As a local politician in Duisburg, as an office assistant in a local transport company and then as an employee of a company health insurance fund, Bärbel Bas learned the political trade from the ground up and retained a solid foothold in professional life for a long time.

Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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The now 53-year-old Social Democrat comes from a large family, she has five siblings, and went her own way at an early age.

Pictures of young people show them on motorcycles, and Bas was already playing football when it was still considered a man's business.

Her position as Libero at the time also describes the result of a somewhat laborious process of finding a candidate for the office of President of the Bundestag.

Bas was playable and ready to take responsibility.

The high office of the state would actually have found a respectable occupation in the SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich, but the prominent party left apparently prefers to intervene further in active government policy, his current office offers him far-reaching opportunities, because without the parliamentary group and its chairman, even the strongest leader can Chancellor can do little.

Crime fan with a sense of comedy

Mützenich's waiver was also due to the fact that the women in the SPD and women and men insisted very emphatically that the Bundestag needed a female president, if only to avoid a purely male impression at the top of the state.

The Duisburg woman, a crime fanatic with a sense of comedy and weird jokes, is also a member of the Duisburg carnival society Rote Funken and the ver.di union.

A woman striving to make something out of her life shows her professional advancement from secondary school diploma to health insurance business economist and HR manager with great managerial responsibility.

But not just for yourself.

Since 2009 member of the German Bundestag

Bärbel Bas joined the SPD at the age of 20 and was active in the Jusos.

In the traditional SPD sub-district of Duisburg, she soon made it into the leadership, since 2009 she has been a member of the German Bundestag and has since successfully defended her direct mandate three times.

After her previous professional experience, the health committee in parliament was the field of activity of choice, as one of the parliamentary managing directors Bas gained cross-party experience, in the Bundestag she appeared as a factual and technical speaker.

Bas belongs to the parliamentary group of the parliamentary left (PL), whose treasurer she was most recently.

The office for which your group is now proposing is a huge step for Bas.

Her two predecessors, Norbert Lammert and Wolfgang Schäuble (both CDU), combined charisma and rhetoric to create a rather luminous overall picture of parliamentary art.

Bas will not want to imitate this.

Finding her own way of exercising office, representing the Bundestag as a worthy but also popular center of parliamentary democracy, that must be achieved nonetheless.

This also includes the approval of as many as possible in parliament, because Bärbel Bas will now go into the election as a proposal of the SPD parliamentary group, but it will want to be Bundestag President of all freely elected members of the German people, at least almost all of them.