Mahmut Özdemir

Mahmut Özdemir (born 23 June 1987 in Duisburg) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag. He represents Duisburg II in North Rhine-Westphalia, a constituency in the northern Ruhr that he first won in 2013. On 8 December 2021 the Bundestag recorded his appointment as a parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs, alongside Johann Saathoff and Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, under Interior Minister Nancy Faeser in the government proposed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. A federal government directory dated 14 September 2026 lists Alexander Dobrindt, interior minister since 6 May 2025, with parliamentary state secretaries Daniela Ludwig and Christoph de Vries, and does not list Özdemir in the ministry's leadership. The Bundestag biography, compiled from members' own disclosures, still names the state-secretary post among his functions and lists him as an ordinary member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy.

Özdemir grew up in Duisburg-Homberg. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung has described him as a Homberg native with Turkish roots, and the Rheinische Post as coming from a working-class family. He attended the Franz-Haniel-Gymnasium in Duisburg from August 1997 to June 2006 and studied law, with a concentration in public law, at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf from October 2006 to August 2010, passing the first state examination in law in March 2011. He worked for the SPD parliamentary group in the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament and served as a legal trainee in the district of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court from June 2011 to May 2013. The Bundestag biography states that he remains on leave from the procedure for the second state examination.

He joined the SPD at the age of 14. In 2012, while still a legal trainee, he won a contested party nomination for the SPD candidacy in northern Duisburg, defeating Heiko Blumenthal. At the 2013 federal election he received 43.2 percent of the first votes in Duisburg II. He and Emmi Zeulner of the Christian Social Union, both 26, were the youngest man and the youngest woman in that Bundestag, whose newly elected members averaged about 49.6 years of age. In his first days in Berlin he was sometimes mistaken for the Green politician Cem Özdemir.

At the 2025 federal election, in the renumbered constituency 115, Özdemir was returned with 36,731 first votes (33.3 percent), ahead of Sascha Lensing of the Alternative for Germany on 29,445 votes (26.7 percent). Turnout was 73.4 percent of 152,391 eligible voters, and the SPD's second-vote share in the constituency was 25.3 percent. His constituency office is at Krummacherstraße 33 in Duisburg.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Mahmut Özdemir was born on 23 June 1987 in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia. He has described himself as the first child of Zeki and Aynur Özdemir, born in the district of Duisburg-Homberg, and as having stayed there rather than move away. An October 2013 profile described a Turkish working-class family that had settled in Homberg, among blast furnaces and chimneys, more than 25 years earlier, and said he kept a tie to his parents' home city of Denizli, in the Aegean region of Turkey. His father was a metalworker; his mother, Aynur, had worked for years in a tin-can factory. He grew up on the eighth floor of a high-rise in Homberg. In 2013 the family was still reported to be living under one roof, including his sister Merve Deniz, then 19.

As a boy he wanted somewhere to ride inline skates his parents had given him, and later a skateboard, after shops in the neighbourhood moved him and his friends off their car parks. He has said a family doctor in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) told them to organize, and that at about twelve they reached the socialist youth Die Falken and then the Young Socialists in the SPD (Jusos). The skate park they asked for was built; the tageszeitung later called that his first political success and described him, at 14, as Juso chair in his district. He himself has said that at 14 he was the youngest Juso chair in the country. By 2013 his sister was chair of the Jusos in Duisburg, and he has said that those teenage years also produced a wish to become a public prosecutor and, at 14, foreign minister. Reporters noted that he spoke German with a light Ruhr inflection and that in the 2013 campaign he neither concealed his parents' migration nor ran on it.

Schooling

In Homberg he attended the Gemeinschaftsgrundschule Ottostraße and then the Franz-Haniel-Gymnasium, which he left with the Abitur. The Bundestag biography, based on his own disclosures, dates the Gymnasium from August 1997 to June 2006, beginning when he was about ten.

The Franz-Haniel-Gymnasium in Duisburg, where Mahmut Özdemir took his Abitur in 2006.

His former teacher Heiner Hülsmann told Bild that Özdemir had liked to debate as a pupil and could see an argument through. The same profile quoted district mayor Hans-Joachim Paschmann (SPD), who said it had been clear early on that Özdemir was single-minded. The Abitur came in June 2006; the law degree began that October.

Legal studies and early employment

From October 2006 to August 2010 he studied law at the faculty of law of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, concentrating on public law (Öffentliches Recht), and in March 2011 he passed the first state examination in law. He has presented those years as coinciding with tuition fees in North Rhine-Westphalia, introduced as he enrolled and, on his account, removed under Minister-President Hannelore Kraft as he finished. The Landtag in fact voted on 24 February 2011, with the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Left, to abolish the fees from the winter semester 2011/12, after the taught course had ended in August 2010 and in the weeks around that first examination.

During the degree he held short placements and then a staff job with the SPD group in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia. A law-firm internship ran from February to April 2007, an administrative internship with the Landtag group from August to September 2007, and a student assistantship at the Institut für Parteienrecht und Parteienforschung (PRuF) in Düsseldorf from April to November 2008. From September 2007 he worked for the SPD Landtag group on parliamentary committees of inquiry I and II, on prisons (Strafvollzug), and on opinions in constitutional and parliamentary law.

In June 2011 he started the preparatory legal service as a Rechtsreferendar in the district of the Düsseldorf Oberlandesgericht, a stage the Bundestag records as lasting until May 2013. He told Legal Tribune Online that he had written the written papers in spring 2013 and completed the elective station (Wahlstation), and that sitting the second state examination beside a Bundestag mandate was, in his words, feasible neither in time nor physically. The biography still lists him as on leave from that examination, and his disclosure of earlier employment names the Landgericht Düsseldorf, employed by the state, with a right to return to the Rechtsreferendar post. Until the mandate he was also a Referent for the SPD Landtag group on legal policy, the area in which he said he wanted to work in parliament.

Local politics and the 2013 nomination

Party youth and district office

Mahmut Özdemir joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 2001, while he was still a teenager. He later told the Turkish daily Hürriyet that he had been active in the party since the age of 14. A profile in the taz in October 2013 reported that he was already chairman of the Young Socialists in the SPD (Jusos) in his district at that age, and that he had then given foreign minister as his chosen profession.

On the SPD Duisburg website he places the start of that activity at the Falkenheim youth centre in Hochheide and then with the Homberg Jusos. The same account, and the taz profile, describe a campaign for a skate park in Homberg. He has said that inline skates given by his parents, who had come from Turkey, led to him and friends being turned off the yard of a neighbouring hardware store, and that pressing for somewhere to skate was his first political success. The taz presented the episode as a story he liked to tell.

He went on to chair the SPD local association in Homberg, a post he already held in August 2012. From 2009 to 2013 he was an elected member of the Bezirksvertretung Homberg/Ruhrort/Baerl. In Duisburg that body is the borough council: the city has one in each of its seven boroughs, dealing with matters of local significance, and the city council (Rat) must hear it before deciding important questions for the borough. The office is therefore not a seat on the Rat. The borough mandate overlapped with paid party work. His Bundestag biography, based on his own disclosure, lists him from September 2007 as a staff member of the SPD parliamentary group in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, including assistance to parliamentary committees of inquiry and work on penal institutions and on constitutional and parliamentary law.

Candidacy for Duisburg II

The nomination was for constituency 116, Duisburg II, in the boundaries used for the 2013 federal election. The Federal Returning Officer assigns to it the Duisburg boroughs of Walsum, Hamborn, Meiderich/Beeck and Homberg/Ruhrort/Baerl, together with the Duissern quarter of the central borough.

The SPD incumbent was Johannes Pflug, a member of the Bundestag since 1998, the group's deputy spokesman on foreign policy and chairman of its Afghanistan/Pakistan task force. In 2012 he announced that he would end his political career and would not stand again. The SPD parliamentary group later listed him among 33 members who did not contest the election of 22 September 2013. The Rheinische Post, reporting the Duisburg count, described Özdemir as entering the Bundestag for the first time and thereby succeeding Pflug, who had won Duisburg II for the SPD in 2009.

In an interview published by Hürriyet on 20 August 2012, Özdemir, then 25, said that once Pflug had ruled out another candidacy the Homberg association he chaired had nominated him unanimously, and that he had agreed to stand. The paper wrote that the race was expected to be between him and Heiko Blumenthal, that the aspirants were to introduce themselves on 17 and 28 September in two different parts of Duisburg, and that about 270 delegates were to choose the candidate on 13 November 2012 at the Rheinhausenhalle, a meeting party chairman Sigmar Gabriel was expected to attend.

He won the contested nomination against Blumenthal. The Rheinische Post recorded in October 2015, when Blumenthal was about to join the staff of Duisburg mayor Sören Link, that Blumenthal had sought the SPD Bundestag candidacy for the north of the city in 2012 and had lost a contested vote to Özdemir. Blumenthal, who had grown up in Neumühl, had been a Duisburg city councillor since 2009 and before that a member of the SPD group on the Hamborn borough council for about five years; he had also worked for Link while Link sat in the Landtag. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported in September 2021 that several Social Democrats had wanted to follow Hans Pflug in the northern constituency, and that Özdemir, then a trainee lawyer in the district of the Düsseldorf higher regional court, had unexpectedly beaten Blumenthal, whom it described as Link's aide for seven years. Neither account gives a figure for that internal vote. The nomination made Özdemir the SPD's direct candidate for Duisburg II.

Bundestag elections

The Duisburg II constituency

Duisburg II is the northern of the two Bundestag constituencies in the independent city of Duisburg, in North Rhine-Westphalia and the Ruhr. It was constituency 116 in 2013, 2017 and 2021, and constituency 115 at the 2025 election. For all four elections the Federal Returning Officer defined it as the boroughs of Walsum, Hamborn, Meiderich/Beeck and Homberg/Ruhrort/Baerl, plus Duissern in the central borough, with the rest of the city in the neighbouring seat.

At the end of 2023 the constituency had 256,900 inhabitants on 113.7 square kilometres, a density of 2,258.6 per square kilometre, and foreign nationals were 25.8 percent of the population. Other figures in that release are for Duisburg as a whole, because the city is split between constituencies: unemployment was 12.7 percent at the end of November 2024, and 151.3 people per 1,000 inhabitants were receiving benefits under Book II of the Social Code at the end of August 2024. Producing industries accounted for 24.5 percent of the city's socially insured employment on 30 June 2023.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany already held the seat before Mahmut Özdemir: the Rheinische Post reported that he succeeded Johannes Pflug, who had won Duisburg II for the SPD in 2009. From 2013 to 2021 the SPD's first-vote plurality was over the Christian Democratic Union; in 2025 the Alternative for Germany took second place. Turnout was 63.6 percent in 2013, 64.7 percent in 2017 and 63.3 percent in 2021, then rose by 10.1 points to 73.4 percent. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that, on 2025 second votes, the AfD led the SPD in Hamborn (27.26 percent to 23.75 percent) and Meiderich/Beeck (27.7 percent to 26.34 percent), both inside Duisburg II.

Results from 2013 to 2025

Özdemir won the first-vote plurality in Duisburg II in 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025. The margin was widest in 2021, against the CDU, and narrowest in 2025, when the AfD's first-vote share rose by 12.9 points.

Map of directly elected constituency winners in the Ruhr at the 2025 Bundestag election, published by the Regionalverband Ruhr.

In 2013 the SPD received 44,759 first votes (43.2 percent) and the CDU 30,654 (29.6 percent); turnout was 63.6 percent of 166,103 eligible voters, and the AfD took 4.1 percent of first votes. The Rheinische Post reported that Özdemir entered the Bundestag and that Volker Mosblech of the CDU did not. Born on 23 June 1987, he was 26. The Bundestag named him the youngest member of the new parliament and named Emmi Zeulner of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, also born in 1987 and elected in Kulmbach, as the youngest woman, so they did not share that status. t-online, on 30 September 2013, likewise called him Germany's youngest parliamentarian.

In 2017 the SPD fell by 8.5 points to 34,799 first votes (34.7 percent), with the CDU on 26,522 (26.4 percent) and the AfD on 16,643 (16.6 percent, up 12.4 points). Turnout was 64.7 percent of 160,204 eligible voters, and the SPD's second-vote share was 34.1 percent.

The 2021 nominations again listed Özdemir for the SPD and Volker Peter Mosblech for the CDU. The SPD rose to 38,162 first votes (39.4 percent, up 4.7 points), the CDU fell to 19,404 (20.0 percent) and the AfD to 13,361 (13.8 percent), while Alliance 90/The Greens reached 10,518 (10.9 percent). Turnout was 63.3 percent of 155,265 eligible voters, and the SPD took 36.9 percent of second votes.

In 2025, 111,847 of 152,391 eligible voters cast ballots, a turnout of 73.4 percent. Özdemir received 36,731 first votes (33.3 percent, down 6.2 points). Sascha Lensing of the AfD was second with 29,445 (26.7 percent, up 12.9 points), ahead of the CDU on 21,791 (19.7 percent), Die Linke on 9,976 (9.0 percent), the Greens on 7,599 (6.9 percent) and the Free Democratic Party on 2,394 (2.2 percent). Second votes put the SPD at 28,032 (25.3 percent, down 11.6 points) and the AfD at 27,428 (24.8 percent, up 12.6 points).

Under the electoral law reformed in 2023 and first applied in 2025, a first-vote plurality no longer by itself gives a party candidate a seat. Winners in each Land are ranked by first-vote share and seated only up to the party's second-vote entitlement there (Zweitstimmendeckung), and the Bundestag is fixed at 630 members. Tagesschau reported that 23 constituency winners — 15 from the CDU, four from the AfD, three from the CSU and one from the SPD — received no seat, and that the Federal Constitutional Court had held in July 2024 that the procedure was compatible with the Basic Law. North Rhine-Westphalia was not among the affected Länder. In the official seat calculation Duisburg II ranks fourth among SPD constituency leaders in the state, at 33.3 percent, with coverage marked yes, and the list of those elected records Özdemir as returned for constituency 115; he had also been 60th on the state SPD list.

Parliamentary work, 2013–2021

Committees

From his entry into the Bundestag in 2013 until the end of the 19th electoral term in 2021, Özdemir's standing assignment was interior policy. In the 18th term (2013–2017) he was a full member of the Interior Committee, of the board of trustees of the Federal Agency for Civic Education and of the subcommittee on municipal affairs, and a substitute on the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and the committee for the scrutiny of elections. In the 19th term he remained a full member of the renamed Committee on the Interior and Community and a legal-affairs substitute, and he was also a substitute on the parliamentary accompanying body for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The interior brief put him in front of the 2018 scandal at the Bremen branch of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). On 29 May 2018 he told Deutschlandfunk that people had been let into the country unchecked, in some cases without identification treatment (erkennungsdienstliche Behandlung), and he called that an egregious security failure and a failure of supervision by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. He held the incumbent minister, Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, responsible, and extended the charge to what he called a decade and a half of interior policy under the Christian Democratic Union. He said the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had questioned the ministry in the Interior Committee and had supported more staff and a restructuring at the BAMF, which he argued had to operate as a security authority.

In the 19th term he was also a full member of the Sports Committee and the SPD's Obmann there, the party's lead member in the committee. On 15 April 2021, debating opposition motions on sports facilities and club sport in the pandemic, he called a Left Party proposal for a "third Golden Plan" of ten billion euros "a lot of hot air" beside a renovation backlog which, as he noted, the motion itself put at 31 billion euros. He pointed to federal programmes he said had already directed 200 million euros to 105 projects in 2020 and a further 600 million through a supplementary budget, and argued that children and young people should be able to do contactless outdoor sport regardless of local infection rates.

He also held deputy chairmanships of two Bundestag parliamentary groups. In the 18th term he was deputy chair of the German–Central Asian group, chaired by Manfred Grund (CDU/CSU) and covering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In the 19th term he was the SPD deputy chair of the group for Arabic-speaking states of the Middle East, chaired by Michael Hennrich (CDU/CSU). In May 2019 he travelled with a delegation of that group to Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian territories; the Bundestag's account places him with Hennrich at the Caritas Baby Hospital in Bethlehem.

Inquiry into the 2016 Berlin attack

On 1 March 2018 the Bundestag unanimously set up the first committee of inquiry of the 19th electoral term into the attack of 19 December 2016 at Berlin's Breitscheidplatz, where the Tunisian Anis Amri drove a truck into a Christmas market and killed 12 people. At the constituent meeting the same day, opened by Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble, Armin Schuster (CDU) was elected chair and Özdemir deputy chair. The committee had nine full members and nine substitutes: three from the CDU/CSU, two from the SPD, and one each from the AfD, the FDP, the Left and the Greens. Özdemir and Fritz Felgentreu were the two SPD members; Felgentreu was the SPD group's Obmann.

The inquiry was to judge whether federal and state security, prosecution, prison and intelligence services, and the authorities applying asylum and residence law, had acted properly, what supervisors knew or should have known, and who was politically responsible, and then to draw conclusions for preventing further attacks. The period ran from Amri's entry into the Schengen area in 2011 to 1 March 2018. The report, printed paper 19/30800 and nearly 1,900 pages, was handed to Schäuble on 21 June 2021 and debated on 24 June. Klaus-Dieter Gröhler (CDU/CSU) described it as the product of 132 sittings, 462 hours and 147 witness examinations, and said individual failures had together been fatal: the attack could have been prevented.

The majority text, carried by the CDU/CSU and the SPD, held that misjudgements and structural problems had combined so that nobody stopped Amri: units dealing with Islamist Gefährder (persons officially classified as threats) lacked resources; agencies handling refugees were overwhelmed in the summer and autumn of 2015; prosecutorial jurisdiction was fragmented; and information-sharing in the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre failed. No single error, it said, had weighed particularly heavily alone, and it recorded later gains in staff, powers and coordination. The FDP, the Left and the Greens dissented jointly, arguing that the "lone perpetrator" thesis advanced after the attack had been refuted and that Amri had pursued attack plans from his arrival in Germany in July 2015, and certainly by the end of November 2015. Felgentreu, for the SPD, also said Amri had been part of a network, and named overload after the 2015–16 arrivals, weak cooperation in the counter-terrorism centre, and a misreading of the threat by the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Intelligence Service and the domestic intelligence service.

Özdemir spoke for the SPD on 24 June, with bereaved relatives and survivors present. He put the injured at more than 170, said the balance of liberty and security had failed because the services had too few staff, and argued that people of unclear identity should not be left at liberty: Amri, he said, had used aliases "in double figures", and anyone who raised doubt, refused to cooperate or deceived the authorities should be held until the identity was established. The BAMF, he said, had to become both an identity-establishing authority and an authority for that custody. He called Amri a highly mobile Gefährder who crossed North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony while the authorities, on his account, could not cross the lines of federalism, and he described a dispute over an informant between the North Rhine-Westphalia state criminal police and the Federal Criminal Police Office which the federal prosecutor general had tried to settle.

Intra-party alignment

Özdemir has stated that he belonged to the Seeheimer Kreis from his first electoral term. The Kreis is an organised current inside the SPD Bundestag group. Before the December 2017 party congress, Der Spiegel described it as the SPD's conservative wing and reported its warning that members should not shrink from the responsibilities of government.

Parliamentary State Secretary, 2021–2025

Appointment and responsibilities

On 8 December 2021, after the Bundestag had elected Olaf Scholz chancellor, Bundestag President Bärbel Bas announced the new government. Nancy Faeser of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) became federal minister of the interior and for home affairs, and the parliamentary state secretaries named for her ministry were Mahmut Özdemir, Johann Saathoff and Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, all SPD members of the Bundestag. The office is held by a Bundestag member and, under the Parliamentary State Secretaries Act, ends with the responsible minister's tenure or, in a caretaker cabinet under Article 69(3) of the Basic Law, when that minister's conduct of business ends—not merely because a parliamentary term expires.

In February 2023 Özdemir described his own share of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community on Abgeordnetenwatch. He said he covered migration, refugees and return policy (department M), sport (department SP), international and EU affairs (staff unit E), constitutional and administrative law, and aviation security (unit B.3), and pointed to the ministry organigram for the split with his two colleagues.

The Scholz government left office on 6 May 2025, when the Bundestag elected Friedrich Merz chancellor and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed the CDU/CSU–SPD ministers. Alexander Dobrindt of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) has been interior minister since that day. Özdemir was not reappointed. Tagesschau had listed Christoph de Vries of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and Daniela Ludwig (CSU) as the Union's interior-ministry parliamentary state secretaries on 28 April, before the swearing-in. De Vries wrote that the next day he and Ludwig received their certificates from Dobrindt and took the oath after Faeser handed over. Sport left the interior ministry with the new government and was handled by a minister of state for sport and volunteering in the Federal Chancellery.

Migration, returns and security

While he held the returns brief, the Bundestag on 18 January 2024 passed the Act to Improve Returns (Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz), with the SPD, the Free Democratic Party and most of Alliance 90/The Greens in favour and the CDU/CSU and Alternative for Germany against. The act extended pre-departure custody from 10 to 28 days, widened searches of shared accommodation, and made identification and the removal of offenders and people assessed as threats easier. In the debate Faeser defended it as the most extensive law a federal government had yet brought forward on the legal framework for returns.

On 26 August 2024 he argued in public for harder policing. In a statement to the broadcaster Welt, carried by the dts news agency, he said that preventing terrorism and crime "with analogue means" was becoming ever more difficult, and he called for facial recognition with occasion-related video surveillance in public places. He said he wanted a constitutional state "with more powers in digital reality, which enforces after a single warning shot", and he described migration policy as still shaped by what he called Angela Merkel's "fatal 'We can do this' policy". He proposed faster procedures at foreigners' authorities and fewer stages of appeal so that unlawful residence could be ended sooner.

Days later he answered for the first removal flight to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. On 30 August 2024 a constituent asked about a flight of 28 convicted offenders and about 1,000 euros paid to each. Özdemir replied on 13 September that a Federal Administrative Court judgment of 21 April 2022 required people being removed to be able to meet basic needs for a foreseeable period, so the cash guarded against a court finding the removal unlawful if destitution could not be ruled out. Germany had no relations with the Taliban, he wrote; the ministry had arranged the flight through neighbouring countries, especially Qatar, and each case still had to be assessed individually. He called irregular migration the ministry's highest priority, and his own.

Federal sport policy

On 21 June 2023, at the Bundestag sports committee's discussion of the federal government's 15th Sport Report, Özdemir said the split under which the federation funds elite sport and the Länder fund mass-participation sport had to be set aside, and that disputes over competence should not block the work. He treated lost physical activity among children and young people after the coronavirus restrictions as a problem that would persist unless it was made up.

He cited "ReStart – Sport bewegt Deutschland", run with the German Olympic Sports Confederation and funded with 25 million euros. He called the International Olympic Committee's readmission of Russian and Belarusian athletes a mistake, said the government stood with Ukraine, and noted that the ministry had withdrawn a rule under which taking part in those events would have ended German athletes' federal funding. An independent contact point for victims of sexualised violence was to open in July 2023, and he linked a future Safe Sport centre, and a first sports-funding act, to a more competitive elite-sport system. On a visit reported on 17 May 2023, Federal Institute of Sport Science director Andrea Schumacher briefed him on the institute, a subordinate body that supports the ministry on sport.

The cabinet adopted the funding bill on 6 November 2024. Its centrepiece was an independent agency to distribute elite-sport money. Hours later the coalition collapsed. The SPD group said the CDU/CSU and the FDP had confirmed in writing that they would not negotiate before the election, so the bill from Faeser's ministry had no majority. CSU sports politician Stephan Mayer said the draft was not approvable and that the agency would lack real independence; SPD spokesperson Sabine Poschmann called that a setback for athletes and coaches.

Özdemir spoke for the government at the first reading on 6 December 2024. He tied the text to the promise of an independent funding body, said more money alone did not produce better elite sport, noted that he had for the first time brought the 16 Land sports-confederation presidents into the ministry, and asked the opposition to pass the law. It did not pass in that term. On 25 March 2026 the next cabinet adopted a new draft, prepared by the minister of state for sport and volunteering and again built around an independent elite-sport agency.

Role since 2025

Committees and the hydrogen brief

On 6 May 2025 the Bundestag swore in Friedrich Merz as chancellor, and the CDU/CSU–SPD cabinet replaced that of Olaf Scholz. Özdemir, parliamentary state secretary at the interior ministry from 2021 to 2025 under Nancy Faeser, did not continue in the post. He stayed the directly elected member for Duisburg II (constituency 115); the Bundestag lists him as an ordinary member, not as a state secretary.

From 21 May 2025 the SPD group records him as a full member of the committees on legal affairs and consumer protection and on economic affairs and energy, and as a deputy on the committee for election scrutiny, immunity and the rules of procedure. On 25 June 2025 he joined the nine-member body under Article 13(6) of the Basic Law, which reviews the annual report on technical surveillance of homes; courts judge individual cases. He joined the Subcommittee on European Law on 16 October 2025 and became a deputy on the Defence Committee on 7 September 2026.

The group named him its commissioner for hydrogen on 7 July 2025. In the first reading on 6 November 2025 he called it a “Hoffnungsträger” for climate-neutral steel and chemicals, affecting grid fees and power prices, and said the coalition had swapped an “ideological colour theory” for a pragmatic ramp-up. Replying to an Alternative for Germany speaker who cited the Bundesrechnungshof on weak demand, supply and price, he said the audit should be read closely, that Brussels defined green hydrogen too narrowly, and that Duisburg’s fuel-cell centre and direct-reduction plant were reasons for budget lines and supply contracts rather than a chicken-and-egg debate.

The bill was to speed permits and procurement for production, import, storage and transport, and to treat covered plants and pipelines as in the overriding public interest. Experts at a 24 November hearing wanted a wider scope, including low-carbon hydrogen; the economic-affairs committee adopted amendments on 25 February 2026, and the next day the Bundestag passed the bill, the CDU/CSU and SPD for and the other groups against. Signed on 29 March and published on 1 April, it took effect on 2 April. Özdemir said the coalition had added plants for liquid organic carriers and low-carbon hydrogen, applied the rules to pending cases and put electrolysers into plan-approval law.

On 18 May 2026 his own five-point plan proposed an auctioned contract for difference with a clawback, public guarantees, lasting grid-fee rules for electrolysers, multi-year budgets, and clusters linked to European import corridors.

SPD Duisburg and criticism of the party leadership

He has chaired the Duisburg SPD since 30 October 2021, when a congress in Homberg’s Glückauf-Halle gave him 123 of 202 votes, against Jürgen C. Brandt and Norbert Fabian. The Rheinische Post tied the fight to the late-2019 resignation of Ralf Jäger, a former North Rhine-Westphalia interior minister, and a failed dual leadership of Sarah Philipp and mayor Sören Link.

On 8 November 2025, in the Rheinhausenhalle, he won only narrowly: 105 votes to 93 for deputy Jannik Neuhaus, which the paper gave as 52.5 percent to 46 percent after one invalid ballot, with three abstentions and a margin it put at 13 votes. Two counts were voided because extra ballots appeared. Neuhaus refused another term as deputy and stayed an assessor; Benedikt Falszewski and Jülide Celenk became deputies.

In early September 2024, after elections in Thuringia and Saxony, Focus reported a Facebook text, written while he was still a state secretary: the SPD had justified poor results since 2005 and carried on; people rejected the claim that Bürgergeld matched wages; deportation explanations did not answer insecurity; and, despite aid he put at 2 billion euros, steel capacity was being cut. “Führungsriegen”, he wrote, had to admit: “Die Menschen vertrauen uns nicht.” The extracts name nobody; Focus read them as aimed at Scholz and co-chairs Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken.

In March 2026, after elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, Bild reported an Instagram call for a special congress and a “schonungslosen Aussprache”. He wrote that he despaired at self-inflicted defeats, that back-room “alte Mechanismen” and functionaries chasing posts and the official car would block a recovery, and that after 2025 one network had merely replaced another.

In September 2026 he told Welt the federal party had no clear line on rents, fuel and the weekly shop, home ownership or migration, unlike Manuela Schwesig in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Reopening a “Gesamtkunstwerk” after a scare was not credible; his trust had broken when Merz “unter der Latte durchgetaucht” in the chancellor’s election; “Hoffnung ist keine Strategie.” Otherwise, he said, the SPD should stop governing rather than stay only lest the AfD gain; members, not a leadership he said did not own the party, should decide course and whether to split government from party office. Asked about posts Welt linked to the Parliamentary Left, among them co-chair Bärbel Bas, he said networks advanced their own people and the current team could not show electoral success.

On 22 October 2026 the dts agency, citing Welt, reported speculation that he could become secretary-general if Hubertus Heil took the chair at a January congress—not a nomination. Heil had told Der Spiegel a candidacy was possible (“Das ist möglich”); asked if he would serve, Özdemir said he was “jederzeit bereit” if voters’ core concerns stayed non-negotiable. He attacked Klingbeil’s double role as chair and finance minister in an “ungeliebten GroKo unter einem unwürdigen Kanzler Merz”, arguing that compromises then stuck to the SPD and a chair in office could no longer offer “SPD pur”, and he asked for basic-allowance relief against bracket creep. Whether Heil would run, or any pairing follow, was left open.

Policy positions

Internal security and migration

Özdemir has stood with the more order-focused current in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. On 25 January 2023 he told Abgeordnetenwatch that he had belonged to the Seeheimer Kreis, the conservative wing of the Bundestag group, since his first term. Its "Weimar Declaration", reported by Der Spiegel on 29 June 2024, said breaking the law should mean prosecution and enforcement, "including the deportation of criminal asylum applicants and persons deemed a threat" (Gefährder).

On 7 May 2024 he answered a constituent who set Chancellor Olaf Scholz's call to deport "on a large scale" those with no right to remain, and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser's discussion of removing clan members, against ideas from a meeting in Potsdam. He wrote that not everyone who arrives can stay: anyone who fails the statutory tests must leave, preferably voluntarily and otherwise by removal, a Länder task with federal support, with stricter enforcement above all against offenders and Gefährder. On clans he cited an August 2023 interior-ministry paper under which expulsion would have required facts suggesting membership of a criminal organisation, not family ties alone. He referred questions about withdrawing German citizenship to the coalition's reformed nationality law.

On 26 August 2024, three days after the knife attack in Solingen, he told Welt, via the agency dts, that preventing terrorism "by analogue means" was growing harder. He asked for "facial recognition with occasion-related video surveillance in public places", a state that "enforces after a single warning shot", faster procedures at foreigners' authorities and fewer appeals, and blamed Angela Merkel's "fatal 'We can do this' policy". On 17 October 2024 the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte called parts of the ministry's autumn security package—biometric matching of faces and voices against the open internet, and wider suspicionless checks—vague and in places unlawful under the constitution, EU law and international law. Legal director Bijan Moini said suspicionless checks on transport and at festivals invited racial profiling, and described online biometric matching and AI-linking of police databases as "activism". The amended text barred a stock database of every face and voice online, but left detail to a later ordinance.

In a Facebook post reported by Focus on 3 September 2024, after the SPD's results in Saxony and Thuringia, he wrote that the party could explain why foreign offenders had not been returned, yet people felt unsafe at festivals and when "gatherings of disrespectful, predominantly foreign men" blocked the pavement "while our population walks around the outside in its own country". Focus read the post as aimed also at Scholz and co-leaders Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken; it recorded no reply from them.

Welfare, industry and energy

The same post treated the Bürgergeld, basic support for people able to work, and steel as reasons for lost trust. He wrote that the SPD tried to "relativise" the claim that the benefit was no higher than "honest work", while people felt that "one lives almost as well unemployed as as a working person". On industry he said the party looked powerless against managers who, despite "billions in subsidies (€2 billion from the federal government and the Land)", accepted dependence on Chinese and Indian steel through what he called the "irresponsible dismantling" of basic industry. That figure matches a European Commission decision of 20 July 2023 approving German aid for ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe in Duisburg: up to €550 million for a direct-reduction plant and two melters to replace a blast furnace, plus up to €1.45 billion toward the extra cost of renewable rather than low-carbon hydrogen for ten years. The plant was to start on natural gas and use only renewable hydrogen from 2037, without a rise in capacity.

On 6 April 2025 the Neue Ruhr Zeitung reported that, after Thyssenkrupp Steel cancelled supply contracts with Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann, with about 3,000 jobs at stake, Özdemir called the step irresponsible, said German security interests were at risk, and argued that the state should take a stake in ThyssenKrupp.

On 6 November 2025, at first reading of the hydrogen-acceleration bill, he said the CDU/CSU–SPD agreement meant dropping an "ideological colour theory" for a pragmatic ramp-up. He called the EU definition of green hydrogen too narrow and tied the Duisburg plant, and a RWE–TotalEnergies contract for 30,000 tonnes a year from 2030, to jobs in the Ruhr. He asked the House to read the Bundesrechnungshof. Its report of 28 October 2025 found that neither domestic supply nor planned imports looked achievable by 2030, that demand was slipping, and that green hydrogen would stay much dearer than fossil fuels, implying lasting subsidy and a double-digit billion risk if the core network failed. The auditors asked for a reality check and, if needed, a path to climate neutrality by 2045 without a permanently subsidised hydrogen economy.

In the same debate Alaa Alhamwi of Alliance 90/The Greens said the bill weakened climate and environmental safeguards, letting electrolysers run on the most carbon-intensive power while still counting as in the overriding public interest. Jörg Cezanne of Die Linke said renewable hydrogen was essential for steel and parts of chemicals, but that lower targets and no priority for scarce supply would not speed investment.

Civic life

Local associations and football

Mahmut Özdemir’s declared civic attachments cluster in Duisburg: history, fire-brigade and citizens’ associations in Homberg and Baerl, carnival societies, the Arbeiterwohlfahrt and a trade union, and football with MSV Duisburg and the parliamentary side FC Bundestag.

The Bundestag biography, based on members’ self-disclosures, lists the Freundeskreis Historisches Homberg from August 2004, the Feuerwehrverein Duisburg-Homberg from July 2011, and the Baerler Heimat- und Bürgerverein 1988 from March 2013. He joined the Arbeiterwohlfahrt in June 2008 through its Homberg local group in the Duisburg district association, and the register of posts he must publish names him chair of the board of trustees of the AWO-Duisburg-Stiftung. Since June 2010 he has belonged to the IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie, and since July 2007 he has sat on the board of the friends’ association of the law faculty at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

He has been a senator of the Karnevalsgemeinschaft Narrenzunft 1957 since November 2011. At the society’s session opening in Homberg in November 2019 he said it was a pleasure to celebrate “because one is among friends.” He became honorary senator of the Karnevalsgesellschaft Grün-Weiß Walsum in November 2021 and, in August 2023, a member of the supporters’ circle of the 1. Große Karnevalsgesellschaft Rot-Weiß Hamborn-Marxloh. The disclosure also records honorary membership of the Römergarde der Stadt DU MMIV and supporting membership of the HDK, the short name of the Hauptausschuss Duisburger Karneval 1956, Duisburg’s carnival umbrella. He is an honorary member of TIAD, an association of Turkish entrepreneurs and academics in the Duisburg region; at its iftar on 7 March 2025 he called the evening the region’s largest official iftar.

MSV Duisburg membership is dated from July 2013, with honorary membership of VfB Homberg. He was already playing for FC Bundestag in 2019, including against a Russian parliamentary side. In May 2022 the Bundestag press office called him captain and chair of the club and said he would lead the delegation to the 49th parliamentary tournament in Lahti, Finland, where the German, Austrian, Swiss and Finnish sides have met since 1971. The Tagesspiegel reported that Germany regained the unofficial title there after eleven years — 1–0 against Finland, 4–0 against Austria and 3–0 against Switzerland — and that Özdemir was injured during the tournament.

He was still captain in May 2025. He told the Rheinische Post that the largest Bundestag group supplies the captain and that, with the SPD third and the CDU first, he was waiting for a CDU nominee; he added that the Union had held the role for 14 years and that a European title had returned only under a Social Democratic captain. On 25 June 2025 Fritz Güntzler (CDU) was elected captain unanimously and succeeded him. Özdemir said a members’ resolution made membership of the Alternative for Germany incompatible with FC Bundestag membership. He said he respected a first-instance decision but wanted further legal clarification, and that a board decision meant AfD deputies would not be selected to play while the question remained open, citing the classification by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Public profile

His constituency office is given as Krummacherstraße 33, 47051 Duisburg. SPD Duisburg states that its sub-district office team is based at that address. The biography links his site, oezdemir-fuer-duisburg.de, and Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts; the site invites residents of Duisburg II to follow his parliamentary and constituency work and to make contact. A further disclosed post is membership of the political advisory board of the Wirtschaftsforum der SPD.