# Karoline Otte

# Karoline Otte

Karoline Otte (born 11 September 1996 in Göttingen) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) and a member of the Bundestag from Lower Saxony. The biography published by the parliament, which notes that personal details come from the members themselves, lists her as Protestant Lutheran, married and the mother of two children, and gives her occupation as Kreisinspektorin, a district civil-service grade. She has sat in the Bundestag since 2021 and was elected again in 2025 on the Lower Saxony Green state list, placed ninth in 2021 and seventh in 2025.

She took her Abitur in 2016 at the Corvinianum in Northeim, after a school year in San Antonio, Texas, arranged through the Bundestag's parliamentary patronage programme with the exchange organisation AFS. From 2016 to 2019 she completed a dual course as a Verwaltungsbetriebswirtin, combining work at Landkreis Göttingen with study at the Hochschule für kommunale Verwaltung in Hanover, and then served as a Kreisinspektorin in that district administration. She lives in Moringen, in the district of Northeim.

At the federal election of 26 September 2021 she was the Green direct candidate in constituency 52, then named Goslar – Northeim – Osterode. The constituency returning committee recorded 14,954 first votes for her. The federal returning officer reported that figure as 10.5 percent, behind Frauke Heiligenstadt of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) (52,129 votes, 36.7 percent), who won the seat, and Roy Kühne of the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) (47,196 votes, 33.2 percent). Green second votes in the constituency were 17,118, or 12.0 percent, and the party's second-vote share across Lower Saxony was 16.1 percent.

In October 2024 a joint members' meeting of the Goslar, Northeim–Einbeck and Göttingen district associations nominated her unanimously as the direct candidate for the renamed constituency Goslar – Northeim – Göttingen II. At the 2025 federal election she received 11,922 first votes, 7.7 percent. Heiligenstadt again took the constituency, with 30.4 percent, a tenth of a point ahead of Constantin Weigel of the CDU, while Waldemar Rau of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany received 19.8 percent. Green second votes in the constituency were 13,464 (8.7 percent), and the party's statewide second-vote share was 11.5 percent. Otte kept a Bundestag seat through seventh place on the state list.

In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member of the Finance Committee and a deputy member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipalities. An NDR Panorama 3 report in November 2021, when she was 25, presented her among the new members from northern Germany and quoted her emphasis on climate policy that also works for people on low incomes, and on combining a young family with work in federal politics. At the 2024 nomination meeting she argued for a municipal investment programme covering railways, childcare, administrative computers and hospital beds.

## Early life and education

### Family and upbringing

Karoline Otte was born on 11 September 1996 in Göttingen, in southern Lower Saxony. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members’ own statements, lists her as Lutheran (*evangelisch-lutherisch*), married, and the mother of two children.

She has written that she has lived all her life in the district of Northeim, between the Harz and the Solling, that she grew up in the municipality of Nörten, and that she now lives with her husband and two children in the municipality of Moringen. In October 2024 the *Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine* (HNA) likewise described her as coming from Moringen, and in February 2025 she told the paper that Fredelsloh was home.

In 2013 and 2014 the family lived in Wolbrechtshausen. Her mother, Heike Müller-Otte, trained as a *Verwaltungsbetriebswirtin* (public-administration manager), had worked for the district of Göttingen since 1987, including eight years in personnel administration, and from 2004 was a project leader in the district’s economic-development office. Her father, Christoph Otte, worked as a service technician. Otte is the eldest of three; her brothers are Phillip and Frederik.

Müller-Otte, then 46, stood in 2014 as an independent candidate for mayor of Moringen. She was backed by the Christian Democratic Union, Alliance 90/The Greens and the local group Moringen 21, and she faced Claus Stumpe of the Social Democratic Party. In the runoff of 15 June 2014 she received 1,733 votes (63.4 percent) to Stumpe’s 1,002 (36.6 percent) and took office that November, succeeding Hartmut Schnabel. While the campaign was under way, Otte, then 17, was spending a school year in Texas. Her mother told the HNA that she was sorry not to be at home and that she was looking after the campaign website from there; she had already helped the Green Youth in election work.

### Schooling and exchange year

Otte took the *Abitur* in 2016 at the Gymnasium Corvinianum in Northeim. The town lists the Corvinianum as a *Gymnasium* sponsored by the district of Northeim, with its address at Wieterstraße 4/6.

Before that examination she spent a school year in San Antonio, Texas. The Bundestag biography attributes the year to the parliament’s *Parlamentarisches Patenschafts-Programm* (Parliamentary Sponsorship Programme), arranged with the exchange organization AFS. The programme, in existence since 1983, is run jointly by the Bundestag and the [United States Congress](/organizations/energy-actor-us-congress) under the patronage of the president of the Bundestag. It awards scholarships for a year in the United States to secondary-school pupils and to young people already in work. AFS Interkulturelle Begegnungen e.V., one of the organizations that carry the programme out for assigned constituencies, states that pupil applicants are generally 15 to 17 years old on 31 July of the departure year and must not yet have completed the *Abitur*. Applications go to the Bundestag, which passes them to the organization responsible for the constituency; the member of the Bundestag for that constituency then chooses a scholarship holder from the organization’s proposals. The HNA’s April 2014 profile of her mother is independent of those later biographical notes: it reported at the time that Otte was on a high-school year in Texas.

### Dual study and administrative career

From 2016 to 2019 Otte completed a dual course of study to qualify as a *Verwaltungsbetriebswirtin*, employed by the district of Göttingen and enrolled at the Hochschule für kommunale Verwaltung in Hanover. The HNA has described the same step more briefly as a dual programme, after school, at the Göttingen district. On the site of the Niedersächsisches Studieninstitut für kommunale Verwaltung, the Hanover college (HSVN) presents *Verwaltungsbetriebswirtschaft* as a bachelor’s course in the business side of municipal administration, taught over nine trimesters, about a third of them at the employing authority, and ending with a Bachelor of Arts. The college states that the degree qualifies graduates for *Laufbahngruppe* 2, the career group entered above the clerical grades in municipal authorities. Admission requires a higher-education entrance qualification and a trainee or employment relationship with a public-law employer.

She then worked at the district of Göttingen as a *Kreisinspektorin*. On her own account she was first in the personnel department and, from April 2021, after parental leave and until the Bundestag election that autumn, in building supervision (*Bauaufsicht*). In the Bundestag’s register of disclosable interests, her occupation before she entered parliament is given as *Kreisinspektorin* at the district of Göttingen, with a right to return to the post and protection against dismissal.

## Local politics

### Party beginnings

Karoline Otte has been active in the Grüne Jugend and in Alliance 90/The Greens locally since 2010, according to the biography published by the [German Bundestag](/organizations/german-bundestag), which rests on members' own statements. In a February 2021 interview with the *Weser-Kurier* she said a childhood decision to stop eating meat drew her parents into arguments about agricultural policy, and that a classmate's mother then took her to her first Green district members' meeting. A Grüne Jugend local group was forming in Northeim; she joined it and, after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, helped organise vigils and other actions for a nuclear phase-out. She described the rural Northeim district as offering few openings for political work, and said lifts to meetings were one reason she stayed.

The Bundestag biography records work on the Green district executive for Northeim and Einbeck from 2015 to 2020. A profile with the *Weser-Kurier* interview called her spokesperson of that executive from 2015 to 2019. In July 2021, then aged 24, she told the district's series "Politik braucht Frauen" that she had started with the Greens and the Grüne Jugend more than ten years earlier, at 14, mainly through environmental and climate questions.

### Northeim district council

At the Lower Saxony local elections on Sunday, 11 September 2016, Alliance 90/The Greens won 6.79 percent and three of 50 seats on the Northeim Kreistag, down from 9.85 percent and five seats in 2011, the *Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine* reported the next day. Turnout was 53.65 percent. The Social Democratic Party of Germany remained largest, on 40.77 percent and 20 seats, ahead of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany on 31.10 percent and 16; the Alternative for Germany entered with 8.51 percent and four seats. Of the Greens elected, Otte, standing in Moringen, was listed with 693 votes, ahead of Karen Pollok of Northeim (631) and Johannes Antpöhler of Bad Gandersheim (504). The paper called the Green loss the steepest among parties already on the council. Detlef Rengshausen, a spokesperson of the Green district executive, put the emerging share near 6.5 percent and said there had been no repeat of the 2011 mood after Fukushima.

The three-member group constituted itself on 26 October 2016. Antpöhler, from Heckenbeck, was elected chair unanimously; Otte became deputy chair, and Pollok the third member. StadtRadio Göttingen reported that the group meant, whatever larger alliances formed, to press for fair access to education, participation and a finance policy that "does not save at the wrong end", and to work for an ecological district, acceptance of wind power, renewables in suitable areas, demand-responsive public transport and nature protection.

For the term the district information system closes on 31 October 2021, that system lists Otte as deputy chair of the Green group and as a member of the committees for schools and sport, for finance, and for social affairs, health, women, families and seniors, with a *Grundmandat* on the youth welfare committee. In February 2021 she said that in her first two years on the council she was often treated like an intern expected to make coffee, and that she answered by preparing twice as thoroughly.

She did not continue into the following council term. After the local elections of September 2021, speaking as a Bundestag candidate, she told *Northeim jetzt* that the Green group had grown to four councillors and had narrowly missed a fifth. On 13 May 2022 Landrätin Astrid Klinkert-Kittel formally farewelled 21 former members of the 2016–2021 period who were no longer on the council, Otte and Antpöhler among them.

### Constituency presence

The Bundestag lists her constituency office at Johannistorstraße 2 in Osterode am Harz. She had stood in 2021 in constituency 52, covering Goslar, Northeim and Osterode, and entered parliament through the Lower Saxony Green state list.

In December 2023 [Jürgen Trittin](/people/jurgen-trittin) said he would leave the Bundestag around the turn of the year, after 25 years as a member; he resigned at the beginning of January 2024. The *Göttinger Tageblatt* reported on 7 February 2024, citing her Bundestag office, that the then 27-year-old would also take on constituency work for Göttingen, constituency 53, which Trittin had served. She was to keep regular appointments in Göttingen. Quoted in the paper, she said that as a former employee of the Göttingen district authority and a resident of the neighbouring Northeim district she knew the people there, and that linking urban and rural life was a current question in the Göttingen district. StadtRadio Göttingen reported on 13 February 2024 that Göttingen was being added to the Northeim–Goslar–Osterode area she already covered; her listed office remained in Osterode.

## Bundestag elections

### The 2021 election

At the [2021 German federal election](/facts/2021-german-federal-election) on 26 September 2021, Karoline Otte stood for Alliance 90/The Greens as the direct candidate in constituency 52, then named Goslar – Northeim – Osterode, and in ninth place on the party’s closed Lower Saxony state list of 40. Voters could not change the order of that list. Under the law then in force, the candidate with the most first votes took the constituency seat, while second votes determined each party’s share of seats in the Bundestag.

The constituency returning officer’s final return, which matches the federal returning officer’s table, recorded 197,519 people eligible to vote and a turnout of 72.7 percent (143,611 ballots). Of 142,067 valid first votes, [Frauke Heiligenstadt](/people/frauke-heiligenstadt) of the Social Democratic Party received 52,129 (36.7 percent) and was declared elected. Dr. Roy Kühne of the Christian Democratic Union was second, with 47,196 (33.2 percent), 4,933 votes behind. Otte took 14,954 first votes (10.5 percent), ahead of Jens Kestner ([Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany), 11,240; 7.9 percent), Jan Schwede (Free Democratic Party, 8,827; 6.2 percent) and Eva-Maria Brunnemann ([Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke), 3,835; 2.7 percent).

On the 142,315 valid second votes in the constituency, the SPD led with 53,876 (37.9 percent), followed by the CDU with 33,614 (23.6 percent), the Greens with 17,118 (12.0 percent), the FDP with 14,239 (10.0 percent), the AfD with 11,819 (8.3 percent) and Die Linke with 4,251 (3.0 percent). Across Lower Saxony the Greens’ second-vote share was 16.1 percent (726,613 votes). In the federal returning officer’s final seat calculation for that election, set out in the results volume that incorporates the partial repeat in Berlin on 11 February 2024, the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers apportionment gave the Greens 13 seats in Lower Saxony and no constituency seats in the state, so all 13 were filled in list order. Otte’s ninth place lay inside that block of list seats, and the Bundestag records her as a member from 2021.

### The 2025 election

At the 2025 German federal election on 23 February 2025, Otte again contested constituency 52, by then named Goslar – Northeim – Göttingen II, and was seventh on a Lower Saxony Green list of 31. From this election a party candidate won a constituency seat only with a plurality of first votes and only if that seat was covered by the party’s second-vote entitlement in the Land (Zweitstimmendeckung); the number of seats still followed the second votes. State lists remained closed.

Turnout was 81.3 percent: 155,587 voters out of 191,421 eligible. Of 154,168 valid first votes, Heiligenstadt was again elected, with 46,875 (30.4 percent), 176 votes ahead of Dr. Constantin Weigel of the CDU (46,699; 30.3 percent). Waldemar Rau (AfD) received 30,494 (19.8 percent), Otte 11,922 (7.7 percent), U. Peggy Plettner-Voigt (Die Linke) 9,187 (6.0 percent) and Ali Abo Hamoud (FDP) 4,000 (2.6 percent). The federal returning officer lists Heiligenstadt as the member returned for the constituency.

On 154,617 valid second votes the CDU led the constituency with 43,210 (27.9 percent), ahead of the SPD with 38,453 (24.9 percent), the AfD with 30,930 (20.0 percent), the Greens with 13,464 (8.7 percent), Die Linke with 10,716 (6.9 percent), the FDP with 6,116 (4.0 percent) and Bündnis [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht) with 6,035 (3.9 percent). In Lower Saxony as a whole the Greens took 11.5 percent of second votes (576,845), down 4.6 percentage points from 2021. The federal returning officer’s list of members elected in the state names eight Greens, all from the state list and none from a constituency, running in list order through place 8. Otte, in seventh place, is on that list and is recorded as having also stood in constituency 52.

### Wahlkreis 52

Constituency 52 is one of Lower Saxony’s Bundestag constituencies, which are numbered 24 to 53. In 2021 its statutory name was Goslar – Northeim – Osterode; for 2025 it is Goslar – Northeim – Göttingen II, and the neighbouring constituency, formerly Göttingen, is Göttingen I. The Bundestag bill that redrew constituencies for the following election stated that both renamings followed the dissolution of the districts of Göttingen and Osterode am Harz and the creation of a new district of Göttingen, and that the new names did not change the boundaries. The federal returning officer’s municipality lists for 2021 and 2025 are the same. The amending act of 7 March 2024 is the Federal Elections Act text cited by the Lower Saxony returning officer for the 2025 lists.

From the district of Göttingen the seat contains the town of Osterode am Harz, Bad Grund (Harz), Walkenried, the unincorporated Harz area in that district, and the joint municipality of Hattorf am Harz (Elbingerode, Hattorf am Harz, Hörden am Harz and Wulften am Harz); the rest of the district, including the city of Göttingen, forms constituency 53. From the district of Goslar it contains the towns of Goslar, Bad Harzburg, Braunlage and Clausthal-Zellerfeld, plus that district’s unincorporated Harz area; its other municipalities are in constituency 49. From the district of Northeim it contains the towns of Northeim, Einbeck, Bad Gandersheim, Dassel, Hardegsen and Moringen, together with Kalefeld, Katlenburg-Lindau and the Flecken Nörten-Hardenberg; the remainder of the district is constituency 46.

On the 2025 structural reference dates the constituency had 20 municipalities, an area of 2,125.5 square kilometres and a population of 237,000 (31 December 2023), or 111.5 inhabitants per square kilometre, with 88.5 percent of the surface classed as vegetation or water and 11.5 percent as settlement or transport. The 2021 structural file reported the same area and the same count of 20 municipalities; its population figure, for 31 December 2019, was 250,400.

## Parliamentary work

### The 20th Bundestag

Karoline Otte has been a member of the Bundestag since 2021, sitting for Alliance 90/The Greens on the state list of Lower Saxony. In the 20th electoral term she entered on list place 9, not by winning a constituency: she was the Green candidate in Wahlkreis 052, then styled Goslar – Northeim – Osterode. The archived Bundestag biography lists her as a full member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government (Ausschuss für Wohnen, Stadtentwicklung, Bauwesen und Kommunen) and of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, and as a deputy member of the Finance Committee (Finanzausschuss).

In October 2024 the municipal magazine *KOMMUNAL* described her as the Green parliamentary group's rapporteur for municipal politics, a brief it said she had taken on after entering the Bundestag. Plenary business in that term included a speech on 13 October 2023, in the 129th sitting, on the federal government's bill for heat planning and the decarbonisation of heating networks (Drucksache 20/8654) and a related AfD motion.

On 11 November 2022 she broke with the majority of her own group. In the first roll-call of the 67th sitting she voted against the government's nineteenth amendment to the Atomic Energy Act (Drucksachen 20/4217 and 20/4357), which extended the operation of the last three German nuclear power plants until 15 April 2023. The Bundestag adopted the bill by 375 votes to 216, with 70 abstentions; Abgeordnetenwatch recorded that nine Green members were among those voting no. In a written explanation under §31 of the Bundestag rules of procedure, printed in the annex to the plenary protocol, Otte stated that she rejected the extension for the Emsland plant.

### The 21st Bundestag

At the 2025 election she returned on place 7 of the Lower Saxony Green list, again as the candidate in Wahlkreis 052, which the current biography styles Goslar – Northeim – Göttingen II. For the 21st term the Bundestag biography lists her as a full member of the Finance Committee and a deputy member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government. The Green group's member page gives the same two assignments. Abgeordnetenwatch's committee table shows the change from the previous term: the economic-cooperation seat and the full housing-committee seat do not appear for 2025–2029, while finance is now a full membership.

As a deputy on the housing committee she was nevertheless named *Berichterstatterin* on that committee's recommendation of 5 November 2025. The report concerned the Green motion "Vor Ort gut leben – Städte und Gemeinden stärken" (Drucksache 21/1310), tabled on 18 August 2025 with Otte as first signatory; the committee recommended that the Bundestag reject it.

### Questions, motions and votes

In the 21st term Otte has been the first-named Green signatory of motions and of minor interpellations (*Kleine Anfragen*). Motions in her name include "Steuergestaltung verhindern – Mindeststeuer stärken" (Drucksache 21/2245, 15 October 2025) and "Big Tech fair besteuern – Digitalsteuer jetzt einführen" (Drucksache 21/5287), the latter taken in plenary on 15 April 2026. Minor interpellations asked the federal government for an overview of funding programmes linked to climate targets and equivalent living conditions (Drucksache 21/4411, 3 March 2026), about planned financing of municipal climate mitigation and adaptation (Drucksache 21/5837, 7 May 2026), and about economic inequality and an International Panel on Inequality (Drucksache 21/7117, 13 July 2026).

Plenary protocols record her as a Green speaker on several of these files. On 13 November 2025, in the 40th sitting, she spoke during the second and third reading of the bill adjusting the Minimum Tax Act, taken with the Green minimum-tax motion. On 26 February 2026, in the 59th sitting, she spoke on an AfD motion to abolish the property tax (Drucksache 21/4277). On 19 March 2026, in the 65th sitting, she closed the Green contribution on an item that covered trade tax as a municipal revenue and a Green bill on real-estate taxation (Drucksache 21/4745), and spoke again, including a short intervention, on an AfD motion to set up a commission of inquiry. On 9 July 2026, in the 89th sitting, she spoke on a [Left Party](/organizations/left-party) motion on the distribution of federal funds and support for structurally weak municipalities (Drucksachen 21/6652 and 21/6997). On 7 November 2025, when the housing committee's recommendation on "Vor Ort gut leben" was before the 38th sitting, she asked to put a supplementary question to a CDU/CSU speaker; the question was declined.

Individual roll-call behaviour is published by the Bundestag and collated by Abgeordnetenwatch. In October 2026 that profile records her voting against an amendment to the Fuel Emissions Trading Act, in favour of extending the Bundeswehr mandate for the [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), abstaining on the EUNAVFOR Aspides mandate in the Red Sea, and against a recommendation on a third motion about organised tax evasion.

## Tax and municipal finance

### Municipal budgets

In the 21st Bundestag, Karoline Otte was the first signatory of the Alliance 90/The Greens motion “Vor Ort gut leben – Städte und Gemeinden stärken” (Drucksache 21/1310, 18 August 2025), which asked the federation to close what it called a €25 billion hole by raising the municipal share of value-added tax, strengthening the trade tax, bearing more local social-benefit costs and helping to clear old debt. On 7 November 2025 she asked CDU/CSU deputy [Heiko Hain](/people/heiko-hain) when relief would come, citing a €25 billion deficit in 2024 and a likely €30 billion or more in 2025, and said a debt solution promised for 1 January 2026 and a “Zukunftspakt” were missing. Hain said the coalition was working and credited Markus Söder with a €100 billion municipal share of the infrastructure special fund.

The Federal Statistical Office later put the 2025 municipal deficit, excluding city-states, at a record €31.9 billion, €7.1 billion above 2024. Tagesschau reported that Christian Schuchardt of the German Association of Cities said cities carried a quarter of public spending but only a seventh of tax revenue, and wanted at least €30 billion a year from the federation. On 19 March 2026 Otte opposed an Alternative for Germany motion (Drucksache 21/4756) for an inquiry reporting by mid-2028, calling it a “Stuhlkreis” against a gap she put at €30 billion. SPD deputy [Hendrik Bollmann](/people/hendrik-bollmann) pointed to the special fund and a deficit of about €30 billion instead of another commission. A written question she led on 11 June (Drucksache 21/6385) cited association forecasts of €36.1 billion by 2028.

The coalition bill was the Länder- und Kommunalentlastungsgesetz (Drucksache 21/6560), limited to 2026–2029 and worth about €1 billion a year to the Länder: €400 million off the VAT discounts of financially strong states, matched for weak states by federal grants; €250 million toward cash credits above €100 per inhabitant, a stock the bill put at about €32 billion in the financially weak non-city states at the end of 2024; and about €350 million from cutting the eastern Länder’s share of former GDR supplementary-pension costs from 50 to 40 percent. Pass-through to municipalities was expected, not required. On 9 July 2026 Otte called the bill a “Geld-für-Söder-Gesetz”, said every fifth euro would go to Bavaria while municipalities were €30 billion short, and asked for VAT to be shifted back to them. The CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party of Germany passed the bill; the Greens and Die Linke voted against, and the AfD abstained. A Green resolution (Drucksache 21/6976) to withdraw the law, reallocate VAT points and appoint a parity commission was rejected by the CDU/CSU, AfD and SPD, with Die Linke abstaining.

### Property and trade tax

On 26 February 2026 the AfD motion “Grundsteuer vollständig abschaffen” (Drucksache 21/4277) received a first reading. It sought to end the property tax from 1 January 2026, to bar a Länder tax, and to replace the yield with higher municipal shares of income tax and VAT. It said the reform in force since 1 January 2025 had missed promised revenue neutrality, citing a Haus & Grund survey, and recalled the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) ruling of 10 April 2018 against the old valuation rules. Otte said a craft worker, a care worker, a CNC miller and a farmer on her street paid more than the billionaire Klatten family, and that abolition would relieve large fortunes and “villas on the Tegernsee” at municipal expense. SPD deputy [Nadine Heselhaus](/people/nadine-heselhaus) said the court had never objected to the tax itself, and CDU/CSU deputy [Fritz Güntzler](/people/fritz-guntzler) said most municipalities were keeping it revenue-neutral. Destatis reported property-tax receipts, excluding the city-states, unchanged in 2025 at €14.5 billion.

On the trade tax, a government bill of 12 March 2026 (Drucksache 21/4550) would raise the minimum multiplier from 200 to 280 percent from 2027, a full-year gain it put at about €220 million, because 200 percent still drew firms to low-rate municipalities. On 19 March Otte called that a “bad fig leaf”, saying FragDenStaat had found 27 trade-tax havens and the bill covered a third of them. Die Linke’s [Doris Achelwilm](/people/doris-achelwilm) said many were already above 280 points, and asked for 350 and for rents and licence fees in [the base](/organizations/the-base).

### Corporate, wealth and digital taxation

On 13 November 2025 the Bundestag passed a bill aligning the Minimum Tax Act with OECD guidance on the global minimum corporate tax and repealing the licence barrier, with the CDU/CSU and SPD in favour and the Greens, Die Linke and the AfD against. Otte said the largest US corporations had not paid at least €14 billion in Germany from 2016 to 2021 and that repeal would let those profits leave largely untaxed; CDU/CSU deputy Fritz Güntzler interjected that the committee had been told the sum was at most €70 million. Her motion “Steuergestaltung verhindern – Mindeststeuer stärken” (Drucksache 21/2245) asked the government to defend the minimum tax, treat the G7 side-by-side deal as interim, keep the licence barrier, compensate municipalities and back United Nations talks on a tax convention. The SPD, CDU/CSU and AfD voted it down.

On 15 April 2026 she opened debate on “Big Tech fair besteuern – Digitalsteuer jetzt einführen” (Drucksache 21/5287), which she led. It sought a temporary 10 percent tax on defined German digital turnover of groups with at least €750 million worldwide and €50 million of that German turnover, and restoration of the licence barrier. The motion cited a 3.4 percent effective 2024 rate for Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, against up to about 30 percent for firms in Germany. Otte said receipts could reach €19 billion a year. CDU/CSU speaker [Mechthilde Wittmann](/people/mechthilde-wittmann) called the motion legally risky and harmful to trade and the location, and said it would fall on the Mittelstand and consumers.

Drucksache 21/8138 (22 September), which she led, asked Germany to help found an International Panel on Inequality and to measure wealth above €100 million more closely. Drucksache 21/8267 (29 September) proposed a “500-million tax” above €500 million of net wealth, at 2 percent, then 3 percent above €1 billion and 4 percent above €10 billion, with income tax credited against it. The text called this a tax on returns, not substance, and set it against a coalition cut in corporate tax which it said would cost €25 billion a year by 2032.

## Housing, development and climate

### Housing and local government

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025), Karoline Otte of Alliance 90/The Greens was a full member of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipal Affairs and a deputy member of the Finance Committee. In the 21st Bundestag she became a full member of the Finance Committee and only a deputy on the housing committee.

On 5 September 2023, in the first reading of the 2024 housing budget, she said rent took more than a quarter of average income and more than half a supermarket cashier’s wage, and that social housing was a loop in which new controlled flats replaced units leaving the scheme. She asked the budget to prepare a “new housing non-profit” status (*Neue Wohngemeinnützigkeit*) for permanently low rents. At the final reading of the Heat Planning Act on 17 November 2023 she called it the second pillar of climate-neutral, affordable heat: households should know by mid-2028 how they would be heated, and a municipality that could already rule out a heat or hydrogen network should use a shortened plan rather than scarce local staff.

She was the first-named signatory of the Green motion “Living well locally – strengthen towns and municipalities” (Drucksache 21/1310, 18 August 2025). Beside revenue questions taken up in her tax work, it sought to close what it called a €25 billion municipal deficit, a higher municipal share of value-added tax, a stronger trade tax, a larger federal share of local social benefits, and help with legacy debt. It also asked for renovation of at least 25,000 schools and daycare centres, 100,000 new social or non-profit homes a year, a renovation rate of at least 2 percent, and reuse of empty buildings. The housing committee, with Otte as rapporteur, recommended rejection on 5 November 2025: CDU/CSU, the Alternative for Germany and the SPD for rejection, the Greens against, and Die Linke abstaining. Four other committees divided the same way.

### Development cooperation

Otte sat on the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development throughout the 20th Bundestag. In August 2023 the *Goslarsche Zeitung* reported her return from a four-day trip to Ukraine and Moldova with [Deborah Düring](/people/deborah-during), to discuss municipal help for reconstruction, which she was told was part of resistance, during attacks by Russia.

She went to Kyiv, to Chernihiv, occupied early in the war, and to Lukashivka, where she said the church had been hit, meeting Deputy Infrastructure Minister Oleksandra Azarkhina and committee chair Olena Shulyak under federal-police escort. She cited Chernihiv’s partnerships with Memmingen and Aachen and said she would back the Bonn Service Agency Communities in One World, which arranges such links. Arms were not the agenda; she said she already favoured further deliveries, and interlocutors wanted a full Russian withdrawal. Moldova was described as a former Soviet republic seeking European Union membership.

On 6 November 2024 the committee named her Green rapporteur for bills ratifying interim EU economic-partnership agreements with Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Central Africa and the SADC EPA states (Drucksachen 20/12200, 20/12199, 20/12202 and 20/12201). In a speech filed for the record on 26 September 2024 she argued that coffee, cocoa and similar imports often left growers without a decent living, that agreements decades old needed revision rather than confirmation, and that ratification should only open talks on industrial-policy space, civil society and EU supply-chain rules.

### Climate and social policy

NDR’s *Panorama 3* reported on 30 November 2021 that the 25-year-old new member from Moringen in Lower Saxony wanted climate policy that also worked for people on low incomes, and, as the mother of a small child, wanted to show that young women could combine family and federal politics. On 22 November 2022 the programme said she had meant to concentrate on climate policy, but Russia’s war against Ukraine and other crises left her looking back with doubt and frustration.

On 11 November 2022 the Bundestag passed, by 375 votes to 216 with 70 abstentions, the nineteenth amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, extending Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland to 15 April 2023. Otte voted no. Her explanation rejected above all Emsland’s continued run. Citing the economy ministry’s stress test, she wrote that Germany lacked no generating capacity, that only Bavaria might face a grid problem if French plants failed, and that gas savings and the wholesale-price effect would be marginal. The chancellor’s instruction did not bind parliament, and, with the coalition agreement, she refused any extension past 31 December 2022.

On 27 July 2021, as deputy chair of the Green group on the Northeim district council, she told the district’s series “Politik braucht Frauen” that women were reduced to actual or potential motherhood, and that decisions taken without them left pavements a stroller could not use and daycare closing in the early afternoon—she cited hours from 8:00 to 14:30.

## Party offices and civic roles

### Green municipal associations

Otte holds offices in the municipal organisations of Alliance 90/The Greens. The federal body, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Kommunalpolitische Bundesvereinigung (BGKomm), was founded in Kassel on 26 October 2023 as the umbrella of the party's 14 state-level municipal associations. Its board—two equal chairs, a treasurer, two deputies, and one delegated member each from the federal executive and the Bundestag group—was elected at the founding assembly and re-elected in Hanover in June 2025.

From 20 February 2024 the Bundestag's register of outside interests lists Otte as a consultative member of the BGKomm board in Berlin. The association describes that seat as the delegated member from the Bundestag group. In Lower Saxony, the Kommunalpolitische Vereinigung GRÜNE Niedersachsen (KPVGrün, also styled KPVGrüN), based in Hanover, was founded in the summer of 2019, after training for councillors had sat with the state party's municipal office. It runs seminars and events and argues for better conditions for Green local politics. Otte has been its treasurer since 3 December 2022, a function recorded for both the 20th and the 21st Bundestag.

### Institut Solidarische Moderne

The Institut Solidarische Moderne (ISM), a Berlin association, calls itself a think tank and platform for policy concepts based on solidarity. It says it was founded in January 2010 because of what its founders saw as deep programmatic and strategic deficits of the left in Germany and Europe; the founding appeal was adopted in Berlin on 31 January 2010. The newspaper *taz* reported that members of Die Linke, the Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Germany around Andrea Ypsilanti started the institute, and that its public role and its ties to the corresponding Bundestag groups later weakened, with the previous speakers no longer sitting deputies.

Otte joined the ISM board on 27 April 2024. On 3 June 2026 the members' assembly elected a new board and named three sitting Bundestag members as its speakers: [Jan Dieren](/people/jan-dieren) (SPD), [Caren Lay](/people/caren-lay) (Die Linke) and Otte, with Jens Pieper continuing as treasurer. The Bundestag register gives 1 June 2026 as the start of her speakership. *taz* quoted her calling the trio a political signal and saying the institute was "back" so as to make room for a common left-wing project.

### Labour and memorial associations

The Bundestag biography, based on the member's own statement, also lists membership of ver.di, the Lagergemeinschaft und Gedenkstätte KZ Moringen e.V., and Bildungswerk Leben und Umwelt e.V. ver.di, the United Services Union, describes itself as organising about 1.8 million people in around 1,000 occupations. Those three entries are memberships, not the board offices published under the code of conduct.

The Lagergemeinschaft was founded in 1989 by former prisoners of the three Moringen concentration camps, which operated in succession in Moringen from 1933 to 1945, together with local residents. It represents former prisoners and their relatives and runs the memorial opened in 1993 in a former gatehouse of the town fortifications. The camps, set in the buildings of a workhouse, were an early men's camp in 1933, a women's camp from 1933 to 1938, and a youth camp from 1940 to 1945. Otte is recorded as a member and is not on the association's published board.

Bildungswerk Leben und Umwelt e.V., in the Moringen district of Fredelsloh, is a charitable association (Amtsgericht Braunschweig, register number 3064). Its stated aim is education "for a different life and the preservation of the threatened environment." A profile it gave the Netzkraft directory says it holds seminars on fair and sustainable economic life, ecology and peace policy, and has for more than twenty years organised interest-free loan communities (Leihgemeinschaften).

From 23 June 2022 until 29 January 2024 the Bundestag listed her as honorary deputy chair of Kuratorium Sport und Natur e.V. in Munich. The German Canoe Association reported that this umbrella of nature-sport federations, which it said represented about four million members, elected her unanimously at a board election in Berlin on 23 June 2022, alongside deputies from other parties. The post is absent from the current disclosure. abgeordnetenwatch records the offices she still holds—BGKomm, KPVGrün and the ISM—without a stated income.

## Public profile

### Media coverage

Coverage has treated Karoline Otte mainly as one of the younger members who entered the Bundestag with the 2021 intake of Alliance 90/The Greens. On 30 November 2021 the [Norddeutscher Rundfunk](/organizations/norddeutscher-rundfunk) programme Panorama 3 profiled four new northern German members in “Die Neuen im Bundestag”, among them the then 25-year-old Otte from Moringen. It quoted her on climate policy that also works for people on low incomes, and on combining a small child with federal politics. On 22 November 2022 the same programme returned in a four-minute item, “Ein Jahr Bundestag: Der Frust einer Abgeordneten”. It said she had meant to concentrate on climate policy, but that the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](/facts/2022-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and other pressures had left her looking back on the year with doubt.

Local papers later covered her as a constituency politician. In February 2024 the *Göttinger Tageblatt* reported that, after Jürgen Trittin left the Bundestag, she had taken on the Göttingen constituency as well as the neighbouring seat she already covered. StadtRadio Göttingen carried the same news on 13 February 2024. The *Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine* reported her unanimous nomination, at a meeting in Goslar covered on 30 October 2024, as the Green direct candidate for Goslar–Northeim–Göttingen II. A portrait on 12 February 2025 quoted her calling the previous three years partly “frustig”, while she pointed to grants she said had reached local projects. On election night, 23 February 2025, the paper described a subdued Green gathering in Northeim: district chairs congratulated her on returning via place 7 on the Lower Saxony list, while local members said they had wanted a stronger party result.

### Family and private life

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states rests on members’ own information, lists Otte as born on 11 September 1996 in Göttingen, Protestant Lutheran, married, and the parent of two children. On abgeordnetenwatch she writes that she has lived all her life in the Northeim district and now lives with her husband and their two children in the municipality of Moringen. In February 2025 she called Fredelsloh home and said that, since a second child had been born about eight months earlier, the family had been moving between Berlin and Fredelsloh.

Her mother is Heike Müller-Otte. When Müller-Otte, then 46, stood in 2014 as a non-party mayoral candidate backed by the CDU and the Greens, the *Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine* named her children as Karoline, then 17, Phillip and Frederik. Müller-Otte won the June 2014 runoff with 63.36 percent and took office that November; she was re-elected on 12 September 2021 with 53.2 percent. In March 2026 she said she would not seek another term and would stand for the town council as an independent on the CDU list; that report called her the town’s first woman mayor. Melanie Lestar won the mayoral runoff on 27 September 2026.

### Disclosure and outside roles

Interests notified under the Bundestag’s rules of conduct (sections 45 onwards of the Members of the Bundestag Act) appear on Otte’s official biography. The notice records her last post before the mandate—Kreisinspektorin at the district of Göttingen, with a right to return and protection against dismissal—and association offices: advisory member of the board of the federal Green municipal association (BGKomm), treasurer of the Lower Saxony Green municipal association (KPV Grün), and, at the Institut Solidarische Moderne, board member and, from 1 June 2026, speaker of the board. Abgeordnetenwatch, republishing those filings, attaches no income figure to any entry, and the Bundestag page lists no remunerated sideline. On her own website she states that she has no further paid work beside the mandate and therefore no further income.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/karoline-otte