# Rasha Nasr

# Rasha Nasr

Rasha Nasr (born 12 May 1992 in Dresden) is a politician in Germany of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag from Saxony. The Bundestag lists her profession as political scientist. She has served in both the 20th and 21st electoral terms, each time on the Saxon state list rather than with a directly won constituency seat, and is the SPD candidate for Dresden I.

Her parents moved from Syria to the German Democratic Republic in 1986. She was born in Dresden and grew up in a village near the Saxon capital. In a July 2021 interview she described an older brother and recalled being taken, at about six, to a demonstration in memory of Jorge Gomondai, who had been killed in a racist attack in Dresden after German reunification. She passed the Abitur in 2010 at the Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium in Nossen and received a bachelor's degree in political science from TU Dresden in 2014. The current official biography, which the Bundestag says is based on the member's own information, records that she is non-denominational, married and has one child.

From 2015 to 2016 she was an assistant in the press office of TU Dresden, and from 2016 to 2017 asylum and integration officer for the city of Freiberg. She then worked in the press office of the Saxon SPD (2017–2020) and as office manager for Landtag member Albrecht Pallas (2020–2021). She joined the SPD in 2017, and the Bundestag biography lists her as co-chair of the Dresden SPD since 2021. Before the 2021 election, the Heinrich Böll Foundation described her as the first woman with a history of migration to seek a Bundestag mandate for the Saxon SPD. The SPD newspaper *Vorwärts* has since described her as the first Saxon SPD member of the Bundestag with a migration history.

In 2021 she stood in Dresden I, then constituency 159. The SPD received 26,271 first votes there (14.6 percent), behind the [Christian Democratic Union of Germany](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) (21.1 percent), [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) (18.9 percent) and [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany (18.8 percent), and 34,125 second votes (19.0 percent); turnout was 79.2 percent. She took her seat on the Saxon state list. At the 2025 federal election the constituency, renumbered 158, gave the SPD 21,457 first votes (11.7 percent). [Thomas Ladzinski](/people/thomas-ladzinski) of the AfD won the direct mandate with 29.4 percent, ahead of Markus Reichel of the CDU on 27.3 percent. Nasr returned through the state list, which Abgeordnetenwatch records as list place 3.

In the 21st Bundestag she has been a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and of the Interior Committee since 21 May 2025, and spokesperson of the SPD parliamentary group's working group on migration and integration since 8 July 2025. She has sat on the board of trustees of the Federal Agency for Civic Education since 25 June 2025 and has been deputy chair of the Parliamentary Friendship Group Berlin–Taipei since 15 September 2025. In the summer of 2025 she voted for the suspension of family reunification for people with subsidiary protection. *Freie Presse* later quoted her calling that consent a mistake because, she said, she had "sold" herself. A January 2026 *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* profile presented her as troubled by having backed asylum laws she regarded as wrong.

## Early life and education

### Family background

Rasha Nasr was born on 12 May 1992 in Dresden. The biography on the website of the [German Bundestag](/organizations/german-bundestag) also states that she is non-denominational, married and has one child, and an editorial note says those details rest on information supplied by the member.

She has said in interviews that her parents came from Syria to the German Democratic Republic in 1986. A 2021 profile in the Berlin daily *taz* reported the same arrival and wrote that, after the Peaceful Revolution, the family moved from Dresden to a village in the district of Meißen, in Saxony. The introduction to a July 2021 interview from the Baden-Württemberg office of the [Heinrich Böll Foundation](/organizations/heinrich-boll-foundation) described her as having grown up in a village near the Saxon capital. In a first-person text for "Wir sind der Osten", Nasr wrote that she was born in Dresden, raised in the Meißen district, and had never wanted to leave Saxony.

In the Böll Foundation interview she dated her first political memory to the age of six, when her parents took her to a Dresden commemoration for Jorge Gomondai. She called him the first person to die in the city after a racist attack following the reunification of Germany, and said she had feared for herself, her parents, her brother and what she called her community. Gomondai, a former contract worker in the GDR, died in Dresden on 6 April 1991 of injuries that an essay for the Federal Agency for Civic Education attributes to neo-Nazis; the same essay notes that prosecutors classified the case as bodily harm resulting in death and participation in a brawl, not as murder. Nasr told *taz* that her parents had taught her to stand up for other people and to meet them with respect and love.

On naturalization, she told the Böll Foundation that her parents had had to sign that they would give up Syrian citizenship if the German state required it, unlike people from European Union states or Switzerland, who could more readily keep an earlier citizenship. She described growing up in two worlds and called that background a cultural treasure. In a conversation with *vorwärts*, the magazine of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, published as she turned 30, she spoke of memories of an ice-cream shop in Damascus and of Syrian food, manners and smells, and of sadness at the war's destruction of the country. In July 2025 she told WEB.DE that in Germany she had not felt German enough and in Syria not Syrian enough, and that Dresden was where she had put down roots, married and started a family.

### School and university

The self-reported Bundestag biography states that Nasr passed the Abitur in 2010 at the Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium in Nossen and in 2014 received a bachelor's degree in political science from TU Dresden, the occupation the page lists for her. It does not name a second subject. The *taz* profile wrote that she had just finished studying politics and philosophy there when, in 2015, many refugees arrived from her parents' country of origin, and that she was then working in the university press office. An author note at *Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte* also says she studied political science and philosophy at TU Dresden.

In the 2021 interview she said that at her Gymnasium she had been the only pupil with an obvious migration background, and that friends still told her they were glad to have grown up with her because it had given them another way into the subject. She tied the Gomondai commemoration to early activity in the student council and in school working groups.

An interview with the Young Socialists in Thuringia, given when she described herself as 28, records a 2009 language trip to England on which, she said, a 14-year-old from Hamburg pitied her for coming from eastern Germany. Nasr took the remark as evidence of a view that eastern Germans were pitiable and backward. In the same interview she called herself an "Ossi" and said she was proud of it, while noting that her parents, having arrived only in 1986, had not lived through the post-reunification years as her schoolmates' families had.

## Early career

Before her election to the Bundestag, Rasha Nasr worked in communications and administration in Saxony. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states rests on the member's own information, lists her as a political scientist and gives four posts between 2015 and 2021. From 2015 to 2016 she was an assistant in the press office of TU Dresden, where that biography says she had completed a bachelor's degree in political science in 2014.

### Municipal integration work

On 1 February 2016 the city of Freiberg appointed Nasr, then 23, as asylum coordinator (*Asylkoordinatorin*), a role its gazette described as networking and public information. Her Bundestag biography summarises 2016 to 2017 as service as the city's asylum officer and integration officer (*Asylbeauftragte/Integrationsbeauftragte*). In a gazette interview of 1 April 2016 she said demand for conversation had been clear from her first day, and she named early contacts with the Johannisbad, the city and mining museum, Diakonie, the German Red Cross, the Workers' Welfare Association, the Bergakademie, volunteers and the Bunte Haus, including a plan to translate museum guides into refugees' languages. She said she accompanied mayor Sven Krüger to meetings on housing unaccompanied minors and on security and integration, visited accommodation, kept in touch with facility managers, and held a monthly citizens' surgery at the town hall, where she handed out Arabic and Persian orientation guides and an Arabic text of the Basic Law.

On sceptical and hostile reactions, she said she wanted "more differentiation" than a split into those for refugees and those against them, and she objected to branding people "Nazis" or "do-gooders", while calling factual disagreement legitimate if it avoided racist agitation. In July 2021 she told the Heinrich Böll Foundation that the post, about 18 months in the foundation's introduction, had pushed her toward party politics because an official "only administers what is decided 'from above.'" At the surgery, she said, refugees asked how to leave initial reception and find housing or work, while long-settled residents spoke of low pay, small pensions and poor prospects for their children in the east. She told *Business Insider* that the job also meant confronting prejudice inside the town hall, including a joke that called the Mediterranean the world's largest reception camp, and that she felt she had to argue with the administration itself. She told the same interview that joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 2017, shortly after she left the Freiberg post, was itself a result of that work, because she wanted to engage more politically.

### Party staff in Saxony

From 2017 to 2020 Nasr worked in the press office of the SPD in Saxony. *Business Insider* wrote that she began in that office and later became press spokesperson for Martin Dulig, then chair of the Saxon SPD. The Heinrich Böll Foundation's introduction to its interview with her said she was at times also his spokesperson. The *taz* reported that she had met Dulig in Freiberg in 2016 and then worked as press spokesperson for the state association, "that is, with Martin Dulig", and quoted her as saying that he had brought her into the SPD and that his manner of talking with people had carried her along.

From 2020 to 2021 she was office manager (*Büroleiterin*) for Albrecht Pallas, a Social Democratic member of the Landtag of Saxony, in Dresden. The parliament's register of interests names that pre-mandate employment in both the archived biography of the 20th Bundestag and the biography of the 21st, and in July 2021 the Böll interview still described her as running an SPD state parliamentarian's office.

## SPD in Dresden and Saxony

### Local roles

Nasr joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 2017. The current Bundestag biography lists her as a member of the SPD in Saxony and as a member of the executive of the SPD in Dresden from 2018 to 2021. In a November 2020 interview she described that role as Beisitzerin, doing press and public relations for the Dresden association, and said she sat on the Stadtbezirksbeirat for Dresden-Altstadt.

The city’s council information system records her as an SPD member of that body from 10 December 2019 to 13 April 2022. The office was honorary. A motion dated 6 April 2022 stated that she had written to the city asking to be released because her work as a Bundestag member no longer left her time for the mandate. On 13 April 2022 the city council found a “wichtiger Grund” under section 18(1) no. 4 of the municipal code of Saxony (Sächsische Gemeindeordnung), the case in which an honorary activity substantially interferes with a person’s occupation, and it recorded her departure from the Stadtbezirksbeirat Altstadt. The next substitute on the SPD list from the district-council election of 26 May 2019, Jutta Petzold-Herrmann, declined because she was caring for a family member and had other private obligations; Pascal Scholtys then took the seat.

### District leadership

On 26 October 2024 the Dresden SPD confirmed Nasr and Albrecht Pallas as co-chairs of the Unterbezirk Dresden. The association reported that Nasr, identified as a 32-year-old Bundestag member, received 90 percent of the vote and Pallas, identified as the 44-year-old fourth vice-president of the Landtag of Saxony, 96 percent. Tag24, citing the party, placed the ballot at the Dresden Volkshaus and assigned the same percentages. The executive elected that day had 17 members, with Jessika Hoffmann and Paolo Le van as deputy chairs, and the congress adopted guidelines under the heading “Dresden 2026: Zukunft für alle”.

Sources do not agree on when the dual leadership began. The current Bundestag biography dates the co-chairmanship from 2021, after ordinary board membership from 2018 to 2021. The archived biography for the 20th Bundestag, which the parliament says rests on the member’s own information, recorded only that she had been on the Dresden executive since 2018 and did not mention a chair. On 21 July 2022 the *Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten* reported that Nasr and Pallas, described as the sitting chair, were candidates for a dual leadership — which the paper said the Dresden SPD had never had — at the Unterbezirksparteitag on 17 September 2022. That article announced the candidacy and did not report a result. What is documented afterwards is that they were the incumbent co-chairs when the October 2024 congress confirmed them.

The Dresden SPD elects the Unterbezirksvorstand every two years; between congresses it is the association’s leading body and meets at least monthly, usually at the Herbert-Wehner-Forum. The Saxon SPD published the agenda of the next ordinary congress, a members’ assembly on 12 September 2026 at Dresden city hall, including a decision on the number of chairs and the election of the executive. The Dresden association’s website states that the executive chosen that day has 18 members and is led by the city councillor Julia Hartl and by Pallas, and it lists Nasr among the Beisitzerinnen, identified as a Bundestag member. An introductory sentence on the same page still names Pallas and “Rasha Nars” as the sitting co-chairs.

Outside the Dresden executive, Nasr has also appeared in groupings of the SPD Bundestag group. A membership overview of the Parlamentarische Linke, archived in April 2022, included her name. In June 2025 *Der Spiegel* reported that Netzwerk Berlin, which it called the smallest grouping in the SPD parliamentary group, had elected her and [Lina Seitzl](/people/lina-seitzl) as speakers alongside [Armand Zorn](/people/armand-zorn), who remained a speaker. Nasr said the network should not only take part in debate but help decide.

## Bundestag elections

### 2021 federal election

At the election to the 20th Bundestag on 26 September 2021, Rasha Nasr was the direct candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in Dresden I, then constituency 159. The Dresden SPD nominated her for the district in March 2021, and in May the Saxon party convention placed her fourth on the SPD’s closed state list. The initiative Brand New Bundestag included her among eleven candidates it supported that year.

Of 228,643 eligible voters, 181,120 cast ballots, a turnout of 79.2 percent. The direct seat went to [Markus Reichel](/people/markus-reichel) of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), with 37,811 first votes (21.1 percent of valid first votes). Katja Kipping of Die Linke was second with 33,872 (18.9 percent), 92 votes ahead of Jens Maier of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 33,780 (18.8 percent). Nasr was fourth, with 26,271 (14.6 percent), ahead of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) on 18,588 (10.4 percent) and Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) on 17,137 (9.5 percent).

On second votes in the constituency the SPD led, with 34,125 (19.0 percent), then the AfD with 32,122 (17.9 percent), the CDU with 27,710 (15.4 percent), the Greens with 27,369 (15.2 percent), the FDP with 21,989 (12.2 percent) and Die Linke with 18,910 (10.5 percent). Across Saxony the SPD took 19.3 percent of valid second votes (474,804). Second votes set each party’s seat total, and since 1953 those votes have been cast for a closed state list whose order the party fixes. In 2021 the constituency plurality winner was seated even if that created overhang seats, which compensatory seats then offset; the statutory size was 598 members, but the 20th Bundestag sat with 736, and a party’s remaining seats in a Land came from its list. Nasr was not the plurality winner in Dresden I. The Bundestag records her as elected to the 20th term from the Saxon SPD list, with constituency 159 as her candidacy rather than a seat she had won.

### 2025 federal election

The election to the 21st Bundestag, on 23 February 2025, was the first under the 2023 reform. The house is capped at 630 seats, and overhang and compensatory seats no longer exist, so a party may return only as many members as its second votes justify. A party candidate is seated for a constituency only with a plurality of first votes and only if that seat is covered by the party’s second-vote allocation in the Land (*Zweitstimmendeckung*). Plurality winners of the same party are ranked by vote share, and seats not taken that way come from the closed state list.

Saxony still had 16 constituencies. One constituency moved from Saxony-Anhalt to Bavaria on population grounds, renumbering former constituencies 72 to 255, so Dresden I changed from 159 to 158. On 8 December 2024 the Dresden SPD again nominated Nasr for Dresden I. She stood third on the Saxon SPD list.

Turnout was 82.1 percent (184,922 of 225,103 eligible voters), and eight direct candidates stood. Thomas Max Ladzinski of the AfD won the constituency seat with 53,853 first votes (29.4 percent). Reichel, again the CDU candidate, was second with 50,040 (27.3 percent); Funda Römer of Die Linke received 26,085 (14.2 percent) and Nasr 21,457 (11.7 percent), 2.9 points below the SPD’s 2021 first-vote share. [Kassem Taher Saleh](/people/kassem-taher-saleh) of the Greens took 19,899 (10.9 percent) and Torsten Herbst of the FDP 6,229 (3.4 percent); Volt had 3,482 (1.9 percent) and [Bündnis Deutschland](/organizations/bundnis-deutschland) 2,020 (1.1 percent).

Second votes went to the AfD with 50,386 (27.4 percent), the CDU with 36,585 (19.9 percent), Die Linke with 25,445 (13.8 percent), the Greens with 22,545 (12.2 percent) and the SPD with 18,241 (9.9 percent), down 9.1 points. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), new since 2021, took 15,474 (8.4 percent), and the FDP 7,082 (3.8 percent). Statewide the SPD’s second-vote share was 8.5 percent (217,144), behind the AfD (37.3 percent), the CDU (19.7), Die Linke (11.3) and the BSW (9.0), and ahead of the Greens (6.5) and the FDP (3.2).

Of Saxony’s 16 constituencies, the members seated from a constituency result were 14 from the AfD and one from Die Linke; the SPD seated none. The Federal Returning Officer lists three Saxon SPD members, all from the state list in list order: [Kathrin Michel](/people/kathrin-michel) (place 1), [Holger Mann](/people/holger-mann) (place 2) and Nasr (place 3). Reichel, runner-up in Dresden I, entered from third place on the Saxon CDU list. Nasr therefore returned for the 21st term on the state list, not by winning Dresden I, which the official result gives to Ladzinski; her biography again separates election on the Saxon list from a constituency candidacy in district 158.

## Twentieth Bundestag (2021–2025)

### Committees and rapporteurs

Rasha Nasr acquired her seat in the Bundestag on 26 October 2021, when the 20th electoral term opened with the chamber’s constituent sitting. Under section 45 of the Federal Elections Act (Bundeswahlgesetz), which sets the electoral system of Germany, a successful candidate becomes a member at the opening of the first sitting after the election, once the Federal Electoral Committee has finally determined the result for the electoral area. The Bundestag’s archived biography for the term records her as a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) elected on the state list of Saxony for constituency 159, Dresden I. The 20th electoral term lasted until 25 March 2025, the day the 21st Bundestag assembled for the first time.

From 13 December 2021 the SPD parliamentary group lists Nasr as a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and as a deputy member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and Home Affairs and of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid. The archived biography records the same pattern: full membership of the labour and social affairs committee, and deputy membership of the interior committee, the human-rights committee and the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development. The group dates the advisory-council seat from 15 March 2022. From 26 April 2022 it also lists her, among memberships in Bundestag bodies, as a deputy member of the board of trustees of the Federal Agency for Civic Education.

On 20 January 2023 she addressed the plenary on a hardship fund linked to the transfer of pensions between east and west Germany, a social-policy item beside her labour-committee brief. In April 2023 the SPD group described her as its rapporteur for the new skilled-immigration legislation and as the labour and social affairs working group’s specialist on skilled immigration. That description was an assignment inside the parliamentary group rather than a separate office recorded on the archived Bundestag biography.

### Coalition talks and group roles

On 21 October 2021, five days before the new Bundestag convened, the SPD published the responsibilities of its working groups for coalition negotiations with Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party. Nasr was named to group 9, “Sozialstaat, Grundsicherung, Rente” (welfare state, basic income support and pensions), together with Dagmar Schmidt, Melanie Leonhard, Martin Rosemann, Martin Dulig and Katja Mast. The same list assigned flight, migration and integration to a separate working group—[Boris Pistorius](/people/boris-pistorius), [Frank Schwabe](/people/frank-schwabe), Nancy Faeser and [Aydan Özoğuz](/people/aydan-ozoguz)—and did not include Nasr.

During the electoral term the SPD Bundestag group lists her as deputy spokesperson of its working group on labour and social affairs from 11 January 2022, with no end date recorded for that period. In the working group on migration and integration she was deputy spokesperson from 14 February 2022 until 25 September 2023 and spokesperson from 26 September 2023, so that from late September 2023 the two group roles ran together. In an interview published on 26 October 2023, Vorwärts described her as having recently become the group’s spokesperson for migration and integration policy.

The archived biography also carries the disclosures required under the members’ rules of conduct. It records that in 2023 the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH, given there with a Berlin address, met travel costs of 8,314 euros, published under donations and other contributions for political activity. The accompanying notice states that published figures are gross amounts, including benefits in kind, and are not a statement of taxable income.

## Twenty-first Bundestag

Nasr took a seat in the Bundestag for its 21st electoral term after the federal election of 23 February 2025. The newly elected parliament met for its constituent sitting on 25 March 2025. She was returned for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) on the Saxony state list, not from a constituency seat. In the Federal Returning Officer’s list of members elected from party state lists in Saxony, the SPD names are Susanne Kathrin Michel (list place 1), Holger Mann (place 2) and Nasr (place 3). Statewide the SPD received 217,144 second votes, 8.5 percent.

She also stood in constituency 158, Dresden I. The seat went to Thomas Max Ladzinski of the Alternative for Germany, with 53,853 first votes (29.4 percent); Markus Alexander Reichel of the Christian Democratic Union was the runner-up, on 27.3 percent. Nasr received 21,457 first votes (11.7 percent), behind Die Linke on 14.2 percent and ahead of Alliance 90/The Greens on 10.9 percent.

The SPD group’s profile lists Dresden I (158) as her *Wahlkreis* and, under a separate heading, four further Saxon constituencies as *betreut*—Meißen (154), Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge (157), Dresden II – Bautzen II (159) and Chemnitz (161)—without describing any duties beyond that assignment. The same field on the profiles of Mann and Kathrin Michel assigns the other constituencies numbered 150 to 165, so that each of Saxony’s 16 Bundestag constituencies is attached on the group’s site to one of the three members elected from the state list. Her Berlin office is Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, and the Dresden constituency office is the *Bürgerbüro* “Die Hauptstadtvertretung” at Devrientstraße 7, 01067 Dresden.

### Committees and spokesperson roles

On 21 May 2025 the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and the Interior Committee (*Innenausschuss*) each held their constituent meeting. Both have 42 ordinary members—14 from the CDU/CSU, ten from the AfD, eight from the SPD, six from Alliance 90/The Greens and four from Die Linke—and the Bundestag’s parliamentary news service named Nasr among the eight SPD ordinary members of each. Her Bundestag biography lists her as an ordinary member (*Ordentliches Mitglied*) of both committees, as distinct from a substitute member.

Inside the SPD group she has, since 21 May 2025, been a member of the working group on labour and social affairs (*Arbeitsgruppe Arbeit und Soziales*) and of the working group on interior affairs (*Arbeitsgruppe Inneres*), and since 8 July 2025 spokesperson of the working group on migration and integration. The migration working group’s page names Hakan Demir and Aydan Özoğuz as deputy spokespersons from 8 July 2025.

On 29 January 2026, after the Bundestag adopted the Act implementing the CER Directive and strengthening the resilience of critical installations (the *KRITIS-Dachgesetz*), the group published a statement under its interior working group in the names of [Sebastian Fiedler](/people/sebastian-fiedler), identified there as its interior-policy spokesperson, and Nasr, identified as the responsible rapporteur (*zuständige Berichterstatterin*).

### Other parliamentary bodies

Since 25 June 2025 the SPD group has listed Nasr as a member of the board of trustees (*Kuratorium*) of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung*). The agency describes that board as 22 members of the Bundestag who review its work for effectiveness and political balance, with the parliamentary groups represented according to their strength in the Bundestag, and its roster of ordinary members for the 21st term includes Nasr among the SPD members, with Demir and [Jasmina Hostert](/people/jasmina-hostert).

Since 15 September 2025 she has been deputy chair of the Parliamentary Friendship Group Berlin–Taipei (*Parlamentarischer Freundeskreis Berlin-Taipei*), a role also recorded on her Bundestag biography. The parliament’s directory of parliamentarian groups lists her in that group with [Till Steffen](/people/till-steffen) (Alliance 90/The Greens), Markus Reichel (CDU/CSU), Tobias Matthias Peterka (AfD) and [Mandy Eißing](/people/mandy-eissing) (Die Linke); the directory itself does not label individual offices within the group.

## Labour and social policy

### Wages and collective bargaining

Nasr, a member of ver.di, has argued for a statutory minimum wage high enough for full-time work to cover living costs and a later pension, with collective bargaining coverage setting pay above that floor. She was deputy spokesperson of the SPD working group on labour and social affairs from 11 January 2022; in the 21st Bundestag she remained an ordinary member of the group.

The 20th Bundestag’s SPD–Green–FDP majority raised the minimum wage by statute to €12 from 1 October 2022; later adjustments returned to the Minimum Wage Commission. On 6 June 2025, debating motions from Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke for a statutory €15, Nasr credited the 2015 introduction and the rise to €12 to [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats), the unions and labour minister Hubertus Heil. She called €15 legitimate, necessary and achievable, and said forty hours a week must fund both living costs and a pension, but the SPD would examine the motions rather than adopt them; they were referred to the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs.

The 2025 CDU/CSU–SPD agreement kept an independent commission, told it to weigh collectively agreed pay and 60 percent of the full-time gross median, and said only that €15 in 2026 was “achievable” on that path. On 27 June 2025 the commission unanimously set €13.90 from 1 January 2026 and €14.60 from 1 January 2027, up from €12.82; its chair criticised outside pressure. Labour minister [Bärbel Bas](/people/barbel-bas)’s cabinet implemented the figures by ordinance on 29 October 2025. At the 12 January 2026 hearing on those motions, Nasr asked the German Trade Union Confederation about the European Court of Justice ruling on the directive’s 60-percent reference, the use of inflation, the two-year cycle, and how unanimous decisions were reached.

In June 2023 she said equal pay in east and west required high Tarifbindung, not only a higher floor. A September 2024 essay for the [Friedrich Ebert Foundation](/organizations/friedrich-ebert-foundation) tied that demand to migrant women in low-paid work and to old-age poverty. The coalition agreement promised a federal Tariftreuegesetz; on 26 February 2026 the Bundestag passed a version narrowed after CDU/CSU objections, covering federal building and service contracts generally from €50,000 and excluding supplies and Bundeswehr orders. Unions called the exceptions a dilution; employers called the law bureaucratic.

### Social security

On 21 June 2023 Nasr welcomed the earlier east–west alignment of the current pension value as a step so that residence and family history would no longer decide life chances. Work done in the GDR, she said, remained a life achievement, and anger was justified when the pension was too low; alignment alone did not fix lower eastern wages, children supporting parents, or thinner inheritances, so equal pay and high bargaining coverage were still required.

The date followed a wage clause in the 2017 Rentenüberleitungs-Abschlussgesetz, not a new statute. Eastern wage growth of 6.78 percent, against 4.50 percent in the west, produced via the 2023 ordinance a single current pension value of €37.60 from 1 July 2023, a year early. Pensions rose 4.39 percent in the west and 5.86 percent in the east, and the securing level was 48.15 percent, above the 48 percent floor then set until 2025; Heil also linked the earlier convergence partly to the €12 wage.

Before entering parliament, Nasr told an interviewer in July 2021 that her priorities included the minimum wage and bargaining coverage, leaving the Hartz unemployment regime later replaced by Bürgergeld, and a Kindergrundsicherung bundling child benefits. That Ampel benefit was not enacted; in November 2024 Lisa Paus blamed the FDP. On 24 April 2026, in a debate on a leaked chancellery paper listing possible cuts affecting children, families and disabled people, Nasr did not speak but told Green MP [Corinna Rüffer](/people/corinna-ruffer), “We could have had the Kindergrundsicherung.” SPD speakers criticised the paper; the CDU/CSU called it review orders, not agreed cuts.

## Migration and asylum policy

### Skilled immigration and integration

As the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Bundestag group's spokesperson on integration and migration, Nasr treated access to work as [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) of integration policy. After the fall of [Bashar al-Assad](/people/bashar-al-assad) in December 2024 she told the SPD magazine *Vorwärts* that the news was a "joyful shock". Germany, she said, should support Syrian civil society and speak to the new rulers without forgetting they were Islamists. She called Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) politician Jens Spahn's call for charter flights to Syria and a €1,000 return payment "the absolutely wrong signal", and called that use of nearly a million people in Germany for a campaign cynical. Return, she said, should be a choice.

She said more than 226,000 Syrians held social-insurance jobs, and *Vorwärts* cited the Institute for Employment Research for a figure of 62 per cent working in systemically relevant occupations. Nasr argued for immediate work permits instead of work bans, faster recognition of qualifications, more language courses, and more childcare, which she linked to the lower employment of Syrian women, plus a reopened Skilled Immigration Act so people could move from asylum into work.

### Family reunification and coalition discipline

The sharpest break with that line was the coalition of the CDU, the [Christian Social Union in Bavaria](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) (CSU) and the SPD, and its suspension of family reunification for people with subsidiary protection. On 27 June 2025 the Bundestag passed, at second and third reading, a bill from the coalition groups (Drucksache 21/321). The official roll-call was 444 yes, 133 no and no abstentions; Nasr voted yes. Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke voted no, as did SPD members Hakan Demir and [Maja Wallstein](/people/maja-wallstein). The CDU/CSU and the Alternative for Germany voted yes. The Act of 17 July 2025, in force from 24 July, suspends section 36a reunification for that group until the end of 23 July 2027. Humanitarian admissions under sections 22 and 23 remain, and the act puts "Begrenzung" (limitation) back beside "Steuerung" (steering) in the Residence Act's purpose clause. The suspended route had been capped at up to 1,000 visas a month.

Nasr told the chamber the clause would not have been in an agreement had the SPD governed alone or with other partners. Reunification, she said, belonged to protection, dignity and integration, but the coalition required compromise: the SPD had not won a cut-off date or a hardship rule beyond section 22, and had only blocked a Union plan for four years with automatic renewal. The result was a two-year limit and a committee note on a clearer section 22 procedure. In a written explanation she called consent "unendlich schwer" (infinitely hard) and the measure not purposeful, and said she would vote yes anyway.

[Schahina Gambir](/people/schahina-gambir) of the Greens called the bill a disgrace and a capitulation to the right; Cansin Köktürk of Die Linke asked how forced separation could be justified as order. [Christina Stumpp](/people/christina-stumpp) of the CDU listed it among steps Interior Minister [Alexander Dobrindt](/people/alexander-dobrindt) had taken within seven weeks, while AfD member [Arne Raue](/people/arne-raue) called it important but half-hearted.

Nasr later said she had voted against her own judgement. A *Freie Presse* interview published on 5 December 2025 quoted her: "It was a mistake to agree, because I sold myself." In a *Der Spiegel* profile by Sophie Garbe (18 January 2026) she said she had considered resigning in summer 2025 — "I went into politics to fight for something. But right now I am constantly fighting against something" — but that stopping would feel wrong merely because it was hard. She would not cast the same vote again: "I cry when I do not see my daughter for a few days, and then I vote for other families to remain separated," a contradiction that had "held up a harsh mirror." Warned not to leave the coalition dependent on AfD votes, she said she should have answered that such a bill was "a shitty law".

In 2026 she criticised the hardship exception the coalition had left in place. The Foreign Office told dpa that 13 hardship visas were issued in the first year; *MiGAZIN* reported the figure on 30 July 2026 and Pro Asyl's criticism of the barriers. Caritas counted 4,727 applications from 24 July 2025 to mid-May 2026, of which 1,022 had been examined and seven visas granted. Nasr told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland, as reported by tagesschau.de on 9 August 2026 and *Welt* the next day, that this did not mean the claims were baseless: five years apart for a small child and ten for an older one were "not family-friendly, but unreasonable", and a test of singular hardship ignored wider crises such as Gaza. The rule "does not work" and must not be extended, she said. SPD children's spokesperson Truels Reichardt doubted it met the Basic Law if the hardship clause failed in practice.

On 25 September 2026 Nasr, in a group statement, rejected Saxony interior minister Armin Schuster's proposal to replace the individual right of asylum with annual quotas. She called it a "grundgesetzwidrige und populistische Aussage": basic rights applied to people who need protection, not until a quota ran out; the demand matched neither the coalition agreement nor a parliamentary majority; and "people in flight are not line items in an annual quota." Ordering migration, she said, did not mean deleting basic rights. Greens, the Left and the BSW in the Saxon parliament warned that an exhausted quota could refuse people in acute danger; federal integration commissioner [Natalie Pawlik](/people/natalie-pawlik) (SPD) warned against cutting basic rights; and Hesse's CDU interior minister Roman Poseck said changes to the Basic Law or the [European Convention on Human Rights](/facts/european-convention-on-human-rights) were not realistic soon. Schuster then said protection remained a German obligation, granted inside quotas with a "flexible upper limit".

## Affiliations and public profile

### Organizations

Biographical entries on the Bundestag website are compiled from members' own disclosures; the note on Rasha Nasr's page says the biographical information rests on her self-report. Under honorary offices, the biography for the 21st electoral term lists, together with her SPD posts, membership of the Deutsch-Syrischen-Verein Dresden, the association's name as printed there, and membership of ver.di (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft), written on the page as "Verdi".

In the separate category of functions in associations, federations and foundations, the same biography records an honorary seat on the advisory board of Humanity in Action e.V. in Berlin, and membership of the advisory board of Zukunftsforum Öffentliche Sicherheit e.V. (ZOES), also in Berlin, from 10 September 2025. The ZOES line is not marked honorary. The archived biography for the 20th term (2021–2025) already listed the Humanity in Action role as honorary membership of the advisory board from March 2023, and did not include the Deutsch-Syrischen-Verein Dresden, ver.di or ZOES.

The current page describes Nasr as non-denominational, married and the parent of one child. The archived 20th-term text described her as single (*ledig*) and mentioned neither a child nor a religious affiliation. The change is between two official self-reports, not an independently compiled civil register.

### Constituency and public presence

The Bundestag biography gives her constituency citizens' office as Bürgerbüro „Die Hauptstadtvertretung“ Rasha Nasr, Devrientstraße 7, 01067 Dresden, and her parliamentary office as Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin. It also links to Instagram and Threads profiles.

In an interview with Rebecca Sawicki for WEB.DE, updated on 10 July 2025, Nasr was described as the first member from Saxony with a migration history (*Migrationsgeschichte*) elected to the Bundestag, in 2021. The interviewer said she repeatedly publishes on Instagram threats against herself and her staff. She answered that "hate has become bolder" (*Der Hass ist mutiger geworden*): two or three years earlier she had changed her mobile number after threatening calls to her private number, including "Ich und fünf Nazis sind auf dem Weg zu dir, wir wissen, wo du wohnst", which she said had affected her even if the call might have been a bluff. She also described an incident on a Dresden train shortly after the gas levy was announced, while masks were still worn: a man recognized her, tore off his mask and stood before her with a raised fist. She said two men intervened and that she would probably otherwise have been hit, and that she and her team had taken a self-defence course about two years before the interview. She referred to SPD politician Matthias Ecke having been beaten the previous year near her citizens' office.

When the interviewer said she had attested a racism problem to Dresden, she answered with Pegida. At its peak, she said, it had marched through the city with 45,000 people — not all of them Nazis, but people who had chosen to stand next to others giving the Nazi salute and shouting Nazi slogans. She said she loves the city and would not let it be taken from her; she called it the place where she had put down roots, married and started a family, after having felt neither German enough in Germany nor Syrian enough in Syria.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/rasha-nasr