# Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter

# Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter

Rita Berta Schwarzelühr-Sutter (born 13 October 1962 in Waldshut-Tiengen) is a German politician of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) (SPD) in Baden-Württemberg. She has been a member of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2009 and again since October 2010, elected on the Baden-Württemberg state list while contesting Waldshut, constituency 288, in the Waldshut district. Since May 2025 she has been Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

She passed the Abitur in 1982 at the Hochrhein-Gymnasium in Waldshut and studied economics from 1983 to 1989 at the University of Freiburg and the University of Zurich in Switzerland, graduating with a Lizentiat in economics, specialized in business administration, and the title Diplom-Betriebswirtin from Zurich. The Bundestag biography, compiled from her own disclosures, records that she is a Roman Catholic, is married and has two children. From 1992 to 1996 she worked as a marketing assistant, and from 1997 to 2005 she provided advice and communications for the SPD member of the Bundestag Karin Rehbock-Zureich. She joined the SPD in 1994, sat on the municipal council of Lauchringen from 1999 to 2013 and on the Waldshut district council from 2004, joined the state executive of the SPD in Baden-Württemberg in 2007 and has been a deputy state chair since 2020.

From March to November 2010, in the interval between her two periods in parliament, she worked as a business consultant, and she returned to the Bundestag in October 2010. At the 2025 German federal election she received 26,958 first votes in Waldshut, 18.7 percent of the valid vote. [Felix Schreiner](/people/felix-schreiner) of the [Christian Democratic Union of Germany](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) won the direct mandate with 54,467 votes (37.7 percent), and Schwarzelühr-Sutter took her seat through the state list. On 6 May 2025 the Bundestag elected [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) federal chancellor; he and the seventeen federal ministers then received their certificates of appointment from President [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier). A ministry statement dated 7 May 2025 said that Schwarzelühr-Sutter and Carsten Träger had taken up their posts as parliamentary state secretaries as [Carsten Schneider](/people/carsten-schneider) succeeded [Steffi Lemke](/people/steffi-lemke).

In the 18th and 19th legislative periods she had already been parliamentary state secretary to the environment minister. The ministry curriculum vitae dates that service from 2013 to 2018, when the ministry also covered building and reactor safety, and from 2018 to 2021 at the environment and nuclear-safety ministry. From 2021 to 2025 she held the same rank at the [Federal Ministry of the Interior](/organizations/federal-ministry-of-the-interior); her own account dates the move to 8 December 2021, after appointment by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser in the government of [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz). On 24 June 2025 the supervisory board of the Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung elected her chair, succeeding Jan-Niclas Gesenhues, who had left the board at the change of government on 6 May 2025. The Bundestag’s register of outside posts lists her as an ex officio member of that board from 19 June 2025 and as its ex officio chair from 24 June 2025.

## Early life and education

### Family and schooling

Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter was born on 13 October 1962 in Waldshut, a town on the High Rhine in the Waldshut district of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. During her childhood the state's municipal reform joined Waldshut with Tiengen/Hochrhein and the municipality of Gurtweil. Section 68 of the *Besonderes Gemeindereformgesetz* of 9 July 1974 created the town of Waldshut-Tiengen, and the statute took effect on 1 January 1975.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is drawn from members' own information, records that she is Roman Catholic, married and has two children. The Munzinger biographical archive likewise describes her as Catholic and states that she grew up in Waldshut as the youngest of three children. On her own website she writes that she went to school in the town, first at the Heinrich-Hansjakob-Schule—spelled there Heinrich-Hans-Jakob-Schule—and then at the Hochrhein-Gymnasium. The municipality lists the Heinrich-Hansjakob-Schule as a primary school and the Hochrhein-Gymnasium, at Waldtorstraße 8, as a general-education Gymnasium in the district of Waldshut. In 1982 she passed the Abitur at the Hochrhein-Gymnasium, the examination that conferred the higher-education entrance qualification.

### University studies

From 1983 to 1989 she studied economics (*Wirtschaftswissenschaften*) at the University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau and at the University of Zurich in Zürich, Switzerland. Those institutional biographies do not say how the years were divided between the two universities. Her website states that she began the course in Freiburg and finished it in Zurich.

The Bundestag records the close of the studies as the *Lizenziat der Wirtschaftswissenschaften* in the business-administration track (*Richtung Betriebswirtschaft*), set beside the title *Diplom-Betriebswirtin* of the University of Zurich. The Federal Ministry for the Environment's curriculum vitae uses *Lizentiat der Wirtschaftswissenschaften* and *Diplom-Betriebswirtin* for the same 1983–1989 course, and Munzinger reports both designations. The *Lizentiat* was the standard Swiss university degree before the Bologna reforms. Article 14 of the Higher Education Council's ordinance on the coordination of teaching at Swiss higher-education institutions treats a licentiate, and the corresponding diploma, of a Swiss university as equivalent to a master's degree. The University of Zurich states that holders of a licentiate from its Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics—other than in business informatics, and including the *lic. oec. publ.*—may use the title Master of Arts UZH as an alternative to, not in addition to, the older title. German official profiles continue to give the qualification in that pre-Bologna form, the educational background recorded alongside her later membership of the Bundestag.

## Professional career before parliament

Official biographies record two spells of employment before Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter's first term in the Bundestag, and a short return to private consulting after she left the chamber in 2009. The Bundestag text is based on the member's own information, and the environment ministry publishes a matching curriculum vitae. Neither names a marketing employer or an individual consulting client.

### Marketing and constituency work

From 1983 to 1989 she studied economics at the University of Freiburg and the University of Zurich, finishing with a Zurich licentiate in economics specialized in business administration (Diplom-Betriebswirtin). The next occupation both biographies record is marketing assistant, from 1992 to 1996, without naming a firm. She has written that she took that work while her children were still small.

From 1997 to 2005 the same biographies list "advice and communications" for Karin Rehbock-Zureich, then a Bundestag member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. A 2014 profile by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt describes the post as personal adviser in Rehbock-Zureich's constituency office. She has written that Rehbock-Zureich decided not to stand again when Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder](/people/gerhard-schroder) called an early election in 2005, and that, after speaking with her family, she ran as her predecessor's successor and was elected in September 2005, which ended the staff role.

### The interval outside parliament

That first mandate lasted from 2005 to 2009. For the September 2009 election the SPD in Baden-Württemberg placed her 16th on the state list drawn up at Singen on 14 February 2009; Hermann Scheer was eighth. She did not regain a seat. The Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt later described the result as a narrow miss and wrote that she then worked on her own account as a business consultant for companies in the transport sector. The ministry curriculum vitae dates the consultancy from March to October 2010. The Bundestag biography gives March to November 2010, and the register of members' interests lists the occupation before membership as business consultant in Lauchringen. No published CV names a client company.

The interval closed after Scheer died on 14 October 2010. Peter Friedrich, general secretary of the southwestern SPD, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the business graduate from the Waldshut-Tiengen area, already a member from 2005 to 2009, would take Scheer's mandate. She returned through the Baden-Württemberg state list in October 2010. In a note dated 24 November 2010 she wrote that from November she would represent the Waldshut constituency in Berlin, with a local office still to be set up.

## Local government and party offices

### Lauchringen, the district council and the regional association

In Lauchringen, in the Waldshut district of Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter was a member of the municipal council (Gemeinderat) from 1999 to 2013. The council and the mayor are the municipality's governing bodies. The mayor chairs 18 honorary councillors, and the council is elected for five years; the last election was in 2024. As the residents' representation and the municipality's principal organ, it decides local affairs except where statute reserves them to the mayor or the council has delegated them, and it may form advisory or decision-making committees. She is not among the councillors listed for 2024–2029.

Since 2004 she has been a member of the Kreistag of Landkreis Waldshut. The Bundestag interests register records that mandate as honorary and places it at Waldshut-Tiengen. Under the Landkreisordnung the district council represents the district's residents and is its principal organ. It sets the principles of district administration, decides matters not assigned by law to the Landrat or delegated to him, supervises the carrying out of its decisions, and appoints committees to prepare or take decisions. Its members serve in an honorary capacity. The council chosen on 9 June 2024 consists of the Landrat as chair and 57 councillors, elected for five years. Standing for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the Waldshut constituency, Schwarzelühr-Sutter, of Lauchringen, received 8,155 votes and was elected. Across the district the SPD won six of the 57 seats, including two compensatory seats (Ausgleichssitze). The published roll for 2024–2029 lists her as an SPD member and does not give her the chair of that group.

From 2009 to 2014 she was a member of the Regionalverband Hochrhein-Bodensee, according to the Bundestag biography, which is compiled from members' own statements. The association is one of twelve regional-planning bodies in Baden-Württemberg. It covers the districts of Lörrach, Waldshut and Konstanz — about 2,756 square kilometres and roughly 675,000 people — along some 315 kilometres of the border with Switzerland, from Lake Constance at Konstanz to the tri-border area near Basel. The association describes that border location as the region's defining feature, and treats settlement and open space, the protection of Lake Constance, a labour market of about 35,000 cross-border commuters, and long-distance rail and road traffic as questions that run across the frontier.

### The SPD in Waldshut and Baden-Württemberg

Schwarzelühr-Sutter joined the SPD in 1994. She chaired its Kreisverband Waldshut, the party's organization for the district, for about two decades. The Bundestag biography still describes her as chair since 2001. The *Südkurier*, reporting the end of that tenure, wrote that she had held the office since 2002. On Saturday, 19 March 2022, a district delegates' conference in the community hall at Kadelburg, in Küssaberg, elected Peter Schallmayer of Höchenschwand as her successor; the paper published the account on 22 March. Alexander Wunderle and Nicole Klein became deputy chairs, and Schwarzelühr-Sutter was elected to the district executive as a Beisitzerin, an ordinary member. The same report put the Kreisverband at 18 local branches and about 450 members.

In 2008 and 2009 she led the working group on sustainable mobility (Arbeitskreis "Nachhaltige Mobilität") of the federal SPD executive, a role recorded in the curriculum vitae issued by the federal environment ministry.

She has been a member of the SPD Baden-Württemberg state executive (Landesvorstand) since September 2007. At the state party's first digital congress, on 14 November 2020, delegates elected her one of four deputy state chairs, with 249 votes in favour (83 percent), 29 against and 22 abstentions. The *Südkurier* reported the election and noted that she was to serve alongside state chair Andreas Stoch, who was re-elected at the same congress, and three other deputies. She did not stand again when the state party chose a new executive in Ulm on 19 June 2026. The party reported that [Jasmina Hostert](/people/jasmina-hostert) and [Parsa Marvi](/people/parsa-marvi) were re-elected as deputies and that Yannik Hummel and Viviane Sigg were elected for the first time, succeeding Dorothea Kliche-Behnke and Schwarzelühr-Sutter. The executive list published after that congress does not include her. The environment ministry's biography, dated 7 May 2025, still listed both membership of the state executive from 2007 and the deputy chairmanship from 2020.

## Bundestag membership and elections

### The 2005 entry and the return after Hermann Scheer

Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter entered the [German Bundestag](/organizations/german-bundestag) at the opening of the 16th electoral term on 18 October 2005. She stood for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in constituency 289, Waldshut, and was 22nd on the party's Baden-Württemberg state list. The direct mandate went to Thomas Dörflinger of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), with 62,042 votes (46.7 percent); the SPD candidate took 49,759 first votes (37.4 percent), and Schwarzelühr-Sutter received a list seat. The Bundestag's biography records membership from 2005 to 2009.

She was not a member when the 17th Bundestag convened on 27 October 2009. The SPD in Baden-Württemberg returned 15 members on its state list that year, and she was not among them, although the party again named her as its candidate in Waldshut, renumbered 288. Dörflinger held the seat with 50,967 votes (41.5 percent); she received 35,026 (28.5 percent). The interval ended after the death of Hermann Scheer. On 28 October 2010 the Bundestag president told the House that Scheer had died on 14 October, and the stenographic record of that sitting lists Schwarzelühr-Sutter as an SPD member. The day after Scheer's death, the SPD in the south-west said that she, a business graduate from Lauchringen who had sat from 2005 to 2009, would take his mandate, and the group's newsletter of 22 November described her as having returned as his successor on the state list. The official biography dates the renewed membership from October 2010, so the period from the end of the 16th term until then was a break rather than continuous service.

She was returned on the state list in 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025, and has therefore sat in the 16th term and, after that break, in the 17th through the 21st. In 2017, 2021 and 2025 she was third on the Baden-Württemberg SPD list; the federal returning officer's 2025 results booklet gives her full name as Rita Berta Schwarzelühr-Sutter.

### Committees and parliamentary roles

In the 16th term, a biography she published while a member recorded that from 2006 she sat on the railway-infrastructure advisory council of the Federal Network Agency and chaired the SPD group's sub-working group on transport and climate, within its working group on transport, building and urban development. From 2007 the same account listed membership of the Bundestag subcommittee on the condition of the rail network and on securing a capable and safe rail infrastructure.

On her return, the SPD group said she would support its work in the Committee on Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection. By April 2013 she was the group's commissioner for small and medium-sized firms in the crafts, and in a Bundestag debate she argued that the governing coalition was neglecting demographic change, the energy transition, business finance and start-ups. In June 2011 she was a member of a delegation of the German–Swiss parliamentary group, chaired by Thomas Dörflinger, which met the [Swiss parliament](/organizations/swiss-parliament)'s delegation for relations with the Bundestag in canton Aargau; the Swiss notice names her as a participant, not as a deputy chair.

From the 18th electoral term the Bundestag biography records her as parliamentary state secretary to the federal environment minister, a post it also records for the 19th term, rather than as a member of a standing committee. The current biography likewise gives her function as parliamentary state secretary for the environment, climate action, nature conservation and nuclear safety, with the mandate coming from the Baden-Württemberg list and the candidacy attached to constituency 288. The work of those government offices is separate from her membership of the House.

### The Waldshut constituency

The seat she has contested was numbered 289 in 2005 and 288 from 2009. Under the 2025 delimitation it covers all of Waldshut district and, from Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald, Breitnau, Buchenbach, Eisenbach, Feldberg, Friedenweiler, Glottertal, Gundelfingen, Heuweiler, Hinterzarten, Kirchzarten, Lenzkirch, Löffingen, Oberried, St. Märgen, St. Peter, Schluchsee, Stegen and Titisee-Neustadt. The constituency returning officer's notice for the 2013 election already gave her residence as Lauchringen.

She has not won the direct mandate. In 2013 Dörflinger, still the CDU candidate, took 65,009 votes (51.4 percent) to her 35,359 (28.0 percent), on a turnout of 72.6 percent. From 2017 the CDU candidate was Felix Schreiner. He received 56,528 votes (41.9 percent) and she 32,522 (24.1 percent), with turnout at 76.8 percent. In 2021 Schreiner won with 45,335 votes (33.6 percent) against her 34,449 (25.5 percent); turnout was again 76.8 percent. At the election of 23 February 2025, with 176,262 people eligible to vote and turnout of 82.5 percent, Schreiner took 54,467 votes (37.7 percent) and Schwarzelühr-Sutter 26,958 (18.7 percent), in second place, and she again entered on the state list.

## Environment and nuclear policy, 2013–2021

### Appointments under Hendricks and Schulze

In the 18th Bundestag, Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was parliamentary state secretary in the environment ministry of [Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel)'s third cabinet. The ministry curriculum vitae dates the office to 2013–2018, under minister Barbara Hendricks, at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety; the Bundestag biography records it for the 18th and 19th legislative periods.

On 14 March 2018 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed [Svenja Schulze](/people/svenja-schulze) environment minister. The ministry said the next day that Schwarzelühr-Sutter and Florian Pronold had again been appointed parliamentary state secretaries. An organisational decree renamed the department the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and moved urban development, housing and building to the interior ministry. The archive dates Schulze's term from 14 March 2018 to 8 December 2021. The curriculum vitae keeps her in that ministry from 2018 to 2021.

### Climate, nature conservation and international work

At the United Nations Conference on Small Island Developing States, held in Samoa from 1 to 4 September 2014, she called for a binding and transparent climate agreement in 2015, on the argument that it was more profitable to invest than to repair damage. The ministry said that since 2008 it had spent about €140 million from its International Climate Initiative on adaptation, biodiversity and sustainable energy with small-island states. In the run-up she and David Sheppard, director-general of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, signed a €5 million agreement, running to 2019, for ecosystem-based coastal protection, with pilot sites in Fiji, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

*Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter speaking in the plenary chamber of the Reichstag building.*

In September 2016 BUND, Greenpeace, NABU and WWF declined to attend the hearing on the draft Climate Action Plan 2050. Their open letter to the chancellor and vice-chancellor called the text neither acceptable nor credible, and incompatible with the [Paris Agreement](/facts/paris-agreement). They wanted a greenhouse-gas cut of at least 95 percent by 2050 against 1990, sector targets, an end to coal-fired power by 2035, and a climate law.

On 31 January 2019 she answered for the government on the report of the Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment. She called the outcome, reached in eight months with one vote against, a success the government now had to examine and implement. An end date for coal was, she said, a symbol; the point was the path, including cuts relevant to 2022, with a climate law also framing transport and buildings. Emissions trading, in her view, did not settle the social and regional side of structural change. She contrasted the commission with the extension of nuclear operating lives, which she said had left taxpayers with the bill, and with waiting for a shock like Fukushima before changing nuclear policy.

The package CDU/CSU and SPD leaders agreed in September 2019 drew criticism from several directions. [Fridays for Future](/organizations/fridays-for-future)'s German section wrote that measures which, in its view, had nothing to do with the 1.5-degree goal were a scandal, not a breakthrough, after years of inaction. Green co-leader Robert Habeck called a higher commuter tax allowance "really nonsense" because it rewarded long journeys, and SPD member Hilde Mattheis called the CDU and CSU a brake on climate policy for blocking what she saw as an effective carbon price.

A written answer to [the Greens](/organizations/the-greens), reported on 1 August 2017, had her list many causes of insect decline: climate, landscape structure, food and habitat, and also more intensive farming and pesticides. She said the environment and nature-conservation agencies knew of studies linking neonicotinoids, among other factors, to fewer wild bees, altered nesting, smaller bumblebee colonies and weaker reproduction, and that nature reserves were not insulated from the surrounding landscape. Green MP [Harald Ebner](/people/harald-ebner), citing biomass losses of 80 percent in 35 years at some sites, said the government had been forced to admit that intensified agriculture was a central cause. On 4 September 2019 the cabinet adopted an insect-protection programme to restrict glyphosate and equivalent products from 2020 and to end glyphosate use in Germany at the end of 2023. Schulze and agriculture minister [Julia Klöckner](/people/julia-klockner) presented it; Schulze called the decline dramatic, and Klöckner said farmers would be asked to change and would be paid for it.

In July 2019 she and Maria Flachsbarth, parliamentary state secretary at the development ministry, represented Germany at the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in [New York](/organizations/new-york), the UN review of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. She said action on climate change and on poverty had to go together, and that a shift to greenhouse-gas neutrality would work better if it benefited people already under economic strain. The joint release said very few goals were on track for 2030, flagged climate, biodiversity and inequality, and said Germany wanted action programmes for the goals furthest behind.

### Reactor safety, the DBU and the GRS

On 11 September 2014 the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt elected her chair of its Kuratorium. The Osnabrück foundation said she was the first woman in the post, after Hans Tietmeyer, Ernst Welteke and Hubert Weinzierl, and called itself Europe's largest environmental foundation. Founded in 1990 after a Bundestag decision, it started with €1.28 billion from the privatisation of federally owned Salzgitter AG, to fund environmental innovation in smaller firms. She called independence a condition of its effectiveness.

On 26 June 2019 the Kuratorium, newly appointed by Schulze for five years, re-elected her. Deputy chairs were Antje von Dewitz of Vaude, research-ministry state secretary Michael Meister, and Kai Niebert of the German Nature Conservation Ring. The foundation said the board sets funding guidelines and awards large grants; it put the endowment above €2.24 billion and the supported projects above 9,700, with more than €1.76 billion paid out.

From March 2014 to 2021 the curriculum vitae lists her on the Mittelstandsrat of KfW, which specifies the mandate of KfW's SME bank and decides on support for smaller firms within the bank's overall plan.

The GRS report for 2016 names her chair of the supervisory board as parliamentary state secretary, with Karsten Xander of TÜV SÜD as deputy, and gives the owners as the Federal Republic and the technical-inspection associations (46 percent each) and Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia (4 percent each). It describes the GRS as an independent non-profit scientific body. The curriculum vitae dates her chairmanship to 2014–2021. The company describes itself as Germany's central nuclear-safety organisation since 1977, covering reactor safety, decommissioning, storage, disposal, physical protection and radiation protection.

## Interior ministry, 2021–2025

### Appointment in the Scholz cabinet

On 8 December 2021, after the Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor, its president, [Bärbel Bas](/people/barbel-bas), announced the Scholz cabinet. The parliamentary state secretaries named to support Interior Minister Nancy Faeser at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community were Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, [Mahmut Özdemir](/people/mahmut-ozdemir) and [Johann Saathoff](/people/johann-saathoff), all of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The post is a political appointment, not a career civil-service office. Under the 1974 Act on the Legal Status of Parliamentary State Secretaries, the federal president appoints the holder on the chancellor's proposal and with the minister's agreement; the holder must be a Bundestag member, except when attached to the chancellor, stands in a public-law relationship to the Federation, and supports the minister in governmental business, including representation in parliament. The office may be ended at any time and ends when the minister's tenure ends.

Published organisation charts of 15 June 2022 and 15 March 2025 assigned Schwarzelühr-Sutter the same blocks of work: public security; Federal Police affairs except air security; leadership, planning and communication; and homeland, cohesion and democracy, plus the central-services subdivision that included the ministry budget. Crisis management and civil protection, the public service and digital administration were assigned to Saathoff; migration, constitutional and administrative law, and sport to Özdemir. Her interior appointment ended with the Scholz government. The Bundestag's account of the government announced on 6 May 2025 listed her as a parliamentary state secretary at the environment ministry.

### Civil protection, extremism and municipal affairs

Responsibility for the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) and the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) lay with Saathoff's crisis-management department. Schwarzelühr-Sutter nevertheless answered a constituent on Abgeordnetenwatch who objected to the 2024 draft cutting the THW by about a tenth and the BBK by about a quarter. She wrote that stimulus money had more than doubled the THW budget, from €249 million in 2019 to €544 million in 2022, and had expired in 2022; that local branches then had a record €48.77 million, plus €8.4 million for training; and that the THW could continue its civil-protection work and start the first 30 sites in its building programme, while every spending line would have to be prioritised.

In parliament she spoke for the ministry as a whole. On 16 December 2022 she asked the Bundesrat to pass the Act introducing an "opportunity residence" right, describing it as a new chapter for people who had lived in Germany for years under tolerated status, obeyed the law and become part of society. After late amendments, she said, those who by 31 October 2022 had been tolerated and without convictions for five years would have 18 months to clarify their identity and secure a livelihood; she called the claim that the cut-off would be a pull factor a myth. The Bundesrat did not call the mediation committee.

On 13 December 2023, in Bundestag question time, she said no reliable forecast of asylum applications for 2024 was possible given what she called the dynamic migration situation. She reported 112,178 police findings, from January to October 2023, of persons who had entered without permission, and she told an AfD questioner that border measures had to remain compatible with the Schengen Borders Code.

Her own departments covered extremism, the Federal Police and local democracy. On 18 October 2023 she opened a Bundestag debate on stopping the glorification of terror after the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October. She said there would be zero tolerance for antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement and for violence; that the activity ban on Hamas and Samidoun announced by Scholz and Faeser on 12 October would be carried out as quickly as possible; and that antisemitism, racism or other group-based hostility would bar naturalisation. Of 2,641 antisemitic offences recorded in 2022, she said, 2,185 had been attributed to the right-wing spectrum.

On 31 May 2024, at the annual meeting of the Initiative kulturelle Integration, she called right-wing extremism the greatest extremist threat, though not the only one. She cited bans on the Hammerskins and on Hamas and Samidoun, easier removal of extremists from the public service under a revised federal disciplinary law, and a stronger Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, including in financial investigations. She tied those measures to the March 2022 action plan against right-wing extremism, extended in February 2024: an alliance to protect municipal office-holders, formed in 2022, and a nationwide contact point for people under threat, opened at the start of 2024. She set the assault on MEP Matthias Ecke among wider attacks on people active in public life, and called civil society the strongest bulwark against enemies of the constitution. That work sat in the homeland department assigned to her, which covered equivalent living conditions, municipal affairs, integration, defensive democracy and civic education.

## Return to the environment ministry

### The Merz cabinet

On 5 May 2025 the executive of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) published its team for the incoming coalition and named Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, together with Carsten Träger, as a parliamentary state secretary to Carsten Schneider at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. The ministry’s curriculum vitae, updated on 7 May 2025, records the post as held since May 2025, the month in which Friedrich Merz’s cabinet of the Christian Democratic Union, the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) and the SPD took office: on 6 May the federal president appointed the ministers, who were then sworn in in the Bundestag. She had been parliamentary state secretary in the environment ministry from 2013 to 2021—until 2018 in the ministry that also covered building, thereafter in the environment and nuclear-safety ministry—and from 2021 to 2025 at the interior ministry. In the 21st Bundestag she is listed in the environment role and holds her seat through the Baden-Württemberg state list.

Her first engagement back at the ministry was on 15 May 2025 in Berlin, when she opened the conference “Klimaanpassung im Sport.” She described it as a bridge between the interior portfolio, which then still covered sport, and climate adaptation at the environment ministry.

*Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter at the lectern opening the conference “Klimaanpassung im Sport” in Berlin on 15 May 2025.*

At the 69th General Conference of the [International Atomic Energy Agency](/organizations/international-atomic-energy-agency) in Vienna, held from 15 to 19 September 2025, she gave Germany’s national statement before about 2,000 participants. The ministry reported that she emphasised nuclear safety in a tense international climate, Germany’s continued push for high safety standards after the nuclear phase-out, and non-power nuclear technology, including medicine: power reactors, she noted, operate in only about 30 states, while many more use other applications. Fusion was a stated focus of that intervention.

She led the German delegation to the seventh United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi in December 2025. The ministry said her priorities there were artificial intelligence, sustainable raw-material supply chains, the circular economy, environmental crime and wildfire prevention. Member states adopted a [United Nations Environment Programme](/organizations/united-nations-environment-programme) strategy for 2026–2029, agreed a resolution on the environmental aspects of minerals including copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium and rare earths, and created a UN task force on critical raw materials. Germany, paying €7.5 million a year into UNEP’s core budget and already one of its three largest contributors, added €1.3 million to the Environment Fund. Schwarzelühr-Sutter said afterwards that a proposal for closer cooperation among UN bodies against environmental crime had been blocked by some states, while negotiations on a plastics treaty were to continue.

On 27 April 2026 she handed the southern Black Forest municipalities of Bonndorf, Dettighofen and Jestetten notices under the “Klimaangepasstes Waldmanagement” programme, worth up to €1.8 million over ten years for about 2,400 hectares. The ministry cited drought, heat and bark-beetle damage in the region and said the programme, increased in 2025, had paid out about €146 million that year.

### The BGE supervisory board and related mandates

The Bundestag’s register of outside activities, dated 1 November 2026, lists Schwarzelühr-Sutter as a member of the supervisory board of the federally owned Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung (BGE) from 19 June 2025 and as its chair from 24 June 2025, both ex officio. The board elected her chair on 24 June, in succession to [Jan-Niclas Gesenhues](/people/jan-niclas-gesenhues), who had left on 6 May 2025 with the change of government. The BGE is responsible for proposing a site for high-level waste meant to offer the best possible safety for a million years. It is also constructing the Konrad mine repository for low- and intermediate-level waste, closing Morsleben, planning retrieval from the Asse II mine and that mine’s later closure, and closing the Gorleben shaft.

The supervisory board meets at least once every half-year and must approve management measures of fundamental importance, including large investments and changes to financial and corporate planning; management reports to it under section 90 of the Stock Corporation Act. It does not select the repository site. Under the Site Selection Act, the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management reviews the BGE’s proposals at the end of each phase, the environment ministry informs the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and each phase ends with a federal statute. On taking the chair she said she wanted to accelerate site selection and would argue for that in the ministry and on the board. In November 2025 Olaf Bandt, chair of Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, said “safety before speed” had to remain the test for the search, and that amendments to the Site Selection Act must not lower scientific standards, transparency, safety or public participation. The BGE noted that her Waldshut constituency, on the High Rhine, lies near the repository Switzerland plans for high-level and for low- and intermediate-level waste; that cross-border procedure is separate from the German siting decision.

The same disclosure lists further ex-officio company roles attached to the ministerial post: membership of the supervisory board of the Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena) in Berlin from 1 September 2025, and the chair of the supervisory board of the Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS) in Cologne from 30 June 2025. dena said she was one of four members seconded with effect from 1 September 2025; the chair chosen later that month was [Stefan Rouenhoff](/people/stefan-rouenhoff), parliamentary state secretary at the economy ministry, not Schwarzelühr-Sutter. The GRS lists her as chair of its supervisory board. She had chaired that board from 2014 to 2021. The register also records ex-officio seats at KfW, on the administrative board from 4 June 2025 and on the SME advisory council from 7 July 2025.

## Cross-border nuclear issues on the High Rhine

### Swiss plants at Beznau and Leibstadt

The Bundestag constituency of Waldshut, in southern Baden-Württemberg on the High Rhine, faces two Swiss reactors on the border between Germany and Switzerland. The Beznau Nuclear Power Plant, run by Axpo, stands on an artificial island in the Aare near Döttingen in Aargau, about seven kilometres southeast of Waldshut-Tiengen, and its pressurized-water units were connected to the grid in 1969 and 1971. The Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant, also in Aargau, is on the Swiss bank within sight of the town. Freiburg’s regional government plans German protection around Leibstadt as the nearer plant; Dogern and parts of Waldshut-Tiengen lie inside a five-kilometre central zone.

*Aerial view of the Beznau nuclear power plant during construction on an island in the Aare near Döttingen, Aargau.*

In July 2015, during an outage of Beznau 1 with the core unloaded, ultrasonic tests found indications in the reactor pressure vessel. On 16 July the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI) required further investigation and said the unit could restart only once the vessel’s safety was shown. The next day in Waldshut-Tiengen, Schwarzelühr-Sutter, then parliamentary state secretary in the federal environment ministry, called the findings worrying and demanded a permanent shutdown, saying the reactor posed a great risk and that protecting people had to come first.

ENSI did not take that view: in March 2018 it accepted Axpo’s safety case: the indications were aluminium-oxide inclusions from 1960s forging, not flaws grown in service, and did not compromise the vessel, and the unit returned after nearly three years offline. On 4 December 2024 Axpo, after talks with ENSI, set unit 2 to run until 2032 and unit 1 until 2033 before dismantling, and budgeted a further 350 million Swiss francs. It described the choice as a safety judgment together with technical, regulatory and economic factors. The dates are Axpo’s choice, not a statutory lifetime. Voters on 21 May 2017 approved, by 58.2 percent, a ban on new nuclear power plants with no fixed shutdown date, so existing reactors may run while judged safe; Aargau, host to both plants, was one of four cantons to vote no.

In January 2016 she criticised Leibstadt after it emerged that, for about eleven days in 2014, a special emergency heat-removal system had been unavailable because groundwater pumps supplying its cooling water were not maintained. She called this “indications of an inadequate safety culture.” The ministry put the plant barely two kilometres from Waldshut-Tiengen and also noted holes in the containment from the improper fixing of a fire extinguisher. ENSI rated the pump event level 1 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, about 263 hours, and traced it to weak maintenance planning and overrun intervals. It said the emergency core-cooling systems had stayed available, the safety effect was slight, and the operator had repaired the pumps and changed its routines.

### Repository siting in Germany and Switzerland

Two separate deep geological repository searches meet at the same border. On 19 November 2024 Nagra, the Swiss cooperative for radioactive-waste disposal, sought a general licence for a combined repository at Nördlich Lägern in canton Zurich: surface works at Haberstal in Stadel, packaging at Zwilag in Würenlingen, and emplacement in Opalinus Clay at 800 to 900 metres. Chief executive Matthias Braun called Nördlich Lägern the best site, compatible with long-term safety, and said the project needed a popular vote as well as official review, with a Federal Council decision envisaged around 2029 and a possible referendum in 2031. Schwarzelühr-Sutter has treated that project as a constituency matter because of its proximity to Waldshut.

Germany’s 2017 Site Selection Act requires a comparative search, open to the whole country at the outset, for the site with the best possible safety for high-level waste over one million years. The federally owned Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung (BGE) proposes regions and sites, explores them and writes the safety analyses; the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management reviews the proposals and organises public participation, and the Bundestag decides by law at the end of each phase.

On 24 June 2025 the BGE supervisory board elected her, unpaid and ex officio as parliamentary state secretary, as chair. She told the *Südkurier* that southern Baden should not expect preferential treatment: “As chair of the supervisory board I am not involved in operational siting decisions — that is the task of the management and of independent scientific bodies.” Comparisons remain with the BGE as developer, the federal office and parliament, not with the board.

## Affiliations and public profile

### Memberships and foundations

The Bundestag biography, drawn from Schwarzelühr-Sutter’s own disclosure, records her as Roman Catholic, married and the mother of two children. The Südkurier identifies her as the member from Lauchringen.

The same biography lists membership of ver.di, the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e.V., EUROSOLAR, KLAR – Kein Leben mit atomaren Risiken, and a hospice association, Hospizdienst e.V., without an office in any of them. ver.di describes itself as the united services union of about 1.8 million people. The AWO, founded on 13 December 1919 at the initiative of Marie Juchacz, presents itself as a welfare association of the workers’ movement. Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie says it is a non-party network of more than 2,300 members working on remembrance and the defence of democracy. EUROSOLAR, active since 1988, states that it promotes a full shift to renewable energy independently of parties and companies. KLAR! e.V. (“Kein Leben mit atomaren Risiken”) uses its site to follow the Swiss deep repository and the German high-level waste search.

The chamber’s register of outside activities records a separate, ex officio seat on the foundation council of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur until 7 May 2025. The same disclosure lists further offices held by virtue of the parliamentary state secretary’s post—the chairs of the supervisory boards of the Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung and the Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit, and seats at the Deutsche Energie-Agentur and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau—together with unpaid membership of the political advisory board of the Wirtschaftsforum der SPD and of the Women in Lead network.

### Reception

Regional reporting has presented her as a long-serving SPD list member from a constituency the public broadcaster SWR calls a stronghold of the CDU, where no other party has ever won the direct mandate. In the February 2025 election Felix Schreiner of the CDU took Waldshut with 37.7 percent of the first votes; Schwarzelühr-Sutter, on 18.7 percent, returned through the Baden-Württemberg state list, the route recorded in the Bundestag biography. The Badische Zeitung reported that the Waldshut SPD had nominated her for that candidacy with more than 98 percent of the votes. At the opening of the campaign SWR quoted her as saying that she had to reckon with “critical tones” and that politics was not a comfort job.

When the SPD announced in May 2025 that she would serve again under Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, the Südkurier’s headline was that she “remains” a parliamentary state secretary, returning to a rank she had held in the environment ministry from 2013 to 2021 before moving to the interior ministry.

On the High Rhine, reporting on reactor safety has quoted her in that state-secretary role. In October 2019 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that she had asked Swiss environment minister Simonetta Sommaruga for Beznau, a few kilometres from Waldshut, to be shut “schnellstmöglich”, for the other Swiss plants to end operation “zeitnah”, and had called lives beyond fifty years a “fatale Fehlentwicklung”. The paper treated the letter as an attempt to influence Swiss energy policy, noted that the ministry would not say on what basis Switzerland should consult neighbours, and recalled that Berlin had not consulted Bern before the 2011 German phase-out. The Swiss department said it had noted the letter but that policy rested on the 2016 rejection of a nuclear-exit initiative and on the Energy Strategy 2050; a Waldshut demonstration on Beznau’s fiftieth year drew about 100 people. At a farmers’ vigil in Bad Säckingen in January 2025 she told the Südkurier that the next government should let farmers keep producing and earning a living, and that the AfD had “no solution” for them.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/rita-schwarzeluhr-sutter