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CEM ÖZDEMIR in BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG
The son of Turkish Gastarbeiter elected Premier of Germany’s most innovative state
By The Immigrant Times
Cem Özdemir, after his election as Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President; The new Minister-President with his predecessor Winfried Kretschmann; Özdemir in 1994 as a newly elected member of the German parliament (Bundestag)
May 2026: On 13 May, Green politician Cem Özdemir was elected Minister-President (Ministerpräsident) of Baden-Württemberg by the state parliament in Stuttgart, becoming the first head of government with Turkish roots in German history.
The occasion marked the peak of Cem Özdemir’s political career spanning over three decades. From his first entry into the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1994 as its first-ever member of Turkish descent, through a decade as co-chair of the Green Party, to two cabinet posts in Olaf Scholz's coalition government, Özdemir has been one of the most recognisable figures in German public life. That he should now lead the state of his birth is both a personal milestone and a sign of how much Germany's political landscape has changed since the era of the Gastarbeiter, the guest workers from whose ranks his own parents came.
Cem, a typical local boy, but with Turkish roots
Cem Özdemir was born on 21 December 1965 in Bad Urach, a small market town in the Swabian hills about 50 kilometres south of Stuttgart. His father, Abdullah Özdemir, was part of the Circassian minority in Turkey, originating from the town of Pazar in the province of Tokat; he moved to Germany in 1963 to work in a textile factory in the Black Forest. His mother, Nihal, arrived from Istanbul a year later and eventually ran her own tailoring shop. Both were part of the Gastarbeiter wave, the mass recruitment of foreign labour that supported West Germany's post-war Wirtschaftswunder. The family settled not in one of the large Turkish communities in Hamburg or Berlin but in a deeply provincial Swabian town, a circumstance that has significantly influenced Özdemir's political identity, as he has often recognised.
His early schooling was not without challenges. He attended a Hauptschule and later a Realschule in Urach, both part of the lower levels of the German educational system, but encountered teachers who encouraged him to aim higher.
He completed a vocational apprenticeship to become an early childhood educator and then studied social pedagogy at the University of Applied Sciences in Reutlingen, graduating in 1994.
Cem’s parents gained German citizenship in 1983, when Cem was seventeen. At a time when Germany still officially denied being a country of immigration, and when dual citizenship was largely unavailable, Özdemir has often spoken about growing up between two cultures, or more accurately, growing up primarily German in the Swabian dialect, with Turkish roots that sometimes sparked curiosity and other times hostility. He has described himself as a "secular Muslim," a term that places personal faith in the private sphere while anchoring his political identity firmly within German democratic traditions.
His mother Nihal died in 2021; his father Abdullah in 2015. Neither lived to see their son become minister-president. Özdemir has shared his feelings about his parents on many occasions, and the symbolic significance of his election - the son of a textile worker and a seamstress rising to lead the state where they settled - has not been lost on commentators in Germany or abroad.
On a personal level, Özdemir was married for around twenty years to Pía María Castro, an Argentine journalist, with whom he has a son and a daughter. The couple separated in November 2023. He married again on Valentine's Day 2026 in Tübingen, presided over by Boris Palmer, the city's maverick mayor and former Green politician, in a detail that reflects Baden-Württemberg's distinctive political culture.
Özdemir, the career politician
Özdemir joined the Green Party in 1981, still a teenager, through the Ludwigsburg district chapter. He served on the Green Party state executive in Baden-Württemberg from 1989 to 1994 and was a founding member of Immi-Grün, Bündnis der neuen InländerInnen, an alliance aiming to bridge immigrant communities and Green politics. When he entered the Bundestag in 1994, he became a historic figure: the first person of Turkish or Circassian descent elected to the German federal parliament.
His first stint in the Bundestag, from 1994 to 2002, established his core preoccupations. As the Greens' parliamentary spokesperson on home affairs, he was a persistent advocate for reforms to German citizenship law, reforms that, when they came in 2000 under the’red-green’ Schröder government, moved Germany away from the principle of descent-based nationality and towards a more territorial model. He also chaired the German-Turkish Parliamentary Friendship Group, a role that placed him at the intersection of two identities he navigated with some complexity.
His first term in the Bundestag ended in disgrace rather than success. In 2002, it was revealed that he had kept Lufthansa frequent-flier miles earned on official parliamentary trips for personal use and had taken out a loan from lobbyist Moritz Hunzinger to settle personal debts, an incident that also involved the then-defence minister Rudolf Scharping. Özdemir resigned both as spokesperson and as a member of parliament. That he recovered from this episode and went on to lead his party and serve in two cabinet positions speaks to his political resilience and his wider standing among German voters.
The interregnum was fruitful. From 2003, Özdemir dedicated time at the German Marshall Fund in Washington and Brussels as a Transatlantic Fellow, strengthening what would become a lasting engagement with transatlantic affairs and American minority politics. Between 2004 and 2009, he sat in the European Parliament as a member of the Greens/European Free Alliance, serving as the group's foreign policy spokesperson, as the Parliament's rapporteur on Central Asia, and, in a role that has since gained a certain irony, as vice-president of the temporary committee investigating the use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and detention of prisoners.
He re-entered the Bundestag in 2013, and had already been elected co-chair of the national Green Party in November 2008, a position he held until January 2018, initially alongside Claudia Roth, and later alongside Simone Peter. His tenure as party co-chair marked the high point of his profile nationally within the party. He ran alongside Katrin Göring-Eckardt as one of the Greens' two lead candidates in the 2017 federal election, in which the party achieved 8.9 per cent. Between 2018 and 2021, he chaired the Bundestag Committee on Transport.
When the Olaf Scholz three-party coalition took office in December 2021, Özdemir was appointed Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, a portfolio that aligned with his longstanding interests in sustainability, animal welfare, and agricultural reform, even though the ministry's constraints frustrated many Green activists. In November 2024, following the collapse of the three-party coalition and the departure of the Free Democrats from the government, he was additionally appointed Federal Minister of Education and Research, a role he held alongside the agriculture portfolio until the government's end in May 2025.
His agricultural tenure was marked by clashes with the farming lobby, especially regarding his proposals to reform EU subsidy arrangements and phase out certain types of intensive livestock farming. The 2023–24 tractor protests by German farmers, partly aimed at Green agricultural policy, provided him with an early glimpse of the tensions between environmental ambitions and rural economic interests that he would encounter as minister-president.
He resigned from the Bundestag in March 2025 to run for Baden-Württemberg's state parliament, winning the Stuttgart I constituency by the largest personal first-vote margin of any candidate in the March 2026 state election. That result was itself notable: polls in late 2025 had placed the Greens around 11 to 14 percentage points behind the CDU, and a decisive Green victory appeared unlikely. The campaign's turnaround, with the Greens finishing at 30.2 per cent compared to the CDU's 29.7, each securing 56 seats, was widely attributed to Özdemir's personal popularity, his name recognition, and a campaign that was frankly built around him as an individual rather than around the party's platform.
Green pragmatic politics from the centre of society
Cem Özdemir has never been a politician of the Green left. When he joined the party in the early 1980s, the Greens were a coalition of peace movement activists, feminists, ecologists and post-Marxists; by 1999, Özdemir was one of forty younger party members who signed a provocative internal manifesto declaring they would not "idly watch the moralising know-it-alls from the founding generation", a shot at figures like Jürgen Trittin on the party's left. He has always aligned with the Realos, the Green tendency that accepts power as a precondition for change and regards ideological purity as a luxury ill-suited to governing a complex industrial economy.
Over three decades, this positioning has become more pronounced rather than less. During the 2026 campaign, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed that as the lead candidate he had "transformed himself into a CDU politician" — an exaggeration, but not an entirely unfair one.
His campaign posters did not bear the party name. Concerning the phase-out of combustion engines, climate targets and migration policies, he took positions to the right of the federal party. His decision to bring Boris Palmer, the Tübingen mayor who was effectively pushed out of the Greens in 2023 for rhetoric on migration deemed incompatible with party membership, into his campaign team was the clearest signal of all.
The choice drew criticism within the Greens nationally, but Özdemir was unapologetic: at a time when the far-right Alternative für Deutschland had been consolidating support partly by making migration a central issue, he was not prepared to give up that ground.
Regarding the environment, Özdemir's commitments are sincere rather than superficial, but they are balanced by economic realism. Baden-Württemberg's industrial sector, including automotive, mechanical engineering, and precision manufacturing, is undergoing a structural transformation that is both necessary and profoundly disruptive.
Özdemir does not deny the necessity of decarbonisation; he emphasises controlling its pace and costs without undermining the employment base of a state that has long been among Germany's most prosperous. The coalition agreement he signed with the centre-right CDU in May 2026 largely ties environmental protections to a financing caveat, a concession to CDU priorities that faced criticism from Green activists nationwide, but which Özdemir described as arithmetic realism: "In Baden-Württemberg you couldn't drop maths at school. We also have to be able to count. We can't run up debts like world champions."
On European policy, Özdemir is an instinctive Europeanist and has been throughout his career. His years in the European Parliament reinforced a conviction that the European Union is the essential framework for managing common challenges, climate, migration, security, and economic policy, that no member state can address alone. He has consistently argued for deeper integration rather than a retreat to national sovereignty, and for a Europe capable of strategic autonomy in defence as well as trade.
On Russia and Ukraine, his stance has been resolute and unwavering since 2022. He has backed arms shipments to Ukraine, opposed any negotiated settlement that rewards Russian territorial aggression, and challenged what he calls ‘Wandel durch Handel’, the false hope that trade relations would curb authoritarian behaviour, a doctrine he views as thoroughly disproved by the invasion. In this respect, he aligns with the mainstream of German Green foreign policy since the war began, although his expressions tend to be more hawkish than those of some colleagues.
Perhaps no aspect of Özdemir's career has attracted more international attention than his relationship with Turkey. As the son of immigrants from a country whose politics he views with a mixture of affection, sorrow, and anger, he has often taken the more difficult route. In 2016, he was the chief architect of the Bundestag resolution recognising the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman state in 1915 as genocide, a designation Turkey rejects and has penalised.
After the resolution passed with near unanimity, Özdemir and ten other German parliamentarians of Turkish heritage were placed under police protection following death threats from Turkish nationalist extremists. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a remark that echoed the racial politics of an earlier German era, suggested the eleven deputies undergo a blood test to prove their ‘Turkishness’. Officials in Tokat, the province of his father's origin, removed Özdemir's name from a register of honoured sons.
His response was resolute. After Turkey's 2023 elections, in which many Turkish-German voters supported Erdoğan, Özdemir publicly criticised them, pointing out that unlike voters in Germany, those living under Erdoğan's government would have to face the direct consequences of their choice, ‘poverty and lack of freedom’. It was a remark widely reported in Turkey and strongly resented there, but completely consistent with a politician who has always refused to soften criticism of Ankara out of respect for his own heritage.
Regarding the AfD party and the broader German far right, Özdemir is both perceptive in analysis and strategic in action. He does not believe that refusing to engage with the anxieties it fuels will diminish the AfD. Instead, his approach has been to confront the party's core issues—migration, national identity, and economic insecurity—directly, rather than leaving them unchallenged. Including Palmer in his campaign was part of this strategy.
More broadly, he has argued that democratic parties lose ground to the radical right when they engage in "politics that puts people off" — dysfunctional, squabbling, performatively contentious coalition behaviour of the kind that characterised the Scholz government's final period. His pointed promise after the election to govern ‘internally’, resolving disagreements within the coalition before presenting a united face to the public, was explicitly framed as a rebuke to the Berlin model.
Özdemir’s views on immigration appeal to a centrist electorate
On immigration and asylum, Özdemir has taken positions that place him significantly to the right of the Green mainstream, leading to more controversy within his own party than on almost any other issue. The most explicit statement appeared in a September 2024 guest essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, written while he was still Federal Agriculture Minister. In it, he called for a clear distinction between asylum policy and labour migration: "We must draw a clear line between those who need us (asylum policy) and people whom we need (skilled worker immigration). Asylum and labour migration must be separated." Those genuinely in need of protection should receive it; those with a demonstrable economic contribution are welcome; "for all others, we have no place."
The essay was notable not only for its conclusions but also for its framing. Özdemir argued that the fear of the AfD exploiting migration as an issue must not prevent open debate: "I am convinced that it helps the AfD most when real existing problems, which these right-wing extremists want to exploit politically, are not addressed by us out of fear and misplaced consideration." He called on the liberal-progressive camp to reform asylum and migration practices precisely because it could do so credibly, without the taint of bad motives.
He went further, calling for "instruments that consciously manage and regulate before the national borders, such as asylum procedures in third countries and at external borders, as well as further migration and readmission agreements."
That is a call for offshore processing and faster deportation measures that, coming from a politician whose own parents arrived as Gastarbeiter, carries a particular weight, or, depending on one's view, a certain paradox.
His stance on EU border management had been evolving for some time. By 2023, he had already supported pre-screening asylum applications at the EU's external borders, arguing that southern European member states must not be left to manage arrivals alone: "If we want the European Union to act together, the states of southern Europe must not be left alone", since failing to do so, he observed, regularly handed those countries over to right-wing populists
The September 2024 essay drew charges from the left, the taz accused him of deploying his own family's experience against migrants in Germany, and qualified approval from the right. Within the Greens, the reaction was predominantly critical.
Özdemir remained unfazed. His consistent stance, articulated over time, is that Germany's model of integration has succeeded for families like his because it was founded on clear expectations and effective institutions. He also believes that defending the right to asylum involves enforcing its limits.
Governing Baden-Württemberg with a conservative coalition partner
The state that Cem Özdemir now leads is, by any measure, exceptional. With a GDP roughly comparable to that of Austria or the Netherlands, Baden-Württemberg has historically been one of Germany's most successful economic regions. Its prosperity depends on a cluster of globally significant companies, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Bosch, SAP, Heidelberg Materials, and on a dense network of Mittelstand manufacturers, many of which are leaders in specialised niches globally, for which the German term "hidden champions" was partly created.
The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, an applied research network among the world’s most effective technology transfer institutions, has a strong presence in the state. Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Freiburg and Ulm host universities and research institutes of international standing.
Özdemir has made clear he regards this inheritance as both a platform and a burden. In a recent interview, he placed Baden-Württemberg in the same league as California and Massachusetts as a technology and innovation hub, a comparison that may say more about the confidence he wishes to project than about strict economic equivalence, but that captures something real about the state's ambitions. He wants Baden-Württemberg to be a leader in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the transition technologies associated with the energy and automotive sectors.
The coalition agreement's provisions on new business formation, including a commitment to make company registration possible within two days, and its emphasis on deregulation and digital public administration reflect a coalition whose economic philosophy, whatever the differences between the Greens and the CDU on environmental policy, converges on competitiveness.
The automotive sector presents the most immediate challenge. Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and their supplier networks are in the midst of a historic structural shift, from internal combustion engines to electric propulsion, from standalone mechanical systems to software-integrated platforms, and from mass production to more flexible manufacturing models.
This transition is causing real difficulties: job losses, plant reorganisations, and supplier insolvencies. Özdemir is open about his concerns. "I have worries given the pressure currently placed on our core sectors of mechanical engineering and the automotive industry," he told ZDF's Heute journal on his first day in office. His approach, however, is not protectionist delay but managed acceleration, supporting companies during the transition with R&D incentives, infrastructure investment, and workforce retraining, while insisting that the "car of tomorrow" must also originate from Baden-Württemberg.
The question of his relationship with the federal government in Berlin will remain a repeated subplot. Özdemir has been highlighting that his coalition plans to act differently from the current CDU-SPD coalition at the federal level. "We are not going to settle for minimum consensus," he said, "and above all we want to distinguish ourselves not only in content but also in style from Berlin." Whether that distinction endures will depend partly on personalities, partly on fiscal realities, Baden-Württemberg must balance its books, and federal transfer mechanisms, EU structural funds, and Bundesrat politics all limit a minister-president's flexibility. Özdemir brings substantial experience to these negotiations and, as the leader of a Green-CDU coalition, a political identity distinct from all other current state governments.
In cooperation with other Länder, Baden-Württemberg's main partners include Bavaria to the east, with both states sharing economic interests in the automotive sector, and the Rhineland states to the north and west, especially regarding infrastructure and energy grid management. Özdemir has not yet outlined a specific Länder-coalition strategy, but the Bundesrat, Germany's upper chamber, where state governments vote, is a forum where he will need to build coalitions across party lines.
The AfD poses a specific institutional challenge in the years ahead. Despite a strong showing nationally, the AfD only received around 14 per cent in Baden-Württemberg, maintaining its Landtag presence with 35 seats. Özdemir faces the prospect that state elections elsewhere in Germany, including potentially in Saxony-Anhalt in the coming months, could produce an AfD-led government, breaking what has been a cross-party firewall against governing coalitions with the far right. He has argued forcefully that the way to prevent this is not to gesture at the firewall but to demonstrate that democratic parties can govern effectively and address the concerns, economic insecurity, administrative dysfunction, migration pressures, that the AfD exploits.
The coalition that enables Özdemir's government is itself born from carefully managed tensions. The rivalry between the Greens and the CDU under Manuel Hagel was, in Özdemir's own words, not always gentlemanly. There were claims of smear campaigns; a widely shared video, later called the "Rehaugen" (doe eyes) affair, fostered mutual bitterness.
Hagel, who becomes deputy minister-president and assumes a prominent role, is thirty-seven years old and seen as a rising star within the CDU, ambitious, talented, and not without political self-interest. Both sides have, since the election, worked to project harmony: the coalition agreement was jointly presented with apparent warmth, and Özdemir's opening remark, "a coalition at eye level," a partnership of equals, was aimed as much at Hagel's CDU as at the public.
Sources and methodology: This profile uses official records from the Baden-Württemberg state parliament (Landtag Baden-Württemberg), the Baden-Württemberg State Ministry (Staatsministerium), reports by ZDF, the Epoch Times Deutschland, and AFP, as well as Özdemir's Wikipedia biography and coverage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other German publications. Voting figures for the 13 May 2026 election are from official Landtag records. Biographical details about Özdemir's family and early life are based on multiple interviews and published sources. Electoral data come from official Baden-Württemberg state election results.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Turkish women immigrants in Germany || Teaching refugees in Germany || Syrian refugee elected mayor in Germany || Immigration in Germany ||
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