Karl Bär

Karl Bär (born 13 March 1985 in Tegernsee) is a German agricultural economist and a politician of Alliance 90/The Greens from Bavaria. He has been a member of the Bundestag since the constitutive sitting of the 20th Bundestag on 26 October 2021, when he took his seat for the Green parliamentary group after being elected on the party’s Bavarian state list. He was returned at the 2025 election, again via the Bavarian list, and sits for constituency 222, Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen – Miesbach.

After his Abitur at Tegernsee in 2004 he studied agricultural science and Islamic studies in Berlin, with political science and sociology as minors, and completed the second of the two degrees in 2013. He joined the Greens in the autumn of 2003, was active in the party’s youth organisation, the Green Youth, from 2002 to 2013, and became one of its federal spokespersons in October 2011. From 2009 to 2013 he worked in the Bundestag office of the Green member Agnes Krumwiede, first as a student assistant and later as a research staffer. Since 2014 he has been an officer for agricultural and trade policy at the Umweltinstitut München, a Munich environmental organisation; the Bundestag’s disclosure of members’ interests lists that post, with a right to return, as his employment before he entered parliament.

At the 2014 Bavarian local elections he won seats on the market council of Holzkirchen, which the Bundestag biography calls his home municipality, and on the district council of Miesbach; he was re-elected to both honorary offices in 2020. While at the Umweltinstitut he was responsible for a 2017 campaign, “Pestizidtirol”, that placed a poster in Munich satirising South Tyrol’s tourism marketing and regional brand in order to draw attention to pesticide use in the province’s apple orchards. South Tyrol’s agriculture minister and more than 1,370 farmers filed criminal complaints alleging defamation and trademark counterfeiting. On 6 May 2022 the regional court in Bolzano acquitted him after the complainants had withdrawn and the prosecution asked that the remaining trademark count be reclassified as defamation, which the court then treated as inadmissible. His lawyer said the Council of Europe had in October 2020 described the complaints as a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

In the constituency, then numbered 223, he was the runner-up at the 2021 federal election: the Christian Social Union candidate Alexander Radwan took the seat with 41.3 percent of the first votes, and Bär, on list place 12, received 15.5 percent (20,829 votes). The Federal Returning Officer records the Greens’ Bavarian second-vote share that year as 14.1 percent, enough for his list place to yield a seat. In 2025 he stood sixth on the Bavarian Green list and again lost the direct contest, finishing third with 14.8 percent (20,820 votes), behind Radwan (46.4 percent) and Ingo Jochen Hahn of the Alternative for Germany (16.5 percent). In the 21st Bundestag he is deputy chair and a full member of the Committee on Agriculture, Food and Homeland, and a substitute member of the committees on the environment, on digital affairs and state modernisation, and on research, technology, space and technology assessment. He is also deputy chair of the Northern Adriatic parliamentary friendship group.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing in the Tegernsee region

Karl Bär was born on 13 March 1985 in Tegernsee, in the Miesbach district of Upper Bavaria. His parents' house was in Fellach, a village in the market town of Holzkirchen. In September 2013 the Münchner Merkur interviewed him in the garden arbour there, and in 2021 the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that he was living in his grandmother's house in Holzkirchen.

He attended primary school in Holzkirchen and then the Gymnasium Tegernsee, taking the Abitur in Tegernsee in 2004. He later traced an early ecological interest to those classrooms. A primary-school teacher, he said, had already explained in the early 1990s how climate change worked. In 2025 he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that teachers in Holzkirchen and at the Gymnasium Tegernsee had tried to interest pupils in ecology—for example by encouraging a wooden rather than a plastic ruler—and that they were pushing at an open door: "I found ecological questions important and exciting."

He has also described himself as an outsider at school. In the 2013 interview he said the beer at parties never appealed to him, so he stood aside and read Rainer Maria Rilke and Hannah Arendt—"cerebral stuff"—and came away feeling that "our society has a problem with otherness." Together with an ecological self-description he summed up as "I'm totally eco," that experience, he said, made Alliance 90/The Greens the logical choice. In 2025 he added that the bullying had been "arbitrary" and not a reaction to his ecological interests, but that the outsider role had sharpened his sense of how a society ought to be built, "so that different people can live contentedly, and not only those who adapt."

Studies in Berlin

After the Abitur he began a double programme in Berlin in agricultural science and Islamic studies, with political science and sociology as minor subjects. The Bundestag, drawing on his own disclosure, states that both courses were completed, the last of them in 2013, and records his profession as Agrarökonom (agricultural economist). A speaker profile for the Zukunftsdialog Agrar & Ernährung conference names the institutions: Islamic studies, with those two minors, at the Free University of Berlin, and agricultural science at Humboldt University of Berlin.

The magazine zenith reported that he chose Islamic studies in the period after the September 11 attacks and the 2003 Iraq War. During the programme he spent a semester in Istanbul—a journey he said he made by train—and afterwards added agricultural science; zenith wrote that his thesis examined guiding models of agriculture in Turkey. In early September 2013, while living between Fellach and Berlin, he told the Merkur that he expected to submit his Magister thesis before the federal election later that month. In 2021 he was quoted as speaking "passable Turkish and a little Arabic." After he entered the Bundestag, he told zenith that Islamic studies no longer had any bearing on his political work, though he could still use the knowledge occasionally in personal encounters.

Green Youth and early party work

Local and federal roles in the Grüne Jugend

Karl Bär has been a member of Alliance 90/The Greens since the autumn of 2003. His Bundestag biography, drawn from his own disclosures, records activity in the party's youth organization, the Grüne Jugend, from 2002 until 2013. A profile the organization published while he was federal spokesperson said that he and a few friends in a village in the Upper Bavarian Oberland joined the Grüne Jugend in 2002, and that he was spokesperson of the Holzkirchen group until 2004, when it broke up because most active members had finished school and left to study. A September 2013 profile in the Münchner Merkur gives the same local office, from 2002 to 2004.

He then sat on the federal executive as an assessor (Beisitzer). On the board elected in November 2006 at the members' assembly in Göttingen, which served until November 2007, Bär—a student of Islamic studies living in Berlin—was responsible for the state associations in Bavaria, Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein and for the ecology forum. He held the same brief on the board elected in October 2009 in Weimar, in office until the autumn of 2010. The Merkur lists the assessor periods as 2006–2007 and 2009–2010.

The 37th federal congress in Gelsenkirchen, from 7 to 9 October 2011, elected a new federal board. Bär became one of the two equal spokespersons, with Sina Doughan, who, like him, was born in Tegernsee. Freia Then was political director and Jens Parker treasurer. The organization said this board would serve until the autumn of 2012. Its office list also named Bär as substitute delegate to the working group on agriculture and rural development. The spokesperson profile assigned him environment and nature protection, agricultural policy, rural development, social policy and culture, and treated agricultural policy as his special field: feeding a growing population and keeping farming from destroying the environment were, in that wording, two sides of one task, to be met by independent, small-scale farming close to consumers rather than by factory farming.

The next board, elected in October 2012 again in Gelsenkirchen, served until the autumn of 2013. Doughan stayed on as spokesperson and Parker took the other spokesperson post; Bär was not on the new executive. The federal statute as of 9 October 2011 allowed only members to hold federal office and ended membership, and therefore any such office, on a member's 28th birthday. Born on 13 March 1985, Bär turned 28 in March 2013, during the year another one-year term would have covered. The statute still in force in December 2025 kept the 28th-birthday limit and a one-year board term. The Merkur dates his federal spokespersonship to 2011–2012.

Staff work for Agnes Krumwiede

From 2009 to 2013, alongside his studies in Berlin and his later Grüne Jugend offices, Bär worked in the Bundestag office of Agnes Krumwiede, first as a student assistant and later as a research assistant (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter). Krumwiede, a concert pianist born in 1977, was a Green member of the 17th Bundestag. Parliament's biography for that term lists her as a party member since 2001, a founding member of the Grüne Jugend, and an ordinary member of the Committee on Culture and Media. Her own curriculum vitae adds that she was the Green group's spokesperson for cultural policy and its Obfrau on that committee, and a parliamentary secretary from October 2009 to November 2012. The assistantship ended with that electoral term in 2013, the year Bär finished the last of his two degree courses.

Municipal and district politics

Holzkirchen market council

At the Bavarian municipal elections of 16 March 2014, Karl Bär won a seat on the 24-member market council of Holzkirchen, in the district of Miesbach. He took 2,007 votes on the list of Alliance 90/The Greens and was one of four Green councillors. The Christian Social Union won nine seats, the local FWG six and the Social Democratic Party five; turnout was 57.13 percent.

On 15 March 2020 he was re-elected with 3,790 votes, second on the Green list behind Robert Wiechmann. The Greens rose to six seats on 48,184 votes (26.92 percent), behind the CSU with eight seats and 34.62 percent; turnout was 61.65 percent. His Bundestag biography records the 2014 elections and the 2020 returns to this seat and the district council as honorary offices. After entering the Bundestag in September 2021 he resigned the market-council mandate. The Münchner Merkur reported in December 2021 that Martin Quaderer would succeed him and be sworn in mid-month. Bär was not a candidate when the council was renewed on 8 March 2026.

In July 2015 he, Sebastian Franz (CSU) and Thomas Hünerfauth (SPD) moved that reports, draft resolutions and annexes be published with agendas for public meetings, except where data protection required otherwise. A majority supported the motion. Mayor Olaf von Löwis (CSU) opposed the wording; the district office said publication lay in the mayor’s discretion, and von Löwis offered fuller agenda descriptions instead. In June 2017 the Green group asked the council to reject synthetic pesticides on municipal land, including cemeteries and school grounds, and to seek limits in future leases. Bär said an earlier inquiry had found that the works yard used products containing glyphosate and the neonicotinoid thiacloprid, and he called glyphosate harmful to biodiversity because it acts on all plants. Managing director Robert Haunschild said the yard had switched to hot-water equipment, while leased land still had no contractual ban. In May 2018 Bär alone opposed a ban on alcohol in parks and playgrounds, revising a 1981 bylaw after complaints about gatherings in Krankenhauspark.

Miesbach district council

The March 2014 elections also placed Bär on the 60-seat Kreistag of Landkreis Miesbach. The final count gave the Greens 14.77 percent and nine seats, and he was among those elected. On 15 March 2020 he was returned with 12,780 votes, third on the Green list behind Landrat Wolfgang Rzehak (23,287) and Wiechmann (13,354). The Greens won 11 seats on 490,943 votes. The district council information system lists him as a Green Kreistag member from 1 May 2014.

At the district elections of 8 March 2026 he led the Green candidates with 14,480 personal votes, from list place 4, and was elected again. The Greens fell to nine of 60 seats on 409,576 votes (15.2 percent), 4.0 percentage points below the previous result; district turnout was 65.6 percent. In the environment committee in December 2019 he backed a cloth-nappy subsidy, arguing that reusable-nappy users should be treated equally with buyers of the district’s disposable-nappy sacks, sold at recycling centres for one euro. The committee agreed to have a scheme drawn up; hygiene waste was put at about 18 percent of residual waste.

Work at the Umweltinstitut München

Agricultural and trade policy

From 2014 Karl Bär was Referent für Agrar- und Handelspolitik at the Umweltinstitut München, an environmental association in Munich. His published interests list that post as employment before membership of the Bundestag, which he entered in 2021, with a right to return and protection against dismissal. Seats won in the 2014 local elections, on the market council of Holzkirchen and the district council of Miesbach, ran alongside the job.

Trade work centred on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States, and on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada. In September 2014 the European Commission refused to register a European Citizens’ Initiative asking it to recommend repeal of the TTIP mandate and no conclusion of CETA. Organisers collected signatures anyway. In June 2015, at two million signatures — about twice the formal threshold, from roughly 470 organisations — Bär spoke as spokesperson of the self-organised initiative. He said members of the European Parliament should reject both agreements and, at minimum, investor–state dispute settlement, which he called a parallel justice beside state courts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that he had prepared the drive for the Umweltinstitut, and that by 9 November 2015 the total stood at 3,284,289 signatures, accepted in Berlin by Martin Schulz, then president of the European Parliament. The General Court of the European Union annulled the refusal on 10 May 2017. The Commission registered the initiative on 10 July 2017 and did not appeal, but the plea not to sign CETA was already without object: the agreement had been signed on 30 October 2016.

Before a September 2016 demonstration on Munich’s Odeonsplatz, he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which identified him as the institute’s agricultural and trade-policy officer, that fracking gas and tar sands should stay in the ground and hazardous chemicals be banned, and that the oil, chemical and genetic-engineering industries had prevailed in the CETA talks. In December 2018 the institute sued for minutes of the committees that apply CETA. Bär said secrecy blocked debate and harmed democracy. Commission secretary-general Martin Selmayr had refused access on data-protection grounds; Bär replied that the papers concerned pesticide approvals, food-residue limits and animal health, not personal data.

As a district councillor for Alliance 90/The Greens, he tabled in September 2014 a motion against TTIP, CETA and the Trade in Services Agreement, to be passed to the Bavarian government so that it could act in the Bundesrat. He argued that small farms could not compete with large North American holdings, that rules on genetic engineering should not be reopened in a district that had sought to keep farming free of it, and that municipal services — a new public kitchen in Holzkirchen, or even the water supply — might no longer be possible. In May 2014, already a Holzkirchen councillor, he told the Merkur that chlorine-disinfected chicken, genetically modified maize and pesticide chemicals could reach local tables if looser United States food rules were extended to Europe.

Campaigns before the South Tyrol action

On 25 February 2016 the institute reported glyphosate in all 14 best-selling German beers it tested, at 0.46 to 29.74 micrograms per litre. The highest figure was nearly 300 times the drinking-water limit of 0.1 micrograms per litre; beer has no glyphosate limit of its own. An ELISA screen, which the Süddeutsche Zeitung called disputed, was confirmed by LC-MS/MS where results were at or above 20 micrograms per litre. Marike Kolossa of the Federal Environment Agency said those confirmed values could be treated as detected, and called exposure “not desirable” while experts still disagreed about cancer. The cancer agency of the World Health Organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, had classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic”; Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) had not.

Replying the same day, without the original study or full method details, the BfR said residues were plausible and expected because glyphosate is approved on cereals, although in Germany brewing grain is generally excluded from the late applications that leave residues. At about 30 micrograms per litre, it calculated, an adult would have to drink roughly 1,000 litres in a day before intake approached the acceptable daily intake or acute reference dose then in force. The Süddeutsche Zeitung noted that the Umweltinstitut is an association campaigning against nuclear power, agricultural genetic engineering and TTIP, not an independent research institute.

In 2017 that line of pesticide criticism became a satirical poster series, “Pestizidtirol,” on spraying in South Tyrol’s apple orchards; the criminal case in Bolzano is a separate episode. Bär kept the agricultural and trade-policy post until he entered the Bundestag.

The South Tyrol pesticide case

The 2017 Pestizidtirol campaign

In August 2017 the Munich association Umweltinstitut München hung a large poster at the S-Bahn station on Karlsplatz (Stachus) in Munich. It parodied the “Südtirol sucht …” tourism campaign of South Tyrol’s marketing agency IDM and the province’s umbrella brand: an aerial view of a tractor spraying an apple orchard, the lines “Südtirol sucht saubere Luft. Südtirol sucht sich.”, a restyled logo reading “Pestizidtirol”, and the address pestizidtirol.info. Karl Bär, the institute’s agricultural-policy officer, ran the campaign to set holiday imagery against pesticide use. The site claimed more than 42 kilograms of active substance per hectare a year, against an Italian average of 6.6, and said spray drifted into meadows, woods and housing. It also cited a 2014 referendum in Mals, in the Vinschgau, in which about three quarters of voters backed farming without synthetic pesticides.

Booked for a week from 10 August, the poster was covered by the contractor Ströer after two days, following what the institute called a legal threat. The institute then distributed 1,000 smaller posters and called the removal censorship. Bär thought the threat had come from Bolzano. IDM’s Thomas Aichner told salto.bz that neither the province nor IDM had threatened anyone, that the slogan was not defamatory, and that only the province, as trademark owner, could sue.

Provincial leaders treated the parody as brand and economic damage, not fair comment. Governor Arno Kompatscher, quoted in the Dolomiten, called it “a bottomless insolence” and “completely unacceptable”, separated opinion from use of the logo, and told the province’s lawyers to act. IDM president Hansi Pichler said the mark would not be allowed to be damaged. Siegfried Rinner, of the South Tyrolean Farmers’ Union, said the poster spread false images and panic.

Criminal proceedings in Bolzano

On 26 September 2017 criminal complaints were filed in Bolzano. A case compilation lists agriculture councillor Arnold Schuler and 1,367 farmers against Bär, the Austrian author Alexander Schiebel, the Umweltinstitut and six of its directors, for aggravated defamation of South Tyrolean agriculture and for counterfeiting the “Südtirol” mark. Schiebel and Jacob Radloff of oekom, publisher of Schiebel’s Das Wunder von Mals, were pursued on a related file counted as Schuler plus 1,382 complainants. Schuler told salto.bz that criticism had gone too far: “We cannot tolerate South Tyrolean agriculture being portrayed so falsely.”

The first hearing at the Landesgericht Bolzano was on 15 September 2020. On 28 October 2020 the court closed, for lack of evidence, the files against board members and Radloff; Bär and Schiebel remained. Schiebel was acquitted in May 2021, the judge finding that defamation was not made out. Bär, on leave after his September 2021 election to the Bundestag for Alliance 90/The Greens, stayed a defendant. Schuler belongs to the South Tyrolean People's Party.

Complainants withdrew in stages. salto.bz reported that after four hearings Schuler and 1,373 farmers were out, leaving two brothers from Tschirland, who later withdrew too. On 28 January 2022 Südtirol News reported that the last defamation complainant, Tobias Gritsch, withdrew, telling the court that Schuler had pressed him to sign and later to withdraw. Lawyer Nicola Canestrini said that allegation should be investigated. Defamation could not continue without a private complainant. The trademark count remained, as an offence prosecuted ex officio.

Acquittal and the European SLAPP debate

On 6 May 2022 prosecutor Federica Iovene asked that the trademark count be reclassified as defamation, on the ground that there was no commercial purpose. Judge Ivan Perathoner declared the proceedings inadmissible. Because a complete withdrawal ends an Italian defamation case, the change brought an immediate acquittal of Bär and of the Umweltinstitut. The stated ground was procedural. The court did not decide whether the criticism was true, and it did not find the complaints abusive.

The label SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) came from critics and from European office-holders, not from the judgment. Canestrini had called the case an attempt to intimidate and to stop debate. On 27 October 2020 Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, listed the South Tyrol proceedings — brought by the agriculture councillor and apple farmers against environmental activists and a book publisher over pesticide use — among lawsuits “intended to intimidate and silence critics”, commonly called SLAPPs. That was her comment, not a court ruling or a decision of the Committee of Ministers. After the acquittal Canestrini said the court had confirmed the label. The Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE), a group of non-governmental organisations, also called the case a SLAPP.

Nine days earlier, on 27 April 2022, the European Commission had proposed a directive and a recommendation on SLAPPs, aimed at cross-border civil cases. CASE reproduced a message of 11 May from Commission vice-president Věra Jourová calling the Bolzano result an anti-SLAPP ruling in a cross-border case. Bär said South Tyrol had a pesticide problem and that stopping criticism through the courts had failed. The institute’s Fabian Holzheid said that, absent a specific legal shield, public pressure — CASE put the withdrawn charges at 1,376 — was what had ended the case.

Farm spray records

At the prosecutor’s request, 2017 spray diaries (Betriebshefte) of complaining farms were seized and shown to the defence. In May 2022 the institute said it was reading about 1,200 of them and hoped to present the results with the fruit industry.

In January 2023 the institute published an analysis of 681 Vinschgau diaries for 2017, the basis of a Süddeutsche Zeitung front-page report, “Das Gift auf dem Apfel”. The Berlin daily taz, citing those figures, reported 590,000 documented applications, no day without spraying from March to September 2017, and an average of 38 applications per orchard. Co-author Christine Vogt said several of the most used products were classed as suspected reproductive toxicants or carcinogens; that glyphosate, fifth most frequent, was “probably carcinogenic” in the rating of the International Agency for Research on Cancer; and that the later-banned chlorpyrifos-methyl can impair foetal brain development. Nearly a quarter of treatments, she said, used substances especially harmful to beneficial insects. The institute demanded an immediate ban on the most dangerous pesticides and on all herbicides in South Tyrolean orchards. Its own write-up counts each active substance as one “treatment”, so a single pass with several products counts more than once.

Schuler and the Association of South Tyrolean Fruit Cooperatives (VOG) called the account unacceptable. He said the province had led reductions for 40 years, cited 90 percent bio-certified insecticides and 70 percent bio-certified fungicides in the Vinschgau, and said every use must be justified in the diary. “Half-truths in the media are not acceptable,” he said, while conceding room for improvement. VOG’s Sabine Oberhollenzer said practice had changed since 2017, including scab-resistant varieties and a “sustainapple” strategy. A planned joint presentation was dropped by the institute before Christmas 2022: Holzheid said the government and industry would not discuss the problems seriously, and Schuler refused the blame for a dialogue the other side had ended.

Bundestag candidacies and elections

Campaigns from 2009 to 2017

Bär, standing for Alliance 90/The Greens, was a direct candidate for the Bundestag at every federal election from 2009 onward in the Upper Bavarian area where he lived, and was placed on the party’s Bavaria state list each time. He did not win a seat in the first three contests. On 27 September 2009 the constituency was number 224, Starnberg. Ilse Aigner of the Christian Social Union took the direct mandate with 101,261 votes (54.0 percent). Candidate listings name Bär as the Green direct candidate and as 12th on the Bavarian list; the Green first-vote total was 19,809 (10.6 percent), fourth behind the CSU, the SPD (15.8 percent) and the FDP (14.6 percent). Green second votes in the constituency were 12.3 percent, and turnout was 75.7 percent. The Greens won 10 Bundestag seats in Bavaria, so 12th place did not elect him.

The same numbered constituency was contested on 22 September 2013. The federal returning officer’s candidate list names Bär, described there as an agricultural economist born in 1985, as the Green direct candidate and as 14th on the Bavarian list, against Alexander Radwan of the CSU. Radwan won with 97,383 votes (54.1 percent). The Green first-vote total was 16,031 (8.9 percent), third behind the CSU and the SPD (17.6 percent); Green second votes were 9.1 percent. Bavaria returned nine Green members, short of 14th place.

By the election of 24 September 2017 the seat had been renumbered 223 and renamed Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen – Miesbach. It had 165,527 eligible voters, against 245,379 in the Starnberg constituency in 2013. Radwan held the district with 62,465 votes (47.6 percent). In what the Süddeutsche Zeitung called his third candidacy, Bär took 17,786 first votes (13.6 percent) and finished second, ahead of the SPD (11.3 percent) and the Alternative for Germany (9.9 percent). The Münchner Merkur and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that he was the only Green direct candidate in Bavaria to place second behind the CSU. His share ran ahead of the Green second-vote share in the district, 10.3 percent. Turnout was 80.1 percent.

The list, not the district, decided whether he entered. At the Bavarian nomination, Bär and Stefan Schmidt of Regensburg tied for the men’s 10th place; a draw, which the Merkur described as a coin toss, gave Schmidt 10th place and Bär 12th. The Greens’ statewide second-vote share was 9.8 percent, worth 11 seats, all filled from the list. Placed 12th, Bär was the first successor and was not seated.

Election in 2021

Constituency 223 was unchanged for the election of 26 September 2021. Radwan won again, with 55,501 votes (41.3 percent). Bär was second with 20,829 (15.5 percent), ahead of the SPD on 11.5 percent and the Free Voters on 10.5 percent. The AfD had no direct candidate; its second-vote share in the district was 8.0 percent. Green second votes were 13.4 percent, and turnout was 81.7 percent.

In April 2021 a Green state congress in Augsburg elected Bär, from Holzkirchen, to the 12th list place he had sought. He told the Merkur that eleven Bavarian Greens had entered in 2017 and that he expected a larger group. The party took 14.1 percent of Bavarian second votes and 19 seats, 18 of them list seats and one a direct mandate outside this constituency. The Bundestag biography for the 20th electoral term records that he entered on the Bavarian state list, while remaining the candidate for constituency 223.

Re-election in 2025

For the federal election of 23 February 2025 the constituency was renumbered 222, still named Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen – Miesbach. Radwan won with 65,481 votes (46.4 percent). Ingo Jochen Hahn of the AfD, recorded as the runner-up, took 23,291 (16.5 percent). Bär, again the Green direct candidate, was third with 20,820 (14.8 percent), nine votes below his 2021 total, while the Green second-vote share in the district was 12.4 percent. Turnout was 85.5 percent.

On 14 and 15 December 2024, 328 delegates meeting in Hirschaid placed him sixth on the Bavarian list, with Jamila Schäfer and Anton Hofreiter in the first two places. Statewide the Greens received 12.0 percent of second votes and 14 seats, all from the list, so sixth place was enough for a mandate. The Bundestag biography for the 21st electoral term records him as elected on the Bavarian state list and as the candidate in constituency 222; Abgeordnetenwatch likewise gives list position 6 and a list mandate rather than a constituency win.

Parliamentary work

The 20th Bundestag

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025) Karl Bär sat for Alliance 90/The Greens, elected on the party’s state list in Bavaria and standing in constituency 223, Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen–Miesbach. Before committees were constituted on 15 December 2021, the Münchner Merkur reported that he would be the Green Obmann on the Committee on Food and Agriculture; the archived biography and the committee’s own account record that he held the post as a full member. The committee had 34 members — ten from the SPD, nine from the CDU/CSU, six Greens, four each from the FDP and the AfD, and one from the Left, then a group rather than a full Fraktion. Hermann Färber (CDU/CSU) chaired it, with Gero Clemens Hocker (FDP) as deputy. Bär was also a substitute on the Committee on Digital Affairs and on the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection.

Karl Bär at a lectern during a Bundestag sitting week in September 2023.

Each Bundestag group names one Obmann or Obfrau per committee. The glossary calls them the leadership’s main contacts there: they help set the group’s line, agree agendas and follow detail the leadership does not sit through. On this committee the Obleute met the chair, as a rule, every sitting week. The deputy chair, not the Obmann, stood in when the chair was absent, so Bär coordinated the Green side rather than presided.

His plenary speeches followed that brief. On 22 September 2022 he spoke on a CDU/CSU motion about a proposed EU regulation on the sustainable use of pesticides and an AfD motion on the availability of plant-protection products. On 24 November 2022, in the second reading of the 2023 budget, he spoke on Einzelplan 10 for the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and used the time for organic farming. On 30 November 2023 he opened a combined debate on a CDU/CSU motion on food self-sufficiency, a CDU/CSU motion on extending glyphosate’s authorization, and an AfD motion on plant protection “according to good professional practice.” On 22 February 2024 he spoke on an AfD motion to release set-aside land at once for food and feed, a debate that turned on the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. On 6 June 2024 he was the Green speaker at the second and third reading of the government’s second bill to amend the Fertilizer Act. The Münchner Merkur described the Greens then as a governing party, and the speeches cover the ministry budget, government bills and replies to opposition motions.

The 21st Bundestag

In the 21st Bundestag the official biography again lists him as elected on the Bavarian list, now candidate in constituency 222, still named Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen – Miesbach. The committee was reconstituted on 21 May 2025 as the Committee on Agriculture, Food and Home Affairs (Ausschuss für Landwirtschaft, Ernährung und Heimat), with 30 full members: ten CDU/CSU, seven AfD, six SPD, four Greens — Bär, Zoe Mayer, Ophelia Nick and Niklas Wagener — and three from the Left’s Fraktion. Vice-president Andrea Lindholz conducted the opening sitting, at which Färber was again elected chair.

The biography lists Bär as deputy chairman as well as a full member, and does not list him as Obmann. He is a substitute on the committees for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety; for Digital Affairs and State Modernization; and for Research, Technology, Space and Technology Assessment. Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor on 6 May 2025, on a second ballot; the CDU/CSU and SPD groups together hold 328 of 630 seats. Outside that majority the Green group used written questions. On 27 November 2025 he again spoke on the agriculture budget, Einzelplan 10 for 2026, by then the chapter of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Home Affairs.

Parliamentary groups and constituency representation

Parlamentariergruppen sit apart from the legislative committees. The glossary describes them as cross-party bodies for conferences, trips and direct contact with members of other parliaments; the Presidium reconstitutes them each term, the Council of Elders sets their number and structure, and chairs follow the strength of the groups. Bär is deputy chair of the Northern Adriatic group. A Bundestag list of group officers for the 19th electoral term identifies that group with Croatia and Slovenia. From 29 June to 3 July 2026 he joined a delegation to Croatia led by the chair, Christian Haase (CDU/CSU), with Christian Wirth (AfD) and Klaus-Peter Willsch (CDU/CSU). The programme included Zagreb meetings with parliament president Gordan Jandroković, Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić Radman and the Croatian-German friendship group, plus Sirač, Medvednica Nature Park and the LNG terminal on Krk.

The Bundestag lists his constituency office at Marienstraße 3, 83607 Holzkirchen, and his Berlin office at Platz der Republik 1. In January 2022 the Münchner Merkur reported the office open in a former hairdressing salon in the Marienpassage, with Maximilian Haberzettl covering Miesbach, Marius Schlosser Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen and Johannes Danzer the online work. Surgeries had not started, because of the pandemic; Bär said he would add fixed hours and hold them every few weeks. The report also said that for the Greens he covered the city of Rosenheim and its district. He kept a local mandate beside the Bundestag seat: disclosures with the 20th-term biography record his Holzkirchen market-council membership as ending in December 2021, while that file and the biography current in October 2026 both list him on the Miesbach district council.

Agricultural, environmental and trade policy

Pesticides, organic farming and genetic engineering

In the Bundestag, Karl Bär treated synthetic pesticides, mineral fertiliser and genetic engineering as a system to leave rather than adjust. On 30 November 2023, after the European Commission moved to renew glyphosate, he said six of nine planetary boundaries were already crossed and dismissed CDU/CSU motions as a 1990s model. Citing the Thünen Institute, he said roughly a quarter of German arable land grew food for people, a quarter energy crops and half animal feed, so the European Union could go fully organic, idle 10 per cent of cropland and still export more if biofuels and animal products declined. That December he told top agrar he would set a distant ban on synthetic pesticides, that Parliament’s rejection of the Sustainable Use Regulation had in his view ended it, and that the Commission’s glyphosate decision was a serious error. He backed agriculture minister Cem Özdemir in using whatever national scope remained. Özdemir’s ministry had called renewal unjustified on biodiversity grounds; the European Food Safety Authority had found no critical areas of concern.

In March 2024 he said agrochemicals and mineral fertiliser would eventually have to go, and he proposed a pesticide levy of €20 per hectare for fungicides and €30 for herbicides and insecticides, which he estimated would raise €0.6–1.2 billion, citing a Danish levy he said had cut use by almost 40 per cent. SPD colleague Franziska Kersten was reported, in the same top agrar series, as opposing such a tax, and FDP speaker Carina Konrad as calling pesticides a blessing for harvests. He refused to class CRISPR products as conventional breeding. On 23 June 2022 he called a patent claim on genetically hornless cattle—long bred in his region—theft, and said each product still needed a risk check, authorisation and a label. The German Farmers’ Association welcomed the Commission’s July 2023 proposal for faster climate adaptation and lower pesticide use, while rejecting plant patents; Özdemir warned against biopatents “through the back door.” On 21 May 2025 he opened a debate on keeping labels, cited more than €17 billion a year in “Ohne Gentechnik” food, and asked agriculture minister Alois Rainer whether buyers would still choose. SPD and CDU/CSU speakers then divided over whether ending the label was a retreat or bureaucracy. In a Die Zeit exchange that October, Bayer executive Matthias Berninger called the techniques a way to grow more food with less fertiliser and insecticide; Bär said the first generation had not delivered.

A coalition pledge to ban exports of pesticides not approved in the EU stayed unresolved from May 2023. At a hearing on 13 November 2024, three of five experts backed a ban; industry cited import licences abroad, while critics objected to selling carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substances where exposure is higher.

Farm incomes, the CAP and animal welfare

On 22 February 2024 Bär said the Common Agricultural Policy was not too ecological but not ecological enough, and that its paperwork defended area payments rather than environmental rules. From 2014 to 2021, he said, the largest 1 per cent of German farms took 25 per cent of subsidies and the smaller half 8 per cent. He backed Steffi Lemke and Özdemir on biodiversity and cited the Borchert commission’s preference for a levy on animal products, of about €4 billion a year, to rebuild livestock housing. CDU speaker Dieter Stier wanted that money found elsewhere in the budget; the Union kept defending the agricultural-diesel tax break.

The fertiliser amendment of 6 June 2024 answered the nitrate infringement case. Bär blamed Union-led agriculture ministries, including rules he tied to Julia Klöckner, for a threatened fine of about €1 billion, and said Lemke and Özdemir had closed the case within a year. It would pool data already held, drop high flat rates in nutrient balances, add phosphorus and exempt small farms. The governing parties and Die Linke passed it; the CDU/CSU, which called it new bureaucracy, and the AfD voted no. FDP speaker Carina Konrad said farmers were not the only nitrate source and that a flat 20 per cent cut in the “red” zones could not sustain wheat yields.

Trade agreements and climate

Bär broke with most of Alliance 90/The Greens on the EU–Canada agreement CETA. On 1 December 2022 the Bundestag ratified it by 558 votes to 110. The AfD, Die Linke and three Greens—Bär, Canan Bayram and Deborah Düring—voted no; the SPD, the FDP, the CDU/CSU and the rest of the Green group voted yes. He wrote afterwards that investor–state arbitration was not limited to direct expropriation and discrimination, and he linked his vote to withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty. On EU–Mercosur he stood with party members rather than Green ministers. In February 2025 he said he opposed a deal backed by Robert Habeck and Özdemir, that opposition was the party decision and the view of what he called an absolute majority of members, and that he would if necessary vote against his own group. In January 2026 party leaders criticised Green MEPs who had backed a court referral, calling the delay a signal sent “without a compass.”

Personal life and public reception

Private life and affiliations

The Bundestag biography, based on his own statements, records that Bär is unmarried and has one child, and lists a constituency office at Marienstraße 3 in Holzkirchen, in the district of Miesbach. The Münchner Merkur and the Süddeutsche Zeitung describe him as a Holzkirchner. On his 40th birthday, 13 March 2025, he told the Merkur he had no large wishes, that world affairs worried him, and that one call he would want was to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, about a blocked Ukraine aid package.

In a Merkur interview of 1 June 2021, when he was 36 and a candidate, he gave his own account of the child. He said his biological daughter, then three, lived in another city with her mother and the mother's wife; that he had been notarially recorded as a sperm donor, giving up parental rights and easing the wife's stepchild adoption, but that he still visited and remained part of the family, and that the girl called his mother "Oma". He said he is heterosexual and had never regretted the decision.

The biography lists membership of the Bund Naturschutz in Bayern, the German Alpine Club and the Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte, and supporting membership of Sea-Watch. Disclosures add a seat on the representatives' assembly of Raiffeisenbank Holzkirchen-Otterfing eG and membership of the Miesbach district council. Europa-Union Deutschland names him in its group in the 21st Bundestag, which the association says consists of deputies who are themselves Europa-Union members.

Media coverage and criticism

Reporting from Bolzano on 6 May 2022, the Süddeutsche Zeitung described the South Tyrol acquittal as the end of complaints by agriculture councillor Arnold Schuler and 1,376 fruit growers for aggravated defamation over the 2017 campaign, with penalties and damages in the millions in view. The paper called the suits SLAPPs meant to silence critics. Bär called the case a political attempt at intimidation; after the complaints were withdrawn, the court ended it as inadmissible.

Local coverage has been harsher where he has spoken for Alliance 90/The Greens on farming. At the Bavarian Farmers' Association rally on Munich's Odeonsplatz on 8 January 2024, the Merkur reported that Bär, then the Greens' whip on the Bundestag agriculture committee, was booed down after warning farmers not to copy the Last Generation. He said people followed him shouting "Volksverräter". In April 2024, after he called continued combination housing—winter tethering and summer grazing—for existing herds of at most 50 cattle a "Green success", district association chairman Peter Fichtner said he was "turning the truth on its head" and blamed the Greens around Cem Özdemir. Alexander Radwan of the Christian Social Union accused the Greens of "Doppelzüngigkeit" for promising less bureaucracy while Green MEPs opposed EU relief for small farms.

In June 2025 Bär opposed ending labels for newer genomic techniques, calling the Christian Democratic Union line a "miracle cure" and the CSU "uncertain" between citizens and lobbyists. Radwan wanted transparency without a "bureaucracy monster", and said the methods were not the creation of genes from other species. On Mercosur, district farm groups that January asked both MPs for equal import standards. Bär said he would vote against ratification without deforestation rules and mirror measures; Radwan called the deal important and favoured easing German rules.