German Parliament Sports Young Face

"I didn’t just want to grumble, I really wanted to do something," said Anna Lührmann, who at age 19 is Germany’s youngest member of parliament.

On Sunday, the candidate for the Greens was elected by voters to represent the constituency of Hesse in the new federal parliament, whose new session begins on October 22.

For Lührmann, it will be her first parliamentary session. For Otto Schily, German Interior Minister and the Bundestag’s oldest member, it will be the sixth. The 70-year-old is the German parliament’s oldest representative, and will open the next session as the Bundestag’s new Senior Chairman.

But with the average age at 49.3 years, Germany’s new Bundestag will be half a year younger on average than the last. In addition, the number of female members has increased for the seventh time in a row by 2 points to 32.2 percent. And with 603 new members - 63 fewer than in 1998 -this year’s parliament will be considerably smaller.

More pragmatic

The majority of female MPs are Greens. According to the Federal Election Office, 58.2 percent of the Greens members of parliament are women, followed by the SPD with 37.8 and the CDU/CSU with 21.3 percent. In addition, the Greens have the Bundestag’s youngest members – here the average age is 45.09, in comparison to the SPD, whose members are an average 50.65.

"Women are not better people, but they have experience in areas that men aren’t interested in, but which are more than important for future policies,” Lührmann told the magazine Journal für die Frau.

In addition, age and experience do not deter the 19-year-old, who claims that young people in politics bring more dedication and a fresh way of seeing things.

Lührmann, who joined the Greens five years ago and who through Sunday was board member of the Green’s youth branch, likes to refer to other young members of parliament including Matthias Berniger of the Greens, who became an MP at the age of 23. What these young members have in common, she says, is the “pragmatic way” they deal with issues.

She feels confident about her new role as representative of the German people, saying she gained a lot of experience in the election campaign, when she had to compete against two old hats in politics, Heinz Riesenhuber of the Christian Democrats and Klaus Wiesehügel of the Social Democrats.

Kohl's last session

But Lührmann is just one of several young, and rather unknown candidates who made it to the German Reichstag on Sunday – at the cost of numerous long-time members.

Only five of Schröder’s 12 ministers won enough first votes to gain a seat in parliament. Among those who lost their seats were Family Minister Christine Bergmann and Justice Minister Herta Däubler Gmelin.

Indeed, a third of the current parliament will be leaving the Reichstag in the coming weeks. Most of them, however, had made this decision before the elections – including long-time chancellor Helmut Kohl and former finance minister Theo Waigel, who have both served the German parliament for more than 30 years.