Timelines

She was the first German politician with a migrant background to be elected to parliament. Five years later, she was elected to the Bundestag. In the same year, Cem Özdemir, a politician from Alliance 90/The Greens, also succeeded in entering the Bundestag. Leyla Onur was born in Braunschweig in 1945 and studied German language and literature and social studies after graduating from high school. After several years of teaching at various high schools, she joined the SPD in 1973. In the years that followed, she was first a member of the Braunschweig City Council and then became deputy mayor. As the first German member of parliament with a migrant background, she was elected to the European Parliament in 1989 and to the German Bundestag in 1994. Cem Özdemir was born in Urach, Swabia, in 1965 and studied social pedagogy after completing his training as an educator. He joined the Green Party at the age of 16 and obtained German citizenship at 18. From 1989 to 1994, he sat on the Green Party's state executive committee in Baden-Württemberg. In the 1998 federal election, he became the first German politician of Turkish descent to be elected to the Bundestag via the state list. From 1998 to 2002, he was the domestic policy spokesperson for the Green Party's parliamentary group in the Bundestag, after which he moved to the European Parliament. He has been the federal chairman of the Green Party since November 2008 (as of 2014).