Andreas Geisel

Andreas Geisel, 2017

Andreas Geisel (born March 1, 1966 in East Berlin ) is a German politician ( SPD ). He was Senator for Urban Development and Environment from 2014 to 2016 and has been Senator for Interior and Sport in Berlin since December 2016 .

Life

Andreas Geisel attended a polytechnic high school in East Berlin from 1972 to 1982 and then completed vocational training with a high school diploma as a skilled worker for communications technology in Neubrandenburg by 1985 . From 1985 to 1986 he worked as a telecommunications technician at the Deutsche Post of the GDR / telephone office in Berlin. From 1986 visited hostage the University of Transport "Friedrich List" in Dresden and completed by 1990 an education with a focus on economics of the news service, which he called Diplomökonom completed. After the German reunification , he worked from 1990 to 1992 as a clerk in the property management of the Telekom Oberpostdirektion in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

From 1992 to 1995 Geisel completed a postgraduate course in business administration at the Humboldt University in Berlin . He then worked from 1994 to 1995 as a freelancer in the management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers .

Geisel is married, lives in Berlin-Karlshorst and has two children.

politics

Geisel joined the SED at the age of 18 . After the GDR - People's Chamber , the massacre in Tiananmen Square "greeted with prolonged applause" in Beijing was, he leaked by its own account after four years of membership in 1989 from the SED again. About his time in the SED he later said that he was “not proud” of it, but that he was not “ashamed” of himself. He sees his time in the SED primarily as “a time of growing up and detachment from the parental home” and as “the beginning of independent thinking and independent decisions”.

Geisel joined the SPD in December 1990 after German reunification and was spokesman for the Jusos Lichtenberg from 1992 to 1994 . From 1994 to 1996 he was chairman of the local association and was elected district chairman of the SPD Lichtenberg in 1996. Since then he has been a member of the state executive committee of the SPD Berlin . After the Berlin district reform of 2001, in which Hohenschönhausen and Lichtenberg merged to form the new Lichtenberg administrative district, Geisel was deputy district chairman of the SPD Lichtenberg-Hohenschönhausen from 2001 to 2002 and again district chairman of the SPD Lichtenberg from 2002 to 2012.

In December 1995 Geisel in Lichtenberg was elected to the district councilor for construction and housing and held this office until 2000. After the district merger with Hohenschönhausen, Geisel was district councilor for construction, real estate and the environment in the Lichtenberg district office from 2001 to 2002. From 2002 to 2006 he took over the post of District Councilor for Environment and Health in the Lichtenberg District Office. After the 2006 election , Geisel was elected Deputy District Mayor of Lichtenberg and District Councilor for Urban Development, Building, Environment and Transport.

In the 2009 federal election , Geisel ran unsuccessfully as a direct candidate for the SPD in the Berlin-Lichtenberg constituency .

On November 10, 2011, Geisel was elected district mayor of Lichtenberg through the formation of a counting community with the CDU and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen .

Geisel was appointed Senator for Urban Development and Environment on December 11, 2014 to succeed Michael Müller .

In the 2016 Berlin election , Geisel was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives. On December 8, 2016, he became Senator for Home Affairs and Sport in Senate Müller II . Geisel is a member of the joint committee of the Bundestag and Bundesrat for the State of Berlin .

Mauerpark

In 2015, Geisel prevented the district referendum on “100 percent Mauerpark”, which was directed against development plans by the Groth Group, among other things, by transferring responsibility directly to his Senate administration. The following year, the real estate entrepreneur Klaus Groth donated the SPD district association Lichtenberg, for which Geisel ran as the top candidate for the House of Representatives election of the same year, with 9,950 euros, a sum just below the obligation to publish the donor of 10,000 euros. The opposition therefore saw Geisel in need of explanation. He denied a connection between the donation and his actions in the Mauerpark case.

Corona demonstrations

In 2020 the hostage police, as the Berlin assembly authority, banned some of the demonstrations registered in Berlin for the weekend of August 28th to 30th as part of the protests during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany , including the large-scale demonstration of the " lateral thinking 711 " initiative , because violations of the current infection protection ordinance are to be expected. In addition to the reason for the prohibition, he made a personal note that he was "not prepared to accept a second time that Berlin is being used as a stage for corona deniers, the Reich citizenship movement and right-wing extremists." He was referring to the demonstrations on August 1, 2020 with 30,000 participants, according to recent police reports, whose participants "consciously disregarded existing hygiene rules and corresponding requirements". The decision was primarily criticized by politicians from the AfD and the FDP . Jörg Meuthen (AfD) wrote on Facebook of a suppression of "[p] politically unpopular [r] demonstrations" and of " GDR methods". For Christian Lindner (FDP), the demo ban gave the impression that “uncomfortable opinions were being suppressed”. The publicist Henryk M. Broder commented that it was "not the task of the Senator to explain who is allowed to demonstrate and who is not." The ban was overturned on Friday, one day before the demo, by the Berlin Administrative Court because there was no immediate danger to them public safety is given. However, as part of its urgent decision, the court defined a number of conditions for maintaining a minimum distance. The Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court, which was subsequently called , also ruled that the ban on demonstrations ordered by Geisel's police did not apply.