Bärbel Bas comes from a humble background. Her father was a bus driver, her mother a homemaker.

Bas was born in 1968 in Duisburg, an industrial city in the Ruhr region characterized by coal mining and iron and steel production. As a working-class child with five siblings, secondary school and an academic education were not a likely path.

She attended secondary school, which qualified young people for basic vocational training, and then became an office assistant. But when that wasn't enough for her, she did a second apprenticeship, got involved as a works council member and continued her education while working to complete a two-year evening course at a business academy.

Bas began her political career at the same time. In 1988, she joined Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), became a city councilor and made her way into the country's parliament, the Bundestag.

In 2009, she won her first direct parliamentary mandate in Duisburg and became the parliamentary secretary and deputy leader of the SPD parliamentary group. From 2021 to 2025, she was president of the Bundestag, the second-highest state office in Germany. And now, she heads the SPD alongside Lars Klingbeil.

At the SPD party conference in Berlin on........

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