Silvia Breher

Silvia Maria Breher (born 23 July 1973 in Löningen, Lower Saxony) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She has sat in the Bundestag since September 2017 as the directly elected member for constituency 32, Cloppenburg–Vechta. Since November 2019 she has been a deputy federal chairwoman of the CDU. On 6 May 2025, the day Friedrich Merz became chancellor, she was appointed parliamentary state secretary to the federal minister for agriculture, food and regional identity, Alois Rainer of the Christian Social Union. A ministry statement published on 27 August 2025 said the federal cabinet had named her the government’s commissioner for animal welfare, with the office to begin on 1 September 2025.

She grew up on a farm in the district of Cloppenburg. After her Abitur she studied law at Osnabrück University, completed her legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court in Oldenburg and qualified as a fully licensed lawyer. From 2001 to 2018 she worked as a self-employed lawyer, and from 2011 to 2017 she was managing director of the Kreislandvolkverband Vechta, the district farmers’ association. She joined the CDU in 2001 and, from 2019 until 2025, chaired its Oldenburg regional association.

At the CDU federal congress in Leipzig she was elected a deputy chair in succession to Ursula von der Leyen, receiving 701 votes, about 82 percent of the ballots cast, and becoming one of five deputies to the party chair, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. In the 19th electoral term the Bundestag listed her as a full member of both the Committee on Food and Agriculture and the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and as a parliamentary secretary (Schriftführerin). In the 20th electoral term she chaired the CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s working group on family, senior citizens, women and youth.

In the 2017 federal election she took the constituency with 57.7 percent of the first votes (93,545), with the Social Democratic Party second on 20.4 percent. She was re-elected in 2021 with 49.1 percent (80,134), again ahead of the SPD on 20.7 percent, and in 2025 with 45.8 percent (85,241), when the runner-up was Sven Horst Sager of the Alternative for Germany on 20.6 percent. Breher is a Roman Catholic, is married and has three children, and lives in the Oldenburger Münsterland, the area formed by the districts of Cloppenburg and Vechta.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Silvia Maria Breher was born Silvia Maria Lucke on 23 July 1973 in Löningen, in Lower Saxony. She grew up in nearby Lindern, in the district of Cloppenburg, in the southern Oldenburg countryside. Her father worked as a mason, and her mother, a farmer, brought a farm there into the marriage; the family ran land and livestock farming as a full-time business. A November 2019 profile in the agricultural paper LAND & FORST called it a small holding that was nevertheless a full-time farm with cattle and pigs, and reported her account that her father had in fact been a bricklayer while her mother had "brought the farm along."

She has described the same place as her grandparents' farm and as a three-generation household. She grew up there with two younger sisters. At a meeting of the Garrel rural women's association on 15 January 2019, covered by the Nordwest-Zeitung, she said that childhood on the small Lindern farm, and the stories her grandparents told, had formed her. In a February 2023 interview with Ralf Thomas Baus for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation journal Die Politische Meinung, she called a multigenerational home valuable for children and grandparents alike. She said she had grown up with strong women: her grandmother and mother encouraged her and her two sisters with the words "Do what you want," in what she called an otherwise conservative parental home. In August 2025 she linked that farm childhood in the Oldenburg Münsterland to chores before school and help at harvest, which she presented as an early training in reliability and responsibility.

Breher is Roman Catholic. In a September 2017 interview with the diocesan paper Kirche+Leben she said church had belonged to life on the grandparents' farm near Lindern as a matter of course: grace at table, Sunday services, the Catholic rural youth (Katholische Landjugend), and preparing youth liturgies. She said that even when this felt like routine or obligation, the church had always meant something to her and she had never rebelled against it.

Schooling and legal studies

Breher took her Abitur at the Copernicus-Gymnasium in Löningen and then studied law at Osnabrück University. She completed the Referendariat, the practical legal traineeship that follows university study in Germany, at the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) in Oldenburg. Published biographies do not give the years of either stage.

Under section 5 of the German Judiciary Act (Deutsches Richtergesetz), the qualification for judicial office is acquired by finishing a university law course with the first examination and the subsequent preparatory service with the second state examination. Parliamentary biographies, drawn from members' own information, list Breher as a Volljuristin after the Osnabrück studies and the Oldenburg traineeship—the ordinary title for a lawyer who has obtained that full qualification. Her own later account places independent practice as a lawyer in Lindern from 2000, immediately after that training; the Bundestag biography dates the start of self-employed practice to 2001.

Legal practice and the farmers' association

Law practice

Before entering the Bundestag, Silvia Breher worked as a self-employed lawyer (Rechtsanwältin). The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own disclosures, dates that practice from 2001 to 2018. A press notice from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Heimat puts the start in 2000 and likewise carries the self-employed practice through 2018. The ministry's short biography says that after studying law at the University of Osnabrück she worked first as a self-employed lawyer and in 2011 moved to the managing directorship of the Vechta district farmers' association.

A first-person profile on the site of the Senioren-Union of the CDU in Vechta states that from 2000 to 2011 she practised from her own firm in Lindern, in the district of Cloppenburg in Lower Saxony, and represented craftsmen in particular on questions of building law. In October 2016, when she was already the association's managing director, the Nordwest-Zeitung described her as a lawyer and a specialist in building law, and quoted her distinction between the lawyer and the jurist: a handshake, she said, was worth more to her than a contract. The Bundestag entry treats the law practice and the association post as overlapping from 2011, and in February 2017 the agricultural magazine top agrar still identified her as both a lawyer and managing director of Landvolk Vechta.

Kreislandvolkverband Vechta

The Kreislandvolkverband Vechta e.V. is the district farmers' association for the district of Vechta. It is one of 34 Kreislandvolkverbände that are the ordinary members of Landvolk Niedersachsen – Landesbauernverband e.V., the state farmers' union based in Hanover. Landvolk's statutes describe the union as party-politically independent and assign it the representation of agricultural interests and advice to members in individual cases; the state association says it speaks for about 70,000 members, with the district associations as the local point of contact. Landvolk Niedersachsen is in turn one of the 18 Landesbauernverbände that are the ordinary members of the Deutscher Bauernverband, the federal farmers' union founded in 1948.

Breher was Geschäftsführerin of the Vechta association from 2011 to 2017, during the long chairmanship of Norbert Meyer. At the delegates' assembly in November 2014 the Nordwest-Zeitung showed her with Meyer as the association's leadership. Meyer told the meeting that the association, which he described as representing more than 90 percent of local farmers, would keep making its own case on the fertiliser ordinance, antibiotic use and the Lower Saxony animal-welfare plan. In February 2015 she spoke, as managing director, to the Agrarsozialer Arbeitskreis in Stapelfeld about the strained relationship between consumers and farmers. She said that more farmers belonged in municipal politics, and that many people in the Oldenburger Münsterland seemed not to notice that agriculture, in all its forms, was the region's most important economic sector.

The Vechta office combines that public role with services to members. Its agricultural bookkeeping office (Buchstelle) keeps accounts and prepares tax returns for farms and for commercial livestock enterprises run alongside agriculture, and it acts in proceedings before the tax authorities and the tax courts. The association states that it has about 2,000 members and more than 70 employees in the Grünes Centrum on Rombergstraße, which it shares with affiliated and partner firms; those are its current figures and are not limited to the years of her directorship.

She left the post after her election to parliament. At the members' meeting in the Waldhof in Vechta in November 2017, the association bade farewell to her, by then a full-time politician, and to Meyer, who stepped down after 24 years as chairman. Dr Friedrich Willms had been managing director since October, and the delegates elected the agricultural engineer and farmer Dr Johannes Wilking as chairman.

Party offices in Lower Saxony

Local associations

Silvia Breher has been a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) since 2001. Her first local executive offices came after she had entered the Bundestag. In May 2018 she succeeded Franz-Josef Holzenkamp of Emstek as chair of the CDU district association (Kreisverband) in Cloppenburg. From 2018 she was also chair of the CDU town association (Stadtverband) in Löningen. The Bundestag biography, which is based on members' own statements, dates both chairs to 2018–2020.

In August 2019, by then also chair of the CDU Landesverband Oldenburg, she told the Nordwest-Zeitung that she would give up the Cloppenburg district chair in May 2020 to concentrate on the Bundestag mandate and the regional association. Landtag member Christoph Eilers of Cappeln said he was prepared to stand. She did not run again. The handover came later than the month she had named: after a digital district congress, delegates voted by post, and on 22 December 2020 the paper reported that Eilers had been elected with 93.5 percent of the valid votes. The Löningen post is dated differently outside the Bundestag biography. On 19 January 2021 the Oldenburg Münsterland reported that Heinz Ameskamp had been elected her successor at the head of the Löningen CDU, with only a few votes against. Breher has remained an advisory member of the Cloppenburg district executive by virtue of her Bundestag seat.

Landesverband Oldenburg

The CDU Landesverband Oldenburg is not the state party of Lower Saxony. The federal statute of the CDU provides that the "CDU in Niedersachsen" is a regional association (Gebietsverband), in the sense of the Political Parties Act, set above three Landesverbände: Braunschweig, Hanover and Oldenburg. Its statute puts Braunschweig and Oldenburg on the same footing as the six Bezirksverbände of the Landesverband Hannover, and it commits the party to preserving the particular character (Eigenart) of the historic territories of Braunschweig and Oldenburg. Towards the federal CDU, the three associations keep their own right to send representatives and their responsibility for federal questions that do not concern Lower Saxony as a whole. The chair of the Oldenburg association sits, by that office, on the executive of the CDU in Niedersachsen. In March 2019 the association was reported to have more than 10,000 members; in June 2025 a Lower Saxony political newsletter put membership at about 9,000, most of them in Cloppenburg and Vechta.

Before the regional chair, Breher led the association's European policy committee (Landesfachausschuss Europa) from 2015 to 2018, according to the Bundestag biography. On 23 March 2019 a Landesparteitag in Friesoythe elected her Holzenkamp's successor with more than 94 percent of the vote. Holzenkamp, who had led the association for about ten years, did not stand again. She was the first woman in the office.

Delegates re-elected her on 26 June 2021 in Vechta, at the association's first in-person congress since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She received 172 of 190 votes, about 90.5 percent. In June 2023 she was confirmed with 89 percent. Jochen Steinkamp of Lohne, district chair in Vechta, was elected one of her deputies, and the congress also filled a general-secretary post.

She did not stand in 2025. On 14 June, at the Landesparteitag in Horumersiel, in the district of Friesland, Steinkamp—then 44, and head of strategic planning at Landkreis Vechta—was elected with 163 of 168 votes and without an opponent. Breher, by then a parliamentary state secretary in the federal agriculture ministry, said she was "not a person of half measures" and wanted to concentrate on Berlin. Steinkamp told delegates that the association had been independent for 79 years and should remain so. Her own site dates the chair from 2019 to June 2025.

Elections in Cloppenburg–Vechta

The constituency

Constituency 32, Cloppenburg – Vechta, is a Bundestag seat in western Lower Saxony. For the 2025 federal election the Federal Returning Officer defined it as the whole of Cloppenburg district and the whole of Vechta district: 23 municipalities, 2,234.6 square kilometres and 322,900 inhabitants on 31 December 2023, or 144.5 people per square kilometre. Those two districts, and the same 23 municipalities, are the area the Verbund Oldenburger Münsterland presents as the Oldenburger Münsterland.

In the 2022 census, 89,337 of 175,408 residents of Cloppenburg district, 50.9 percent, and 81,790 of 145,112 residents of Vechta district, 56.4 percent, were recorded as Roman Catholic; the Protestant shares were 18.9 and 16.8 percent. Of employees covered by social insurance on 30 June 2023, the Federal Returning Officer’s structure file put 43.3 percent in manufacturing and 3.6 percent in agriculture, forestry and fishing. At the end of November 2024 the unemployment rate was 4.0 percent, and 14.1 percent of the population were foreign nationals.

The direct mandate before Silvia Breher was held by Franz-Josef Holzenkamp of the Christian Democratic Union, a member of the Bundestag from 2005 who sat for this constituency in the 2013–2017 term. At the 2013 election the CDU received 101,015 first votes, 66.3 percent, against 21.3 percent for the Social Democratic Party, on a turnout of 71.1 percent of 216,300 eligible voters. Holzenkamp said in September 2016 that he would not stand in 2017, citing his health. At a members’ meeting in the Rasta-Dome in Vechta, reported on 6 February 2017, Breher, then managing director of the Vechta district farmers’ association, won a runoff against three other candidates with 1,072 of 1,837 votes, 61.36 percent, and became the CDU candidate.

Results from 2017 to 2025

On 24 September 2017 Breher took 93,545 first votes, 57.7 percent of 162,119 valid first votes, 8.6 percentage points below the CDU share in 2013 but still an absolute majority of the valid vote. The Social Democratic Party was second with 32,997 votes (20.4 percent), a gap of 37.3 points. Alternative for Germany received 12,683 (7.8 percent), the Free Democratic Party 8,306 (5.1), Alliance 90/The Greens 7,034 (4.3) and Die Linke 6,640 (4.1). Turnout was 74.4 percent of 220,042 eligible voters. The Bundestag described her 57.7 percent as the highest first-vote share of any member directly elected in the 299 constituencies; the highest share recorded that year in Bavaria, for the Christian Social Union, was 55.4 percent. On the party list the CDU still led, with 86,301 second votes (53.1 percent), ahead of the SPD on 17.8 percent, so the personal vote ran 4.6 points ahead of the list.

On 26 September 2021 the first-vote share fell by another 8.6 points, to 80,134 votes, or 49.1 percent of 163,186 valid first votes. Breher stayed ahead of the SPD, which took 33,825 votes (20.7 percent), a margin of 28.4 points, but she no longer had a majority of the valid first vote. The Greens rose to 17,366 (10.6 percent) and the FDP to 14,397 (8.8 percent). The AfD was almost unchanged at 12,674 (7.8 percent), and Die Linke fell to 3,542 (2.2 percent). Turnout was 73.5 percent of 223,948 eligible voters. Second votes moved further than first votes: the CDU received 62,837 (38.5 percent, down 14.6 points) and the SPD 40,212 (24.6 percent). The gap between Breher’s constituency vote and the CDU list widened to 10.6 points.

The election of 23 February 2025 drew a higher turnout, 83.2 percent of 225,099 eligible voters. Breher received 85,241 first votes, 45.8 percent of 185,977 valid first votes: 3.3 points below 2021 as a share, but more votes than in 2021 because more ballots were cast. The runner-up was Sven Horst Sager of the AfD, with 38,364 votes (20.6 percent, up 12.9 points). The SPD fell to 32,516 (17.5 percent). The lead over the second-placed candidate was 25.2 points, compared with 45.0 points between the CDU and the SPD in 2013. The Greens took 11,281 first votes (6.1 percent), Die Linke 9,485 (5.1), the FDP 6,135 (3.3) and the Free Voters 2,955 (1.6). On second votes the CDU rose slightly, to 73,616 (39.5 percent, up 1.1 points). The AfD list also reached 20.6 percent (38,354 votes, up 12.8 points), the SPD list fell to 15.6 percent, and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which had no constituency candidate, received 6,221 second votes (3.3 percent). From 2017 to 2025 the CDU first-vote share in the constituency declined from 57.7 to 45.8 percent. The party kept the seat at each election, and the margin over the next candidate remained above 25 points.

Bundestag work, 2017–2025

Committees

In the 19th electoral term (2017–2021) Silvia Breher sat in the Bundestag as the directly elected member for constituency 32, Cloppenburg–Vechta, in Lower Saxony. The archived biography for that term lists her as a full member of the Committee on Food and Agriculture and of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and as a deputy member of the family committee’s Subcommittee on Civic Engagement. It also lists her as a Schriftführerin. The Bundestag elects these members on proposals from the parliamentary groups; together with the acting President of the Bundestag they conduct the sitting, taking requests to speak and motions, keeping the speakers’ list and establishing how votes have gone. That office is not the group whip. Neither the 19th- nor the 20th-term list of her Bundestag posts records her as a parliamentary managing director (Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin) of the CDU/CSU.

Her current biography summarizes the 2017–2021 agriculture seat as a full membership and the family-committee seat as a deputy membership. The term archive instead places both committees under ordinary membership, as does Abgeordnetenwatch’s copy of the 2017–2021 membership data. For the 20th electoral term (2021–2025) the archived biography and the later summary agree: full member of the family committee, deputy member of the agriculture committee, and no renewed listing as Schriftführerin. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture has described her as having been, among other things, her parliamentary group’s rapporteur on animal welfare. Named rapporteurs on individual bills were a separate assignment. The family committee’s report of 29 January 2025 on the CDU/CSU bill to adapt maternity-protection law after a miscarriage names Melanie Bernstein as the Union rapporteur, with rapporteurs from the other groups.

Parliamentary group roles and outside offices

On 13 December 2021 the CDU/CSU Bundestag group elected Breher chair of its working group on family, senior citizens, women and youth, and with that post its spokesperson on family policy. She remained a deputy in the group’s working group on food and agriculture. The Bundestag biography records her as chair of the family working group in the 20th electoral term.

On 30 January 2025 the Bundestag unanimously adopted the CDU/CSU bill, printed paper 20/14231, on the recommendation of the family committee in printed paper 20/14783. The act provides for staggered maternity-protection periods after a miscarriage from the 13th week of pregnancy, with the employment ban applying only if the woman does not expressly declare herself willing to work. The Bundestag’s account of that day’s debate lists Breher among the speakers, with Bernstein and members of the other groups.

Under the members’ code of conduct she disclosed paid work as a lawyer in Löningen until 28 May 2018. In December 2018 the Verband der Züchter des Oldenburger Pferdes, in Vechta, reported that its delegates’ assembly had unanimously elected her to the executive board, succeeding Albrecht Dalhoff; the association described her as a breeder living in Löningen. The Bundestag disclosure records that board seat as ending on 5 May 2025. The association stated that she had resigned because she had become parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

At a virtual general meeting in early July 2022, shareholders of EnviTec Biogas AG, a biogas company in Lohne in the district of Vechta, elected her to the supervisory board, together with a new chair, Ulf Hüttmeyer. The 20th-term disclosure published gross income from that seat of €9,500 for 2023 and €16,000 for 2024. The current biography records the seat as ending on 2 May 2025. The same 20th-term disclosure lists membership of the board of trustees of the Federal Foundation for Gender Equality (Bundesstiftung Gleichstellung), in Berlin, until 24 March 2025.

Deputy federal chair of the CDU

The 2019 Leipzig congress

On 22 November 2019 the federal congress of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Leipzig elected Silvia Breher a deputy federal chair. She was the only candidate to succeed Ursula von der Leyen, who was leaving the office to become president of the European Commission. Breher received 701 votes, which the presiding committee reported as 82 percent of the votes cast.

The ballot filled a single deputy seat and left Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as chair. Breher became one of five deputies and, with federal agriculture minister Julia Klöckner, one of two women in that group. An unwritten regional balance gave the CDU in Lower Saxony the claim to nominate a successor to von der Leyen, who was from the same state. At the time of the vote Breher chaired the CDU association in Oldenburg. She was a lawyer and a mother of three, had sat in the Bundestag for two years, and worked there on agriculture and rural areas.

Re-elections and role under successive chairs

She was re-elected as the chair changed. At a digital congress on 16 January 2021, Armin Laschet defeated Friedrich Merz in a runoff, 521 votes to 466, with four abstentions among 991 ballots. In the separate vote for five deputy chairs that day, Volker Bouffier received 806 votes, Klöckner 787, Breher 777, Thomas Strobl 670 and Jens Spahn 589. Under the party law then in force, delegates still had to confirm the new chair by post; the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the legally binding result would be announced on 22 January.

On 3 September 2021, about three weeks before the federal election, Laschet presented an eight-member "Zukunftsteam" for the last stage of the CDU/CSU campaign and assigned Breher family and generations. The others were Merz, Dorothee Bär, Karin Prien, Barbara Klepsch, Andreas Jung, the security specialist Peter Neumann and Joe Chialo. Laschet had said he did not want a shadow cabinet. The party headquarters said a place on the team would not automatically mean a ministry if the Union entered government, and Laschet, citing Breher's clear 2017 constituency win, called her an "Erststimmenqueen."

At the digital congress of 22 January 2022, Merz was elected chair. Breher was the only sitting deputy among the five candidates, with Carsten Linnemann, then head of the Mittelstandsunion, the climate politician Andreas Jung, Saxony's minister-president Michael Kretschmer and Schleswig-Holstein's education minister Karin Prien. Tagesschau reported that those five were elected, and that Merz wanted Linnemann to lead the drafting of a new basic program. In the postal ballot of 31 January 2022, Merz received 837 of 878 valid votes, or 95.33 percent; a later account put the online figure at 94.6 percent and the postal confirmation at 95.3 percent. On the same postal tally Breher received 790 votes (87.97 percent), behind Kretschmer on 845 (94.10 percent) and ahead of Linnemann on 785 (87.42 percent), Jung on 778 (86.64 percent) and Prien on 669 (74.50 percent).

At the federal congress in Berlin in May 2024, the official results recorded another term for Breher, with 741 votes (77.43 percent). The other deputies were Karl-Josef Laumann with 880 votes (91.95 percent), Kretschmer with 839 (87.67 percent), Jung with 760 (79.41 percent) and Prien with 556 (58.10 percent). Merz was re-elected with 873 votes (89.81 percent). On 7 May 2024 the congress adopted, with no votes against, the basic program "In Freiheit leben – Deutschland sicher in die Zukunft führen." A CDU list of specialist commissions from March 2022 had named Breher head of the Fachkommission Zusammenhalt, on social cohesion, with Heike Wermer as deputy head.

On 20 February 2026 the congress in Stuttgart enlarged the deputy group from five seats to six. Of 862 valid votes, Laumann received 769, Kretschmer 757, Jung, a deputy chair of the Union group in the Bundestag from Baden-Württemberg, 667, Breher, by then a parliamentary state secretary for agriculture, 662, Ines Claus, chair of the CDU group in the Hessian state parliament and a new federal deputy, 657, and Prien, then federal education minister, 604. The party's results sheet gave Breher 76.80 percent. Merz was confirmed with 91.17 percent, above the 89.8 percent recorded for 2024. The vote ran hours late after a long debate and technical problems with the planned digital ballot.

Government office since 2025

Parliamentary state secretary

A parliamentary state secretary is not a voting member of the federal cabinet. Article 62 of the Basic Law provides that the federal government consists of the chancellor and the federal ministers. Under the 1974 Law on the Legal Status of Parliamentary State Secretaries, they are attached to a member of the government, must normally be members of the Bundestag, and support that minister in governmental business; the federal president appoints them on the chancellor’s proposal, with the agreement of the minister concerned.

On 6 May 2025 Silvia Breher took up that office at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Heimat (Bundesministerium für Landwirtschaft, Ernährung und Heimat) in the CDU/CSU–SPD cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The same day Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed Alois Rainer (CSU) as federal minister, succeeding Cem Özdemir; Rainer then administered the oath to Breher and Martina Englhardt-Kopf and handed them their certificates of appointment.

Press reports had treated Breher, the member for Cloppenburg–Vechta, as a possible minister. In late March the regional paper OM, citing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reported that she was on a Union–SPD list of proposed cabinet members, and the Nordwest-Zeitung later wrote that the deputy CDU chair had long been discussed for a ministerial post. The education, family, senior citizens, women and youth portfolio went instead to Karin Prien, in office since 6 May 2025. On 28 April Merz named Breher for the agriculture state secretaryship and Gitta Connemann, also from Lower Saxony, as parliamentary state secretary at the economics ministry and as SME commissioner. Breher told the Nordwest-Zeitung that the post would keep a Lower Saxon voice in the CSU-led ministry.

Animal-welfare commissioner and related offices

The Bundestag’s register of outside interests lists Breher, ex officio from 24 June 2025, on the administrative board of the Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank and on its audit, risk and specialist committees, and from 13 November 2025 on the board of trustees of the bank’s Edmund Rehwinkel Foundation.

On 27 August 2025, on Rainer’s proposal, the cabinet appointed her Federal Government Commissioner for Animal Welfare (Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Tierschutz), effective 1 September, alongside the state secretaryship. She succeeded Ariane Kari, appointed by the previous cabinet on 10 May 2023, at Özdemir’s proposal, to start on 12 June 2023. That May the government told the Bundestag the commissioner would work independently and free of instructions, outside the ministry hierarchy, advising the minister, reviewing government measures for their effects on animals, and dealing with the Länder, organisations and the public. The same answer said the post required a relevant degree and long experience in animal welfare.

Rainer said Kari had done a good job but that he wanted different structures, and that using a state secretary avoided new bureaucracy and any extra charge on the budget; Tagesschau reported that the post had at first looked likely to lapse on cost grounds. The ministry called a state secretary who is also a commissioner established practice, citing the integration and SME commissioners.

Animal-welfare groups and opposition politicians said the dual role ended that independence. On 8 August Thomas Schröder, president of the Deutscher Tierschutzbund, said the federation was utterly astonished: the job description had required independent advice, a state secretary was already responsible for animal welfare by office, and “Ms Breher will hardly be able to consult with herself.” He argued she would help make laws on farm animals and then monitor them, and that the roles should be separate. After the decision it said Kari left a large gap, still asked how a state secretary could act independently, and offered talks while expecting movement on farm conditions, animal experiments, domestic and wild animals, shelters, and a revised Animal Welfare Act. Vier Pfoten said independence had been buried because a state secretary must represent the minister, and pointed to her years running the Kreislandvolkverband Vechta and to a constituency it called Germany’s most livestock-dense region. Menschen für Tierrechte likewise said the freedom from instructions set in 2023 no longer applied. Tagesschau quoted Alliance 90/The Greens member Zoe Mayer, who called the appointment a severe setback and a party-political post, citing that farmers’-association background in what she described as a centre of industrial livestock farming.

Breher rejected a conflict of interest. She told NDR that the two offices gave her more influence and that many federal commissioners were also members of the government. In the ministry statement she called animal protection a matter of the heart and named compulsory video surveillance in slaughterhouses, rules for online trade in animals, and support for volunteer-run shelters as priorities; NDR added welfare-oriented conversion of livestock housing and more information for keepers and the public. Rainer called her a “fighter for animal welfare” who combined experience with the ability to prevail, and thanked Kari for pioneering work.

Policy record and debate

Agriculture and rural development

Breher has treated agricultural policy as a question of whether farms in districts such as Cloppenburg and Vechta, in Lower Saxony, can plan investment at all. In February 2025 she said the farm protests of the previous winter had been set off by the dispute over agricultural diesel, but that the real cause was a missing future for the sector: young farmers had asked her what a new barn should look like, and she had not been able to tell them. The Zukunftskommission Landwirtschaft had reported, she said, and its findings had not been carried out; she accused the then federal government of an "ideology-driven" course that, on her account, kept insisting livestock farming in Germany had to shrink. Farms, she argued, wanted to operate as businesses rather than live on subsidies.

She tied higher welfare standards to permitting. Without changes to the TA Luft, the Federal Immission Control Act and building law, she said, livestock housing would not be converted; a labelling law for only part of the sector, without those conditions, had been the previous period's "cardinal error." She accepted the Borchert recommendations and the Zukunftskommission, but said a European level playing field and those legal conditions had to come first, and that Germany should again "set the tone" in European Union farm policy instead of stacking national rules on European ones. For women on farms she asked for support decoupled from the main holding, so that a line such as farm tourism need not sit inside the existing business. As state secretary she repeated that every statute had to work on a real farm—"pure policy theory has no place in the field"—and that welfare changes had to be practical and affordable or they would neither reach the barn nor keep the holding solvent.

Family and social policy

Before she entered the Bundestag, Breher told Kirche+Leben that she favoured same-sex marriage. The recorded vote, on 30 June 2017, came before her election that September, so she did not take part.

As family-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU she argued that maternity pay and Elterngeld missed how self-employed mothers work. In Die Welt on 18 July 2023 she wrote that statutory maternity pay for self-employed women in the public health-insurance system follows sick pay, while employees receive their previous income in full during the protection periods, and that parental allowance ignores costs such as office rent. She sought a majority to date receipts to when the work was done rather than when the money arrived, to let applicants choose the last twelve months or the last tax assessment as the reference period, and to make work-related childcare easier to deduct. Only 42 percent of German firms were founded by women, she wrote, which she treated as a disadvantage for women and a limit on the economy.

On 9 November 2023 she called Family Minister Lisa Paus's Kindergrundsicherung bill "the most comprehensive social-policy sham package in years": 100 million euro more for administration the next year, then more than 400 million a year, while parents on Bürgergeld stayed at the job centre, children applied to the Familienkasse, and education-and-participation benefits stayed municipal. She urged the coalition to use existing law, digitise applications and spend that money on children. SPD speaker Sönke Rix answered that single-parent gains had been hard to pass against Union finance ministers and that digitisation was already in the bill; an interjection from Alliance 90/The Greens asked where the Union's concept was.

On cannabis, in August 2023, she told Der Spiegel that legalisation was "a serious mistake" and that "this curious drug experiment must not be carried out on the backs of our young people," citing studies she said showed higher use among adolescents and young adults, and calling an information campaign by Health Minister Karl Lauterbach absurd if he did not trust his own bill.

Animal welfare

Taking office on 1 September 2025 as animal-welfare commissioner, while remaining state secretary to Agriculture Minister Alois Rainer, Breher named compulsory video surveillance in slaughterhouses as her first priority: cameras would bring "transparency that helps producers and enforcement authorities," and mistreatment in the last phase of an animal's life would have to be answered for. The coalition agreement had already promised to examine the idea. She also wanted easier permits where a barn conversion raises welfare standards, rules for the online animal trade, and support for shelters. She succeeded Ariane Kari, a non-party veterinarian and the first holder of the post, who was not in the government.

The dual role drew the sharpest criticism. Thomas Schröder, president of the German Animal Welfare Association, spoke of "maximum astonishment" and asked how an MP and parliamentary state secretary could act as an independent commissioner. The Greens called the appointment a setback for animal welfare and described Vechta as a centre of industrial livestock farming. Breher said she saw no conflict of interest: she could carry measures through government and parliament, not merely appeal, and extra commissioner roles for state secretaries were established practice. The ministry said the previous annual cost of about half a million euro would be cut by roughly half.

On 27 August 2026 Schröder welcomed talks with welfare groups and "first impulses," but said the large items remained open because a state secretary must follow the minister. Video surveillance was "only half the job" if limited to large plants and if stunning methods were unchanged; promised shelter investment had in practice been dropped; and rules were still missing on online trade, castration of free-roaming cats, keeper competence and transports to high-risk countries. The association also cited a horse-drawn ride through Vechta in heat above 30 degrees, a photograph with a fur heart at Berlin's Green Week, and a video presenting the wolf's place in hunting law as her chief success, while saying it would still support a stronger Animal Welfare Act.

Personal life

Family and residence

Silvia Maria Breher, née Lucke, was born on 23 July 1973 in Löningen, Lower Saxony. Munzinger states that her father was a mason and that her mother, a farmer, brought a farm at Lindern, in southern Oldenburg, into the marriage; Breher grew up there, where the family ran full-time arable and livestock farming. Land & Forst in 2019 called the holding small but a full-time farm with cattle and pigs. In 2017 she told Kirche+Leben that she had grown up near Lindern on her grandparents' farm, and a note published by the Senioren-Union of the CDU district association in Vechta says she grew up there with two younger sisters.

She is married and has three children. Published biographies do not name her husband or the children. The Bundestag biography, based on members' own information, lists her as Roman Catholic with three children and does not mention a spouse. The biography issued by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Heimat on 6 May 2025 states that she is married, has three children, and lives in the Oldenburger Münsterland, the area of the districts of Cloppenburg and Vechta.

The town named for that household is not uniform. A Nordwest-Zeitung caption of 10 November 2018 said she otherwise lived with her husband and three children in Löningen, and Land & Forst wrote in 2019 that she lived in Löningen. Her website says she grew up on a farm in Lindern and, after studying in Osnabrück and intermediate stops, lives again with her children in that home municipality. Abgeordnetenwatch lists Lindern as her residence, and the Vechta Senioren-Union profile gives 49699 Lindern. In June 2024 she told the Weser-Kurier that she lived in Lindern in the Oldenburger Münsterland and worked in Berlin, calling the split a complete balancing act and saying her family was at home in Lindern, where ordinary errands kept her outside what she called the Berlin bubble.

In the 2017 interview she described Catholic practice as part of that upbringing: grace before meals, Sunday Mass, the Catholic rural youth, and preparing youth services had simply belonged to life, she said, and she had never rebelled against the church. She said she was a lector in the parish of St. Vitus in Löningen, had worked on the parish pastoral plan, and still found quiet in worship. Kirche+Leben also reported a story then told in the CDU: that campaign advisers had suggested she stop wearing a cross on a chain, and that she had refused.

On 11 February 2026 she wrote on Instagram that her mother had died suddenly, saying her mother had always been there for her, for "us children and grandchildren," and for the family.