Franziska Giffey is the new Governing Mayor of Berlin.

The SPD politician and former Federal Family Minister is the first woman in this office.

The self-confident woman with the thin voice succeeds the rather hapless social democrat Michael Müller, who has moved to the Bundestag as a member of the Bundestag.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Contrary to what she had planned, Giffey leads a coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Left - the three parties have been in the Senate since 2016.

On Tuesday morning, the representatives of the parties signed the coalition agreement in the Wilhelm von Humboldt Hall in the Unter den Linden State Library, followed by Giffey's election in the House of Representatives.

84 MPs voted for the 43-year-old politician, 52 voted no, two abstained and one vote was invalid.

139 of 147 MPs were present, eight MPs were absent due to illness.

Giffey received ten votes more than she needed to achieve an absolute majority.

Since the opposition from the CDU, FDP and AfD got 52 votes, Giffey was missing three votes from Red-Green-Red.

Doctorate revoked

In view of the resentment that there had been in parts of the Left Party about the coalition agreement, Giffey achieved a very good result. After the election she was sworn in in the House of Representatives. Giffey took the oath with the religious reference "So help me God". She then drove to her official residence, the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin-Mitte. There they were greeted in the stairwell by a reception trellis made up of 18 chimney sweeps, they wished the new mayor luck. In the afternoon Giffey wanted to take part in the Prime Minister's Conference with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (also SPD). A constituent meeting of the new Senate was therefore postponed to the evening.

Giffey is not the first woman to manage the fortunes of the city - in 1947 and 1948 the Social Democrat Louise Schröder led Berlin as acting mayor, the office of governing mayor has existed since 1951. But Giffey is the first mayor to go out comes from the GDR, she grew up in Briesen near Fürstenwalde. Her father, a master mechanic, her brother and her son also followed the election in the House of Representatives on Monday. 0

Giffey began her political career as a councilor for education in the Berlin district of Neukölln, and at the age of 36 she became district mayor of the problem district in Berlin. There she made a name for herself with resolute crackdown on clan crime. Her sociable manner also made her popular among the population. As Federal Family Minister in the last grand coalition, she resigned in the course of a plagiarism affair in May of this year - her doctorate was revoked.

In the election to the House of Representatives, the SPD achieved 21.4 percent.

That was the historically worst result of the Berlin Social Democrats.

However, the Berlin SPD was still 15 percent in autumn 2020, more than ten percentage points behind the Greens and well behind the CDU.

The party owed the election victory above all to Giffey, and there was also a recent positive federal trend.

Nevertheless, Giffey could not prevail with her idea of ​​forming a traffic light coalition in Berlin, as in the federal government.

This was prevented on the one hand by the Berlin Greens, whose regional association is dominated by the left, and on the other hand by large parts of the Berlin SPD, which is also left-wing.