had more than 24,000 hostile comments, and spokesperson Benjamin Buddendiek said criminal complaints would be filed. Jamila Schäfer, then federal spokesperson, defended the line in Der Spiegel on 13 June 2016: the point was not to spoil football but to reject loading tournaments with a positive idea of the nation. She called national community feelings fundamentally dangerous and said a DFB flag would do. She said she had received messages that people wanted to hang or beat her to death, that many comments were criminally relevant, and that the warning was urgent in the time of the Alternative for Germany and Pegida.

Other parties treated the appeal as a misunderstanding of fans. Peter Altmaier, CDU chancellery minister, tweeted that the Green Youth “doesn’t get it”: fans’ flags were “the opposite of the flags of the past,” a symbol of an open, likeable Germany. SPD politician Johannes Kahrs called the post embarrassing. CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer told Bild am Sonntag that national colours were healthy patriotism—“Better a patriot than an idiot.” Rhineland-Palatinate CDU leader Julia Klöckner said the call to roll up the German flag cast patriotism as nationalism, and state general secretary Patrick Schnieder said the Green Youth could no longer be taken seriously.

Alliance 90/The Greens were split as well. State chair Katharina Binz said cheek-flags were not nationalist; co-chair Thomas Petry rejected dividing fans into good and bad. Bundestag member Dieter Janecek told the Handelsblatt they were “quite the spoilsports,” while welcoming peaceful support for a diverse team. Green Youth speaker Jennifer Werthwein had hoped for more party backing. Die Welt noted that co-chair Simone Peter had written not to look away, because dangerous nationalism grows in the shadow of healthy patriotism.

The abuse was not only online. On the evening of 14 June 2018, as deputy federal chair, Schäfer told t-online that a man on a Berlin S-Bahn filmed and flash-photographed her, insulted her, said she would “see what you get from this,” mimed cutting her throat and called himself “radical,” then left at Jannowitzbrücke. She filed a complaint and said she was used to threats, including internet murder threats, but that the commute crossed a new line. Police confirmed a state-security investigation into a suspected politically motivated threat and insult at that station; they did not name her, and reports named no suspect.

Media profile and political criticism

Reporting has put her on the party’s left. After her January 2018 election to the federal executive, the Abendzeitung München described her as coming from the left wing; she said wings were not personnel clubs and that left positions had to become realpolitik. A taz profile as the new Bundestag met in 2021 placed her in the party’s “left hemisphere.”

The published challenge on defence was internal. On 13 May 2022 the Süddeutsche Zeitung paired her with former vice-president Antje Vollmer under the headline “You are all Joschka Fischer’s children, Jamila.” It wrote that near-unanimity for arms to Ukraine left some members at a loss, and that the two—almost fifty years apart—were “worlds” apart on weapons.

Bild on 7 October 2022 seized on a video in which she said one “cannot go bankrupt in one’s own currency” and that politics could set credit terms to stabilize the economy. Economist Gunther Schnabl said financing spending through the European Central Bank is banned by Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and is “taxation without a legal basis” that causes inflation. CSU budget politician Sebastian Brehm called it “dangerous green monetary policy” and debt “come hell or high water” at the next generation’s expense.

Dissent from the government majority stayed in the minutes. On 12 April 2024 the Bundestag passed a legal basis for an asylum payment card with most coalition votes plus the AfD and BSW; the CDU/CSU, the Left and one Green MP voted no. Schäfer’s explanation called the card a disproportionate curb on people seeking protection and no fix for real migration problems. From the other side, Detlef Seif called it no cure-all and Kai Whittaker objected that cash was not capped at 50 euros a month. On 26 April 2024 she joined Greens who refused the climate-law amendment in written explanations, calling it a “Schieflage zulasten des Klimaschutzes” that let less ambitious ministries, especially transport, avoid concrete measures. Spiegel reported the reform had come chiefly under FDP pressure; group chair Katharina Dröge defended it as forward-looking while conceding the Greens had wanted clearer responsibility.

The disputes in this reporting are over political positions and over harassment and threats, not personal misconduct.

Personal life and other roles

Family and residence

Jamila Anna Schäfer was born on 30 April 1993 in Munich. The Bundestag states that the biographical details on its member pages rest on the members’ own declarations; on that basis her entry records one child. In May 2024 she told the Abendzeitung that she was pregnant and expected her first child at the end of August, and that she was very pleased; she declined to say anything further in public. The same report quoted the Bundestag administration: because deputies exercise a free mandate under Article 38 of the Basic Law and are not bound by instructions, the Parental Leave Act does not apply to them, while maternity protection of six weeks before and eight weeks after birth does.

In October 2021, as the new Bundestag was about to convene, she told taz that she was living with her boyfriend in Berlin-Weißensee, while her primary residence remained in the Munich-South constituency, at her parents’ home. The addresses published for her as a member are a Bundestag office at Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, and a constituency office at Implerstraße 66, 81371 Munich.

Memberships and outside offices

The self-reported biography lists membership of ver.di, the Naturfreundejugend and the World Wide Fund for Nature, together with a supporting membership of Finanzwende e.V. A separate disclosure under the members’ code of conduct gives her occupation before she entered the Bundestag as work for Alliance 90/The Greens in Berlin under the title Bundesvorsitzende. The party’s own chronicle records a narrower office: at the extraordinary federal delegates’ conference in Hanover on 26–27 January 2018, when Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck were elected the two chairs, Schäfer was newly elected to the executive as deputy chair (Stellvertretende Vorsitzende). A February 2023 text issued from her office and published by Zentrum Überleben describes that deputy chairmanship as the four years from 2018 to 2022.

The conduct disclosure also lists an unpaid seat on the advisory board for fundamental questions of savings-bank policy at the Sparkassenverband Bayern in Munich, part of the public-law savings-bank group. The association describes the board as a forum for dialogue with politics, drawing cross-party Bavarian members of the European Parliament, the Bundestag and the Bavarian Landtag from parties represented in those parliaments; it is not itself a decision-making body of the association.

Since September 2022 she has been patron (Schirmfrau) of Zentrum Überleben in Berlin, succeeding Claudia Roth; the centre’s 2022/23 report presents her as a political voice for people traumatised in the context of flight and quotes her describing its work as a rights-based approach to the difficulties that arise with migration. She does not appear on the published list of the 49 members of the general assembly of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. On 1 March 2024 she delivered the laudation when the foundation awarded its Anne Klein Women’s Prize to the Ukrainian activist Yuliya Sporysh.