Johann Saathoff

Johann Saathoff (born 9 December 1967 in Emden) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag for Aurich–Emden in Lower Saxony. He has held the constituency as a directly elected member since 2013. Since May 2025 he has been Parliamentary State Secretary to the federal minister for economic cooperation and development.

He qualified for the higher general administrative service. He took the Abitur at the Johannes-Althusius-Gymnasium in Emden in the summer of 1987, trained as a Regierungsinspektor at the Bezirksregierung Lüneburg from August 1987 to August 1990, and that summer passed the career examination as a Diplom-Verwaltungswirt (FH). From August 1990 he was a probationary Regierungsinspektor and head of a civil-service pay group at the Aurich office of the Bezirksregierung Weser-Ems, and from September 1993 to September 2003 he worked at the Fachhochschule Ostfriesland, latterly as a Regierungsoberamtsrat. In February 2003 he was elected the first full-time mayor of the municipality of Krummhörn, and he was re-elected in September 2011.

The Bundestag biography records direct elections in Aurich–Emden in September 2013, September 2017, September 2021 and February 2025. In the 2017 federal election he received 49.6 percent of the first votes (69,231). On 26 September 2021 he received 52.8 percent in the East Frisian constituency, the highest first-vote share of any directly elected member and the only result above 50 percent. The federal returning officer’s table for the constituency records 71,596 SPD first votes (52.8 percent) and turnout of 71.9 percent. In the 2025 federal election his first-vote share was 41.2 percent (63,557 votes), 11.7 points below 2021, ahead of the CDU candidate Joachim Lübbo Kleen on 22.1 percent; turnout was 82.0 percent and the SPD’s second-vote share was 28.6 percent. In 2013 the same office’s table listed the SPD at 50.2 percent of valid first votes (66,348 of 132,039), with turnout at 70.3 percent.

From 2014 to January 2022 he was pilot of the SPD Bundestag group’s coastal caucus, and from 2015 until the end of the 19th electoral term he was the group’s coordinator for energy policy. Since 2018 he has chaired the group’s Lower Saxony–Bremen delegation. From August 2020 to December 2021 he was the federal government’s coordinator for civil-society cooperation with Russia, Central Asia and the countries of the Eastern Partnership. From December 2021 to May 2025 he was Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, and from November 2024 to May 2025 he also held that rank at the Federal Ministry of Justice. A ministry statement of 7 May 2025 announced his appointment as Parliamentary State Secretary as Reem Alabali-Radovan took over the development ministry that day, after Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had appointed her on 6 May. The Bundestag lists him as deputy chair of its German–South Asian Parliamentary Group.

On 2 March 2018 he answered, partly in Low German, an Alternative for Germany initiative to write German into the Basic Law as the national language, saying that other languages would leave Germany richer (“Düütschland word neet armer dör anner Spraken, Düütschland word rieker”). The Bundestag biography, which publishes members’ own disclosures, describes him as evangelical Lutheran, married and the father of five children, and lists membership of ver.di, the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, the Sozialverband Deutschland and IG Metall.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing in Emden

Johann Saathoff was born on 9 December 1967 in Emden, the main seaport of East Frisia in Lower Saxony. The Bundestag biography, drawn from his own disclosure, lists him as evangelical Lutheran, and a later profile records that he grew up in the city.

The municipal history of Emden places his childhood in a port economy that had just passed through a boom and then a slump. In the 1960s the Nordseewerke shipyard was busy, and a Volkswagen plant opened in the Larrelter Polder in 1964, creating jobs beyond the city itself. The 1970s brought the oil-price shock and a shipyard crisis: unemployment rose even though the Volkswagen works steadied the local economy, and the city lost tax revenue while social spending increased. From 1946 to 2001, apart from 1952–1956, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) held both the council majority and the mayoralty.

Saathoff's family belonged to that labour and party milieu. A 2017 profile in the SPD paper vorwärts reported that he grew up in a social-democratic household, that his father was a dockworker (Hafenarbeiter) and his mother a net knitter (Netzstrickerin), and that he was active in the Socialist Youth of Germany – Die Falken and later in the Young Socialists in the SPD (Jusos). He has written that both parents were Social Democrats and trade-union members who taught him to treat solidarity as what mattered most, and that his first organised political work was with the Falken, at weekly meetings he recalls as pacifist and concerned with disarmament and the NATO Double-Track Decision, before he joined the Jusos and the SPD.

Schooling and the civil-service degree

In the summer of 1987 he passed the Abitur at the Johannes-Althusius-Gymnasium in Emden. The school takes its name from the jurist and political theorist Johannes Althusius, for many years syndic of Emden, and states that it was first mentioned in historical sources in 1483.

From August 1987 to August 1990 he was a Regierungsinspektoranwärter, a trainee for the higher intermediate grade of the general administrative civil service, at the Bezirksregierung Lüneburg, then a regional office of the Land government, in what he has called a dual course of study for the Diplom-Verwaltungswirt (FH). In the summer of 1990 he passed the Laufbahnprüfung, the career examination for the gehobener allgemeiner Verwaltungsdienst, and finished that Fachhochschule degree.

Published biographies do not name a separate campus for the academic parts of that course. They place the traineeship at the Bezirksregierung Lüneburg and record the 1990 examination and the diploma together as its conclusion. In Lower Saxony the academic side of this career sat at a Fachhochschule: until 30 September 2007 the Niedersächsische Fachhochschule für Verwaltung und Rechtspflege ran the Verwaltung programme at its faculty of general administration, and a statute of 13 September 2007 dissolved that college and continued the programme at the Kommunale Fachhochschule für Verwaltung in Niedersachsen, recognised for training for the careers of the higher intermediate general administrative service.

Public administration and mayoralty

Bezirksregierung and the Emden university of applied sciences

Johann Saathoff trained for the higher intermediate general administrative service of Lower Saxony. From August 1987 to August 1990 he was a Regierungsinspektoranwärter at the Bezirksregierung Lüneburg, the intermediate state authority in Lüneburg. In the summer of 1990 he passed the career examination and completed the course as a Diplom-Verwaltungswirt (FH).

In August 1990 he was appointed Regierungsinspektor zur Anstellung at the Bezirksregierung Weser-Ems, at its branch office in Aurich, as group leader in the civil-service pay section. From September 1993 to September 2003 he worked at the Fachhochschule Ostfriesland in Emden and left in the rank of Regierungsoberamtsrat. The Bundestag notes that such career details are supplied by the member.

Mayor of Krummhörn, 2003–2013

In February 2003 Saathoff was elected the first full-time mayor of Krummhörn, in the district of Aurich in East Frisia. The Ostfriesen-Zeitung later wrote that he had taken office with 61 percent of the vote. The office is that of Hauptverwaltungsbeamter, the directly elected head of the municipal administration, based at the town hall in Pewsum. The municipal website describes Krummhörn as 19 villages.

That term ended with the council period on 31 October 2011. Councils in that position set the date of the direct election, held across the state on 11 September 2011 with the elections to local councils. Saathoff, for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), was the only candidate. The state returning officer’s preliminary result gave him 4,491 of 6,363 valid votes (70.6 percent); the other 1,872 were votes against him. Of 10,455 eligible voters, 6,519 took part (62.4 percent) and 156 ballots were invalid. The Ostfriesen-Zeitung reported 70.57 percent and no opponent, against 61 percent eight years earlier. From 2005 to 2013 the state used an eight-year term for these chief executives. The SPD group in the Bundestag dates the second mayoralty from September 2011 to September 2013.

The dispute reported in most detail set wind income against species protection. Wind power was already dense: Die Welt wrote of about 160 turbines in Krummhörn producing more electricity than the municipality used, and Saathoff told the Nordwest-Zeitung that wind covered 2.7 times local demand. Through Touristik GmbH Krummhörn-Greetsiel, which it wholly owned, the municipality ran two turbines, including a 2.3-megawatt Enercon E-70 at Groteland.

On 20 May 2011 the district ordered the E-70 stopped by day, from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. until 1 August, because a pair of Montagu’s harriers was nesting about 50 metres from the tower; a second machine, at Petjenburg, was then stopped for another pair. The order rested on the Federal Nature Conservation Act’s ban on killing specially protected wild animals. Naturschutzbund Deutschland counted about 400 German breeding pairs, and Die Welt reported a fall in western East Frisia from 14 pairs to six. The Nordwest-Zeitung placed the species in category 2 of the breeding-bird Red List, “strongly endangered,” after an earlier listing as threatened with extinction. Saathoff put the loss at least 60,000 euros and called the order a limit on property rights: the park, he told Deutschlandfunk, had stood before the birds chose the site. He told Die Welt he had not seen the pair, and the taz that he wanted a photograph proving they were breeding. The Verwaltungsgericht Oldenburg upheld the shutdown: the pair mattered to the local population, protection outweighed the temporary loss, and a permit did not run on unaltered. The municipality appealed to the Oberverwaltungsgericht in Lüneburg. Saathoff called it a test case and, as the Nordwest-Zeitung quoted him, asked whether the alternative was “a Disneyland for geese” or using the wind.

That interview also described him serving East Frisian tea with Kluntjes in the town hall. A 2017 profile in Vorwärts, the SPD newspaper, wrote that as mayor he had invited residents in the villages to a “Tass Tee mit Börgmester” — a cup of tea with the mayor — to hear local concerns.

The SPD Bundestag biography ends the mayoralty in September 2013, when he won the Aurich–Emden seat. On Sunday, 2 February 2014, Frank Baumann, an SPD politician from Pewsum, was elected successor with 59.48 percent of the votes cast, for a seven-year term, after Saathoff’s move to the Bundestag.

Bundestag elections and the Aurich–Emden constituency

Direct mandates, 2013–2025

Johann Saathoff has held the direct mandate for constituency 24, Aurich – Emden, in Lower Saxony, at every Bundestag election from 2013 to 2025. His Bundestag biography, drawn from the member’s own disclosures, records direct elections in September 2013, September 2017, September 2021 and February 2025. The seat is the independent city of Emden and the rural district of Aurich, on the coast of East Frisia. The direct seat goes to the candidate with the most first votes, cast for a person rather than a party list.

At the 2013 election the federal returning officer’s final table names parties, not candidates. It gives the Social Democratic Party (SPD) 66,348 first votes, 50.2 percent of 132,039 valid ballots, ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 42,737 (32.4 percent). Turnout was 70.3 percent of 190,987 eligible voters, and the SPD’s second-vote share was 43.8 percent (58,080). Tagesschau identified Saathoff as the SPD winner and displayed his share as 50.3 percent, a tenth of a point above the official party figure.

In 2017 Tagesschau again named Saathoff, with 49.6 percent and 69,231 first votes, the same SPD total in the returning officer’s final table. The CDU had 38,531 first votes (27.6 percent); Alliance 90/The Greens 7.0 percent, Die Linke 6.7 percent and the Free Democratic Party 4.9 percent. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) had no first-vote line, but took 12,877 second votes (9.1 percent). The SPD still led the party vote, with 37.8 percent (53,353), and turnout was 74.5 percent.

On 26 September 2021 Saathoff received 52.8 percent of first votes, which the Bundestag described as the highest share among 299 directly elected members and the only result above 50 percent. The next-highest was 49.0 percent for Silvia Breher of the CDU in Cloppenburg – Vechta. The constituency table records 71,596 SPD first votes (52.8 percent) against 24,019 for the CDU (17.7 percent), on a turnout of 71.9 percent. Second votes also put the SPD first, at 43.3 percent (59,038).

In February 2025 the same table names the candidates: Saathoff won with 63,557 first votes (41.2 percent), and Dr Joachim Lübbo Kleen of the CDU was second with 34,070 (22.1 percent). The AfD, now with a first-vote total, took 31,160 votes (20.2 percent), ahead of Die Linke on 5.8 percent and the Greens on 5.0 percent. Turnout rose to 82.0 percent, 10.2 points above 2021, among 189,800 eligible voters. On second votes the SPD remained ahead but fell to 28.6 percent (44,278), in front of the CDU on 23.3 percent and the AfD on 21.0 percent.

The constituency since 1949

In the federal returning officer’s volume for 2005 and 2009, Emden and the district of Aurich formed constituency 25, Aurich – Emden, rather than number 24.

The name is older than that numbering. The Biographisches Lexikon für Ostfriesland records that, at the first Bundestag election on 14 August 1949, Georg Peters of the SPD was directly elected in Aurich–Emden, then the districts of Norden and Aurich plus the city of Emden. He won with 35.5 percent against 13.4 percent for the CDU and 10 percent for the FDP, and his share rose to 48.6 percent by 1961. From 1965 the boundaries changed: voters in Emden–Leer, covering Norden, Emden and the district of Leer, returned Peters, who reached 50.8 percent of first votes in 1969, the best result of his two decades in parliament.

When Aurich – Emden reappeared as constituency 25, the SPD was still the first-vote plurality. In 2005 it took 82,618 first votes (58.3 percent) on a turnout of 77.3 percent, with the CDU at 27.1 percent. In 2009 the SPD fell to 57,876 votes (44.4 percent); turnout was 70.0 percent and the CDU had 33,706 votes (25.8 percent). A dpa report carried by Bild identified Lower Saxony SPD leader Garrelt Duin as the winner on 44.4 percent, almost 14 points below his 2005 share. Duin resigned the mandate on 21 June 2012 to become minister for economic affairs, energy, industry, small business and crafts of North Rhine-Westphalia. The next direct election, in 2013, was Saathoff’s first, and the SPD’s official first-vote share in the renumbered constituency 24 was again above half.

Peters in the original seat and then in Emden–Leer, Duin in constituency 25, and Saathoff in constituency 24 are the documented SPD wins on this part of the coast, not a result for every intervening election. The 2025 plurality kept the direct seat, but 41.2 percent was the lowest of Saathoff’s four reported first-vote shares, and the AfD’s 20.2 percent left three parties above one fifth where in 2021 the SPD alone had cleared half.

Energy, maritime and economic policy

Energy transition and offshore wind

From 2015 until the end of the 19th Bundestag term, Saathoff was energy-policy coordinator of the SPD parliamentary group. The group also lists him as Lotse, or chair, of its Küstengang from 2014 until January 2022, and the maritime journal Hansa reported that the Küstengang re-elected him unanimously to that post at a constitutive meeting. In the 18th Bundestag (2013–2017) the archived biography lists him as a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and of the Committee on Food and Agriculture; in the 19th term he was a full member of the economic-affairs committee and a substitute on the Subcommittee on Regional Economic Policy and ERP Economic Plans. The remit ran from the Energiewende at sea, in the North Sea, to wind on land.

On 5 November 2020 he closed the second and third reading of amendments to the Offshore Wind Energy Act (Windenergie-auf-See-Gesetz). He welcomed raising the 2030 target by 5 gigawatts, to 20 GW, and setting 40 GW for 2040, noting that one gigawatt offshore yielded about twice the electricity of one gigawatt onshore and four times that of photovoltaics. The SPD opposed a second auction component as dearer to finance and riskier to build, and he regretted that the bill said nothing about the territorial sea. The EEG 2021, passed that December and in force on 1 January 2021, kept the 20 GW offshore path beside 71 GW onshore and 100 GW of solar, under a 65 per cent renewable share of gross electricity use.

The onshore slump ran through the same brief. When Aurich-based Enercon warned of plant closures, top agrar reported an open letter in which Saathoff called the news dramatic for the district and for East Frisia and said the Energiewende itself was at risk. He blamed Enercon's product range, which he said had not fitted the auction system, and policy: auctions, slow grids and distance rules. In the 2019 climate package the SPD had wanted noise limits averaging about 700 metres; the CDU and CSU sought a "10H" rule averaging about 2,500 metres; 1,000 metres was the compromise, and he warned its definition of housing could wipe out many sites. He told Energie & Management that anyone serious about the Paris goals could not accept the cabinet draft drawn up under economics minister Peter Altmaier. Solarserver reported that he wanted the photovoltaic cap lifted at once, with a wider EEG reform, rather than after the coal phase-out bill.

Coal exit and industrial policy

On 31 January 2020, debating three Alternative for Germany motions to halt a coal-exit law, Saathoff said they ignored the consensus of the Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment. He argued for ending coal-fired power by 2038 at the latest, with scope to go earlier, and for cushioning the regions. Leaving coal, he said, meant entering renewables, "above all wind, as the workhorse", including in the south, and using combined heat and power as a bridge from coal to gas that would itself later be renewable. East Frisia, he added, already knew structural change: it had lost almost all of its shipyards. The 2020 act sets closure of the last coal plant by the end of 2038, with reviews in 2026, 2029 and 2032 that can advance later shutdowns by three years and so allow an exit in 2035, plus up to €40 billion for the coal regions by 2038.

Opposition speakers called the bargain too slow and too kind to operators. Oliver Krischer of Alliance 90/The Greens said the cabinet text was not the commission's result one-to-one, that closures had slipped and that the compensation was needless; Gesine Lötzsch of Die Linke wanted the money spent on a faster transition and on miners' incomes. Saathoff, for his part, wrote that a local-content rule should be considered so that turbines put up in Germany were built there. On gas, he told Vorwärts in February 2021 that Nord Stream 2 was "energy-politically sensible", because stopping construction would not cut Russian methane imports by a gram, and that sanctions should hit those responsible for repression rather than workers across Europe.

Coastal and maritime economy

In the same sitting, on bills to speed infrastructure planning, he said permits took too long but must not be written against the people affected. As mayor, he said, he had seen a grid operator substitute formal consultation for actually listening, and the lawsuits had followed.

The Volkswagen works in Emden was the other industrial interest he defended from the constituency. The Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung reported a Bundestag intervention on the company's savings plans in which he said he refused even to contemplate an Emden without Volkswagen.

Trade tax on North Sea wind farms, which stand in the exclusive economic zone and so outside any municipality, became a later quarrel. The Nordwest-Zeitung reported that a 2024 decision stopped Lower Saxony collecting the tax itself, and that Minister-President Olaf Lies's government then named his birthplace, Wilhelmshaven, as sole collector from 2026, for about €110 million a year, much of it to be shared out. East Frisian councils objected. The paper called the region the birthplace of German offshore industry—an Emden firm's Bard Offshore 1 was the first commercial park of its kind in the North Sea—and reported that Saathoff and the operators' association BWO wanted the split to follow local burdens, such as power lines, rather than a single-city rule the association called an impermissible generalisation given Wilhelmshaven's thinner link to the parks.

Coordinator for Russia, Central Asia and the Eastern Partnership

Appointment and civil-society mandate

On 26 August 2020 the federal cabinet appointed Johann Saathoff, a Bundestag member of the Social Democratic Party, coordinator for intersocietal cooperation with Russia, Central Asia and the countries of the Eastern Partnership. The post, based at the Federal Foreign Office, covered twelve states. He succeeded Dirk Wiese, appointed on 11 April 2018, who had followed Gernot Erler, Russia commissioner since 2014. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Saathoff was taking over when a living civil society, and dialogue beyond governments, were again conspicuous.

Saathoff called the twelve states Germany’s nearest neighbourhood and said policy would keep clear positions on democracy and human rights, while person-to-person contact could build trust “even where political conditions are difficult,” especially with Russia. He pointed to civil-society organisations in Kyiv, Tbilisi, Nur-Sultan and Bishkek, and to energy policy, as fields for that cooperation. His Bundestag biography records the role as lasting from August 2020 to December 2021.

Nord Stream 2, Navalny and the debate after 2022

The appointment came six days after Alexei Navalny collapsed on 20 August 2020 on a flight from Tomsk and was flown to Germany two days later. In the Bundestag on 11 September, in a debate the Greens had requested, Saathoff called the poisoning an “abominable crime” and an attempted murder with a nerve agent developed in Russia, a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and said the evidence lay in Russia. Condemning the attack, he argued, should not mean questioning “everything that connects us with Russia”—town partnerships, universities and personal friendships—and, when he spoke of keeping bridges, Annalena Baerbock interjected, “To whom?” Agnieszka Brugger of Alliance 90/The Greens called Nord Stream 2 a bet against European climate policy and urged that it be stopped; Renata Alt of the Free Democratic Party demanded a construction moratorium until the case was clarified. Saathoff did not mention the pipeline.

The same day he told Handelsblatt that sanctions should “above all hit those responsible,” and that stopping Nord Stream 2 was “not at the top of the list,” because deliveries through it would be only a small part of Russian raw-material exports. Trust, he said, had to be rebuilt, and Moscow had to answer a Bundeswehr laboratory’s finding that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok. On 12 February 2021, in the SPD newspaper Vorwärts, after Navalny’s imprisonment, he said the proceedings breached the European Convention on Human Rights and that the suppression of protests, like the laws on so-called foreign agents, was not an internal affair. Nord Stream 2 remained, he said, “sensible in energy-policy terms”: a halt would not import “a single gram less methane” from Russia, and he preferred personal sanctions while restating support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

He left the post in mid-December 2021 on becoming a parliamentary state secretary. On 5 January 2022 he convened a meeting in Hanover with former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Martin Schulz, then chair of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, former SPD leader Matthias Platzeck, and Heino Wiese, a businessman and honorary consul of Russia. It became public in February after CDU MP Matthias Hauer asked which members of the government had met Schröder since the cabinet was sworn in on 8 December 2021; only Saathoff had. Saathoff told Der Spiegel that he had acted as a parliamentarian, that Nord Stream 2 “was not a topic” as he remembered it, and that the subject was Russian civil society; he told the Tagesspiegel he had “no sense of guilt at all.” The Interior Ministry’s account, given inside government, was an exchange on the future of German-Russian relations and on civil society.

Der Spiegel presented the gathering as awkward for the SPD and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, because it cut against the claim that Schröder—sharply critical of Ukraine, and due to join Gazprom’s supervisory board—was isolated from party and government. CDU parliamentary manager Thorsten Frei called advice from Schröder, ahead of visits to Kyiv and Moscow, a “fatal signal.” Saathoff told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Schröder had not tried to influence government action.

After Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine the office was not filled again in its old form. In the summer of 2022 Nils Schmid told the Rheinische Post that the job still reached Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, and should now be a contact for Russian and Belarusian civil society in exile. In January 2024 the government said the post would not be refilled as before, because relations with Russia had been “comprehensively reassessed” on account of the war of aggression, “including a redrafting of the coordinator’s role.” On 8 February 2023 the cabinet instead created a coordinator for the South Caucasus, Moldova and Central Asia; Robin Wagener took it up on 1 March, also as contact for democratic Russian and Belarusian civil society in exile, with Russia outside the geographic mandate.

Parliamentary State Secretary for the interior and justice

Portfolio at the Interior Ministry

On 8 December 2021, the day the Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor, it was announced that three members of the Social Democratic Party would serve as parliamentary state secretaries at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community: Mahmut Özdemir, Johann Saathoff and Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, under minister Nancy Faeser. Saathoff held the post until May 2025. It ended when the government of Friedrich Merz was announced on 6 May 2025; Saathoff was then named a parliamentary state secretary at the development ministry, not at the interior ministry.

Parliamentary state secretaries are Bundestag members who support the minister in parliament. Organisation charts of 15 June 2022 and 15 March 2025 assigned Saathoff the same block: departments KM, D, DG (including the Federal Academy of Public Administration), DV and CI, plus central-services subdivision Z I. On the March 2025 chart those were crisis management and civil protection, the public service, digital society and information technology, digital administration and steering of the Online Access Act, and cyber and information security. Migration, asylum and return policy were listed under Özdemir, and public security, Federal Police affairs and homeland policy under Schwarzelühr-Sutter. Saathoff was not the ministry’s parliamentary lead on migration.

Cybersecurity, the civil service and crisis management

Civil protection was the part of that brief most visibly tied to the war in Ukraine. In the government podcast Aus Regierungskreisen on 5 May 2022, Saathoff said the chancellor’s Zeitenwende also applied to crisis management. He restated the division of labour—municipalities for fire protection, the Länder for disaster relief, and the federation for civil protection in wartime—and described situation centres at the interior ministry and at the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance.

On 21 March 2024 he opened the Bundestag’s first debate on the government’s 2023 civil-protection risk analysis, which, because of Russia’s war against Ukraine, was to bring civil-defence scenarios into the regular assessments. On 5 December 2024 he introduced the draft KRITIS umbrella act, which the cabinet had adopted on 6 November to transpose the EU directive on the resilience of critical entities. He argued for the first cross-sector rules on physical protection, beside existing cybersecurity rules, covering identification of installations, operator risk analyses, minimum resilience measures and incident monitoring on an all-hazards basis, and said swift passage was essential.

He also took the NIS2 transposition bill into the Bundestag. At the first reading on 11 October 2024 he presented a widening of cybersecurity duties from about 4,500 to about 29,500 entities in 18 sectors and, citing reported damage of €178 billion from cyberattacks in 2024, said the problem had not reached every board. The CDU/CSU called the timetable late—the EU deadline was October 2024, with enactment then expected only in spring 2025—and pointed to cuts at the Federal Office for Information Security alongside wider powers. Die Linke criticised unfilled security posts and the planned exclusion of municipal authorities.

On administrative modernisation he described the amendment of the Online Access Act as the basis for end-to-end digital services, abolition of the written-form requirement and, within five years, digital-only services for businesses. In the Bundesrat on 22 March 2024 he offered a protocol declaration on IT Planning Council consent for standards, asynchronous retrieval of evidence and continued use of ELSTER, but ruled out further federal funding. The chamber withheld its consent. The German County Association had objected that the federation would set standards without an effective role for the IT Planning Council, and the Bundesrat’s interior committee had opposed concentrating rule-making in Berlin while the federation stepped back from financing. A revised statute was later promulgated as the Act amending the Online Access Act and further provisions on the digitalisation of administration.

Public-service pay produced a separate dispute. In October 2024 the customs and finance union BDZ rejected a new interior-ministry draft on constitutionally adequate federal pay and pensions, more than four years after the leading Federal Constitutional Court rulings of 2020. The union said the draft aimed only at minimum requirements and replaced the single-earner family used to calculate minimum pay with a model that assumed a second income. Saathoff told constituents that the 2020 deadlines had bound Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, not the federation, which had no statutory deadline, and that the government still meant to act as soon as possible. He also wrote that talks with the staff associations had been constructive, that smaller changes were still being examined before a cabinet decision, and that the government considered the draft to implement the 2020 requirements.

Additional role at the Justice Ministry

After the Scholz coalition broke up, justice minister Volker Wissing appointed Saathoff an additional parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of Justice. He took up that post on 26 November 2024 while keeping the interior portfolio. He said the extra task would above all be to accompany an amendment of the Basic Law securing the Federal Constitutional Court. On 19 December 2024 the Bundestag adopted that amendment with 600 votes, the required two-thirds majority; Wissing called entrenching the court’s role a step toward securing democracy and the rule of law. The dual mandate lasted until the change of government in May 2025.

Development cooperation

Appointment at the BMZ

On 6 May 2025 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed the new federal government. The next day Reem Alabali-Radovan took office at the Berlin seat of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, succeeding Svenja Schulze. Johann Saathoff was named parliamentary state secretary; Bärbel Kofler remained a parliamentary state secretary, and Niels Annen became state secretary in the civil service.

The government's 2027 draft, debated in the Bundestag on 9 September 2026, set Einzelplan 23 at about €9.47 billion, around €587 million below the €10.06 billion of 2026, with bilateral cooperation and crisis response reduced and payments to multilateral development banks increased. In question time on 14 October Saathoff called the figure a further cut of €580 million, to 1.7 percent of the federal budget. He said funds had fallen by about a third since 2022, almost €4.5 billion, that the ministry saw no further savings, and that support related to displacement in South America and Southeast Asia would end.

VENRO, the umbrella of German development and humanitarian organisations, said another reduction toward about €9.5 billion showed that the government did not grasp the consequences. In the September debate Sascha Wagner of Die Linke called the draft a choice against the poorest, Felix Döring of the SPD said the coalition agreement did not justify it, and Matthias Rentzsch of the Alternative for Germany called the spending opaque and wasteful. Jan-Niclas Gesenhues of Alliance 90/The Greens said a €6 billion climate-finance target would be missed. Saathoff answered that the previous coalition had also missed that figure in some years, rejected scrapping the ministry's roughly €9 billion, and called an AfD motion to leave the 2030 Agenda irresponsible. On Syria he said help with basic services and jobs might later make returns possible, rather than returns being the starting aim. At a September 2025 congress of the Catholic agency Renovabis he said the cuts were hitting church and civil-society projects and denied that the money was simply given away.

Multilateral banks and parliamentary groups

The Bundestag's register of outside interests lists offices he holds by virtue of the post: German governor at the Asian Development Bank from 11 June 2025, the Caribbean Development Bank from 19 June 2025 and the Inter-American Development Bank from 25 June 2025; member of the supervisory board of Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations fund for education in crises, from 1 July 2025; chair of the supervisory board of DEG – Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft from 10 September 2025; and member of the board of trustees of the Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden in Bonn from 7 November 2025. DEG's own list names him chair. In the October question time he pointed to DEG finance for the Saguling solar plant under the Just Energy Transition Partnership with Indonesia, and said it was a loan to be repaid, not a grant.

In August 2026 Mongolia's foreign ministry said he was leading the German delegation to the 17th conference of the parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar. Before it he told Foreign Minister Battsetseg Batmunkh that Germany would help align positions; during it he discussed closer work with KfW on land and water with Environment Minister Sandag-Ochir Tsend. The Bundestag also lists him as deputy chair of the German–South Asian Parliamentary Group, whose partners a Bundestag account names as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. On 14 September 2026 it announced a delegation for 14–19 September, led by chair Nicklas Kappe of the CDU/CSU — the notice spells the surname Kappa — and including Saathoff, for talks in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On 27 and 28 October 2025 he had already visited Bangladesh as state secretary, including Cox's Bazar, and said Rohingya refugees should be able to return voluntarily and with dignity once there was peace in Myanmar. YPSA, implementer of a BMZ-funded camp radio project, reported that on 28 October he attended a Palonger Hota listener club and said conditions were worse than news coverage.

Party offices and local mandates

SPD offices in Aurich and the Bundestag group

Saathoff has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) since the late 1980s. As a child in Emden he attended holiday camps of the Falken, a socialist children's and youth association, with Garrelt Duin, later a member of the Bundestag and economics minister of North Rhine-Westphalia; they took the Abitur together in 1987.

In August 2013 he was elected chair of the SPD Unterbezirk Aurich, the sub-district covering the district of Aurich, and held the post for thirteen years. At a party congress in Middels in June 2026, Marek Tatjes, then 32 and from Norden, succeeded him with 66 of 74 votes. Saathoff supported the change in order to concentrate on the Bundestag and his work as a parliamentary state secretary. Wiard Siebels of Aurich and Beate Ihmels of Brookmerland were elected deputies, each by a large majority; the sub-district then had about 1,900 members.

In the SPD parliamentary group he has chaired the Landesgruppe Niedersachsen/Bremen, its members from Lower Saxony and the state of Bremen, since 19 February 2018. The group's then 22 members elected him unanimously to succeed Lars Klingbeil, who had become SPD general secretary. On 28 September 2021 the enlarged group — 25 members from Lower Saxony and two from Bremen — confirmed him unanimously. The SPD group again lists him as chair from 25 February 2025, at the opening of the 21st Bundestag. In May 2025 the board was completed with Saathoff for the Weser-Ems district and deputies Frauke Heiligenstadt (Hanover), Klingbeil (northern Lower Saxony), Dunja Kreiser (Braunschweig) and Uwe Schmidt (Bremen); Saathoff said all of them had been elected unanimously.

The Aurich district council

He has been a directly elected member of the Aurich district council (Kreistag) since 1 November 2021. At the election of 12 September 2021 he received 10,062 votes, more than any other candidate, and the SPD won 24 of 58 seats. On 13 September 2026 he was again directly elected, in electoral area I (Norden and Krummhörn), with 9,453 votes. The district election committee certified that result on 17 September; the SPD took 20 of 58 seats.

On 7 March 2024 the council rejected a reprimand (Rüge) moved by the Free Voters group (Freie Wählergemeinschaft). At the sitting of 7 December 2023 Saathoff had criticised Detlev Krüger — a Free Voters councillor from Südbrookmerland and newly deputy chair of the Free Voters in Lower Saxony — for advertising online an event with Antony Lee, their lead candidate in Lower Saxony for the European Parliament election. Saathoff quoted a 2021 speech in which Lee said that his father had been a British soldier with the Army of the Rhine, that his grandfather had been a Waffen-SS officer, and that this was why he spoke plainly. Lee, also known as a farmers' activist, had repeatedly rejected accusations of right-wing extremism. The minutes nevertheless recorded Saathoff as saying that Lee had made demonstrably positive statements about the deeds of the Nazi SS. Saathoff said he had been misquoted; a correction passed against only the six Free Voters votes.

Edgar Weiss of the Free Voters, from Wiesmoor, still sought the reprimand, saying the group had been placed in the right-wing corner and that Saathoff had not apologised. SPD councillor Theo Wimberg said the corrected record showed no misconduct and suspected an attempt to damage a prominent politician. District administrator Olaf Meinen said the December sitting had brought no protest. Gila Altmann of Alliance 90/The Greens connected the row to a working group against extremism: an urgent decision taken outside the full council had been challenged by the Free Voters at the interior ministry and found unlawful, so the council was to decide again in June. Only the six Free Voters members voted for the reprimand.

Low German and coastal culture

Speeches in the Bundestag

On 2 March 2018 the Bundestag gave a first reading to an Alternative for Germany bill, Drucksache 19/951, to amend the Basic Law so that German would be fixed as the language of the state. Stephan Brandner, moving the draft, said German was threatened by an “Englisch-Wahn” and by immigration, and that some authorities already published information in Arabic or Turkish.

Johann Saathoff of the SPD answered in High German and Low German, which he called his mother tongue. He described the bill’s aim as “nationale Abgrenzung” and said that, as mayor, he had found it better to speak Low German with the people he dealt with. In East Frisian Low Saxon he spoke of people in Iowa, about seventy, who spoke Low German and no High German and were, he said, integrated Americans, and told the AfD benches: “Düütschland word neet armer dör anner Spraken, Düütschland word rieker.”

Wolfgang Schäuble of the CDU, then Bundestag president, interrupted and asked Saathoff to see that everyone could understand him. He also offered a question from Detlev Spangenberg, which Saathoff refused. Saathoff apologised to the stenographic service—“Ich gelobe Besserung”—and ended, “Besten Dank för ’t Tohören, leev Kolleginnen un Kollegen.” The administration asked Reinhard Goltz of the Institut für Niederdeutsche Sprache in Bremen for a written record of the Low German, as it had done for other dialect speeches.

On 2 March 2023, five years to the day, Saathoff opened an agreed debate on the 25th anniversary of the entry into force, on 1 March 1998, of the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Almost entirely in Low German, he said, “Wat bün ik blied, dat wi vandaag rechtschapen mitnanner up Platt proten köönt – neet blot over Platt, sünnern ok up Platt,” and argued that Platt belonged in nurseries, schools, courts, town halls, care homes and parliament. Astrid Damerow spoke North Frisian; others used Low German. Danish, Frisian, Sorbian, Romanes and Low German have been protected in Germany since 1999, and the stenographers had to record the speeches word for word. Saathoff thanked them and said he could not promise never to use Low German again, though his next speech would be in High German.

Parliamentary group and the Keerlke Prize

The debate had been sought by the Parlamentskreis Plattdeutsch, an informal cross-party circle outside the committees. On 12 January 2022 the FDP announced that Gyde Jensen, member for Nordfriesland/Dithmarschen Nord in North Frisia, and Saathoff, member for Aurich–Emden, had founded it so deputies could meet to speak Low German and discuss how to promote it. In the 2023 sitting Saathoff thanked Jensen for the idea. Andreas Mattfeldt (CDU), speaking Low German, called the circle newly founded and credited her with organising it; Linda Heitmann of Alliance 90/The Greens asked for Low German courses in schools and universities and more regional languages in the media.

On the evening of Friday, 18 November 2022, the association Oostfreeske Taal gave Saathoff the Keerlke Prize at the Hotel Novum in Hinte, in East Frisia, for his work for Low German in the Bundestag. Chairman Hans Freese presented it; Frank Baumann, mayor of Krummhörn, gave the laudation.

The association has awarded the prize since 1993. The trophy is a clay figure of Keerlke, a character in Wilhelmine Siefkes’s novel of that name, made by the Esens sculptor Christian Eisbein. Its list names Saathoff, from Pewsum, for 2022, between Heinz Janssen (2021) and Artur Reents (2023).

Personal life and voluntary offices

Family and residence

Johann Saathoff was born on 9 December 1967 in Emden, Lower Saxony. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members' own information, describes him as Evangelical Lutheran, married, and the father of five children. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the SPD parliamentary group give the same date and place of birth and the same account of marriage and children, without naming a spouse. On his own website he gives his wife's first name as Sonja.

Abgeordnetenwatch lists his place of residence as Pewsum, in the municipality of Krummhörn in the district of Aurich, East Frisia.

Voluntary offices and memberships

The self-reported Bundestag biography lists membership of the services union ver.di, the welfare association Arbeiterwohlfahrt, the Sozialverband Deutschland and the metalworkers' union IG Metall. Interests published under the rules for Bundestag members also record him as a member of the board of the Deichacht Krummhörn, a member of the Kreistag of the district of Aurich, an honorary member of the Landschaftsversammlung of the Ostfriesische Landschaft in Aurich, and an honorary member of the Trägerversammlung of the Ostfriesische Landschaftliche Brandkasse. The SPD group dates the district-council seat from 1 November 2021.

A Deichacht is an East Frisian dike association for the main dikes. The state coastal authority NLWKN states that 22 such self-governing public-law bodies build and maintain Lower Saxony's main sea and river dikes against storm surges. Each is run by a board whose chair is also styled Deichrichter, Deichhauptmann or Deichgraf, with a committee elected by the members supervising the business. The Deichacht Krummhörn, founded on 1 March 1963 under section 7 of the Lower Saxony Dike Act, describes itself as a water and soil association under the federal Water Association Act, supervised by the district of Aurich and the city of Emden. Its statute assigns storm-surge protection: the dikes and foreland, sluices and other structures in the dike, and preparations for dike defence. A glossary on its website reserves Oberdeichrichter for the chair and Deichrichter for a board member who is neither chair nor deputy. The Bundestag filing lists Saathoff as a board member, not as chair.

The Ostfriesische Landschaft is a public-law successor of the historic East Frisian estates, covering the districts of Aurich, Leer and Wittmund and the city of Emden, with regional tasks in culture, scholarship and education. Its Landschaftsversammlung is honorary: 49 ordinary members chosen by those four councils, seven Landschaftsräte and the Landschaftspräsident.

The Ostfriesische Landschaftliche Brandkasse is East Frisia's public fire insurer, formed in 1953 from a town society founded in 1754 by order of Frederick II of Prussia and a rural society founded in 1767 at the Landschaft's initiative. The Landschaft is a joint carrier with the Sparkassenverband Niedersachsen and the Landschaftliche Brandkasse Hannover and acts through the assembly and the collegium. In the Brandkasse's Trägerversammlung that assembly is quorate however many members attend, and the insurer treats the two Landschaft organs as its own.