Germany: 87% Of New Bundestag Members Have University Degrees

87 percent of members at Germany’s new Bundestag have university degrees, and only a very few of them have been low-income earners or have gone through vocational training in their life, Deutsche Welle reports.

However, in an interview with Deutsche Welle, the member of the German Parliament for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Josip Juratovic, said that after graduation, he was trained at a car repair shop, and for several years worked as a painter at the car manufacturer Audi to become later a council member.

He said that people have to fight for their existence every day, hence he would like to see more people in the Bundestag who know life below the poverty line.

“I know what the prevailing opinion about politics is at my social level and what expectations these people have of politics. I can express complex political things in a simple way and have credibility,” Juratovic said.

According to the report, the new Bundestag is considered more diverse compared to its predecessors, but only 15 percent of the German citizens are academics, while the majority have finished vocational training after school.

Juratovic said that the life experience of members in the Bundestag is a bit one-sided.

On the other hand, the research associate at the Institute for Parliamentary Research at the Foundation for Science and Democracy, Daniel Hellmann, said that as an academic, he would not feel well represented only by an academic in the Bundestag, as according to him, it depends if the academic shares his political stances.

“If I’m looking for someone to represent my interests, I wouldn’t primarily look at what profession they have, but which party they’re in,” Hellmann said.

Germany elected the new Parliament a month ago, the 763 members of which are significantly younger than previous members, with the youngest politician being Emilia Fester of the Green Party, who is 23 years old.

Meanwhile, the oldest politician in the new parliament is the 80-year-old Alexander Gauland of the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Another highlight of the new German Bundestag is that the number of women has increased by 46 percent, as well as that some 83 parliamentarians have been migrants in Germany.

According to a 2021 study carried out by the universities of Constance, Basel, Geneva, and Stuttgart, the interest of voters could be better represented if the parliament is diverse because the members who belong to the minority are politically committed to their groups.

Some of the German Bundestag members studied the following:

• Knut Abraham, CDU / CSU studied law at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. 
• Stephanie Aeffner, Alliance 90 / The Greens, studied social work with a degree as a qualified social worker (FH). 
• Adis Ahmetovic, SPD, studied Master’s degree in teaching at grammar schools: Politics, Economics and German Studies.
• Gökay Akbulut, The Left Party Studied political science, sociology and public law at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg; Master’s degree (MA).
• Stephan Albani, CDU / CSU studied physics in Göttingen.