# Jürgen Trittin

# Jürgen Trittin

Jürgen Trittin (born 25 July 1954 in Bremen) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens). He was a member of the Bundestag from 1998 until his resignation took effect on 5 January 2024. From 27 October 1998 to 22 November 2005 he was federal minister for the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety in the cabinets of Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder](/people/gerhard-schroder), of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany).

He passed the Abitur in 1973 at the Gerhard-Rohlfs-Gymnasium in Bremen-Vegesack, served six of the prescribed fifteen months of basic military service in 1974, and in 1975 spent nine months in civilian service at a home for boys with behavioural difficulties near Bremen. From 1975 to 1981 he studied social sciences at the University of Göttingen and graduated as a Diplom-Sozialwirt. He joined the Greens in 1980. In Lower Saxony he sat in the Landtag and, from 1990 to 1994, was the state's minister for federal and European affairs, a member of the Bundesrat and the Land's plenipotentiary to the federation. From 1994 to 1998 he was a spokesperson of the Greens' federal executive.

On 15 June 2000 the government in which he served agreed with the electricity utilities to limit German nuclear power plants to an average operating life of about 32 years, counted in residual quantities of electricity rather than fixed shutdown dates. Trittin said the outcome would leave no nuclear plant on the grid from about 2018, and anti-nuclear groups announced protests against the compromise. On 1 April 2000 the Renewable Energy Sources Act (*Gesetz für den Vorrang Erneuerbarer Energien*) replaced the earlier electricity feed-in law, with the stated aim of doubling the share of electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

After red–green left office he was deputy chair of the Green Bundestag group from 2005 to 2009, with responsibility for international politics and human rights, and chair of the group from 2009 to 2013, alongside Renate Künast. A ballot of party members in November 2012 chose him and Katrin Göring-Eckardt as lead candidates for the 2013 federal election; Trittin received 71.9 percent of the valid votes. The Greens then won 8.4 percent of the second votes, down from 10.7 percent in 2009, and 63 seats. Days before that election, the historian Franz Walter, whose research the party had commissioned, wrote that Trittin had approved a 1981 Göttingen election pamphlet calling for some sexual acts between adults and children to be decriminalised; Trittin said the failure to stop that demand had been his mistake and that he regretted it. He later served on the Foreign Affairs Committee and, from 2021, as the group's foreign-policy spokesperson and a member of the [NATO Parliamentary Assembly](/organizations/nato-parliamentary-assembly). In December 2023 he told *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* that he would give up the seat the following January, calling the middle of the legislative term the moment "to leave of my own accord" after 25 years in parliament.

## Early life and education

### Family and schooling

Jürgen Trittin was born on 25 July 1954 in Bremen and spent his first 19 years in the northern district of Vegesack. Interviewed in 2001, his mother, Helene Trittin, described a comfortably off household with roots in the Oldenburg region: his father, Klaus Trittin, was Prokurist and head of accounting at the Bremer Tauwerk-Fabrik, and the three children grew up in a self-built house. The younger siblings were Uwe, then a banker in Leipzig, and Anke, then a biologist in a Berlin hospital; she said neither shared Jürgen’s politics. Klaus Trittin died in 1998.

In 2012 *Stern*, citing documents, reported that Klaus Trittin had volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1941 at 17, joined the Nazi Party a year later, and served against Poland and the Soviet Union. Wounded in 1943, he was later promoted to SS-Obersturmführer; a “Kampfgruppe Trittin” was among units still fighting in East Prussia in the Wehrmacht report of 9 May 1945, and he was a Soviet prisoner until 1950. Jürgen Trittin has said his father was convicted because he had been in the SS, spoke of killing and of “incredible crimes,” and, his mother told him, testified against other perpetrators. *Stern* reported that the father discussed that past and, when Jürgen was 15, took his sons to the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and told them never to allow what “we” had committed; Trittin has repeated the visit with his brother, then about 12 or 13, and his father’s view that the Soviet sentence was justified. His sport teacher Wilhelm H. Brand told *[Cicero](/people/cicero)* in 2013 a different version: that the father had stayed silent about Nazism, and that the silence had driven the boy to protest.

He took the Abitur in 1973 at the Gerhard-Rohlfs-Gymnasium in Bremen-Vegesack, named for the Africa explorer Gerhard Rohlfs. His mother called him a consistently good pupil and a pupil representative often at odds with the head, while his father sat as a parents’ representative. Brand remembered him as intelligent but contradictory and, after 1968, a junior figure beside older activists at the school. A 2017 *Spiegel* profile described the first 14 years as those of a table-tennis-playing scout, with a change from the tenth form once 1968 and the Vietnam War reached Vegesack. Trittin has said he was confirmed in a nominally Protestant household and left the church after arguing, in a parish discussion, that it could not endorse a war that included the My Lai massacre. At the school’s centenary he demanded that colonialism be discussed—he has called Rohlfs “an evil colonialist”—and with other pupils blocked the road to the Strandlust inn where the ceremony was held; the profile also describes demonstrations against the German Emergency Acts, school rules, Franz Josef Strauß and tram fares.

Refusing armed service was, he has said, always settled, and he has dated the refusal to age 17, but recognition as a conscientious objector was denied at two instances. From April 1974 he served in the Bundeswehr as a signals soldier until he won his case in November 1974. His Bundestag biography records six of fifteen months’ basic service in 1974, then nine months of Zivildienst in 1975 at a home near Bremen for boys with behavioural difficulties. After one week, he later said, he was left to supervise 16 adolescents alone over a weekend, some barely younger than he was.

### Studies in Göttingen

He studied social sciences at the University of Göttingen and graduated in 1981 as a Diplom-Sozialwirt. Chronologies of the start differ: the detailed Bundestag biography places the course in 1975–1981, after military and civilian service, while a 2010 university press release and his alumni profile date the beginning to the period after the 1973 Abitur in Göttingen. He has said he chose the university for what he considered the best integrated social-science degree. He sat on the AStA, the general student committee, and was for a time president of the student parliament. His mother remembered that activity, and a left-wing departmental student council, but said the parents knew he was on the left without knowing the detail.

## From the radical left to the Greens

### Kommunistischer Bund and student activism

As a social-science student at the University of Göttingen in the 1970s, Trittin belonged to the Kommunistischer Bund (KB), a cadre group founded in 1971 in northern Germany. The 1977 report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, read into the Bundestag record in January 2001, said the KB had no written programme and did not reject violence on principle, judging it by tactical necessity; officials added that personal files could not describe an individual member's role. Trittin later told *Stern* that the milieu fought professional bans on radicals (*Berufsverbote*) and nuclear power and campaigned for free speech and women's emancipation: "We wanted a different state." He said he had never used violence himself.

In 1977, after the [Red Army Faction](/organizations/red-army-faction) murdered Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, an anonymous "Mescalero" published "Buback – ein Nachruf" in the student paper *Göttinger Nachrichten*. He wrote that he "could not conceal my clandestine joy" (*klammheimliche Freude*) at the killing, while also warning that "our path to socialism cannot be paved with corpses." Republishing the text led to prosecutions; thirteen professors in Lower Saxony were acquitted, among their lawyers the later chancellor Gerhard Schröder. In 2001 the prosecutor who had led the Göttingen case, Klaus Kutzer, said Trittin had played no part. Jürgen Arens, then on the student executive, said Trittin "had nothing to do with our affair" and had not edited the paper; Arens also said he had never sat on the AStA, whereas a 2010 university note described him as an AStA member and for a time president of the student parliament.

In an NDR interview on 6 January 1994, which he read to the Bundestag on 24 January 2001, Trittin called the obituary a "radical-pacifist essay" and said he had been among those who refused to distance themselves from it, a position he then still thought right. Days earlier Michael Buback had said a short meeting on a train left him believing the minister saw no need to do so. Trittin answered that the exchange had been reported incompletely, that he had twice said he had not made the essay his own, and that he had offered condolences. To *Stern* he then called that defence of publication "perhaps too headstrong," something he would "certainly" not repeat, because the language "must have been unbearable for the relatives of the victims." "That was a serious mistake." He joined the Greens in 1980.

### Göttingen and the 1981 programme

His Bundestag biography lists him, for [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative)-Grüne-Initiativen-Liste (AGIL) in Göttingen, as a research assistant and freelance journalist in 1981–82 and as business manager of its city-council group from 1982 to 1984.

On 16 September 2013, less than a week before the Bundestag election, Franz Walter and Stephan Klecha wrote in the *taz* that Trittin, then a council candidate, had been one of five members of the final editorial board of AGIL's 1981 municipal programme, and the only name marked as legally responsible under press law. The Greens had commissioned their Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research that May, on a contract *Spiegel* put at 209,000 euros, to examine how pedophile activists' demands had entered the new party. In a section supplied by the Homosexuelle Aktion Göttingen, the programme sought to exempt from punishment sexual acts between children and adults that involved neither the use nor the threat of violence, a change aimed at sections 174 and 176 of the criminal code.

Trittin told the *taz* that the account was accurate. Not only the Greens, he said, but "even more so" AGIL had been pressed by groups that wanted to legalize the abuse of children; the list's habit had been to adopt initiatives' demands "one to one," and "we did not even question it." "This is also my responsibility. And these are also my mistakes, which I regret." Correction had taken too long: "There can be no impunity for abuse." The next day in Augsburg he said the position the Greens, "myself included with that responsibility," had taken in the early 1980s "must seem like mockery to all victims of abuse."

Walter and Klecha's December 2013 interim report set the passage beside the federal basic programme adopted at Saarbrücken in March 1980, which already required that sections 174 and 176 punish sexual acts only in cases of violence, threat of violence, or abuse of dependence. They wrote that this would have lifted the absolute ban on sexual acts with children, and that programmes in Hamburg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Bremen, Münster, Hanover and Göttingen had copied the demand. In Göttingen the list took the Homosexuelle Aktion text and labelled it as such; the final editors, Trittin among them, raised no objection because the lines matched the federal programme. Much of the section, on equal treatment of gay and straight relationships, was in their view "predominantly reasonable"; the criminal-law lines were easier to miss, and a city council could not have changed the code. The study appeared in 2015 as *Die Grünen und die Pädosexualität*, edited by Walter, Klecha and Alexander Hensel.

Co-chair [Cem Özdemir](/people/cem-ozdemir) said he did not yet know the material and could not comment. CDU politician Philipp Missfelder said Trittin should consider whether he was the right person to front the Greens; [Alexander Dobrindt](/people/alexander-dobrindt), general secretary of the CSU, said he should step down as lead candidate. Co-lead candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt said he had not known he was listed as responsible, called such demands in the Greens of the 1970s and 1980s "absolutely incomprehensible," and said she was glad the chapter was closed.

## Lower Saxony and national party leadership

### Landtag and state minister

Trittin entered the Landtag of Lower Saxony in 1985, after a year as press spokesperson of the Green group. The Greens had won 6.5 percent and 11 seats in 1982 and meant to rotate deputies at mid-term. Landtag president Bruno Brandes of the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) refused to accept five resignations as ordinary, and the CDU majority blocked them. The state [constitutional court](/organizations/constitutional-court) then sided with the Greens, and five of the eleven mandates changed hands. Trittin sat until 1990. In 1986 the Greens took 7.1 percent and again 11 seats, still opposite Minister-President Ernst Albrecht; his Bundestag biography says he chaired the Green group for three years in this period.

At the 1990 election the Greens fell to 5.5 percent and eight seats, and the Social Democratic Party won 44.2 percent and 71 of 155. They formed Lower Saxony’s first SPD–Green government, under Gerhard Schröder, for the twelfth period, 21 June 1990 to 20 June 1994. Waltraud Schoppe became minister for women and Trittin minister for federal and European affairs. He sat in the Bundesrat and was the state’s plenipotentiary to the federation; the same biography lists membership of the European Committee of the Regions in 1994–1995. The Green group later recorded repeated fights with the SPD over programme, including a Daimler-Benz test track and the Europipe line through the Wadden Sea.

In 1994 the Greens rose to 7.4 percent and 13 seats, but the SPD, with 44.3 percent and 81 of 161, had a majority of one after the Free Democratic Party missed the threshold on 4.4 percent. Schröder dropped the coalition. Trittin was a Landtag member again in 1994–1995, as deputy chair of the Green group, then left for the federal executive.

### Federal executive, 1994–1998

The federal party he joined at the top had just been remade. In mid-May 1993 Alliance 90, formed from East German civil-rights groups, and the West German Greens finished a merger presented as a partnership of equals, after the western party had missed the five-percent hurdle in 1990 and the clash of “Fundis” and “Realos” had driven leading radicals out. Alliance 90/The Greens returned to the Bundestag on 16 October 1994 with 7.3 percent and 49 seats. At the Potsdam-Babelsberg congress that December, delegates made Trittin, identified with the party left, and the Hamburg Realo Krista Sager equal speakers of the federal executive. He had no opponent and took 85.4 percent; Sager beat the eastern candidate Christiane Ziller by ten votes, and a call for an eastern speaker was rejected. With Sager and with [Joschka Fischer](/people/joschka-fischer), speaker of the Bundestag group, he excluded cooperation with the Union; Fischer called that talk a “ghost debate.” On Bosnia the congress urged Bonn to refuse Bundeswehr deployments and combat aircraft, while backing a larger UN blue-helmet presence.

Sager stood down in 1996 and returned to Hamburg as lead candidate of the Green-Alternative List. At Suhl that December, Trittin was re-elected with 70.5 percent and Gunda Röstel, a little-known teacher from Flöha in Saxony put forward as the eastern-quota candidate, with 70.3 percent. Realo delegates had withheld votes from him. He told the congress the executive was not a doctrinal court over the parliamentary group, backing away from his pressure on Fischer to follow party decisions on Bosnia; Suhl refused to reopen that debate. Röstel, a Realo, said she saw no alternative to the NATO-led IFOR mission if more civilians were not to die, and she joined attacks on Chancellor [Helmut Kohl](/people/helmut-kohl) to pitches for small business and the unions.

In May 1998 a Hameln congress put Trittin second on the Lower Saxony Bundestag list, the first place open to a man under the women’s quota, with 96 of 168 votes; Gila Altmann was first. The campaign was loaded with a disputed petrol-price resolution, which Röstel called a “current bogey,” and with the Bosnia mandate: Helmut Lippelt blamed a Magdeburg vote against extending SFOR more than the petrol decision for the party’s loss of standing in the press. On 27 September 1998 the Greens won 6.7 percent and 47 seats, and the SPD 40.9 percent and 298, against 198 for the CDU, 47 for the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria), 43 for the FDP and 36 for the PDS. The SPD and the Greens had a majority, and the party entered federal government for the first time. Trittin, a Bundestag member from 1998, left the speakership. Antje Radcke, of the Hamburg left, prepared to succeed him beside Röstel, arguing that the base had to be taken into government and that party office should stay separate from a parliamentary mandate.

## Federal environment minister

Jürgen Trittin of Alliance 90/The Greens was Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from 27 October 1998 to 22 November 2005, through both cabinets of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He was the first Green in the office. With the Social Democratic Party of Germany he tied a negotiated limit on nuclear power to support for renewable energy, a [Kyoto Protocol](/facts/kyoto-protocol) climate programme, and laws on nature, packaging and scrap cars. The Bundestag and the finance ministry drafted several of them.

### Nuclear phase-out

The phase-out was negotiated. In the night of 14–15 June 2000 the government and the utilities settled on a reference life of 32 calendar years and a residual electricity quantity from 1 January 2000; once that quantity was used up, the right to operate ended. Amounts could be moved, as a rule from older and smaller reactors to newer and larger ones, so the date of the last shutdown was left open. The flexible scheme was the one economics minister Werner Müller had wanted. *Der Spiegel* called the result a bitter pill for the Greens.

The text initialled on 14 June 2000 named VEBA, VIAG, RWE and EnBW for the companies, and [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier), Rainer Baake and Alfred Tacke for the government. On 11 June 2001 Schröder, Trittin and Müller signed with Ulrich Hartmann of [E.ON](/organizations/e-on), Dietmar Kuhnt of RWE, Gerhard Goll of EnBW and Manfred Timm of Hamburg’s HEW. Vattenfall was not a party. Reference output, excluding Mülheim-Kärlich, was 160.99 terawatt-hours a year, plus 5.5 percent. RWE dropped that plant and a damages suit against Rhineland-Palatinate and received 107.25 terawatt-hours to transfer. The government promised undisturbed lawful operation and no discriminatory nuclear tax, and the quantities were to go into an amended Atomic Energy Act banning new commercial reactors and requiring on-site stores. From 1 July 2005 only direct final storage was allowed. Exploration of the Gorleben salt dome stopped for three to ten years.

Trittin urged the Greens to accept a “caesura” and, at the 2001 signing, spoke of a “historic setting of the course.” Co-chair Antje Radcke wanted the Münster congress to reject the deal and said she would risk the coalition, since only two plants would close in the next term; Gunda Röstel and Renate Künast defended it. The CDU and CSU called the exit a serious mistake, and Edmund Stoiber and Roland Koch considered the Federal Constitutional Court over the exclusion of the Länder. VIAG’s Wilhelm Simson said the firms had limited existing plants, not abandoned reactor technology. BUND and Greenpeace saw a guarantee of long further operation and weaker safety leverage; NABU and Greenpeace’s Susanne Ochse said the remaining output would roughly duplicate the waste produced since nuclear generation began. RWE welcomed the end of an open-ended economic risk.

On 14 November 2001 six Castor casks from La Hague reached Gorleben; about 200 people in the anti-nuclear movement in Germany blocked the road at Laase for twelve hours. Stade, on the Elbe in Lower Saxony, was the first regularly operated commercial reactor to close. Spiegel reported on 11 November 2003 that E.ON would shut the 660-megawatt plant that Friday, 14 November, for economic reasons, with residual electricity left to transfer. Obrigheim, due by 31 December 2002 under the agreement, ran until 2005 on power shifted from Philippsburg 2. Critics had long called Stade a “scrap reactor.”

### Renewables, climate and ecological tax reform

The Renewable Energy Sources Act was introduced by the SPD and Green groups as Drucksache 14/2341. Hermann Scheer (SPD) and Kurt-Dieter Grill (CDU/CSU) were rapporteurs of the lead economics committee. The Bundestag passed it on 25 February 2000 by 328 votes to 217, with five abstentions. Scheer and the Green MP Hans-Josef Fell spoke for the sponsoring groups; Trittin spoke as minister. The law was not his draft alone. In force on 1 April 2000, it replaced the 1991 feed-in law and set out to double the share of renewable electricity by 2010, from about 6 percent. Utilities had to buy electricity from sun, wind, water, biomass, gases from sewage, landfill and mines, and geothermal plant, at fixed rates—17.8 pfennig per kilowatt-hour for early wind output, then 12.1; 17 to 20 for biomass; 99 for solar, beside a 100,000-roofs programme—with the cost pooled nationally.

On 18 October 2000 the cabinet adopted a climate programme he proposed, aimed at the 1995 Berlin pledge, repeated in 1998, of a 25 percent CO2 cut by 2005 against 1990. The paper found that 1990–98 policies would yield at most 15 to 17 percent, and that the eco-tax, the renewable law and related schemes would still reach only 18 to 20 percent, a gap of 50 to 70 million tonnes. Under European Union burden-sharing, the Kyoto target was a 21 percent cut in the six gases over 2008–2012.

The ecological tax reform, a stepwise rise in energy taxes, was finance-ministry legislation. Trittin defended it: in December 1999 he cited an OECD survey that called it a useful instrument and urged that it continue. In April 2002 Spiegel reported that Schröder, against the Greens, would not raise the levy again from 2004. On the night of 29–30 March 2004 Trittin and economics minister Wolfgang Clement, with Schröder and Vice-Chancellor Joschka Fischer, set the EU emissions-trading cap at 503 million tonnes of CO2 a year for 2005–2007 and 495 million for 2008–2012. Clement had wanted 505 million in the first period. Trittin called that decent; Spiegel judged that Clement had largely won, and Greenpeace said the permits would not force real cuts.

### Waste, packaging and nature conservation

On 1 January 2003 a deposit began on one-way cans and bottles of beer, mineral water and carbonated soft drinks: 25 cents up to 1.5 litres and 50 cents above that. Spirit mixers, still drinks, wine, sparkling wine and spirits were left out. No national return system existed. Shops mostly took back only what they had sold, some outlets charged nothing, and the trade had hoped an election win for the Union would overturn a rule already challenged up to the Federal Constitutional Court. A common system was promised for 1 October 2003. Enforcement lay with the Länder.

A new Federal Nature Conservation Act replaced the 1976 law on 4 April 2002. As framework law it required a biotope network on at least 10 percent of each Land, gave recognised associations a federal right to sue, and defined “good agricultural practice,” including limits on fertiliser and on ploughing grassland in erosion-prone places. On 31 May 2002 the Bundesrat passed an end-of-life vehicle law Trittin had tabled, in force on 1 July and transposing the EU directive of September 2000. Makers had to take scrap cars and light vans back free of charge—new vehicles from summer 2002, the existing fleet only from January 2007.

### Coalition conflicts

Inside the coalition the sharpest fight was with Wolfgang Clement, economics minister from 2002. In September 2003 he still gave coal, gas and oil the “greatest importance,” while press reports of the subsidy report put aid per hard-coal job at about 61,000 euros in 2002. Finance minister Hans Eichel had spoken of cutting coal aid; Clement’s paper instead proposed deep cuts for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal power. Reinhard Loske of the Greens called that paradoxical. Schröder defended coal subsidies past 2005 and, participants said, wanted renewable support reduced. The same pattern showed elsewhere. Radcke’s wing treated the nuclear quantities as a retreat and Simson as reversible industrial policy; the pledge against a discriminatory nuclear tax limited later pressure on operators. Retailers, not the SPD, led the attack on the deposit. Schröder, not the environment ministry, stopped further eco-tax rises from 2004, and free return of cars already on the road waited until 2007.

## Parliamentary leadership and the 2013 election

### Group leadership, 2005–2013

The federal election of 18 September 2005 ended seven years of government by the Social Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens. The Greens took 8.1 percent of the second votes and 51 seats in the Bundestag, and returned to opposition. At the Green group's meeting on 27 September the chairs were filled by contested votes. Trittin, standing for the left, tied Renate Künast on 18 votes in the first round and lost the runoff 17 to 33; Katrin Göring-Eckardt had 15 and withdrew. He then stood down, and Fritz Kuhn beat Göring-Eckardt 37 to 10 for the second chair. From 2005 to 2009 Trittin was a deputy chair, responsible for the working group on international politics and human rights, and a member of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union.

For the 2009 election the Greens, for the first time, had a congress choose lead candidates rather than have the executive name one, as it had for Joschka Fischer. On 16 November 2008 the Erfurt congress voted 92 percent for Künast and Trittin. On 27 September 2009 the party won 10.7 percent of the second votes—4,643,272—and 68 seats, then its best federal result, and remained in opposition to the Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union and the Free Democratic Party under Chancellor [Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel). On 6 October the group elected Künast and Trittin co-chairs for two years, with no opponents: she received 79.1 percent and he 91 percent. Kuhn did not stand. They promised a hard opposition line. Trittin said the aim was to deny the coalition a majority in 2013, starting with a motion for an inquiry into the Gorleben nuclear-waste site. On 18 October 2011 the 68-member group confirmed them again, still unopposed and with the same percentages, on 66 ballots.

### Lead candidacy and the 2013 result

The 2013 ticket was chosen in the party's first membership ballot, with results announced on 10 November 2012. Members could cast two votes, and the statutes required at least one woman. Trittin received 71.9 percent of valid votes and Göring-Eckardt, a Bundestag vice-president, 47.3 percent; Künast had 38.6 percent and party chair [Claudia Roth](/people/claudia-roth) 26.2 percent. About 62 percent of nearly 60,000 members voted. Federal manager Steffi Lemke called it a balance of wings and of continuity with renewal: Göring-Eckardt was identified with the realists, Trittin with the left. Both ruled out a coalition with the CDU and CSU.

The Berlin programme congress of 27 April 2013 adopted, with no votes against, a top income-tax rate of 49 percent from €80,000 a year and 45 percent from €60,000, against a general top rate of 42 percent. It also approved a temporary 1 percent levy on net wealth above €1 million, capped for firms at 35 percent of profits and expected to raise about €100 billion over several years before a permanent wealth tax, plus a phased reduction of married couples' income splitting. The money was assigned to education, childcare, ecological change and debt reduction. Baden-Württemberg's minister-president [Winfried Kretschmann](/people/winfried-kretschmann) had warned against tightening taxes too far. Trittin became the public face of the package. After the election *Der Spiegel* reported that researchers treated that tax concept, for which he was one of those chiefly responsible, as the main cause of the defeat.

In August a proposed meat-free day in public canteens, a "Veggie Day", overtook the campaign. Infratest dimap, polling 1,000 adults for *Welt am Sonntag* on 6–7 August, found 61 percent opposed and 36 percent in favour. SPD candidate Peer Steinbrück said people should choose their own food. Trittin said that without the Greens nobody would discuss meat production he called harmful to the climate, socially damaging and a health risk, and that such a day would sharpen awareness and widen menus. By 11 September Forsa put the Greens under 10 percent for the first time in four years, after 23 percent at that institute about eighteen months earlier and figures near 30 percent elsewhere. The 10.7 percent of 2009, then a record, would now have been a setback. Trittin and Göring-Eckardt urged members into the final stretch in a letter headed "Auf geht's in den Endspurt!".

Six days before the vote, work the party had commissioned brought a 1981 Göttingen programme back into the campaign. Political scientist Franz Walter reported in the *tageszeitung* that Trittin had been legally responsible for a local Green list's platform calling, among other things, for some sexual acts between adults and children to go unpunished. He did not dispute it, saying the position "is wrong, was wrong and was corrected by us too late", and that the mistakes were his as well. CDU and CSU politicians demanded that he withdraw.

On 22 September 2013 the Greens won 3,694,057 second votes, 8.4 percent—down 2.3 points—and 63 seats, five fewer than before. On 24 September Künast told the realist deputies she would not stand again for the chair, a choice she dated to the membership ballot, and would seek a Bundestag vice-presidency instead. The same day Trittin told the group he would not run either: it needed a new leadership with 2017 in view. On 8 October Göring-Eckardt beat fellow realist Kerstin Andreae by 41 votes to 20, with two abstentions. Anton Hofreiter, the left's nominee, had 49 votes in favour, five against and seven abstentions, with two ballots invalid. Britta Haßelmann became parliamentary managing director with 60 of 62 votes, succeeding Volker Beck.

## Foreign and security policy

### Roles in the Bundestag

After the red–green government left office, Trittin was from 2005 to 2009 deputy chair of the Bundestag group of Alliance 90/The Greens for its working group on international politics and human rights, and a member of the Committee on European Union Affairs. The biography for the 19th electoral term states that from 2014 he was an ordinary member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly; the 20th-term biography records that membership for 2017–2021 and again from 2021.

After the 2021 election he became the Green group’s foreign-policy spokesperson and chair of its foreign-policy working group, stayed on the Foreign Affairs Committee and became a deputy member of the Defence Committee. In the 20th Bundestag he also chaired the German–American parliamentary group and, from 11 to 15 September 2022, led its delegation to Pennsylvania and Washington for the Congress–Bundestag Seminar. He gave up his seat on 2 January 2024 and left the Bundestag at the end of 5 January 2024, which ended these offices.

### Wars, alliances and human rights

As environment minister during the [Kosovo War](/facts/kosovo-war), Trittin called the NATO air strikes a mistake. In Washington on 19 April 1999 he said the allies had misjudged how quickly bombing would stop the persecution of Kosovo Albanians, and that any exit had to come inside the alliance, including through Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. In 2014 he rejected former chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s later description of the operation as unlawful. Before the [Iraq War](/facts/iraq-war) he told *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* on 19 February 2003 that Iraq was not an acute threat, that inspectors needed more time, and that Germany would agree to no resolution legitimising war; he traced the dispute to the Bush administration’s claim of a right to preventive war and its readiness to bypass the [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations).

As Green group co-chair in the [Libyan civil war](/facts/libyan-civil-war), he said on 18 March 2011 that Germany had rightly abstained with Brazil and India, while urging a ceasefire, a protection zone, sanctions and an oil cutoff for Muammar Gaddafi. *Der Spiegel* reported that the leadership first welcomed the abstention and that Trittin then shifted toward Cem Özdemir, who had opposed it. On the [war in Afghanistan](/facts/war-in-afghanistan), he wrote in June 2021 that a Green majority had refused the mandate since 2013 and that the remaining NATO troops, rather than stopping the escalation, had become a target and a legitimation for it.

On the Russo-Ukrainian War, he said in April 2014 that the conflict could not be solved through NATO and that Ukrainian membership was out of the question, while Russia had broken international law in Crimea. He told the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* that NATO should stop its sabre-rattling: permanent troops in Poland would be read as escalation, and enlargement to states with open territorial disputes would destabilise the alliance. In May 2021 he rejected a proposal by Robert Habeck for defensive weapons, saying exports to Ukraine would break the rule against arms for war zones and that only a political settlement was possible. On 19 January 2022 he told *Der Spiegel* that military goods for crisis regions added no security and would, in Ukraine, more likely destabilise, and that no real line separated defensive from offensive weapons.

After the full-scale invasion he called that view an error. In the Bundestag on 6 April 2022, after the killings in Bucha, he said it had been wrong to think [Vladimir Putin](/people/vladimir-putin) could be deterred economically—“Er versteht nur Abschreckung durch Militär und Gewalt”—and for that reason backed the €100 billion fund, a stronger eastern flank and weapons for Ukraine, with evidence preserved for the International Criminal Court. On 26 April he defended heavy-weapons deliveries so Ukrainian forces would not be overrun, provided Germany and NATO did not become parties to the war.

The restrictive export line was not limited to Ukraine. In June 2014 he demanded a stop to German arms deals with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which he said had helped the Islamic State, and he rejected a German or U.S. military role in that crisis. In November 2016, at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Istanbul, he urged a halt to deliveries Turkey could use in a war against parts of its own population, arguing that the ban on arms for war zones had to apply inside the alliance. In November 2019 he called NATO a shadow of itself because members’ interests diverged—Turkey in Syria, the United States on trade and Iran—while still judging it effective against symmetric threats, including Baltic air policing and a rotating eastern presence.

After the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, in the ensuing war, he said in December that Germany stood with Israel but that Israel was losing support and had to keep international law in self-defence, citing settler violence in the West Bank and the failure to supply Gaza. He defended Germany’s abstention on a General Assembly ceasefire text: hostages’ release could be negotiated in, he said, but Germany could not vote yes if the Hamas attack was not named as terrorism.

## Later career and personal life

### Final years in parliament

After he did not stand again in 2013 for the chair of the Bundestag group of Alliance 90/The Greens, Jürgen Trittin remained a member for Lower Saxony, returned on the state list with Göttingen (constituency 053) given as his constituency. In the 18th legislative period (2013–2017) he was a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. His entry for the 20th period, which the Bundestag notes is drawn from members’ own information, records that he remained on that committee and, from 2021, was the Green group’s foreign-policy spokesperson, a deputy member of the Defence Committee and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. The same account states that his seat on the party council, held since 2000, ended in 2013.

In December 2023 he told *Der Spiegel* that the middle of the legislative period was the right moment to leave of his own accord. He said he had decided before the 2021 election that it would be his last candidacy, and that in the summer of 2023 he had realised the coming autumn would mark 25 years in the Bundestag — “a nice anniversary on which to take one’s leave.” He informed the Green group on the afternoon of 12 December. He renounced his membership on 2 January 2024 and left the Bundestag at the end of 5 January 2024. The Lower Saxony state returning officer then determined, under section 48 of the Federal Elections Act, that Ottmar Wilhelm von Holtz of Hildesheim — next on the Green state list, and a member from 2017 to 2021 — would succeed him.

### Writing, public roles and private life

Posts disclosed to the Bundestag included membership of the board of trustees of the public-law foundation Fonds zur Finanzierung der kerntechnischen Entsorgung (KENFO), which finances interim and final storage of nuclear waste, until 17 January 2024. From 19 May 2022 he was listed as a member of the foundation council of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik; from 6 February 2023 as a member of the presidium of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik; and as an unpaid member of the scientific advisory board of the Institut für Klimaschutz, Energie und Mobilität.

On 2 September 2024 Droemer Knaur in Munich published *Alles muss anders bleiben. Eine politische Autobiografie*, a 392-page hardcover. The book is arranged, in the publisher’s description, as four autobiographical essays on democracy, equality, ecology and international politics. Reviewing it in the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* of 23 September 2024, Peter Fahrenholz wrote that much of what would have been most interesting was left out: no real reckoning with Trittin’s position on the Red Army Faction, and no deeper account of the rivalry with Joschka Fischer or of the debate over German participation in the Kosovo War. He found the nuclear phase-out, which Trittin called a success story, set out in almost excessive detail, while the questions he thought central were pushed to the margins.

Bundestag biographies based on his own information describe him as married, with one daughter, and — in the 18th-period entry — as a member of the services union ver.di. *Focus* reported in December 2013 that he had recently married his long-time partner Angelika Büter at a very small ceremony that even close colleagues in the party had not known about. A 2024 *Focus* profile added that in the 1980s he had adopted the daughter of his then partner and that he had been a grandfather since the early 2000s. In late January 2010, while he was co-chair of the Green Bundestag group and aged 55, he suffered a heart attack. A group spokesperson said early treatment had stopped the infarction from spreading, that he was well, and that he would leave hospital within days but take no appointments for several weeks. In September 2024 he was living in the Berlin district of Pankow.

## Reception and legacy

### Assessments of the environmental record

In June 2000, as environment minister under Gerhard Schröder, he called the negotiated nuclear phase-out difficult but reasonable — "a caesura" and "the exit" — and asked Alliance 90/The Greens to accept residual lives of about 32 years. BUND, Greenpeace and NABU called it a de facto guarantee for existing plants; the CDU and CSU called the exit a serious mistake. The April 2002 Atomic Energy Act amendment, which his ministry presented as making that deal legally binding, replaced promotion of nuclear power with an orderly end to commercial use, banned new commercial reactors and capped each plant's remaining output.

After the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, Angela Merkel's coalition proposed a final exit in 2022, undoing lifetime extensions passed about seven months earlier. As leader of the Green Bundestag group, Trittin said there was no reason for praise: the government was correcting the extension "with a further error," relying on coal rather than a forced expansion of renewables.

Debate over the cost of the Renewable Energy Sources Act has often been laid at his door, though he was not its sole author. *Der Spiegel* called SPD deputy Hermann Scheer the decisive figure behind the 2000 law, which the *taz* has also credited in part to Green deputy Hans-Josef Fell; the 2004 revision was a government bill under Trittin. As that revision took effect, his ministry said the support would cost an average household only about one euro a month — "as much as a scoop of ice cream." In 2012 the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* dismissed his attack on industrial exemptions as a diversion from "planned statutory over-subsidisation," including higher solar and wind premiums he had secured in 2004 and guaranteed for 20 years. The surcharge overseen by the Bundesnetzagentur reached 6.88 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2017; from July 2022 it was set to zero and the support moved to the federal budget.

The deposit on one-way drinks containers, enforced from January 2003 under an ordinance from CDU predecessor Klaus Töpfer, opened in disarray. Discounters launched own-brand bottles to avoid taking back rivals' empties, and the retail federation spoke of "sheer chaos"; Merkel called the policy unbounded nonsense, and [Edmund Stoiber](/people/edmund-stoiber) labelled Trittin a "chaos minister." Twelve years on, *Spiegel* called the record mixed: can sales collapsed and then partly recovered, but the reusable share fell from 64 percent to 45.7 percent by 2012, short of the 80 percent he had sought.

### Public image

In February 2004 CSU parliamentary leader Michael Glos called Trittin an "Öko-Stalinist" — and Joschka Fischer a former terrorist — while ruling out a Union–Green coalition. He later said he had spoken in a background talk "as the words came," would not have used the phrase on camera, and did not know exactly what it meant; Green manager Volker Beck called it defamation, and Glos did not apologise.

The remark that forced a formal retreat came in March 2001. In a Westdeutscher Rundfunk interview on a Green congress resolution about asylum, Trittin said CDU general secretary Laurenz Meyer had "the mentality of a skinhead and not only the appearance," and cast Meyer's pride in being German as the "intellectual low flight that marks every racist thug in this republic." After an initial letter that regretted the personal injury but kept up the political criticism, and after Schröder told him simply to apologise, Trittin withdrew the comparison "with an expression of regret." [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) called the remarks grounds for dismissal, and [Guido Westerwelle](/people/guido-westerwelle) of the FDP said Trittin was "not suited in character" for ministerial office; Schröder left him in place.

A 2011 *Welt* gallery summarised the arc as a move "from communist to green Realo": a student in the Kommunistischer Bund, a Green from 1980, then a minister who bargained with the utilities. He remained identified with the party left, and when he left parliament in January 2024 the Green group replaced him as its foreign-policy spokesperson. In the 2013 campaign, research the party had commissioned showed he was press-law responsible for a 1981 Göttingen platform seeking to decriminalise sex between adults and minors if no violence was used; he called that adoption a mistake he regretted, while CDU and CSU politicians questioned his place at the head of the ticket.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/jurgen-trittin