born: 1953
land list: Hamburg

Office in Berlin
T: +49 30 / 227 - 72032
F: +49 30 / 227 - 76032
krista.sager@bundestag.de

Spokesperson on science and research policy

I have been a member of the Bundestag since 2002, and since 2005 deputy leader of the parliamentary group and political coordinator of the newly formed Working Group 5 "Knowledge and the Generations". This working group formulates the parliamentary group's positions in the areas of school and tertiary education, research, children, young people, family affairs, demographic development and senior citizens, culture and the media, i.e. those areas pertaining to the central future issues of our society.

In Working Group 5 I am continuing the work with which I was significantly involved as parliamentary group leader during the 15th parliamentary term. Against massive opposition, primarily in the Bundestag, we made Germany more child-oriented and enabled parents to combine family and career more easily. We voted in the programme to increase day-care facilities for children, including under-three-year-olds, and we supported the federal states and local authorities by launching a programme to encourage full-time schools, which will give our children better chances in life. Even the CDU has now come to realise that there is a great deal still to do here. We are committed to the legal right to full-time day care from the age of one till the beginning of school, and to free access to such care for children from poorer families.

Our aim is to prioritise education and research and development in order to improve the university system. Here our central task for the coming year is to get to grips with the expected increase in the number of students and to accomplish a need-based extension of university capacity. The university covenant recently passed by the Confederation and the federal states does not do justice to this task. The so-called excellence initiative must be supplemented as soon as possible by a competition to increase teaching excellence.

Individual access to education must be kept open. Student grants need to be raised higher than the government is currently planning in order to keep up with the cost of living. Equality of opportunity for men and women must finally be asserted in higher education. Another important aim is to improve the situation of young academics.

We stand for politics of integration and social participation, and are against politics of division and exclusion. The key to achieving this is to provide an efficient social infrastructure in education and day care. We want to see a fundamental transformation of the welfare state. The future welfare state must empower its citizens to participate actively in society.

Future-oriented politics are impossible without a strong Green voice in the Bundestag, to which I add my own.

Committees

• Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment (m.)

Political CV

• Member of the Green Party since 1982
• Member of the Hamburg Parliament for the Green-Alternative List (GAL), between 1989 and 1994 extended period as parliamentary group leader
• 1993 front runner for the GAL in the Hamburg parliamentary election, chief negotiator during failed coalition negotiations with Henning Voscherau (SPD)
• From 1994 to 1996 co-spokesperson of the federal executive committee of Alliance 90/The Greens with Jürgen Trittin
• Front runner for the GAL in the Hamburg parliamentary election (1997)
• During the red-green coalition (1997 to 2001) mayor of Hamburg, senator for science and research and equality senator.
• From October 2001 to 2002 parliamentary group leader and transport spokeswoman of Alliance 90/The Greens GAL Hamburg
• Since 2002 member of the Bundestag
• From 2002 to 2005 leader of the parliamentary group
• Deputy leader of the parliamentary group and spokesperson of Working Group 5 "Knowledge and the Generations" (2005-2009)
• Member of the Alliance 90/The Greens party council (2002-2008)