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Plenary hall of the Bundestag in Berlin
Photo: Michael Kappeler / picture alliance / dpa
Parliament President Bärbel Bas (SPD) viewed Heike Heubach's entry into the Bundestag as the first deaf member of the Bundestag as a "strong sign" of inclusion.
Bas told the newspapers of the Funke media group that the Bundestag administration had been preparing intensively for months to enable the Social Democrat to exercise her mandate in a "largely barrier-free manner."
Sign language interpreting in the plenary hall should be ensured, and an interpreter should translate their speeches in the plenary hall.
Heike Heubach, 43, is a Bavarian social democrat and will take up her mandate next week.
She replaces SPD politician Uli Grötsch, who was elected federal police commissioner on Thursday.
In the 2021 federal election, she ran in the Augsburg-Land constituency, but narrowly missed entering parliament.
Helmut Vogel, President of the German Association of the Deaf, spoke in the Funke newspapers of a “significant step for the sign language community” and a “breaking point”.
The deaf community's long-held wish "that a deaf person is represented in the heart of German democracy, i.e. in the 'Hohes Haus'" is being fulfilled.
So far, individual deaf people have been active as elected representatives at the local level.
jpz/dpa/AFP