Michael Kellner

Michael Kellner (born 8 May 1977 in Gera, Thuringia) is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens and a member of the Bundestag. He sits for the Brandenburg state list and is associated with constituency 57, Uckermark–Barnim I. In the 21st Bundestag, elected on 23 February 2025, he is the Greens’ spokesperson for energy policy and head of the parliamentary group’s working group on the economy and energy, a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Protection, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. The Bundestag’s biography, which is based on his own disclosure, records that he is married and has two children.

He studied political science in Potsdam, in Canterbury in Britain, and in East Lansing in the United States. From October 2013 to January 2022 he was political federal managing director of Alliance 90/The Greens and, in that capacity, a member of the party’s federal executive. A federal delegates’ conference in Berlin elected him to the post on 19 October 2013 with 88.5 percent of the vote, succeeding Steffi Lemke, in the same leadership ballot that chose Simone Peter as co-chair and confirmed Cem Özdemir.

Kellner entered the Bundestag in 2021 on the Brandenburg list after standing in Uckermark–Barnim I, where Alliance 90/The Greens took 5.8 percent of the constituency first votes (7,528) and 7.0 percent of the second votes. Across Brandenburg the party received 9.0 percent of second votes (137,472). In December 2021, in Olaf Scholz’s traffic-light coalition, he became parliamentary state secretary to Robert Habeck at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. From January 2022 he was also the federal government’s commissioner for small and medium-sized enterprises, and from October 2022 its contact person for the cultural and creative industries, remaining in those offices until the end of the 20th legislative period. At the 2025 election the same constituency gave the Greens 3.9 percent of first votes (5,459) and 4.8 percent of second votes, while Hannes Gnauck of the Alternative for Germany won the direct seat with 38.3 percent. Kellner returned on list place 2 after the Greens won 6.6 percent of second votes in Brandenburg (108,598).

In 2023 his family connections became part of a compliance dispute in Habeck’s ministry. Der Spiegel reported that Kellner is married to Verena Graichen, sister of state secretary Patrick Graichen, and that she, like her brother, had worked at the Öko-Institut, a research institute that receives federal contracts. Graichen had advanced his best man, Michael Schäfer, for the leadership of the German Energy Agency without disclosing the personal tie, and on 30 November 2022 had approved project sketches for the National Climate Initiative, including one from the Berlin branch of BUND, where his sister had been a board member. Habeck at first kept Graichen after a closed Bundestag hearing, then said the BUND file was “one mistake too many” and asked the federal president to place Graichen in temporary retirement. The ministry said Kellner and Graichen had not taken part in tenders on which the Öko-Institut could have bid.

Early life and education

Childhood in Gera

Michael Kellner was born on 8 May 1977 in Gera, Thuringia, then in the German Democratic Republic, and grew up in a prefabricated Plattenbau block in the district of Lusan. His father was a school principal and his mother a medical-technical assistant in a polyclinic; the family had little to do with the church. A sister eight years older, a national-team volleyball player permitted to travel as a Reisekader, brought coins and gifts from Tokyo and Paris. He later said those returns left him sure he would never see the countries himself. West German relatives near Heidelberg visited about once a year. Because his sister was barred from official contact with them, his parents arranged meetings at a tram stop in East Berlin and told him to keep them secret.

He was twelve when the Berlin Wall fell. His mother took him to Monday demonstrations, including a candlelit church, which caused an argument at home because his father was not pleased. After German reunification both parents lost their posts: his mother became unemployed and later worked for less pay in a doctor's practice, while his father gave up the directorship and long remained unsure whether he could stay in the school service. Kellner has called the 1990s an enormous burden for that generation. For him they felt like a gain in freedom. The Pioneer leader and the civics teacher disappeared, and he said adults no longer knew what was right or wrong, while teenagers felt they could try anything. He also described a split in which one was treated as a right-winger or as a Zecke, then a slur for alternative youth, and said he later went to Potsdam partly to escape skinheads in combat boots.

University studies

After the Abitur in 1995 he went abroad for the first time, at 18. He spent several months working on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights with young people from many countries and travelling in Israel; a 2004 profile put the stay at about a quarter of a year. Die Zeit also noted a visit to Hebron and, about a year later, a period in Cairo on a university project about the Egypt–Israel peace treaty.

From 1996 to 2002 he studied political science at the University of Potsdam. During the student strikes of autumn 1997 he spoke for the Potsdam protest, gave interviews and debated state ministers about cuts and university policy. That year he founded the Green university group, joined Alliance 90/The Greens in Brandenburg and served as higher-education officer on the student council; he later also sat on the senate, the university council and the AStA.

Feeling stuck in Potsdam, he went abroad to study: first at the University of Kent in Canterbury, then for a year on a Fulbright Program grant in East Lansing, where he followed the 2000 United States presidential election. He returned in 2001 with his coursework finished. In January 2002 he submitted a diploma thesis on urban regime theory and completed the degree that May. He later credited teachers such as Heinz Kleger with pushing independent thought and said the statistical training kept him from reading every poll as an election result. The university profiled him in January 2017 as alumnus of the month.

Early political career

Brandenburg party work

Michael Kellner joined Alliance 90/The Greens in 1997, while studying political science at the University of Potsdam, after what the Augsburger Allgemeine described as a short spell with the Young Socialists in the SPD. That year he founded a Green student group, became higher-education officer on the student council, and during the autumn strikes spoke for the protest in Potsdam, debating cuts with ministers Alwin Ziel and Steffen Reiche. In the 1998 federal campaign in Potsdam he handed out cabbage heads calling for the defeat of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He also stood in as moderator when Joschka Fischer appeared at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the booked moderator was late.

After about three years of state and federal party work he was elected in 2000 to the state executive of the Brandenburg Greens, then studied at the University of Kent in Canterbury and spent a year in Michigan on a Fulbright Program grant, returning in 2001 having watched the 2000 United States presidential campaign. He has described the state board, and a candidacy for the Landtag of Brandenburg, as his main political activity until 2005. In January 2002 he submitted a diploma thesis on urban regime theory and relations between Berlin and Brandenburg.

At the state election of 19 September 2004 he was the Green direct candidate in constituency 22, Potsdam II, and received 774 first votes (2.5 percent), behind Matthias Platzeck of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (12,805; 41.3 percent), Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg of the Party of Democratic Socialism (12,217; 39.4 percent) and Sven Petke of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (3,399; 11.0 percent). Statewide the Greens took 42,091 of 1,168,909 valid second votes, 3.6 percent, missed the five-percent threshold and won no seats. He called the district, ironically, a "lucrative constituency."

Staff roles in Berlin

After returning from the United States he joined talks on a traffic-light coalition for the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin; they failed. On the January 2002 morning he handed in his thesis he covered leave in the office of Green co-chair Fritz Kuhn, then moved to co-chair Claudia Roth, from an internship to a staff contract in May. He managed her campaign for that year's Bundestag election on a two-month tour. When Roth lost the chair under the separation of party office and a parliamentary mandate, Kellner lost the post and worked for another Bundestag member until 2003, when her aide left for Jürgen Trittin and she recalled him.

By July 2004 he was her speechwriter and scientific assistant for press, party work and scheduling, while she prepared another bid for the chair. A biography for a Heinrich Böll Foundation event said that from 2004 he was her office manager in the federal party office and that from 2002 he advised the chair responsible for foreign policy. A later speaker note dates the Roth post to 2004–2009 and lists him as office manager to Bundestag member Frithjof Schmidt from 2009 to 2013; nd describes that role as scientific staff work. He has also written that he worked for Cornelia Behm, the Green Bundestag member from Brandenburg.

Soon after joining the party he opposed German participation in the NATO intervention in the Kosovo War, unlike most Greens and Foreign Minister Fischer. Neues Deutschland reported that Die Zeit called him a pacifist and that he nearly left, staying because he valued the party's arguments. From 2011 to 2013 he was spokesperson of the federal working group on peace and international policy, and in September 2012 the Cologne Greens listed him leading a workshop on the "responsibility to protect." By then, nd wrote, he supported integrating European armed forces, with the federal executive, while still urging an end to NATO combat missions, including in Afghanistan.

Federal managing director

Election and the federal executive

On 19 October 2013, four weeks after Alliance 90/The Greens took 8.4 percent of second votes at the Bundestag election, a federal delegates' conference in Berlin elected Michael Kellner political federal managing director (Politischer Bundesgeschäftsführer). About 800 delegates gave him 88.5 percent. He succeeded Steffi Lemke, who had held the office for eleven years, after the outgoing executive announced its resignation the day after the election. Simone Peter, described at the time as a figure of the party's left, replaced Claudia Roth as co-chair with 75.9 percent; Cem Özdemir was confirmed beside her with 71.4 percent. The other three seats were filled the same day. The political managing director was one of six elected executive members and, with the chairs, sat ex officio on the party council. A separate organisational managing director ran the federal office; Emily Büning held that post from 2012.

Later conferences returned him to the office while the chairmanship changed. At Halle (Saale) in November 2015 he received 86.04 percent, more than Peter (68.01) or Özdemir (76.93), and said member participation was the party's core and the next two years should be used to organise the Bundestag campaign. On 27 January 2018 in Hanover, the first board election after the Jamaica talks failed, delegates chose Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck as co-chairs. Baerbock won 64.45 percent against Anja Piel; Kellner was re-elected with 74.19 percent. In Bielefeld in November 2019 Baerbock and Habeck were confirmed with 97.1 and 90.4 percent and Kellner with 87.3. Ricarda Lang, a former Green Youth spokesperson, replaced Agena on the executive with 87.8 percent.

He told the Hanover congress he wanted further growth, especially in eastern Germany. The party put membership by January 2018 above 65,000, more than 6,000 up on his early tenure; the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported 94,000 by Bielefeld. He held the office until January 2022, overlapping a government role: from December 2021 he was parliamentary state secretary to Habeck at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. On 29 January 2022 a congress elected Büning, the organisational managing director since 2012, to succeed him with 88.4 percent.

Federal and European campaigns

The office organised nationwide campaigns; co-chairs and lead candidates fronted them. In the 2014 election to the European Parliament the Greens took 10.7 percent, below 12.1 percent in 2009 and above 8.4 percent in 2013. At Halle, Kellner said the aim was "the finest and greenest" Bundestag campaign. In January 2016 Der Tagesspiegel reported that the executive had named him 2017 campaign director and that he called the campaign "knallgrün". Lead candidates were Özdemir and Katrin Göring-Eckardt. The vote brought 8.9 percent of second votes and 67 seats, against 8.4 percent and 63 in 2013.

At the 2019 European election, still on his watch and under Habeck and Baerbock, the Federal Returning Officer recorded 20.5 percent, up from 10.7 in 2014 and second behind the CDU on 22.6, with turnout up from 48.1 to 61.4 percent. In 2021 the Greens took 14.8 percent of Bundestag second votes, 5.9 points above 2017, behind the SPD on 25.7 and the CDU on 18.9 and ahead of the CSU, FDP and AfD.

Programme debate and coalition negotiations

The basic-programme debate, meant to replace the 2002 text with a values document rather than a manifesto, closed at the first fully digital federal delegates' conference, 20–22 November 2020, run from Berlin's Tempodrom with more than 800 delegates online. Delegates tied the climate chapter more closely to the Paris Agreement and a 1.5-degree path, backed citizens' assemblies rather than nationwide referendums by 51.48 percent, and, against the executive's preference for a means-tested Garantiesicherung, wrote in a longer-term unconditional basic income. On 22 November they adopted "...zu achten und zu schützen – Veränderung schafft Halt", the fourth basic programme, by a large majority.

Coalition soundings sat with the same office. After the 2017 election a 14-member Green delegation entered talks with the CDU, the CSU and the FDP. Der Spiegel placed Kellner, as federal managing director, alongside lead candidates Özdemir and Göring-Eckardt, co-chair Peter, Habeck and Baden-Württemberg minister-president Winfried Kretschmann. In the night of 19–20 November, after about four weeks, FDP chair Christian Lindner broke off the talks: it was better not to govern than to govern wrongly, he said, for lack of trust and because the draft was full of contradictions. Angela Merkel said the Union had thought an agreement still reachable.

After the 2021 election he reported the soundings beside Lars Klingbeil, general secretary of the SPD, and Volker Wissing, general secretary of the FDP. At the first three-party meeting he said a basis of trust existed but that much of the road remained, and the parties agreed not to publish interim accounts. Those talks opened the negotiations for the SPD–Green–FDP government in which he became a state secretary, and the January 2022 congress passed the party office to Büning.

Bundestag elections and constituency

The 2021 election

Kellner first stood for the Bundestag on 26 September 2021, as the direct candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens in constituency 57, Uckermark – Barnim I, and second on the party's Brandenburg state list, behind Annalena Baerbock.

Of 182,836 eligible voters, 71.6 percent voted. Kellner received 7,528 first votes (5.8 percent, up 2.1 points on 2017) and finished sixth. Stefan Zierke of the Social Democratic Party won the direct seat with 38,247 votes (29.6 percent); the Bundestag records him as the constituency's directly elected member from 2021. Hannes Gnauck of the Alternative for Germany was second with 26,163 votes (20.3 percent), 12,084 behind. Green second votes there were 9,095 (7.0 percent), below the party's 137,472 votes and 9.0 percent in Brandenburg.

Under the Sainte-Laguë method, those second votes gave the Greens two Brandenburg seats. The party won no constituency in the state—the SPD took all ten—so both mandates were list seats, and the returning officer's table of list members records Green places 1 and 2, held by Baerbock and Kellner. His mandate was therefore the second list seat. The 20th Bundestag's term began with the constituent sitting on 26 October 2021.

The 2025 election

After the 20th Bundestag was dissolved, the election to the 21st Bundestag was held on 23 February 2025. Kellner again contested constituency 57 and again stood second on the Brandenburg Green list, behind Baerbock. The list published on 3 February 2025 gave his residence as Oberuckersee.

Of 180,128 eligible voters, 78.9 percent voted. Kellner received 5,459 first votes (3.9 percent, down 1.9 points) and finished fifth, behind the AfD, the SPD, the Christian Democratic Union on 18.3 percent and Die Linke on 12.2 percent. Gnauck won the direct seat with 53,912 votes (38.3 percent); Zierke was second with 27,211 (19.4 percent). Green second votes in the constituency were 6,831 (4.8 percent), against 108,598 (6.6 percent) statewide.

Seats followed second votes, and a constituency plurality counted only if the party's entitlement covered it. The Greens received 85 seats nationally. Brandenburg's 108,598 Green second votes, divided by 69,400, came to 1.564 and thus two seats; with no constituency plurality in the state, both were list seats for places 1 and 2. Gnauck's lead in constituency 57 was covered by the AfD's second-vote seats in Brandenburg.

Constituency politics

Constituency 57 is the whole Uckermark district plus part of Barnim: Eberswalde, Schorfheide and Wandlitz, and the Ämter Biesenthal-Barnim, Britz-Chorin-Oderberg and Joachimsthal (Schorfheide). The rest of Barnim is constituency 59. On 31 December 2023 it had 51 municipalities, 4,251.6 square kilometres and 221,700 inhabitants, 52.1 per square kilometre against 233.3 in Germany, with vegetation and water on 92.6 percent of the area.

On the same benchmarks the district is older and poorer than the country. Unemployment at the end of November 2024 was 8.3 percent, against 5.9 percent nationally. Disposable household income in 2021 was 22,137 euro per inhabitant, against 24,415 euro, and gross domestic product per inhabitant was 30,331 euro, against 43,292 euro. Social-insurance employment was 306.1 per 1,000 inhabitants, against 415.9. In 2022–23 births trailed deaths by 10.1 per 1,000 inhabitants, and 24.6 percent of residents were 60 to 74 and 13.3 percent were 75 or older, against 18.9 and 11.0 percent in Germany.

The Green vote in the constituency has stayed below the Brandenburg share, and the direct seat passed from Zierke in 2021 to Gnauck in 2025. Kellner's mandate in both terms came from the state list rather than the constituency. The Bundestag lists a constituency office for him in Angermünde, in the Uckermark, and another in Fürstenwalde, outside constituency 57.

Parliamentary State Secretary and SME policy

Appointment and remit

On 8 December 2021, after the Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor, President Bärbel Bas announced the new government. Its parliamentary state secretaries at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action were Franziska Brantner, Michael Kellner and Oliver Krischer, all of Alliance 90/The Greens, under minister Robert Habeck. Kellner’s Bundestag biography records the post from December 2021 until the end of the 20th legislative period.

The cabinet of 5 January 2022 appointed him Federal Government Commissioner for SMEs (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für den Mittelstand). The ministry defined the role as drawing federal SME policy together, representing it externally, acting as the contact for Mittelstand concerns, and carrying those concerns inside government and in parliament. The biography dates that commission, like the state secretaryship, to the end of the legislative period.

In April 2023 the appointments became part of a separate compliance dispute. Kellner is married to Verena Graichen, sister of Patrick Graichen, then the ministry’s energy state secretary, and reporting on that family network coincided with a review of the selection of the German Energy Agency’s chief executive. The ministry said the relationships had been disclosed before both officials took office in December 2021 and that safeguards against conflicts of interest, including in awarding studies and contracts, were already in use; opposition speakers called the ties nepotism.

Mittelstand and transformation

The ministry’s action plan of December 2022 drew the Mittelstand more widely than the European Union’s small-and-medium-enterprise category, taking in craft businesses, digital start-ups, service firms, internationally competitive manufacturers, the liberal professions and public-benefit enterprises.

On 1 July 2022 Kellner opened the dialogue “Mittelstand, Klimaschutz und Transformation” with more than 40 business and SME associations. He described the shift to climate-neutral production as more urgent after Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the reduction of gas deliveries, and the ministry said the talks would produce an action plan and a contact point for associations and companies. Published that December, with a foreword by Kellner, the plan called itself a first inventory and promised a closing report in spring 2025. Its chapters covered energy prices, decarbonisation, skilled labour, finance, sustainability reporting and supply-chain duties, the circular economy, red tape and permitting, and measures for crafts, retail, tourism, the cultural and creative industries and several manufacturing branches.

On finance it promised stable promotional conditions, especially in ERP programmes run with KfW, plus a syndicated loan for sustainable transformation from January 2023 and a higher ceiling for mezzanine-style silent partnerships, from €1.25 million to €1.5 million. It treated bureaucracy as a tighter constraint on smaller firms, cited tax relief for small photovoltaic systems in the Annual Tax Act 2022, and backed a cross-departmental relief bill, including a rise in the turnover limit for cash-basis VAT from €600,000 to €1.5 million. The 2021 agreement of the traffic-light coalition had already promised a new relief act and “Praxischecks”, reviews of administrative burden carried out with those affected. A ministry paper of 16 August 2023 said the economics ministry had piloted that method between May and August 2022 on photovoltaic installations and had found more than 50 obstacles; the wider Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act was led by the justice ministry. In September 2024 the government told the Bundestag that the ministry had reviewed information obligations within its own remit and listed measures taken or still planned as of August 2024.

An interim balance, written about two years after the July 2022 start, said the energy-price crisis had shaped the opening and pointed to faster renewable-energy permitting, abolition of the EEG surcharge, a lower electricity tax for manufacturing and new decarbonisation aid for industrial SMEs. It set a dialogue meeting for 19 June to fix priorities for the rest of the legislative period and a closing event for spring 2025.

Cultural and creative industries

The coalition agreement said the government would name a contact for the cultural and creative industries, simplify support for creative and non-technical innovation, and put federal games funding on a more lasting basis. On 6 October 2022 the economics ministry and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media appointed Kellner to that role, with Andreas Görgen, director-general in the commissioner’s office, as deputy. He was to lead the exchange with the sector, represent the government alongside the responsible departments, and offer an additional contact for companies and associations. The Bundestag biography runs the function from October 2022 to the end of the 20th legislative period.

The German Cultural Council welcomed the appointment the same day, noting that much of the sector consists of SMEs and solo self-employed people, across eleven submarkets from music, film and design to software and games. Managing director Olaf Zimmermann said that, in the energy crisis, Kellner would be measured by whether support programmes reflected the sector’s situation. Trade reporting in February 2022 had already described him as responsible for federal games policy after that unit moved from the transport ministry, including funding then put at €50 million a year and the German Computer Game Award. The December action plan said the ministry would keep supporting the federal Competence Centre for the Cultural and Creative Industries, with the emphasis on transformation.

Energy and industrial policy

Hydrogen and energy-intensive industry

As parliamentary state secretary, Michael Kellner, of Alliance 90/The Greens, treated hydrogen as the carrier for processes that could not be fully electrified. In July 2023, with more than 50 business associations, he called it, beside electricity, “the energy carrier of the future.” The ministry’s note of that meeting set two limits: energy-intensive mid-sized plants that could not electrify had to remain in the supply plans, and, because many lay outside the cities, the hydrogen core network was only a first stage.

On 26 July 2023 the cabinet updated the 2020 National Hydrogen Strategy, raising the 2030 electrolysis target from five gigawatts to at least ten and leaving the rest to imports, with use aimed chiefly at industry and heavy transport. Robert Habeck called that the step from demonstration plants to large-scale production. The emphasis inside government was not uniform: research minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger tied hydrogen to competitiveness and to using all climate-friendly types at first, while environment minister Steffi Lemke said it belonged where no better decarbonisation existed.

On 26 April 2023 Kellner told the Bundestag economic committee that “the electricity price is decisive for the competitiveness of the country.” The four cents per kilowatt-hour Olaf Scholz had offered industry in June 2021 were, he said, no longer realistic; he spoke of a price under ten cents. In October, after talks in Saxony-Anhalt, he said a basic-materials industry had to stay and that Berlin must decide on a “bridge electricity price” for the energy-intensive firms. Armin Willingmann (SPD), the state’s energy minister, added that grid fees penalised the wind-rich north and east.

Eastern German industrial sites

One such site was the PCK refinery in Schwedt. Supplied with Russian crude by the Druzhba pipeline and majority-owned through Rosneft Deutschland, it employed a little over 1,100 people and made heating oil and fuel for much of eastern Germany and for Berlin.

With an EU embargo on Russian oil looming, that feedstock was in doubt. On 9 May 2022, Spiegel reported, more than a hundred employees questioned Habeck outdoors about their jobs. Kellner led the federal–state working group on the site; a local report of 15 June 2022 named him its head. On 16 September, as Rosneft’s German subsidiaries passed to the Federal Network Agency, he told management and the works council it was “a good day for the Uckermark and for Brandenburg”: “We kept our word.” The Land had threatened to quit the group.

The joint declaration that day called the trusteeship necessary for supply and insufficient for the future: neutrality by 2045, and electric vehicles, required the site to change. Support for the Uckermark and PCK was put at a minimum of €825 million over 15 years, about 77 percent federal. Berlin also promised the full €400 million to upgrade the Rostock–Schwedt pipeline, plus oil via Gdańsk and Kazakh crude through Druzhba.

At ENERTRAG in Dauerthal on 30 March 2022 he called a faster renewable build-out “a national feat of strength,” with green hydrogen made from wind. In January 2023 he told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland that the east could match North Rhine-Westphalia and leave coal in 2030 rather than 2038, the date still set in Dresden, Magdeburg and Potsdam for the central-German and Lusatian mines. The exit was needed “in order to enter future industries based on green hydrogen”; “whoever holds on to the old loses the new.” In November the Federal Constitutional Court voided the transfer of €60 billion in unused pandemic credit into the Climate and Transformation Fund. Kellner said an unfilled gap meant “considerable damage” in the east, where about €50 billion of some €80 billion in announced industrial investment was located; without the fund, chip plants in Dresden and Magdeburg and a rebuilt solar industry were not secure. Frank Schäffler of the Free Democratic Party told the same agency the subsidies had always been wrong: the cities lacked workers, not structure, and the factories would crowd out local mid-sized firms.

Family ties and the 2023 compliance controversy

The Graichen family network

Kellner is married to Verena Graichen, a sister of Patrick Graichen, state secretary in the same ministry under Robert Habeck. Both belong to Alliance 90/The Greens. Verena Graichen worked at the Öko-Institut, as did a brother, Jakob Graichen; the institute regularly prepares paid studies for the federal government. She also sat on the board of BUND’s Berlin branch. Habeck later said she had no formal power to represent it, but that the association register listed her as its chair until May 2022.

The ministry said the relationship had been disclosed before they took office in December 2021, under conflict rules carried over from earlier governments. On 26 April 2023 the Bundestag debated the staffing at the request of the Alternative for Germany. AfD deputy Stephan Brandner spoke of a “mafiöses Geflecht” and of green “Clanstrukturen”; CSU general secretary Martin Huber said the Greens were turning the ministry into a “Familienministerium” around a “Graichen-Clan”. Green deputy Till Steffen said Graichen was kept out of tenders involving the Öko-Institut; SPD deputy Markus Hümpfer said the ties were not forbidden but left a bad taste.

On 5 May the ministry published lists: orders to the Öko-Institut of nearly €13 million since the end of 2019, most from before Olaf Scholz’s government, and grants of €13.3 million since 2012. Der Spiegel reported that neither man was allowed to award the institute contracts directly. Habeck said the legal unit found that, since the start of the term, Graichen had taken no decision on contracts or grants to the Öko-Institut or on grants to BUND e.V. or Agora Energiewende, and that funding had not risen above the earlier level.

The dena appointment and political fallout

In April 2023 a different appointment became public. Graichen sat on a search committee, with state secretary Stefan Wenzel, for chief executive of the federally owned Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena). The committee recommended Michael Schäfer, a former Berlin Green and Graichen’s best man (Trauzeuge), and the post was awarded to him. Graichen told Habeck only at the start of that week, around 24 April. The ministry said the supervisory board’s decision was legally effective, but that a shortlisting error left an appearance of bias, and the board readvertised the post. Graichen said he should have withdrawn once Schäfer was a candidate; Habeck called it a mistake but at first kept him.

Patrick Graichen and Robert Habeck at a federal press conference in Berlin in 2023.

Kellner was not on the committee. He told newspapers of the Mediengruppe Bayern that mistakes had been made over the dena chair, but that “mixing everything together” so as to harm people personally was something he rejected. Criticism had also touched his wife’s seat on the National Hydrogen Council; he said the previous economics minister, Peter Altmaier, had appointed her for her expertise, not the current leadership.

A review Habeck ordered on 23 April then found another case. On 30 November 2022 Graichen approved three project sketches under the National Climate Initiative, including one from BUND Berlin for just under €600,000. No money was paid, but the signature classed the project as eligible and left a final grant largely a formality. Habeck said the file should neither have reached Graichen nor been signed by him, and called the episode a compliance breach. Taken with the dena shortlist, he said, the compliance “firewall” drawn because of the family ties now had cracks, and Graichen was too vulnerable to do the job. On the evening of 16 May they agreed to stop working together. On 17 May Habeck said he would ask the federal president to place Graichen in temporary retirement—“the one mistake too many”.

Before that finding was public, the Berlin Public Prosecutor General’s Office told Welt am Sonntag that complaints over the dena appointment disclosed no initial suspicion of a crime, so no investigation was opened. Der Tagesspiegel later reported that prosecutors also looked at the BUND file for a possible breach of trust and again found none. Habeck’s account named Graichen’s signatures and the dena shortlist; it did not attribute a comparable breach to Kellner. The Berliner Zeitung, citing Bild, reported that a check found Kellner had not handled contracts or grants to the Öko-Institut or grants to BUND, and he stayed in office. CDU parliamentary manager Thorsten Frei called the departure overdue and said Habeck was badly damaged; Huber said the “green swamp” was not cleared.

The 21st Bundestag

Parliamentary offices

The 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on 25 March 2025, after the federal election of 23 February 2025. Michael Kellner again sat for Alliance 90/The Greens on the Brandenburg state list, having stood in constituency 57, Uckermark–Barnim I. In Brandenburg the Greens took 6.6 percent of second votes, 108,598 ballots, 2.4 points below 2021; nationally their share fell from 14.7 to 11.6 percent and their seats from 118 to 85 in a chamber of 630. The traffic-light coalition did not continue. On 6 May 2025 the Bundestag elected Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union chancellor, and Katherina Reiche (CDU) joined the CDU/CSU–Social Democratic Party cabinet as minister for economic affairs and energy.

His Bundestag biography, based on members' own statements, describes him as the Green parliamentary group's energy-policy spokesperson and head of its working group on the economy and energy; the group's page lists the spokesperson role on its own. He is a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Climate Protection, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. On 18 September 2025 the plenary unanimously adopted the Greens' proposal naming him and Anna Lührmann as Bundestag members of the advisory board of the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways, with Alaa Alhamwi and Till Steffen as deputies. The board has 16 members from the Bundestag and 16 from the Bundesrat. From 25 November 2025 the register of outside activities lists him as an unpaid member of dena's advisory board for the Marktoffensive Erneuerbare Energien, the German Energy Agency's programme for market-driven renewable supply. In September 2026 Klimareporter° identified him as chair of the group's eastern state group, the Landesgruppe Ost, a post distinct from the eastern-Germany commissionership given in June 2025 to Katrin Göring-Eckardt when the faction restored that grouping to working-group rank.

Opposition to federal economic policy

As energy spokesperson, Kellner publicly criticised the economics ministry under Reiche. In late August 2025, before a monitoring report she had commissioned on the Energiewende, he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that renewable-expansion targets must not be lowered and that the industry was already uncertain. Decisions on an industrial electricity price, climate-protection contracts, heating-law reform and a power-plant strategy were, he said, piling up: "The pressure to act is becoming ever greater, but little is happening." Reiche had argued for joining renewable expansion to cost control, and had called the previous government's electricity-use forecasts for 2030 and 2035 unrealistic.

After the report appeared, he told taz on 18 September 2025: "The monitoring report is not the problem. The minister is the problem." He said the text itself demanded that the transition continue and that more be done to meet the 2030 and 2045 climate targets, and he called it a work order for the ministry. He objected to a 2030 demand band of 600 to 700 terawatt-hours instead of 750, and to Reiche's plan to orient policy toward the lower end, which he said assumed lasting economic weakness and made the case for deindustrialisation. He described the course as unwillingness "paired with the idea of securing a remaining business model for fossil energy," built around what he called an oversized fleet of gas-fired plants, and warned against replacing Russian gas with American fracked gas. Questioning support for private solar, he said, was "an outstretched middle finger instead of a thank-you." Backup capacity, in his view, should also cover hydrogen-capable plants, large batteries, biogas and pumped storage, and firms needed planning certainty rather than doubt. Because many energy rules did not require Bundesrat consent, he said the Greens would apply pressure elsewhere, pointing to what he called doubters in the CDU and asking whether the SPD meant to undo the traffic-light record.

Political positions

Climate, energy and the economy

Kellner treats the Energiewende as climate and industrial policy together. After Katherina Reiche’s September 2025 monitoring report, he told taz that the paper required more renewables for the 2030 and 2045 targets, and that the minister was the problem. Planning for 600 to 700 terawatt-hours in 2030 rather than 750, he said, assumed a weak economy, stalled electric cars and heat pumps, and the loss of steel and chemicals—keeping a fossil business model and risking a new dependence on American fracked gas after the attack on Ukraine. Backup capacity, he argued, should be able to run on green hydrogen, not only fossil gas; asked if that was wishful thinking, he called it a chicken-and-egg problem. Tagesschau reported the warning that July. The Federation of German Industries told the broadcaster the opposite: earlier expansion plans were oversized and were raising grid fees.

He has wanted price relief longer and wider than the industrial power price of the CDU–SPD government. In November 2025 he told taz a bridge tariff should outlast the three years then allowed by EU rules and cover more than half of consumption. A motion he backed proposed 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for up to 80 percent of use into the mid-2030s, about €4–5 billion a year, tied to a site guarantee, collective agreements and climate neutrality. In March 2025 he told rbb Inforadio that a €500 billion special fund was a “shifting yard” unless the money was additional and carried a large climate share; in 2019 he had told taz the Greens opposed the debt brake because it ignored investment.

Eastern Germany and party orientation

Asked by Klimareporter in September 2026 why the Greens polled about 6 percent in Brandenburg, a surplus producer of green power, he traced it to the early 1990s in the new states: jobs eclipsed nature protection, the party left eastern legislatures, and unemployment marked his parents’ generation, including in his Uckermark constituency. Hostility had eased since the traffic-light years; fear of change had not. He sees lignite ending before the 2038 coal phase-out, says eastern governments refused an earlier exit for fear of elections, and warns that LEAG’s owners will leave the states the clean-up. Treuhand sales, he argues, blocked citizen wind farms, and lower wealth makes a solar system of about €15,000 harder to afford. He backs a tenant “solar bonus,” and village energy sharing that he says the government and the Federal Network Agency obstruct, and describes solar owners who vote for the AfD while denying climate change.

Der Spiegel and taz placed him in the 2010s on the left of Alliance 90/The Greens. In 2014 Spiegel reported that he rejected an FDP freedom of “elbows and the right of the stronger”: freedom needed social security and solidarity and ranked with ecology, justice and democracy, against colleagues such as Kerstin Andreae who treated freedom as the core. The Greens, he said, were “neither conservative, nor liberal, nor social democratic.” taz noted that he had coordinated Grün.Links.Denken and warned against neglecting social justice, and in 2018 listed him on the executive’s left, behind Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock. In 2019 he told taz that “Jamaica was never my dream,” welcomed red–red–green in Bremen, and said both wings had dropped their bans on deals with the CDU or the Left Party. By 2025, interviewers were introducing him as the Bundestag group’s energy spokesperson, not by that label.

Personal life and other offices

Family and residence

The Bundestag biography, drawn from the member's own information, states that Kellner is married and has two children. His wife is Verena Graichen, a sister of Patrick Graichen. In December 2021 the taz reported that she worked as a senior researcher at the Öko-Institut on climate policy and emissions trading and chaired the Berlin branch of BUND; in December 2024 Der Spiegel again noted the marriage and her work at the institute. The marriage made Kellner Graichen's brother-in-law while Kellner was a parliamentary state secretary and Graichen a state secretary in Robert Habeck's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, a family connection later examined in the 2023 compliance controversy.

In August 2020, as Kellner sought the nomination of Alliance 90/The Greens in Uckermark–Barnim I, the Märkische Oderzeitung described him as a married father of two who lived in Berlin, and reported that his family owned a house near the Oberuckersee where he said he spent much of his free time. On the Green Bundestag group's website he has since written that the longer he lives in the Uckermark, the clearer it is to him that a change in transport there cannot do without cars. His own site states that he lives with his wife and their two children in Berlin and in the Uckermark.

Honorary offices

Functions that members must publish under the Bundestag rules of conduct appear on the biography pages. For the 20th electoral period Kellner disclosed an unpaid seat on the board of Denkwerk Demokratie e.V. in Berlin until July 2022; unpaid membership of the supervisory board and of the members' assembly of the Heinrich Böll Foundation until June 2022; and an unpaid seat on the board of the federal party's asset-management association, the Vermögensverwaltungsverein, until February 2022. From 1 September 2023 the same disclosure listed him on the political advisory board of the Wirtschaftsvereinigung der Grünen, and as a member of the senate of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.

In the 21st Bundestag those two roles remain on the published list, with an unpaid seat, from 25 November 2025, on the advisory board for the Marktoffensive Erneuerbare Energien at the Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena) in Berlin. The entries do not publish remuneration for any of these posts. Apart from reportable offices, his website lists membership of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, of the trade union ver.di, and of Alliance 90/The Greens.