# Tina Winklmann

# Tina Winklmann

Tina Winklmann (née Kurzwart; born 26 February 1980 in Weiden in der Oberpfalz) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) and a member of the Bundestag from Bavaria. She took her seat when the 20th Bundestag convened on 26 October 2021 and was returned at the federal election of 23 February 2025, both times on the Bavarian Green state list rather than by a constituency plurality. The Bundestag lists her trained occupation as *Verfahrensmechanikerin für Kunststoff- und Kautschuktechnik*, a process mechanic for plastics and rubber technology.

She grew up in Damelsdorf, part of the market municipality of Wernberg-Köblitz in the Upper Palatinate. In an October 2021 interview with *Die Tageszeitung* she said she had joined the Greens in 1996, at 16, after starting a small environmental group at about 11, and she described more than twenty years of shift work; the paper presented her as the only member of the incoming Green Bundestag group without a university degree. The Bundestag biography, which prints members’ own biographical statements, records schooling in Wernberg-Köblitz from 1986 to 1995, an apprenticeship from 1995 to 1998 at Wilden GmbH & Co. KG in Pfreimd, skilled work there until 2001, and skilled work at Siemens in Amberg from 2001 to 2019, with service as an [IG Metall](/organizations/ig-metall) *Vertrauensfrau* (shop steward) from 2002 to 2019. From 2019 until she entered the Bundestag she was a personal assistant to Anna Schwamberger, then a Green member of the Bavarian Landtag.

The same biography lists her as a board member of the Schwandorf district Greens from 2007 to 2014, district chair from 2014 to 2017, chair of the Upper Palatinate Greens from 2017 to 2021, a member of the Bavarian Greens’ state committee from 2017 to 2021, and spokesperson of the state working group GewerkschaftsGrün from 2019 to 2021. Abgeordnetenwatch gives her place of residence as Schwandorf; in December 2024 Oberpfalz-Medien reported that she lives in Wackersdorf. For the 2025 election the Bavarian Greens placed her seventh on the state list, with about 90 percent of delegate votes and no opposing candidate for that place, at a conference in Hirschaid.

In the constituency named Schwandorf — number 234 in 2021 and number 233 in 2025 — her first-vote share was 4.6 percent (7,934 votes) and then 4.1 percent (7,516 votes). The [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) won the seat both times; in 2025 Martina Englhardt-Kopf took 42.2 percent and [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany candidate Reinhard Wilhelm Mixl was second with 27.0 percent, while the Greens’ second-vote share in the constituency was 5.0 percent. The Bundestag lists her, in the 21st electoral term, as the Green parliamentary group’s spokesperson for sports policy and volunteering, an ordinary member of the Committee on Sport and Volunteering and of the Petitions Committee, a secretary of the house, a deputy member of the Committee on Education, Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and deputy chair of the German–Czech parliamentary group. In May 2025 she described that sports-policy role as a renewed vote of confidence by the group.

## Early life and education

### Childhood in the Upper Palatinate

Tina Winklmann was born on 26 February 1980 in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, according to the biography published by the Bundestag, which states that its biographical data are the member’s own disclosure. On her website she gives her birth name as Kurzwart and says that she was born in the Upper Palatinate in 1980.

Weiden i.d.OPf. is a district-free city in the Bavarian administrative region of the Upper Palatinate, in eastern Germany. The state statistical office counted 46,867 inhabitants in 1970 and 42,100 at the census of 25 May 1987, around the decade of her birth, and 42,444 on 31 December 2024, on 7,057 hectares. The city administration describes Weiden as the higher-order centre of the northern Upper Palatinate, about 20 kilometres from the Czech border, and names glass and porcelain works alongside vehicle manufacturing, plastics processing and microelectronics. The Upper Palatinate, one of seven Regierungsbezirke, had about 1.1 million inhabitants on 9,688 square kilometres, in three district-free cities, seven rural districts and 223 municipalities; woodland covered 4,031 square kilometres and farmland 3,992.

She grew up not in Weiden but in Damelsdorf, a village of the market municipality of Wernberg-Köblitz in the district of Schwandorf. In a 2021 Onetz interview she called herself an “Arbeiter- und Dorfkind” from a working-class family; that report spells the village Dammelsdorf, while a 2024 Onetz article and the municipality use Damelsdorf, including for a chapel of the Holy Family dated by local tradition to 1802. The market was assembled in the territorial reform of 1971 to 1978 from Losau, Woppenhof, Deindorf, Glaubendorf, Saltendorf, Neunaigen, Oberköblitz with Unterköblitz, and the market of Wernberg, joining 26 places on about 66 square kilometres with roughly 6,000 inhabitants. The 1987 census recorded 5,607 residents, and the statistical office counted 5,494 on 31 December 2024; of 6,606 hectares, 2,716 were agricultural and 2,732 were forest. The crossing of the A 6 and A 93, which the town calls the Autobahnkreuz Oberpfälzer Wald, now shapes the place as earlier road junctions did and links it toward Nuremberg, Regensburg and the Czech Republic. Onetz reported in 2024 that she lives in Wackersdorf.

### Schooling in Wernberg-Köblitz

The same Bundestag biography lists attendance from 1986 to 1995 at the VS Wernberg-Köblitz, the local Volksschule, without naming grades or a schoolhouse. Under the Bavarian Education Act of 10 September 1982, the Volksschule consisted of the Grundschule, years 1 to 4 for children of compulsory school age who were not in a special school, and the Hauptschule, years 5 to 9. The published dates cover that nine-year course and end in the year she turned 15.

A chronicle in the municipal newspaper recounts that the old schoolhouse in Oberköblitz, crowded after 1945 by the arrival of expellees, was replaced by a new building in Unterköblitz on the Naab. Work began in the summer of 1955; the “Waldschule” was blessed on 6 January 1957, and classes started on 8 January with five teachers and 190 pupils. Further blocks followed in 1964 and 1969, the latter with a sports hall. Enrolment reached 620 pupils in 1970, a peak of 690 in 1973, and 624 in 1977, which the chronicle links to the baby boom, the closure of the schools in Glaubendorf and Saltendorf, the ninth year from 1969, and the transfer of older classes from Wernberg, Kemnath and Neunaigen. Years 1 to 6 remained for a time at a partial Hauptschule in Wernberg—203 pupils in five classes in 1970—until it joined the Grund- und Hauptschule Wernberg-Köblitz in 2005. The market still called it the Volksschule Wernberg-Köblitz when it renovated the three blocks between 2001 and 2005. For 2024/25 the statistical office recorded one public Grund- and Mittel-/Hauptschule there, with 10 teachers, seven classes and 176 pupils.

## Vocational training and industrial work

### Apprenticeship at Wilden

The Bundestag gives Tina Winklmann’s occupation as Verfahrensmechanikerin für Kunststoff- und Kautschuktechnik. In the biography—which the parliament notes is drawn from the member’s own statements—it records an apprenticeship from 1995 to 1998 at WILDEN GmbH & Co. KG in Pfreimd. She has said that she entered working life at 15 with that training.

The title was, until 2023, the state-recognised training occupation for production work in plastics and rubber. An ordinance of 14 June 2023, issued under the Vocational Training Act and prepared with the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), renamed it Kunststoff- und Kautschuktechnologe or Kunststoff- und Kautschuktechnologin from 1 August 2023, repealed the regulation of 21 May 2012 that had carried Winklmann’s title, and fixed the apprenticeship at three years. BIBB calls the occupation the only production trade specific to the plastics- and rubber-processing industry, covering moulded parts and components, plastic windows and fibre composites. It is a dual vocational apprenticeship, shared between the firm and a vocational school, and is divided into seven specialisations: moulded parts, semi-finished goods, multilayer rubber parts, compounds and masterbatches, components, fibre-composite technology, and plastic windows. In the moulded-parts specialisation, the BIBB profile includes planning production, setting up lines and making parts by injection moulding, pressing, blow moulding, foaming and thermoforming. That is the occupation as regulated in the 2010s and in the 2023 reform, not a reconstruction of the syllabus at Pfreimd in the mid-1990s, and no public source states which specialisation Winklmann took.

Pfreimd lies in Bavaria’s Upper Palatinate. In March 2024 the regional paper Onetz described plastics production there as a roughly 75-year history that had begun with buttons and clothes hangers and that it associated with about 750 jobs in the town. On 3 January 2007 Gerresheimer announced that it was buying Wilden AG, a group with medical-plastics and technical-plastics divisions, eight plants and more than 2,300 employees. The Pfreimd works now sits in Gerresheimer Regensburg GmbH. The company states that the site makes custom drug-delivery systems and diagnostic and medical devices, including applicators, auto-injectors, inhalers, laboratory disposables, prefillable polymer syringes and parts for on-body devices. Onetz reported about 18,000 contiguous square metres of cleanroom for those medical plastic systems. A 2021 Onetz profile identified Winklmann’s training firm as “Wilden (now Gerresheimer).”

### Skilled work at Siemens in Amberg

The same biography lists her as a skilled worker (Facharbeiterin) at Wilden in Pfreimd from 1998 to 2001 and at Siemens AG in Amberg from 2001 to 2019. It names neither a department nor a product. In the 2021 interview she said, “I worked for 20 years in three-shift operation,” and the paper reported that after Wilden she had been employed at Siemens in Amberg. Her own site likewise speaks of more than 20 years as a skilled worker in three-shift operation, without tying the rota to one employer.

Siemens’s presence in Amberg includes the Elektronikwerk Amberg, which the company says was founded in 1989 to make Simatic programmable logic controllers. A Siemens background note, dated March 2016 in the file metadata, put the plant at about 1,200 employees and about 15 million Simatic products a year, in more than 1,000 variants, and said that component placement there ran around the clock in three shifts. Those details describe the electronics works. They are not a record of Winklmann’s job: the parliamentary biography says only “Siemens AG in Amberg.”

### IG Metall

The biography lists membership of IG Metall and, in parentheses, service from 2002 to 2019 as a Vertrauensfrau, the union’s term for a shop steward. Onetz quoted her as saying she had joined the union at 15, when the apprenticeship began.

IG Metall describes Vertrauensleute as the contacts employees have inside the plant. They are not created by statute, and the union says they have a different task from the works council (Betriebsrat), which is the legal representative of the whole workforce and management’s counterpart on works agreements. Stewards, on the union’s account, advise members, explain laws, collective agreements and works agreements, take up members’ interests at the workplace, and link the works council to the shop floor; January is the usual month for their election.

On her website Winklmann describes union work “from member, via Vertrauensfrau, to works councillor” (*Betriebsrätin*), including talks with colleagues and employers, strikes at the factory gate, bargaining and recruitment. The text supplied for the Bundestag biography records the shop-steward years and does not list a works-council office.

## Green Party career in Bavaria

### Local and regional offices

Winklmann’s work in Alliance 90/The Greens in Bavaria was concentrated in the Upper Palatinate. In an October 2021 interview with *Die Tageszeitung* she said that she had gone to the Greens in 1996 and that, at 16, she had put a membership form in the party’s letterbox.

Under the Bavarian Green statutes, a Kreisverband is the branch for a rural district or a district-free city. It alone elects delegates to federal, state and Bezirk assemblies and collects dues, and it nominates municipal candidates unless a local Ortsverband does so. Its board has at least two chairs, at least one a woman, plus a treasurer. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members’ own statements, lists Winklmann as a board member of the Kreisverband Schwandorf from 2007 to 2014 and as its Kreisvorsitzende from 2014 to 2017. Regional papers place her in that chair after 2017. In April 2018 the *Ostbayern-Kurier* called her and Elisabeth Bauer of Bruck the equal chairs and wrote that a Kreisversammlung had just confirmed them; on 15 September 2019 *Onetz* reported that the two had not stood again. Members then elected Claudia Müller-Völkl of Nittenau and Benjamin Quaas of Teublitz to lead a Kreisverband which the paper put at about 80 members.

Each Kreisverband belongs to a Bezirksverband, which may set its own statutes and which draws up the lists for elections to the Landtag of Bavaria and the Bezirkstag. The Bezirksverband Oberpfalz is the Green organization for the Upper Palatinate. Winklmann’s Bundestag disclosure dates her Bezirksvorsitz to 2017–2021. The *Ostbayern-Kurier* reported an election on 2 March 2018, when the Bezirksversammlung in Amberg chose her as Bezirksvorsitzende alongside the Bundestag member Stefan Schmidt. *Onetz* later reported that a board vote in Wenzenbach, Landkreis Regensburg, confirmed her in December 2022, while co-chair Merten Niebelschütz was not up until 2023, and that after the December 2023 annual meeting the two still formed the dual leadership. On 24 November 2024 *Onetz* and *idowa* reported that the Oberpfalz Greens had elected Madeleine Schneider, then 22 and from Pechbrunn in Landkreis Tirschenreuth, as Bezirksvorsitzende, with Niebelschütz remaining co-chair. The Bezirksverband’s board page lists Schneider, not Winklmann, as chair since November 2024.

### State committee and union Greens

The same disclosure lists Winklmann as a member of the Landesausschuss of the Bavarian Greens from 2017 to 2021, without identifying the seat. The statutes give that committee the task of coordinating the state party’s political work, advising the Landesvorstand and linking party levels. It provisionally adopts the budget, decides on supplementary budgets and on the recognition or renaming of Landesarbeitsgemeinschaften, and meets at least every two months. Its voting members are the state executive, the two chairs of the Green Landtag group, the speaker of the Bavarian Bundestag group, one current Bezirksvorstand member elected by each Bezirksversammlung, a Green Youth representative, and nine further members chosen by the Landesversammlung for two-year terms. In December 2023 the Oberpfalz annual meeting elected Hannah Quaas of Teublitz as the region’s Landesausschuss representative for two years, after Laura Weber stood down because she had entered the Landtag.

A Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft is a state working group on a defined subject. It must be recognized by the Landesausschuss, is a forum for programme discussion, and sends delegates to the corresponding federal working group. GewerkschaftsGrün started federally: the 1998 delegate conference in Leipzig called for a visible structure of Green and Green-aligned trade unionists, and the network was constituted in February 2001. In January 2019 Ami Lanzinger and Landtag member Eva Lettenbauer invited people to a founding meeting for a Bavarian branch, to carry Green concerns into the unions and union concerns into Green decisions. The Bundestag biography lists Winklmann as spokesperson of LAG GewerkschaftsGrün Bayern from 2019 to 2021. She and Lanzinger signed the invitation to the 12 October 2019 meeting as its spokespersons, and the call to the online annual meeting on 27 November 2021, which included board elections, said they would not stand again. In April 2021 she told *Onetz* that her task was to represent workers and rural people inside the Greens; the paper also reported her describing herself as a co-founder of that working group.

### Staff work in the Landtag

From 2019 to 2021 Winklmann was employed as persönliche Mitarbeiterin, personal staff, of Anna Schwamberger, a Green member of the Landtag. Schwamberger, a teacher born in Tirschenreuth, sat for the Upper Palatinate electoral region from 5 November 2018 until 30 October 2023. The Bundestag interests register gives Bärnau as the place of the employment, and in April 2021 *Onetz* reported that Winklmann, then living in Wackersdorf, was working in Schwamberger’s office. The biography places the post in the years immediately before Winklmann entered the Bundestag.

## Bundestag candidacies and election results

### 2021 federal election

Tina Winklmann was the Alliance 90/The Greens direct candidate in Bundestag constituency 234 Schwandorf at the [2021 German federal election](/facts/2021-german-federal-election) on 26 September 2021. The constituency, in the Upper Palatinate, comprised the districts of Schwandorf and Cham and, from the district of Regensburg, the municipalities of Brennberg and Wörth an der Donau. At the Bavarian Green delegate conference that spring she was placed 17th on the state list, the position she had aimed for, with no other candidate for that place; [Claudia Roth](/people/claudia-roth) and Anton Hofreiter headed the list.

Of 222,424 people eligible to vote, 174,957 did so, a turnout of 78.7 percent (3.5 percentage points higher than in 2017). The first vote, which decides the constituency seat, was won by [Martina Englhardt-Kopf](/people/martina-englhardt-kopf) of the Christian Social Union (CSU) with 60,924 votes (35.1 percent). She was the new CSU candidate after Karl Holmeier did not stand again. Marianne Schieder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), a member of the Bundestag since 2005, came second with 39,615 votes (22.8 percent). Christian Schindler of the [Free Voters](/organizations/free-voters) received 27,381 votes (15.8 percent) and Wolfgang Pöschl of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) 23,142 (13.3 percent). Winklmann was fifth, with 7,934 votes (4.6 percent). Ines Tegtmeier of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) had 7,341 (4.2 percent) and Manfred Preischl of [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) 3,043 (1.8 percent).

On the second vote the Greens polled 11,179 (6.4 percent) in the constituency, behind the CSU on 34.1 percent, the SPD on 17.9 percent, the Free Voters on 14.4 percent and the AfD on 13.5 percent. In Bavaria as a whole the Greens received 1,067,830 second votes, 14.1 percent. The Federal Returning Officer’s final seat calculation, in the volume that includes the partial rerun of the 2021 election in parts of Berlin, assigned the Bavarian Greens 19 seats: one constituency seat and 18 seats from the state list. Seventeen was inside the stretch of the list reached by those 18 list seats, and Winklmann entered the Bundestag from the state list rather than by winning Schwandorf.

### List nominations

Both places were fixed by delegate conferences of the Bavarian Greens. The 2021 decision, reported on 18 April 2021, put Winklmann 17th without an opponent for the place, behind a Regensburg candidate higher on the same list.

On 14 and 15 December 2024, 328 delegates meeting in Hirschaid, near Bamberg, elected a list of 62 candidates for the early election. [Jamila Schäfer](/people/jamila-schafer) and Anton Hofreiter were the lead candidates, Claudia Roth was third, and Winklmann seventh. Oberpfalz Medien reported that she took about 90 percent of the votes cast for that place and had no opponent, and that she was again the direct candidate in the constituency locally called Schwandorf-Cham. Stefan Schmidt of Regensburg was 14th. Winklmann left Hirschaid on the Sunday afternoon because the Bundestag was to vote the next day on Chancellor [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz)’s confidence motion.

### 2025 snap election

The 2025 German federal election followed the collapse of Scholz’s coalition. Tagesschau reported that the coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP failed on 6 November 2024 after Scholz dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner and the other FDP ministers left the cabinet, so that Scholz continued with an SPD–Green government that no longer had a Bundestag majority. On 16 December 2024 the Bundestag refused him confidence under Article 68 of the Basic Law. Of 733 members, 207 voted yes, 394 no and 116 abstained, with 16 not voting; the absolute majority required was 367. The Green group cast neither yes nor no votes: 115 of its 117 members abstained and two did not vote. On 27 December 2024 Federal President [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier) dissolved the 20th Bundestag and set the election for 23 February 2025.

Schwandorf kept its name and the same area—the districts of Schwandorf and Cham, plus Brennberg and Wörth an der Donau—but its number changed from 234 to 233. The Federal Returning Officer recorded that population change moved one constituency from Saxony-Anhalt to Bavaria, taking Bavaria from 46 constituencies to 47, and that the numbers of the previous constituencies 72 to 255 each dropped by one. The added constituency and the redrawn boundaries were in Swabia, and Schwandorf was not among the 16 constituencies the statute newly delimited, so 233 is the same district renumbered rather than a different one.

Nine candidates were admitted to the first-vote ballot in constituency 233. Of 220,950 eligible voters, 185,033 voted, a turnout of 83.7 percent, 5.1 percentage points above 2021. Englhardt-Kopf (CSU) again won the seat, with 77,717 votes (42.2 percent). Reinhard Wilhelm Mixl (AfD) was second with 49,695 (27.0 percent). Schieder (SPD) received 25,534 (13.9 percent), Fabian Schmid of the Free Voters 13,591 (7.4 percent) and Winklmann 7,516 (4.1 percent, 0.5 points lower than in 2021). Tobias Mainka (Die Linke) had 4,914 (2.7 percent) and Ileana-Valeria Pößl (FDP) 3,432 (1.9 percent). Green second votes were 9,173 (5.0 percent, down 1.4 points); the CSU led the party vote with 39.3 percent and the AfD followed with 28.2 percent.

Across Bavaria the Greens won 957,435 second votes (12.0 percent) and 14 seats, every one of them from the state list: the party had no constituency plurality in the state. With no Bavarian Green constituency winner to pass over, list order filled those 14 seats, and seventh place was inside that range. Winklmann did not win the constituency and sat in the 21st Bundestag through the Bavarian list.

## Twentieth Bundestag

### Mandate and spokesperson role

Tina Winklmann took her seat in the 20th Bundestag when the chamber constituted itself on 26 October 2021, after the federal election of 26 September. She held a list mandate for Alliance 90/The Greens in Bavaria, having also stood in the Schwandorf constituency. The term ended on 25 March 2025, when the 21st Bundestag met; a legislative period ends when the next Bundestag convenes.

At the sports committee’s constitutive meeting on 15 December 2021 she stated that she was the sports-policy spokesperson of the Green Bundestag group. The minutes name Philip Krämer, not her, as the group’s *Obmann* on the committee. The archived biography for the 20th term also lists her as a secretary (*Schriftführerin*) of the Bundestag, and records two sports-related posts: the parliamentary advisory board of TeamSport Deutschland from 23 June 2022 to 25 March 2025, and the foundation council of the BFV-Sozialstiftung in Munich from 1 January 2023.

### Sports and labour committees

She was an ordinary member of the Sportausschuss from that first sitting, initially with Krämer and a seat still left vacant. By the public hearing of 4 July 2022 the Green ordinary members were [Marcel Emmerich](/people/marcel-emmerich), Krämer and Winklmann, as they still were on 1 March 2023. The archived biography lists her as an ordinary member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and a deputy member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment. A 2024 Bundestag brochure on the labour committee includes her among the members of the 20th term.

On 14 June 2024 she spoke on the *Berufsbildungsvalidierungs- und -digitalisierungsgesetz*, the act on validating and digitising vocational training. She argued for recognising experience gained without a formal qualification, while keeping dual apprenticeships the main route for young people, and welcomed an age floor of 25 and the inclusion of people with disabilities. She referred to her own apprenticeship as a process mechanic and to more than 20 years as a skilled worker on shifts. In March 2023 the Upper Palatinate site Onetz reported that, as a member of the labour committee, she had been substantially involved in drawing up the Bürgergeld that replaced Hartz IV. At a Green discussion in Amberg she said Hartz IV “simply no longer fitted”, that not everything had turned out as the Greens wanted, and that the coalition had nevertheless “taken everyone along”. She cited a standard rate 53 euros a month higher, faster adjustment for inflation, 150 euros for taking part in further training, and the chance to gain a qualification without first having to take casual work.

### Debates and delegation travel

In August 2024 she travelled with the sports committee to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. A report on 6 August named her in a delegation led by the committee chair, [Frank Ullrich](/people/frank-ullrich), and scheduled for 6 to 12 August, with Christian Schreider, Herbert Wollmann, Stephan Mayer, [Fritz Güntzler](/people/fritz-guntzler) and Bernd Reuther. On 26 August she told the Bundestag youth portal *mitmischen.de* that she had been there. Talks with German athletes, she said, had covered sustainability, doping controls and the later use of venues, and she called the Olympic Village—fully accessible, in her account, for the first time—a personal highlight of the first Games she had attended.

The same day the Bundestag press office listed her for a further delegation to the 2024 Summer Paralympics, planned for 27 August to 2 September and again led by Ullrich. The announced programme covered competitions and meetings on organisation, sustainability, security, finance, accessibility and effects on club sport.

Earlier, the committee held a public hearing on the men’s 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar on 4 July 2022, with Winklmann listed as an ordinary member. In November 2022 Onetz reported that, as sports spokesperson and an active footballer, she called the award of the tournament a scandal but rejected a boycott. On 1 March 2023, in a committee discussion with German Football Association president Bernd Neuendorf and national-team director Rudi Völler, she linked the dispute over the “One Love” armband to the fact that, unlike in the women’s game, active male professionals in Germany were still not coming out.

On 19 October 2023 she spoke on a CDU/CSU motion, Drucksache 20/8858, about using the Special Olympics World Games in Berlin. She said the Games had shown sport crossing barriers, thanked organisers, volunteers and athletes for “great Games with a unique atmosphere”, and described inclusion, from kindergarten to old age, as a task for society as a whole.

On 5 August 2023 the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* reported watching Germany’s match against South Korea at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup with her in the Schwandorf campaign office. The paper treated the group-stage exit as a setback for those, Winklmann among them, who had hoped a strong performance would push both sport and women’s emancipation, and it captioned a photograph with her remark that she could “tackle really well” and “shout extremely loudly”.

The sitting of 14 June 2024 also debated UEFA Euro 2024. Speaking last for the Greens on the sports committee’s recommendation on a CDU/CSU motion, “Football Euro 2024 — full support for a new summer fairytale” (Drucksachen 20/10068 and 20/11467), she said security, transport and the cultural programme were in place, thanked volunteers and the security authorities, and argued that major events needed a transparent, sustainable and humane setting. She called the tournament the start of a summer that would continue in Paris, thanked Claudia Roth for the cultural programme, and told the players, “we are your twelfth.” The Bundestag then adopted the recommendation to reject the Union motion: the governing groups and the Left voted for it, and the CDU/CSU and the AfD against.

## Twenty-first Bundestag

### Re-election and committee seats

The Bundestag opened its 21st electoral term on 25 March 2025. Tina Winklmann’s membership runs from that date. She holds the seat on the state list of Bavaria and was the candidate in constituency 233, Schwandorf.

On 15 May 2025 the House, on a motion of the CDU/CSU and the SPD, set up 24 standing committees, among them an Ausschuss für Sport und Ehrenamt of 14 members and a Petitionsausschuss of 26. The Committee on Sport and Volunteering first met on 21 May 2025 under vice-president [Josephine Ortleb](/people/josephine-ortleb). Its published remit is the financing of elite sport, including disability sport, rules against doping and manipulation, the social place of sport, and the conditions of voluntary work. [Aydan Özoğuz](/people/aydan-ozoguz) (SPD) was elected chair. The ordinary members from Alliance 90/The Greens on the roll were [Ophelia Nick](/people/ophelia-nick) and Winklmann. The Bundestag’s report of the sitting is headlined as the chair of the Sportausschuss, while the text uses the new name.

The biography, whose narrative it marks as the member’s own information, calls her spokesperson for sports policy and volunteering of the Green Bundestag group. The group treats working-group leads as its policy spokespersons and names her lead of the sport-and-volunteering group, with Nick as deputy. On 2 May 2025 the Oberpfalz Bote quoted her saying the group had again given her that role.

She is listed as an ordinary member of the Petitions Committee and a deputy member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. The Petitions Committee first sat on 21 May 2025 under Bundestag president [Julia Klöckner](/people/julia-klockner). The AfD held the right to name the chair; its nominee Manfred Schiller missed a majority, and [Andreas Mattfeldt](/people/andreas-mattfeldt) (CDU/CSU) took the acting chair. The same account gives the Greens three seats and prints a roll of [Corinna Rüffer](/people/corinna-ruffer) and Winklmann.

An Obfrau or Obmann is a faction’s principal contact in a committee, not the chair: the holder shapes the faction’s line, helps settle the agenda and reports the committee’s work back. Rüffer’s biography lists her as Obfrau of the Petitions Committee, and the Green group lists her as lead, and Winklmann as deputy lead, of its petitions working group. The Oberpfalz Bote of 2 May 2025 reported that Winklmann would be the Greens’ Obfrau; the Bundestag biography, current to 31 October 2026, does not give her that title.

On 10 June 2026 the House debated the committee’s 2025 report (Drucksache 21/6000). Rüffer spoke, and so did Winklmann, who called citizens’ concerns the concerns of Parliament and said the Federal Chancellery had recorded 244 submissions on sport in 2025.

### Secretary and parliamentary groups

At the opening sitting [Gregor Gysi](/people/gregor-gysi), as Alterspräsident, named provisional secretaries under § 1(3) of the Rules of Procedure. Winklmann was on the list; Michael Donth and [Kay-Uwe Ziegler](/people/kay-uwe-ziegler) sat beside him. On 22 May 2025 the Bundestag elected its secretaries without debate from the nominations in Drucksache 21/215 (neu) of 20 May, which placed her among nine Green nominees. The term has 64 secretaries — 21 CDU/CSU, 15 AfD, 12 SPD, nine Greens and seven from Die Linke — who take turns on sitting days. Two form the Sitzungsvorstand with the presiding member, usually one from each side of the House. They take motions and requests to speak, keep the speakers’ list and establish vote results. Her biography lists the office of Schriftführerin.

The offices block records her as deputy chair of the parliamentary group for the Czech Republic. The self-reported narrative also lists the German–Austrian parliamentary group, which that block does not.

### Disclosed outside posts

Since 19 October 2021 the members’ conduct rules have stood in the eleventh section of the Members of the Bundestag Act, widened in 2021 from rules that had sat in the Rules of Procedure. Members notify the President of their last occupation, paid outside work, company and public-law posts, and posts in associations and foundations, plus income above €1,000 a month or €3,000 a year. What must be published appears on the biography. Notifications under §§ 45 ff. are due within three months of taking the seat, and changes within three months; an entry is posted after a check that publication is required.

Her disclosure lists the advisory board of the German–Czech Discussion Forum in Prague, which the archived 20th-term biography already recorded from 1 January 2025. It lists the foundation council of the BFV-Sozialstiftung in Munich until 9 May 2026. The 20th-term disclosure dated that council from 1 January 2023, without an end date, while the narrative summarises it as 2021 to 2025. It lists the deputy chair of Sportgemeinschaft Deutscher Bundestag e.V. in Berlin from 8 October 2026, and membership of the parliamentary advisory board of Teamsport Deutschland from 8 September 2026. The archived entry for that board runs from 23 June 2022 to 25 March 2025, the day the new Bundestag met. The narrative says she has been a member since the 20th term, which does not fill the gap between those published dates.

## Sports policy and volunteering

### Grassroots sport, women’s football and para sport

In the 20th Bundestag, Tina Winklmann was sportspolitische Sprecherin for the group of Alliance 90/The Greens. The biography for the 21st term lists her as Sprecherin für Sportpolitik und Ehrenamt. She has treated club sport as [the base](/organizations/the-base) of the elite system, and in 2024 said a German Olympic bid should serve both rather than become a project of grandeur. In December 2025, on a joint CDU/CSU, SPD and Green motion, she asked for a “booster” for grassroots sport and facilities and for a festival of peace that did not forget Germany’s “dark history”. Die Linke answered that school sport, not an Olympic dream, should come first.

On 5 July 2023 a sports-committee hearing on girls’ and women’s football ended, unusually, in applause. Winklmann said a panel of women had changed the mood, and that parity brought the movement and joy she wanted in clubs. Witnesses from the German Football Association described growth in girls’ football, and sharp under-representation of women in men’s-club leadership.

She travelled to the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* watched Germany’s group-stage exit with her in her Schwandorf office and called it a setback both for a self-styled sports nation and for women’s sport. She has played since the age of six and, in parliament, for FC Bundestag.

Before the men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar, *Onetz* reported that she called the award a scandal but rejected a boycott. At a December 2022 panel in Augsburg she said the FIFA decision showed why corruption had to be fought, and that missed interim targets should reopen the choice of host. On the opening day of UEFA Euro 2024 she welcomed the tournament and said major events had to be transparent, sustainable and humane. The House then rejected a CDU/CSU motion for “ein neues Sommermärchen”: the governing parties and Die Linke backed the committee, the Union and the AfD did not.

After a committee trip to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, she described the village as fully accessible for the first time and called medal tables a poor sole measure of athletes. In October 2023, on a Union motion after that summer’s Special Olympics World Games in Berlin, she said inclusion had to run from kindergarten into work and old age. She cited figures that only 55 percent of people with disabilities played sport and only 7 percent of clubs offered inclusive sport, and separated that from Paralympic sport, which she said creates attention and must be funded at the base and at the top.

### Elite-sport funding

On 25 March 2026 the CDU/CSU–SPD cabinet cleared a draft Sportfördergesetz. [Christiane Schenderlein](/people/christiane-schenderlein), minister of state for sport and volunteering, called it a milestone aimed at more medals. Its core was an independent Spitzensport-Agentur in Leipzig, to take over after the 2028 Los Angeles Games, with a board allocating money on sporting criteria and a council of six political members and three from organised sport. The German Olympic Sports Confederation had rejected an October 2025 draft whose five-seat council would have given politics a majority; on the March text, DOSB chair Otto Fricke still criticised Leipzig over Frankfurt, and Athleten Deutschland stayed dissatisfied.

Sportschau quoted Winklmann calling the decision “kein Aufbruch für den Spitzensport, sondern die Absicherung alter Machtstrukturen”: safe sport and independent athlete participation were too weak. At first reading on 21 May 2026 she said a statute was right but this bill promised reform without delivering it. She asked for a transparency portal, a voting seat for an independent athletes’ body, binding safe-sport rules as a condition of federal money, maternity protection, and cover beyond Olympic sport. Medals, she said, must never matter more than the people who win them. The Greens tabled motions on transparent funding (Drucksache 21/4292) and maternity protection for self-employed athletes (21/6009). Die Linke’s [Christian Görke](/people/christian-gorke) called it a change of letterheads: funding would stay discretionary, and athletes and the German Disabled Sports Association would sit “at the side table”.

On 10 July 2026 she called the bill historic but unfinished, and said the Greens would vote yes. As amended in committee it passed by 519 votes to 43, with 68 members not voting. The Bundestag noted the aim of a first special statute for elite funding; the Greens’ and Left motions failed against the CDU/CSU, the AfD and the SPD. Die Linke’s [Jorrit Bosch](/people/jorrit-bosch) said his party alone had opposed it in committee, because the athletes’ seat went to the DOSB commission rather than Athleten Deutschland.

### Volunteering and safe sport

On 9 February 2023, at the second and third reading of Bundesrat and CDU/CSU bills on digital members’ assemblies, Winklmann said more than 615,000 associations were registered in April 2022 and that hybrid meetings could bring people back to grassroots clubs without replacing meeting in person. On 21 May 2026 she called volunteering the country’s “Kitt” — the coach after work, and help outside formal associations — and said praise without relief would overload it unless support such as “Demokratie leben!” was simpler and local. In the funding debate the same day she treated safe sport as physical, psychological and sexualised violence, and argued that federal money should require binding protection rather than a voluntary code. By the July vote she counted the Safe Sport Code as a gain inside a statute she still wanted amended.

## Constituency, labour and cross-border work

### Schwandorf constituency

Tina Winklmann sits in the Bundestag on the state list of Bavaria and is the constituency candidate for Schwandorf, numbered 233 in 2025 and 234 in 2021. The territory was the same in both elections: the districts of Cham and Schwandorf in full, and, from the Regensburg district, Brennberg and Wörth an der Donau. She grew up in Damelsdorf, part of the market town of Wernberg-Köblitz—a 2021 profile spelled it Dammelsdorf—and lives in Wackersdorf, in the Upper Palatinate. The Bundestag gives her constituency office as Marktplatz 13, 92421 Schwandorf.

For the 2025 election the Federal Returning Officer recorded 74 municipalities, 3,068 square kilometres and about 284,100 inhabitants at the end of 2023, or 92.6 people per square kilometre, with vegetation and water on 89.1 percent of the land. Of employees covered by social insurance on 30 June 2023, 46.4 percent worked in manufacturing and 0.7 percent in agriculture and forestry; unemployment at the end of November 2024 was 3.0 percent. Oberpfalz Echo reported office hours at the Marktplatz office on 20 October 2026, from 14:00 to 16:00, with email registration. In September 2026 Oberpfalz TV reported a visit to a regulars’ table of Alliance 90/The Greens in Amberg, where questions included federal oil and gas policy and declining interest in climate protection.

### Labour and rural policy

In the 20th Bundestag she was a member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs. At a Green regulars’ table that Simone Maaß held on 15 March 2023 in an Amberg inn, she discussed the Bürgergeld that replaced Hartz IV, saying Hartz IV “simply no longer fitted” and that the coalition result, though short of what the Greens had wanted, had “brought everyone along.” She pointed to a standard rate 53 euros a month above Hartz IV, faster rises when inflation was high, and a shift she described from sanctions to incentives, including 150 euros for further training; sanctions under Hartz IV, she said, had not moved people into work. She also welcomed ending the priority of immediate placement, so a person without a qualification could finish one without taking casual jobs, and a six-month grace period after a refused job offer.

Before entering parliament she told Onetz she wanted better rural public transport, while saying, “We don’t want to take anyone’s car away in the country,” and that a second car might become unnecessary; she tied jobs at regional automotive suppliers to a successful move away from the combustion engine. In December 2024, before the election of 23 February 2025, she again named weak rural transport links and jobs in crafts and industry, and said farmers needed support “if we want to keep the rural structure.”

On 9 November 2023, at the animal-breeding centre in Schwandorf, she discussed a draft animal-welfare law with the Bavarian Farmers’ Association in Schwandorf and Regensburg. She called the draft a compromise still needing an expert hearing, argued for small farms and more regional food, and said tethered housing had to be considered as a whole, that the market would not settle the question, and that aid should follow the animal and the farm as well as greater recognition of farming. She said she still hoped to cut bureaucracy and would take the farmers’ arguments to Berlin. Onetz reported on 26 January 2024 that Josef Irlbacher, the association’s Schwandorf chairman, handed her signatures at a vigil on the market square, and wrote that she stood with the farmers while asking them to compromise. It recorded her case for fair producer prices, a “Tierwohlcent” toward barn conversions, organic food in canteens, 30 percent organic farming by 2030, farmland kept out of speculation, simpler grants and alternative drives for machinery.

### Relations with the Czech Republic

The Bundestag biography lists her as deputy chair of the German–Czech Parliamentary Group. Such groups are reconstituted each term by the Bundestag presidium, draw members from every parliamentary group, and have their number and structure set by the Council of Elders, with chairs shared by the groups’ strength. They carry parliamentary foreign relations through conferences, information trips, specialist events and personal contacts: open-ended dialogue, not binding decisions or bills, including on delegation travel.

Her disclosed posts include the advisory board of the German–Czech Discussion Forum in Prague. Founded in 1997, the forum describes its aim as dialogue between Germans and Czechs in civil society, politics, business, science, culture and the media, with young people involved, and holds an annual conference. Its board—15 German and 15 Czech members, named by the two foreign ministers for two years—meets twice a year, alternating between Germany and the Czech Republic, reviews relations, discusses cooperation and sets the next conference theme. The forum is financed by the German–Czech Future Fund, and Winklmann is listed as a German member for 2025/2026.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/tina-winklmann