The applicant for the co-presidency of the Brandenburg Greens, Hanna Große Holtrup, is focusing on factual issues after Julia Schmidt’s resignation. “Content is our strength. That is also our recipe for the future,” she told the German Press Agency with a view to the 2024 state elections. “It is important that we now look ahead.”
The coming year will be very exciting. “There is also a lot of motivation there and we simply have to use it to concentrate on the content again. I see that calm is slowly coming in and the party wants to deal with content and the preparations for the election campaign.”
Julia Schmidt resigned in February at the urging of the state board. The board did not name specific incidents that had led to this. However, the co-president Alexandra Pichl had accused Schmidt of having been mainly on her own behalf in the previous months. On Saturday (April 29) Große Holtrup will be up for election as Schmidt’s successor. She is the only applicant so far.
The state elections in Brandenburg are coming up next year. The Greens have governed with SPD and CDU since 2019. Große Holtrup named a leading motion on traffic for the state party conference as an example of content. In it, the Green Party demands, among other things, the expansion of rail and bicycle traffic as well as a nationwide 29-euro ticket for students, trainees and schoolchildren.
The 25-year-old Große Holtrup works as a consultant for the Greens parliamentary group for the RBB investigative committee of the state parliament. She is a member of the State Arbitration Court of the Greens and was a member of the state board of the Green Youth in Brandenburg in 2020 and 2021. In her application as co-head of state, she names a humane and fair asylum policy, equal opportunities between East and West and the fight against the climate crisis as priorities. In her application, she writes that Schmidt’s resignation shook the party.
Große Holtrup campaigned for the integration of refugees. “I perceive that the mood is going in one direction at the moment and there is a lot of talk about it, the boat is full,” she said. “An important step is to talk about it and to show that the ‘boot-is-full’ rhetoric doesn’t get us anywhere, but that we find solutions. That’s our job.”
In addition to her law studies, she worked for Brandenburg’s integration officer in 2021 and 2022. Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) calls for a “brake on migration” and warns of a collapse. The red-black-green coalition wants to relieve municipalities with more initial reception places and, if possible, not distribute people with no prospects of staying there.
Application Hanna Große Holtrup for the Green Party presidency
