# Renate Künast

# Renate Künast

Renate Künast (born 15 December 1955 in Recklinghausen, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a German lawyer and a politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens). She was a member of the Berlin [House of Representatives](/organizations/house-of-representatives) from 1989 to 2000, federal co-chair of the Greens in 2000–2001, and from 2001 to 2005 Federal Minister for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture in the cabinet of Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder](/people/gerhard-schroder). She entered the Bundestag in 2002 and, from October 2005 to 2013, co-chaired her party's parliamentary group. In July 2024 she said she would not stand in the 2025 federal election; the 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on 25 March 2025, closing the parliamentary term in which she had served.

The daughter of working-class parents, she completed a degree in social work and then studied law at the Free University of Berlin, finishing in 1985. From 1977 to 1979 she worked as a social worker at Berlin-Tegel prison. In 1985 she passed the second state examination in law and was admitted as a lawyer. She joined Berlin's Alternative List in 1979 and chaired the Green group in the House of Representatives in 1989–1990 and again from 1998 to 2000.

She joined the federal cabinet during the crisis over bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Karl-Heinz Funke of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) resigned as agriculture minister on 9 January 2001, and Künast was sworn in on 18 January 2001 after receiving her letter of appointment from President Johannes Rau the previous week. In her government policy statement of 8 February 2001 she said that the BSE scandal marked the end of the old type of agricultural policy, and she called for organic farming to rise from about 2.5 percent of agricultural land to 20 percent within ten years, together with stronger consumer protection and more environmentally sound animal husbandry. Speakers for the opposition accused the government of making farmers the scapegoats of the crisis.

In the Berlin state election of 18 September 2011 she was the Greens' lead candidate for Governing Mayor, in a race with the incumbent [Klaus Wowereit](/people/klaus-wowereit). The Greens received 17.6 percent of second votes, behind the SPD with 28.3 percent and the CDU with 23.3 percent; turnout was 60.2 percent. From 2014 to 2017 she chaired the Bundestag Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection.

A further body of litigation concerned abusive posts about her on Facebook. In an order of 19 December 2021, published on 2 February 2022, the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) held that decisions of the Berlin courts had violated the complainant's general right of personality by refusing the court order required to obtain inventory data from a social-media platform. Reporting on the same file identified Künast as the complainant and described 22 comments, of which the Berlin courts had treated only some as potentially criminal insults. The constitutional court quashed the Kammergericht rulings insofar as they were adverse to her and remitted the case.

## Early life, education and legal practice

### Family and schooling

Renate Elly Künast was born on 15 December 1955 in Recklinghausen, in the Ruhr area of North Rhine-Westphalia, the second of four children. Her father, the third son of a farming family in Thuringia and so without a claim on the farm, worked in the Ruhr as a motor mechanic and later as chauffeur to the head of Stiehl, a Recklinghausen firm supplying metallurgical equipment; her mother was an auxiliary nurse. They shared a company flat with her grandparents—her grandfather from Kashubia and her grandmother from Masuria, who ran the household. The Munzinger archive describes the home as strict and authoritarian. Her mother, Künast later said, wanted the children neatly dressed and hoped her daughter would become an office clerk.

Further schooling had to be argued for. At 14 she pressed to be the first in the family allowed onto a Realschule; in 2025 she quoted her father as saying, "She's a girl, she'll marry anyway." Her teacher Brunhilde Verstege visited the parents and won the father's consent after Künast was hurt that a classmate, Eugenie, was bound for a Gymnasium. She later lost the argument for the general Abitur. Her mother preferred a bank apprenticeship, because a longer education would have been costly and, in Künast's account, because bank dress codes clashed with her preference for jeans. A visit to the employment office with her mother produced a Fachoberschule supported by BAföG. Against the wish that she train as a bank clerk, she completed a Fachoberschule für Sozialwesen, the route into a Fachhochschule.

### Social work, law studies and practice

From 1973 to 1976 Künast studied social work at the Fachhochschule für Sozialarbeit in Düsseldorf. Placements included Caritas in Herten, a project for homeless people and an after-school centre. She later said she could have imagined the criminal police, but wanted work that would "challenge my mind" rather than marriage and motherhood alone.

In 1977, once recognised as a social worker, she left for what she expected to be a short stay in West Berlin and took a post at the men's prison Tegel. Bundestag biographies date that job from 1977 to 1979; a 1998 profile said she arrived in 1976 and spent part of her recognition year there. At 21 she worked mainly with drug-dependent prisoners and argued for "therapy instead of punishment," against staff who treated social workers as superfluous.

She has called the prison the reason she studied law, wanting to change penal practice and psychiatry rather than only treat individuals. Law had seemed closed to a mechanic's daughter whose father had planned "Hauptschule, marriage, done"; after meeting law students she decided, "I can do that." Munzinger dates the course at the Free University of Berlin from 1977, the first state examination to 1982 and the second, after the Referendariat, to 1985. In a 2008 university profile she called herself a fast student who sat the first examination after eight semesters and the second in 1985, living in 1979 on about 600 Deutsche Mark a month in BAföG plus about 330 Mark from work at Tegel. In 1998 she recalled going that year, as a first-semester student, to anti-nuclear protests at Gorleben, and called law the "toolbox" for that campaign as well as for penal reform.

She met the lawyer Wolfgang Wieland in a working group on democratic rights and did part of her traineeship in his Berlin firm. He later said the office hired her immediately after the 1985 examination because she had been "so brilliant." She then practised there mainly in criminal and aliens law, returned to the firm between a two-year seat in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin from 1985 and a new mandate in 1989, and remained admitted as a Berlin lawyer.

## Berlin state politics and the rise to federal leadership

### Alternative List and the House of Representatives

Künast joined [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) Liste für Demokratie und Umweltschutz (AL) in West Berlin at the beginning of 1979, through the anti-nuclear movement. As a first-year law student that year she travelled at weekends to Gorleben in Lower Saxony to protest against the planned reprocessing plant, and she later described helping to build the hut village. She kept a passport of the “Free Republic of Wendland,” the occupation of drilling site 1004 from 3 May to 4 June 1980.

In the AL she worked on prisons and democratic rights. In 1985, the year she qualified as a lawyer, she entered the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin. The AL still rotated mandates after two years, so she gave the seat up and went back to legal practice. Her Bundestag biography lists House membership only from 1989 to 2000; contemporary reporting also records the rotated term. She sat again after the 29 January 1989 election, when the AL took 17 of 138 seats, and stayed until June 2000. From 1989 she sat on the committee controlling Berlin’s domestic-intelligence service, an oversight she called in 1990 “groping with a pole in the fog, but sometimes hitting a corpse.”

### Coalitions, legal policy and the Berlin constitution

That election ended the CDU–FDP Senate under Eberhard Diepgen. The SPD under Walter Momper took 37.3 percent, half a point behind the CDU, and the FDP missed the five-percent hurdle. On 16 March 1989 Momper became governing mayor of an SPD–AL Senate, Berlin’s first red-green coalition and the first with women in eight of the 14 Senate posts.

On 27 March 1990 the AL group elected Künast to succeed Heidi Bischoff-Pflanz as chair, by 14 votes with two abstentions. She was narrowly confirmed in January 1992. On 15 November 1990 the AL left after Interior Senator Pätzold cleared squatted houses in the Mainzer Straße, a step Momper backed and which the AL said broke a de-escalation agreement. The AL senators resigned, and Momper led an SPD minority Senate until the all-Berlin election of 2 December 1990. In January 1993 Wolfgang Wieland and Anette Detering became group chairs. On 27 January 1998 Künast returned as equal co-chair with Michaele Schreyer.

During the coalition she joined CDU lawyer Klaus Finkelnburg and SPD expert Ehrhart Körting in an informal trio, “FKK” from their surnames, to frame the merger of the two city parliaments and a common constitutional text. Because amendments needed a two-thirds majority, the CDU had to be included. The first joint sitting followed on 11 January 1991 in the Nikolaikirche. East Berlin demands for a right to work were turned down; the draft rested on the earlier Berlin constitution, with added clauses on data protection, the environment and petitions.

In 1991 the House appointed an enquiry commission on constitutional and parliamentary reform, chaired by Künast. The constitution adopted on 8 June 1995, approved by three quarters of voters on 22 October and in force from 29 November, was based on its report. It added referendums and barred disadvantage because of sexual identity, a clause later credited to her chairmanship. On 23 September 1999 the House also passed a [Freedom of Information Act](/facts/freedom-of-information-act) she had pressed with Ingrid Lottenburger—Green, SPD and PDS for, CDU against—giving access to administrative files without a special interest. She accused the CDU of trying to delay it until the term expired.

On 9 May 1999 a members’ assembly made her lead candidate for 10 October, with 445 votes on the runoff after she missed a majority by two on the first ballot. Alliance 90/The Greens took 9.9 percent of valid second votes (155,322), down 3.3 points from 13.2 percent in 1995, and 18 of 169 seats. The CDU stayed largest, on 40.8 percent, ahead of the SPD on 22.4 and the PDS on 17.7.

### Federal party co-chair

On 24 June 2000 the Münster congress elected her federal co-chair with 541 of 655 votes, beside Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Green group in Baden-Württemberg, who received 483. Antje Radcke had withdrawn the night before, after delegates backed the federal nuclear consensus by 64.4 percent. The statute separated party office from a parliamentary mandate—a March attempt in Karlsruhe to delete the rule had failed—so both chairs had to give up their state seats. On the morning of 26 June, Künast resigned her Abgeordnetenhaus mandate and the group leadership held since 1998.

Combining party office with a ministerial post was also barred. Nominated federal minister for consumer protection, food and agriculture, she received her appointment from Federal President [Johannes Rau](/people/johannes-rau) in January 2001 and had to leave the executive. [Claudia Roth](/people/claudia-roth) was elected co-chair at the Stuttgart congress that closed on 11 March 2001, with 91.5 percent, Kuhn remaining co-chair. Roth was expected to give up her Bundestag seat under the same separation of office and mandate.

## Federal Minister for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture

### Appointment after the BSE crisis

The first cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in German-born cattle, in November 2000, brought down two members of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's second cabinet. Health minister Andrea Fischer, of Alliance 90/The Greens, and Karl-Heinz Funke, the Social Democratic minister for food, agriculture and forestry, announced their resignations on 9 January 2001. On 12 January, Federal President Johannes Rau dismissed both on their applications and, on Schröder's proposal, appointed Ulla Schmidt health minister and Renate Künast Federal Minister for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture. The new title replaced the Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forestry and joined consumer protection to farming, a break with the separation Künast said other countries still practised.

Rau handed over the certificates that day at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, with Schröder present. Künast took the oath in the Bundestag on 18 January 2001. She used the constitutional formula without the optional words "so wahr mir Gott helfe"; Schmidt, sworn immediately afterwards, added them.

### The Agrarwende

On 8 February 2001 Künast gave the government statement on a "reorientation of consumer and agricultural policy." The BSE scandal, she said, marked the end of agricultural policy of the old type, and everyone in the house stood before a "Scherbenhaufen." The measure of the turn she called the Agrarwende was "Klasse statt Masse": consumers were to be protected, not the volume of what was consumed.

She named consumers, farmers, the feed and food industries, retailers and politics as the parties to the turn, and said organic farming should reach 20 percent within ten years. The Federal Statistical Office recorded the target as 20 percent of utilised agricultural area by 2010; in 2000 that share was 3.2 percent, or 546,023 hectares. She promised an organic mark and a second mark for conventional food meeting minimum standards, including husbandry appropriate to the species, open feed declarations and traceability from feed mill to counter. For BSE she cited 1 billion Deutsche Mark already set aside toward an expected 2 billion, of which 362 million was for buying cattle out of the market and more than 63 million was offered to clear banned meat-and-bone meal.

[Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel), for the CDU and the CSU, argued that stricter animal welfare had to be European, or production would move abroad, and that tying livestock to land would hit small farms in Baden and the Allgäu harder than holdings in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The FDP tabled a motion on shielding consumers from BSE while helping farmers.

### Food safety, organic farming and animal welfare

An EU-wide ban on feeding meat-and-bone meal was already in force. In June 2001 agriculture ministers extended it only for a limited time and left open a later return of the feed once safety conditions were met. Künast, who had wanted a general ban, called the outcome a confusing "Flickenteppich." The Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety began work on 1 May 2002, at first as a federal institute, which the office describes as a consequence of the BSE crisis.

On 5 September 2001 she presented a state organic mark, a hexagon aligned with the EC organic regulation. The ministry treats the Bio-Siegel as a voluntary label, introduced because private organic marks had become hard to follow. Its basis is the Öko-Kennzeichengesetz, which provides for fines and for up to a year in prison for misuse; the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food administers its use.

An unlicensed laboratory in Westheim, Bavaria, had tested about 39,500 cattle for BSE; in 38 cases animals were stamped free of the disease although the result was inconclusive. Künast called the delay "bayerisches Gezumpel" and said she would seek damages from Bavaria, including for beef sent as aid. Bavaria called the claim baseless. Rhineland-Palatinate withdrew approval from two private laboratories over deficient tests.

In May 2002 the banned herbicide nitrofen was found in organic feed and organic poultry meat. The Federal Institute for Meat Research in Kulmbach had detected it in organic turkey at the start of March but had not informed the ministry; Künast said the test had been a private commission and that institutes would have to report such findings in future. Gerd Sonnleitner, president of the German Farmers' Association, said she did not have her house under control. She replied that his role in the BSE crisis left him no standing to say so, while calling the affair a setback.

In November 2003 she refused to sign an amended husbandry ordinance passed by the Bundesrat that would have left forms of cage housing for laying hens in use. She said the cage would be banned in Germany from the end of 2006, earlier than the EU date of 2012 for conventional cages.

### Criticism and record

At the Farmers' Association's Bauerntag in Münster on 6 July 2001, whistles from about 5,000 listeners stopped Künast until Sonnleitner quieted the hall. She said the Agrarwende would come; he said she had not taken farmers' fears seriously, rejected favouring organic farming, and warned that a reform against the farmers would fail.

The area target was missed. Eurostat recorded 807,406 hectares of organic land in Germany in 2005, 4.7 percent of utilised agricultural area, against 3.2 percent in 2000.

Künast left before the change of government. On 27 September 2005 the Greens elected her one of their two Bundestag group chairs. Schröder accepted her resignation; the government said environment minister [Jürgen Trittin](/people/jurgen-trittin) would conduct the ministry's business, and that President [Horst Köhler](/people/horst-kohler) would hand her the dismissal certificate the following Tuesday. Köhler did so in Berlin, and Trittin carried the portfolio alongside his own until the red-green term ended. On 22 November 2005 the Bundestag elected Merkel chancellor, and Horst Seehofer was sworn in as minister for food, agriculture and consumer protection, with agriculture again named first.

## Bundestag membership and parliamentary group leadership

### Elections and mandates

Renate Künast entered the Bundestag in 2002 and was still a member when the 17th Bundestag ended in 2013; she remained a deputy in later terms. In Berlin she stood for Alliance 90/The Greens in the constituency of Tempelhof-Schöneberg, numbered 82 in 2002, 2005 and 2009 and 81 in 2013. She never won it. The direct seat went to the Social Democratic Party in 2002 and 2005 and to the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) in 2009 and 2013, so her mandate was a Berlin list seat rather than a constituency seat.

The Green first-vote share there—the vote for the party’s constituency candidate—was 20.0 percent in 2002 (37,788 votes) and 21.0 percent in 2005 (38,198). Künast was the candidate in 2002, when the SPD won with 35.7 percent to the CDU’s 34.6 percent; in 2005 the SPD held the seat with 34.2 percent, ahead of the CDU on 32.9 percent. In 2009, with Künast again the candidate, the Green share rose to 26.3 percent (44,506 votes), her strongest result in the district and the second-best Green constituency result in Berlin, behind Hans-Christian Ströbele in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Jan-Marco Luczak of the CDU won with 32.5 percent; the SPD’s Mechthild Rawert took 22.6 percent. In 2013 all three stood again, the Green share fell to 20.4 percent (35,461 votes), and the CDU candidate won with 35.0 percent to the SPD’s 26.2 percent. As Berlin lead candidate she still had a secure list route back into parliament.

### Co-chair of the Green group, 2005–2013

On 27 September 2005 the Green Bundestag group elected Künast and Fritz Kuhn as equal co-chairs for the move into opposition. Outgoing co-chair Krista Sager had withdrawn. In the first ballot Künast and Jürgen Trittin each received 18 votes and Katrin Göring-Eckardt 15, short of the absolute majority of 26; Künast then defeated Trittin by 33 votes to 17. Kuhn, who had not run against Künast, beat Göring-Eckardt by 37 votes to 10. Künast, still consumer-protection minister, said the group’s aim had to be to lead opinion in opposition, and she resigned the ministry so that she would not speak as a member of the caretaker government. The Bundestag’s own biography dates her chairmanship from October 2005, the start of the 16th Bundestag, until 2013.

On 6 October 2009 the group, which had grown from 51 to 68 members, elected the chairs for a two-year term. Künast received 79.1 percent and Trittin 91.0 percent, with no opposing candidates; Kuhn did not stand and instead sought one of the deputy posts. The pair, the party’s 2009 lead candidates, promised a hard opposition to the CDU/CSU–FDP coalition. In the 17th Bundestag she was the Greens’ member of the twelve-member Wahlausschuss for the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court; a Bundestag list of 29 October 2010 names her as that member.

The sharpest parliamentary test of the co-chairmanship came over nuclear power. On 30 June 2011 the Bundestag adopted the renewed nuclear phase-out, amending the Atomic Energy Act with the votes of the CDU/CSU, the FDP, the SPD and the Greens, against the Left. Speaking for the group, Künast described the Greens’ vote as a “Ja, aber”: a decision that could not be walked back, but one she still wanted tied to a nationwide search for a repository and a halt to further construction at Gorleben.

### The 2013 leadership contest

The party’s first membership ballot for a Bundestag lead duo was counted on 10 November 2012. Members could cast up to two votes, and the statutes required that the duo include a woman. Of the valid votes, Trittin received 71.9 percent, Göring-Eckardt 47.3 percent, Künast 38.6 percent and party chair Claudia Roth 26.2 percent; eleven largely unknown members also stood. About 62 percent of the nearly 60,000 members took part. Trittin and Göring-Eckardt were chosen. Künast remained group co-chair through the election campaign.

After the Greens fell to 8.4 percent on 22 September 2013, she and Trittin did not stand again. The Tagesspiegel reported on 24 September that Künast would instead seek a Bundestag vice-presidency, a post Roth also wanted. On 8 October the group elected Anton Hofreiter, with 49 votes in favour, five against, seven abstentions and two invalid, and Göring-Eckardt, who defeated Kerstin Andreae by 41 votes to 20, with two abstentions. They succeeded Künast and Trittin; Künast kept her seat.

## The 2011 Berlin state election

### Candidacy and campaign

On 9 April 2011 a members’ assembly of Alliance 90/The Greens in Berlin nominated Renate Künast, co-chair of the party’s group in the Bundestag, as lead candidate for Governing Mayor at the 2011 state election on 18 September. Of 804 members voting, 734 supported her (91.3 percent), 32 voted against and 38 abstained; she had no opponent. She said she would enter state politics only if she became head of government. In her nomination speech she called the record of the red–red Senate under Klaus Wowereit, in office since 2002, bleak—citing unemployment, S-Bahn disruption, dissatisfied teachers and little climate policy—and named climate, jobs and education as the campaign’s core, including 100,000 new jobs and making Berlin a “climate capital.”

Spring polls briefly put the Greens ahead of the SPD. An Infratest dimap survey for Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg and the *Berliner Morgenpost*, taken from 1 to 4 April, had the Greens at 28 percent and the SPD at 26, the CDU at 21 and the Left at 15; respondents preferred Wowereit to Künast as governing mayor by 55 percent to 30. Emnid for *Focus* soon after showed 29 to 27, and INFO GmbH on 20 May still had 31 to 28. The lead did not last: by early June Infratest had the SPD ahead, 30 to 25, and on 6–8 September its ARD survey put the SPD at 29.5 percent, the CDU at 22, the Greens at 20 and the [Pirate Party](/organizations/pirate-party) at 6.5.

### Result and coalition talks

The official second-vote result, fixed by the state election committee on 6 October, gave the SPD 28.3 percent (413,332 votes) and 47 seats, the CDU 23.3 percent (341,158) and 39, and the Greens 17.6 percent (257,063) and 29, including 11 constituencies. [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) took 11.7 percent and 19 seats. The [Pirate Party](/organizations/pirate-party-germany) entered the Abgeordnetenhaus for the first time with 8.9 percent and 15 seats; the FDP fell to 1.8 percent and lost its seats. Turnout was 60.2 percent of 2,469,716 eligible voters, up from 58.0 percent in 2006. Overhang and leveling seats left a chamber of 149, so 75 votes made a majority. The Greens’ 17.6 percent was their best Abgeordnetenhaus result, 4.5 points and six seats above 13.1 percent and 23 seats in 2006, but short of hopes raised by polls in late 2010.

The SPD and the Left held 66 seats together, so the coalition governing since 2001 could not continue; the SPD and the Greens had 76, a majority of one. Exploratory talks opened on 21 September. After four hours Wowereit and Künast reported common ground on education but a dispute over extending the A 100, which he wanted and the Greens rejected; he said the SPD would also sound out the CDU. Formal negotiations on 5 October lasted about an hour and collapsed over a 3.2-kilometre section from Neukölln toward Treptow. A proposal to seek reallocation of more than €400 million in federal funds failed to close the gap: the SPD still intended to build if that effort failed, while Green negotiator Volker Ratzmann called 900 metres the party’s limit. Wowereit and SPD state chair Michael Müller said there was no basis for a deal. That evening the SPD executive, with one abstention and no votes against, opened talks with the CDU. Green state chair Bettina Jarasch said the SPD had not really wanted the coalition; federal co-chairs Claudia Roth and [Cem Özdemir](/people/cem-ozdemir) said Wowereit had been building a bridge to the CDU.

On 23 November Müller and CDU state chair Frank Henkel signed a 98-page agreement. With 86 of 149 seats, each party was to name four senators, and Wowereit was to be re-elected Governing Mayor the next day—his first alliance with the CDU after a short red–green minority government and nine years with the Left.

## Later parliamentary work, 2013–2025

### Committee on Legal Affairs

Künast remained a member of the Bundestag after she stopped co-chairing the Alliance 90/The Greens group in October 2013. When the standing committees of the 18th Bundestag were constituted on 15 January 2014, she became chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, a post the Bundestag’s biography dates from 2014 to 2017. The Greens were in opposition to a CDU/CSU–SPD majority.

In May 2015, as Justice Minister Heiko Maas prepared a bill restoring telecommunications data retention, she called the plan unconstitutional and a “Dammbruch”. After the Bundestag passed it on 16 October 2015, she said the coalition had not explained “warum wir alle derartig verdächtig sind” and had ignored alternatives such as quick freeze: “Wer die Sicherheitsideologie so weit treibt, dass er die Freiheit opfert, hat am Ende weder das eine noch das andere.” Konstantin von Notz said the Greens would challenge the statute in court.

On 28 June 2017 the committee recommended a Bundesrat bill to introduce [same-sex marriage](/facts/same-sex-marriage-in-germany). The SPD, Die Linke and the Greens voted for that recommendation and the CDU/CSU against; the Bundestag held a recorded vote two days later. On 30 June it also adopted the Network Enforcement Act. Künast warned that the law set “ganz grundlegende Weichen für das digitale Zeitalter” and that “der Reiz zu löschen größer ist als der Reiz, die Meinungsfreiheit einzuhalten”.

At the 2017 election she again stood in Berlin-Tempelhof-Schöneberg, constituency 81. The Federal Returning Officer’s final count gave her 33,763 first votes (18.9 percent), behind Jan-Marco Luczak of the CDU with 51,708 (28.9 percent). The Berlin Greens had placed her third on the state list, after Lisa Paus and Stefan Gelbhaar, and she returned on that list.

On 31 January 2018 the new legal-affairs committee elected Stephan Brandner of the Alternative for Germany chair by secret ballot — 19 in favour, 12 against, 12 abstentions — after members objected to his nomination. The Bundestag noted that Künast had chaired the committee in the previous term. She was a substitute member of it in both the 19th and 20th terms.

### Agriculture and nutrition

From the 19th term she was a full member of the Committee on Food and Agriculture. The Green group’s March 2018 profile named her spokesperson for animal-welfare policy and for nutrition policy, and Friedrich Ostendorff spokesperson for agricultural policy.

In 2021 she was again third on the Berlin state list and again the Green candidate in Tempelhof-Schöneberg. In the Federal Returning Officer’s final result she took 44,021 first votes (25.1 percent); Kevin Kühnert of the SPD won the seat with 47,451 (27.1 percent). She entered on the state list. A partial repeat of the Berlin Bundestag election on 11 February 2024 changed the totals but not the order: Kühnert 45,220 first votes (26.7 percent), Künast 42,680 (25.2 percent). The Bundestag recorded that she won her mandate again in that repeat.

In the negotiations for the traffic-light coalition she led the Green side of the working group on agriculture and nutrition, with Till Backhaus for the SPD and Carina Konrad for the FDP. From 2021 she was the group’s spokesperson for nutrition and agriculture. She stayed on the food and agriculture committee and, in the 20th term, also sat on the Wahlausschuss, which prepares the Bundestag’s election of judges to the Federal Constitutional Court.

### Withdrawal from the Bundestag

On 8 July 2024 she wrote to her Tempelhof-Schöneberg district association that she would not stand in the 2025 federal election. “Es ist jetzt Zeit, um Platz für Jüngere zu machen,” she wrote, while saying she would remain a politician. For the rest of the term she named food security, redirecting farm payments toward climate, soil, water and species protection, and support for a bill by Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir to limit the marketing of sugary food to children. The letter, as reported, also pointed to her litigation over online abuse, which had reached the Federal Constitutional Court.

She did not stand. The 21st Bundestag held its constituent sitting on 25 March 2025, the 30th day after the election and the latest date Article 39 of the Basic Law allows. Under that article an electoral term ends when a new Bundestag assembles, so the mandate she had held since 2002 ended that day.

## Litigation over online speech

### Insulting comments and the Federal Constitutional Court

These cases concerned insults under a fabricated quotation, not the integration meme below. In late October 2016 a blog published Renate Künast’s photograph and, as if quoting her, “Komma, wenn keine Gewalt im Spiel ist, ist der Sex mit Kindern doch ganz ok. Ist mal gut jetzt.” The Federal Constitutional Court linked that text to 2015 reporting, including in *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* on 24 May, on the 1980s stance of Alliance 90/The Greens toward pedophilia. On 29 May 1986, the protocol of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin records, a coalition deputy interrupted a Green speech on domestic violence to ask about a North Rhine-Westphalian Green resolution to decriminalize sexual acts with children. Künast, not the speaker, called out: “Komma, wenn keine Gewalt im Spiel ist!”

In early 2019, after she had sued, Sven Liebich reposted the image and text on Facebook and referred to a Halle prosecution not yet begun. She sought the authors’ data for 22 comments. Under the Telemedia Act a court could order disclosure for civil claims over unlawful content, including section 185 insults, as also defined in the Network Enforcement Act. On 9 September 2019 the Landgericht Berlin (27 AR 17/19) refused all 22 requests as opinion on a public controversy. Legal Tribune Online reported that even “Drecks Fotze” was allowed through, to wide criticism. On 21 January 2020 the Landgericht ordered six disclosures. On 11 March 2020 the Kammergericht added six and refused ten, including “Pädophilen-Trulla” and “Gehirn Amputiert,” which it did not call context-free abuse.

On 19 December 2021, in 1 BvR 1073/20, published on 2 February 2022, the Second Chamber of the First Senate held unanimously that the rulings violated her general right of personality under Article 2(1) in conjunction with Article 1(1) of the Basic Law. It quashed the Kammergericht orders against her and remanded. An insult under section 185 generally requires balancing freedom of expression and honor. That step may be omitted only for *Schmähkritik*, a formal insult, or an attack on human dignity. The Kammergericht stopped once it found no *Schmähkritik*. The chamber instead required a balance, and tied protection from written online attacks to democratic participation. On 31 October 2022 (10 W 13/20) the Kammergericht held the remaining ten comments to be insults as well—denigration for a statement she had not made—and ordered disclosure for all 22. Legal Tribune Online reported that HateAid supported the case.

The Amtsgericht Halle sentenced Liebich to eleven months, suspended, in a case that included the false quotation. On 24 October 2022 the Landgericht Halle imposed ten months, suspended, for defamation of Künast and incitement of the people, dropping three insult counts. The quotation marks and photograph had made the claim look like her words.

### False quotations and Meta

A separate meme showed her photograph with the line “Integration fängt damit an, dass Sie als Deutscher mal türkisch lernen.” The Landgericht Frankfurt am Main held that she never said it. *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* reported that she denied it on Facebook in 2015 and that it kept circulating after Correctiv called it false. On 8 April 2022 (2-03 O 188/21) it ordered Meta Platforms, operator of Facebook, to block the meme and equivalent variants without a fresh URL, and awarded 10,000 euros. Meta had not shown that search, including human review of altered text, was unreasonable. False quotations, it said, damage credibility and debate.

On 25 January 2024 the Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt am Main (16 U 65/22) affirmed the blocking order and set the damages aside. Once notified, Meta had to delete that post and search for equivalents, as an indirect disturber under the Civil Code, using filters and human review. Legal Tribune Online reported HateAid’s support and that an appeal was allowed.

The Federal Court of Justice heard the cross-appeals on 18 February 2025 (VI ZR 64/24). Meta resists any duty beyond URL-identified posts. Künast seeks at least 10,000 euros and removal of equivalent memes at large; the Senate records that she never said “Integration fängt damit an, dass sie als Deutscher mal türkisch lernen.” The Sixth Civil Senate asked whether Articles 17 and 82 of the General Data Protection Regulation and Articles 6(4) and 8 of the [Digital Services Act](/facts/digital-services-act) govern deletion and damages, rather than German tort law alone. It stayed the case for the [Court of Justice of the European Union](/organizations/justice-cjeu) judgment of 2 December 2025 in C-492/23 and relisted the hearing for 27 October 2026. No concluding judgment had been announced.

### Broader debate

Berlin decides when comments under a false quotation are criminal insults, and so when a court may order a platform to name the users. Frankfurt, still open in the Federal Court of Justice, decides whether one notice obliges the host to find repetitions itself. The 2019 refusal of every disclosure was widely criticized, and Karlsruhe then rejected a test that protects every remark short of *Schmähkritik*.

In C-18/18 (3 October 2019) the Court of Justice considered removal of identical or equivalent material. VI ZR 64/24 asks how that duty sits with the Act and with data-protection claims. In Berlin the Network Enforcement Act only supplied the list of content for which disclosure could be ordered.

## Political positions

### Agriculture, food and animal welfare

In her Bundestag policy statement of 8 February 2001, after the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis, Renate Künast of Alliance 90/The Greens called the scandal the end of the old farm policy. “Class instead of mass” meant raising organic farming from about 2.5 to 20 percent in ten years, capping stock at two livestock units per hectare, and tying subsidies to land rather than herds. Antibiotics in livestock feed were to leave the trough, not be scattered “with a watering can through the barn”; production was to be traceable “from stall to counter”; and quality marks were to flag organic food and conventional food meeting minimum standards.

Before the 2012 Green Week in Berlin she said cruel husbandry should be banned and public money paid only where animal welfare and environmental minima were met, because dumping-price meat made decent keeping impossible and drove antibiotic use.

### Civil liberties, migration and gender

On assisted suicide she was the first signatory of a bill of 30 June 2015 (printed paper 18/5375). It would have stated what the sponsors called the law since 1871—help is not a crime for relatives, doctors or associations—and forbidden only commercial help: “more care instead of more criminal law.” After the Federal Constitutional Court voided the 2015 ban on 26 February 2020, her draft, merged with one from Katrin Helling-Plahr, stayed outside the Criminal Code, with counseling before a lethal drug and no duty to assist or refuse. The Bundestag rejected it on 6 July 2023, 286 votes to 375.

In *Die Welt* on 27 August 2013 she urged abolition of the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act and the residence restriction so refugees could move and work, and called large shelters in Berlin a failure of dignity. On 3 December 2004 *Der Spiegel* reported her call for German-language religious instruction in Islam in Germany in state schools—“Why should one convey only the contents of the Bible and not those of the Quran?”—to develop “an enlightened European Islam” fit for “a libertarian and open society,” but only under the Basic Law. She also proposed a points bonus for good German and for qualifications.

After the New Year assaults in Cologne in 2015, she told Deutschlandfunk on 12 January 2016 that evidence, charges and a sexual-offences law covering groping—“a policy of a cool and clear head”—mattered more than a contest of deportation demands, and she rejected a residence rule for recognized refugees. On 1 February 2011 she said women lacked equal chances because business was “a place of pure male glory,” with men choosing men; the Greens’ gender quota, and the Basic Law, had to change that.

### Reception

On 8 February 2001 the opposition said the government was making farmers the scapegoats of BSE. On 29 June 2001 Albert Deß, agriculture spokesman of the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria), inverted her slogan: an organic label set only at European Union standards was “mass instead of class.” At the German Farmers’ Association congress in Münster on 6 July 2001, about 5,000 delegates whistled and shouted “stop.” President Gerd Sonnleitner warned of “avalanches of costs through one-sided requirements and harassment.”

Foodwatch was harsh from the consumer side. In a feed report covered on 21 April 2005, director Thilo Bode said she had “failed across the board”: safer feed and hard punishment had been promised, yet after the nitrofen scandal no one was held to account. Cheap feed, he said, was a “licence for our long-term poisoning.” The ministry called that inappropriate; inspection, it said, belonged to the states.

The March 2001 Politbarometer for ZDF was kinder: she placed joint second, level with [Joschka Fischer](/people/joschka-fischer) and behind Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, on 1.6 points. A Forsa survey of 1,002 adults, published on 30 November 2007, rated her the most popular Green politician, at 49 of 100 points among the public and 69 among Green supporters.

## Personal life and public profile

### Private life

Künast has long lived in Berlin. A November 2022 *Berliner Zeitung* questionnaire described her as a resident of 46 years; asked how she unwinds, she mentioned movement, including walks by the Havel and in the Botanical Garden.

On 22 February 2011 she married the Berlin criminal-defence lawyer Rüdiger Portius at the registry office in Charlottenburg. She told *Bild am Sonntag*, in an account reported that July by *Die Welt* and *Der Tagesspiegel*, that the ceremony had been small and unannounced for five months because a witness, the former Berlin senator Anne Klein, was terminally ill. Portius said that even if she became governing mayor he would avoid most official appearances, keep practising as a defence lawyer, and follow the example of Joachim Sauer, husband of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Bundestag biography for 2021–2025 still listed her as married, and a 2025 rbb24 interview referred to her husband in the present.

That biography, which the Bundestag says rests on members’ own information, lists honorary membership of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and membership of the German Women Lawyers Association and of [Slow Food](/organizations/slow-food). Its register of outside posts also names her as a trustee of Berliner AIDS-Hilfe.

### Books and public persona

The German National Library records several of her books. As Alliance 90/The Greens minister for consumer protection, food and agriculture she published *Klasse statt Masse: Die Erde schätzen, den Verbraucher schützen* (Econ, Munich, 2002) and, with Hajo Schumacher, *Die Dickmacher: Warum die Deutschen immer fetter werden und was wir dagegen tun müssen* (Riemann, Munich, 2004). *Perlentaucher*’s notes on the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* and the *taz* describe *Klasse statt Masse* as part self-portrait and part policy primer: Wolfgang Roth preferred the later material on European farm policy, incomes and world nutrition to the opening self-presentation, and Manfred Kriener wrote that the book strengthened once facts predominated.

Later entries are *Träume sind mir nicht genug: Was jetzt geschehen muss* (Herder, 2009, with Cathrin Kahlweit); *Hass ist keine Meinung: Was die Wut in unserem Land anrichtet* (Heyne, Munich, 2017); and, with Victoria Wegner, *Rein ins Grüne – raus in die Stadt: Eine Reise durch urbane Gärten* (Callwey, Munich, 2019). Heyne issued *Hass ist keine Meinung* on 28 August 2017 as an account of hostile messages, of visits to some senders, and of the political use of anger.

In a June 2011 profile, *Newsweek* wrote that the nickname “Granate”—a rhyme on Renate—came from reforms she pushed through against established networks in the agriculture ministry. The 2025 rbb24 interview introduced her as someone known for speaking bluntly, and quoted her husband as saying she seemed abrupt but was warm-hearted, which she accepted.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/renate-kunast