SPD Chairmanship | Bärbel Bas: Ruhrpott-snouted at the top

Whenever Bärbel Bas is mentioned today, she thinks of the office of President of the Bundestag, which she held from October 2021 to March of this year. Before that, Bas was known only to a few. During the legislative period up to 2021, she was deputy chairwoman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag and responsible for health policy, a position that should have brought her notoriety during the coronavirus crisis. But at the time, Karl Lauterbach, a frequent talk show guest, attracted a great deal of attention. From now on, Bas will be the center of attention. The 57-year-old now heads the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and is also expected to lead the SPD out of the crisis. She is expected to be elected as the new chairwoman at the party conference at the end of June.

In the fall of 2021, Rolf Mützenich also had his eye on the position of President of the Bundestag. However, the SPD felt that having three men in the three highest state offices—Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Olaf Scholz, and Rolf Mützenich—was too unbalanced. When asked, Bas didn't hesitate for long. She knew what she wanted, she said in a podcast by the Funke Media Group. After the 2021 federal election, Bas and her colleague Kerstin Tack saw "The Unbreakable" in the cinema—a film about female politicians from the Bonn Republic. Afterward, Bas promised her colleague that if she were offered office, she would not refuse.

Yet she had still had serious doubts the previous year. Bärbel Bas, a member of the Bundestag since 2009 and a consistent winner in her constituency, was seriously considering leaving professional politics. The reason was personal: Her husband, Siegfried Ambrosius, 28 years her senior, suffered from Parkinson's disease. Bas could no longer imagine being in politics in Berlin while having a sick husband at home in Duisburg. But in September 2020, Ambrosius died of an infection following back surgery. Bas later referred to it as an "irony of fate."

After her husband's death, she continued her political career and became President of the Bundestag. A closer look at the couple provides insight into Bas's political background. The two were together for 15 years and married for the last five – for pragmatic reasons, as Bas explained, because Ambrosius suffered from Parkinson's disease and the couple wanted to be prepared for emergencies.

Siegfried Ambrosius had a decisive influence on his wife's political approach. The Duisburg SPD managing director, 28 years her senior, embodied social democracy in the city for decades. Colleagues describe Ambrosius as a modern party manager who was an early adopter of the internet. At the same time, he was a typical social democratic caretaker, approachable to voters over a beer at neighborhood festivals. Bas has adopted this down-to-earth political style as his own.

The Social Democrat was born in Walsum, formerly an independent town, now part of Duisburg. The Thyssenkrupp steelworks are not far away. Bärbel Bas was the second oldest of six children. She says in interviews that things were always "tight" at home. Her father was a bus driver for the Duisburg Transport Company (DVG), and her mother was a housewife. Vacations were nonexistent; they had gone to an amusement park once, but that alone was difficult and only possible if her aunt came along. Six children couldn't fit in one car.

When Bas was twelve, her parents separated, and her financial situation worsened: "When I needed new shoes, my mother took me to the social services office, where I had to show them my shoes," Bas told Die Zeit. "If they were too small or broken, I got new ones. That left its mark on her. Often, there wasn't enough money for class trips either." Bas used alleged illnesses to avoid having to explain why she was staying home.

After obtaining her vocational qualification at a secondary school, Bas actually wanted to begin training as a technical draftswoman. She wrote 80 applications but didn't receive a training position. The Social Democrat blames sexism for this: "The rejections said there were no restrooms for women." Bas spent a transitional year at a technical vocational school, learning filing and welding. Then she began training as an office assistant at the Duisburg public transport company. Her father had recommended it, and his daughter had reluctantly accepted it. It was important to her to earn money quickly, and that was the only way out of poverty, she says today.

Her path out of poverty is as closely linked to the DVG as her path to the SPD. As a trainee representative, she witnessed controversies over the hiring of trainees. She was surprised that local politicians were making the decision and decided that she wanted to have a say in such issues in the future.

There were organized Social Democrats at the public transport companies. Bärbel Bas joined them and joined the SPD in 1988 at the age of 20. A year later, she was elected chairwoman of the local Young Socialists (Juso), and in 1994, she was elected to the Duisburg city council for the first time.

Parallel to these commitments, Bas also pursued her professional advancement. After moving to the DVG company health insurance fund, she completed a second apprenticeship as a social insurance clerk, further training as a health insurance business economist, and further education as a human resources management economist. Finally, in 2007, Bas headed the human resources department of the BKK company health insurance fund. Then, at the age of 38, she took the plunge: she ran for the Bundestag.

Since 2009, Bas has consistently won the direct mandate in the Duisburg 1 constituency. This may have been helped by the fact that she has retained a certain old school of the Ruhr SPD. Bas visits campaign stands and takes to the streets on May Day. She always appears unpretentious and is careful not to come across as too important. The fact that she had represented the employees on the supervisory board of the Krupp Mannesmann steelworks (HKM) until her appointment to Chancellor Friedrich Merz's cabinet probably didn't hurt her.

As Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Bas has already attracted attention with several initiatives in her short term in office: Her pension plans , which envisage the inclusion of civil servants, members of parliament, and the self-employed in the statutory pension insurance system, have already met with resistance from the CDU/CSU. But Bas remains firm in her position. At the same time, she emphasized that civil servants need not fear for their pensions; after all, the goal is to prepare the system for the future.

Particularly revealing, however, is Bas's proposal regarding the receipt of citizen's allowance by impoverished immigrants. Just a few days ago, the Minister of Labor spoke out against alleged "mafia-like structures ." These lure people to Germany with "mini-employment contracts" and then siphon off the citizen's allowance. Bas wants to "dismantle" these structures. This requires better data exchange between authorities, he says, and it is also necessary to examine "whether someone is truly entitled to freedom of movement."

However, Bas' initiative is based on a thin data base: Reliable figures on organized welfare fraud do not exist. Thorsten Schlee researches poverty-related immigration in the Ruhr region. He told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper: "I have so far searched in vain for information on the types of cases, the number of cases, and the amount of damage that would shed light on the extent and significance of this phenomenon. There is a huge gap between the public presence of the issue and what we know about it."

In Duisburg itself, the Social Democratic city administration is taking particularly repressive action against precarious housing conditions, which primarily affect migrants, with a "Task Force on Problem Properties." Since 2014, the task force has regularly carried out unannounced evictions from rental properties, allegedly because they are uninhabitable. These actions exclusively affect people in precarious housing. The largest group are immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, many of whom belong to the Roma minority.

Such measures exemplify the SPD type that Bas embodies. When she claims to be taking stronger action against poverty-stricken immigration at the federal level, this is a model in her hometown. She stands for a policy that is down-to-earth, pro-worker, but restrictive in its migration policy.

What's striking is the closeness she maintains to the Ruhr region. She makes frequent trips there. On a May evening in Herne, Bas is standing at the basketball hoop at the SPD family festival. A few shots, selfies with the pensioners, a beer with her comrades – that's her element. What no longer works elsewhere still works here: the proximity to the grassroots, the promise of upward mobility. The only question is whether that's enough for the whole of Germany. In just under two weeks, the delegates to the SPD party conference will decide.