Franziska Katharina Brantner (born 24 August 1979) is a German politician of the Green Party who has been serving as a member of the German Parliament since 2013.
In 2010, Brantner defended her PhD thesis "The reformability of the United Nations" at the University of Mannheim where she used to be a research associate at the department for Political Science II of Prof. Dr. Thomas König with a lectureship for International Policy. From 2006 to 2007, she worked as a research associate at the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford.
In 2010, Branter was (along with Richard Gowan) co-author of a study concerning the EU Human Rights Policy on behalf of the European Council on Foreign Relations. According to the study, 127 out of the 192 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted against EU stances on human rights, up from 117 previous year; only half of democratic countries outside the Union voted with it most of the time.[6] For the Bertelsmann Foundation, she worked in Brussels on the subjects of European Foreign Affairs and European answers to the banking crisis.
Brantner speaks fluent French, English and Spanish and is able to communicate in Hebrew.
Political career
In 1996, Brantner became a member of the Green Party Youth at the age of 17. She then was part of the Green Party's local administration in Baden-Württemberg and their Federal Board. During her studies at Sciences Po in Paris she founded a Green university group and was co-organiser of the first "European Students Convent" in 2001/2002.
Brantner also served as spokeswoman for foreign affairs of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament and Parliament’s standing rapporteur for the Instrument for Stability. She also was her group’s chief negotiator for the establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAD). In 2010, she joined the Friends of the EEAS, a unofficial and independent pressure group formed because of concerns that the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security PolicyCatherine Ashton was not paying sufficient attention to the Parliament and was sharing too little information on the formation of the European External Action Service.[7]
In 2010 she supported the Spinelli Group initiative for more Europe.
During the euro crisis, Brantner pleaded for solidarity and community liability.[8]
Between 2014 and 2017, Brantner served as chairwoman of the parliamentary Sub-Committee for Civilian Crisis Prevention and as member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. From 2017 until 2021, she has been serving as secretary of her parliamentary group, in this position assisting the group's chairs Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Anton Hofreiter. She also served on the Committee on European Affairs. From 2019 until 2021, she was a member of the German delegation to the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly.[10]
In addition to her committee assignments, Brantner is a Deputy Chairwoman of the German-Egyptian Parliamentary Friendship Group. She is also part of the Elie Wiesel Network of Parliamentarians for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities and against Genocide Denial.[11]
New Pact for Europe, Member of the Advisory Group[24]
Political positions
Since becoming a member of the Bundestag, Brantner has regularly abstained from parliamentary votes on the participation of Germany in United Nations peacekeeping missions as well as in United Nations-mandated European Union peacekeeping missions, including those for Afghanistan (2014), Somalia (2014, 2015 and 2018), Darfur/Sudan (2013, 2014), South Sudan (2013 and 2014) and the Central African Republic (2014). She voted against participation in EUTM Somalia (2014 and 2016). However, she voted in favor of extending the German mandate for the UN missions in Mali (2014, 2016 and 2018), Lebanon (2014) and Liberia (2015).