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.
Rising to the top
Bas began her political career at the same time. In 1988, she joined Germany’s center-left , 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 .
At the SPD party conference in Berlin on Friday, Bas pointed out that she wasn’t born into her political and professional career. “But I had the chance to progress step by step,” she said. “I have continued to educate myself and worked my way up.”
Bas wants to ensure that this kind of professional advancement through is possible for many more people in Germany. “That’s also why I joined the SPD back then,” she said.
Collective rebuke for Lars Klingbeil
Bas belongs to the SPD’s left wing. As co-leader of the party, her role will be to act as counterweight to Lars Klingbeil, who belongs to the party’s conservative wing.
Now in his third term, the 47-year-old has co-chaired the party since 2021. That makes him partly responsible for , when it received just 16.4% of the vote — the worst result since the end of the 19th century.
With Klingbeil, Bas will now have the task of rebuilding the SPD and leading it forward. It will be a daunting task for a deeply wounded party, and it showed at the party conference. Klingbeil was only reelected by just under 65% of the party’s delegates — a poor result laden with frustrations.
Solidarity with predecessor Saskia Esken
Immediately after the election defeat, Klingbeil positioned himself for with the leading conservative and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), to become both finance minister and vice chancellor.
Saskia Esken, his SPD co-chair at the time, was sidelined until she eventually gave up.
“I found much of what came from within my own ranks, but also from outside as comments, to be unfair,” she said in an interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung, in which she also admitted to making mistakes. “But the way I was maligned was disproportionate and undignified.”
Speaking on Friday, Bas agreed with Esken’s assessment. “You, dear Saskia, have had to experience that it can sometimes be damn lonely in politics — even in a party with over 350,000 members,” she said at the party conference. “You have had to experience that solidarity is not always a given — not even in social democracy.”
Embracing responsibility and power
As such, Bas said she’d considered whether she should take on the party chairmanship. But her decision was clear: “It’s not acceptable for us women to avoid responsibility. It’s about visibility, respect — and yes, it’s also about power!”
Bas now has power not only in the SPD, but as Germany’s new labor minister. In that role, she has taken on the mammoth tasks of reforming unemployment benefits and patching up the , the latter of which is plagued by demographic changes that make it unlikely there will be enough to support the aging population.
The conservatives are pushing to cut social benefits, something which Bas has rejected outright. She sharply criticized talk of allegedly lazy Germans and attempts to turn the term “welfare state” into a dirty word. This is “shamelessly punching down” she said, adding that a society based on solidarity with dignified work for all should be at the heart of politics.
Delegates celebrated her stance on Friday, electing her as the party’s new co-chair with 95% of the vote. Bas knows that she has the historically difficult task of saving the SPD from further disintegration.
“But I always say: if it were easy, others could do it too,” she said.
This article was originally written in German.
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