Carsten Sieling

Mayor Carsten Sieling (2019)

Play media file

Video presentation (2014)

Carsten Sieling (born January 13, 1959 in Nienburg / Weser ) is a German politician ( SPD ). From July 2015 to August 2019 he was President of the Senate and Mayor of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen as well as Senator for Religious Affairs and Senator for Culture.

Before that, he was a member of the German Bundestag for constituency 54 (Bremen I) from 2009 to 2015 , after having been a member of the Bremen parliament from 1995 and chairman of the SPD parliamentary group from 2005 to 2009. From 2004 to 2006 he headed the SPD Bremen as state chairman .

Life

Family, education and work

Sieling grew up on a sideline farm near Nienburg; his father was a worker at Volkswagen , his mother a postal worker . After College student Sieling made from 1975 to 1978 at Telefunken in Hanover vocational training for industrial clerk and then worked there until 1979 as a clerk. He obtained the general university entrance qualification on the second educational path . From 1979 to 1988 he studied economics at the Hamburg University of Economics and Politics , the University of Bremen , the University of Maryland (USA) and graduated with a degree in economics . In 1988/89 he did community service . He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Bremen and at the Bremen State Employment Promotion Center. He received his doctorate in 1999 under Wolfram Elsner with a thesis on armament conversion as a means of regional structural policy. From 1991 Sieling was a consultant for regional economic policy at the Bremen Chamber of Employees ; this employment was suspended during his mandate as a member of the Bundestag.

Sieling is married and has three children. He does not belong to any denomination.

Political career

Carsten Sieling in the Federal Council, 2019

Sieling has been a member of the SPD since 1976. He was a member of the SPD Bremen executive committee from 1993 to 2006 , as chairman from 2004, and was a member of the SPD party executive committee from 2011 to 2019 .

On June 8, 1995, he became a member of the Bremen Parliament. He was a member of the executive committee of the SPD parliamentary group from 1999; from 2005 he was parliamentary group chairman.

His membership in the Bremen citizenship ended on October 14, 2009 when he took over his mandate in the Bundestag. Sieling was a member of the finance committee of the German Bundestag and of the committee for the financial market stabilization fund (SoFFin) that was newly created after the banking crisis . He was also a member of the municipal subcommittee and a deputy member of the budget committee. He was a member of the board of the SPD state group Lower Saxony / Bremen and was involved in the parliamentary left (PL) of the SPD parliamentary group, whose spokesman he had been since March 2014. He professionalized the PL and ensured that it was perceived by the public with clear criticism of the party line, which is why Die Tageszeitung spoke of a "serious loss" for the PL when Sieling left in mid-2015. In addition, Sieling co-founded the Social Democratic Community for Local Politics (SGK) in the Northwest Metropolitan Region in March 2011 and was elected spokesman there. In November 2014, together with Johanna Uekermann and Ralf Stegner , he initiated a new alliance - the “Magdeburg Platform”, named after the place where it was founded.

In May 2015, Bremen's SPD country chief Dieter Reinken announced that the party executive was proposing Sieling to succeed Böhrnsen in the office of Bremen's mayor after the incumbent Jens Böhrnsen had declared after the election on May 10, 2015 that he would no longer run. At the extraordinary state party conference of the SPD on June 2, 2015, Sieling was nominated for this post with an approval of 97 percent: 184 delegates voted for him, four against him, there were two abstentions.

Carsten Sieling at the election evening in the Bremen Citizenship 2019

After the coalition agreement between the SPD and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen was confirmed by the party committees, Sieling was elected Bremen's new mayor on July 15, 2015. He received 46 votes in favor, 33 against and 3 abstentions. These are two more votes in favor than the SPD and Green MPs in the citizenry. He left the German Bundestag on July 16, 2015, and was succeeded by Sarah Ryglewski .

In July 2019, he announced his resignation from the mayor's office for the newly formed government after the SPD failed to become the strongest force in the 2019 mayor elections for the first time in 73 years. His successor was Andreas Bovenschulte (SPD).

Further memberships

Sieling was a member of the GEWOBA Supervisory Board from 2003 to June 18, 2010 . At the beginning of 2014 he was elected as an employee representative to the Supervisory Board of ArcelorMittal Bremen.

Political positions

Sieling is an expert in finance and tax policy and clearly represents his predominantly left-wing positions . He criticized the SPD party leader Sigmar Gabriel for his business-friendly course on the transatlantic free trade agreement (TTIP), for his departure from a wealth tax and for the change in course in data retention . In 2012, Sieling supported the much-discussed motion in the so-called circumcision debate ( circumcision # controversies about the circumcision of minors ), according to which the circumcision of boys before the age of 14 should be criminalized. Sieling advocates opening up the SPD to a red-red-green coalition at the federal level. As the first head of government in a federal state, Sieling advocates the legalization of cannabis use . In July 2015, he spoke out on refugee policy, criticized the tough stance of the Bavarian CSU and saw German politics as an obligation to show solidarity .

See also

• List of Bremen Senators
• List of Bremen mayors
• Senate Sieling

Web links

Commons : Carsten Sieling  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography with the Bremen citizenship
• Biography at the Bundestag
• Presentation at the Senate Chancellery (Bremen)
• Presentation to the Federal Council
• Presentation to the SPD parliamentary group
• Carsten Sieling on parliament watch.de
• Dr. Carsten Sieling. Resume. PDF. In: BDEW .de .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Eckhard Stengel: In profile. Carsten Sieling wants to let go of Bremen. In: Badische Zeitung , July 16, 2015.
2. ↑ http://www.taz.de/!5445143/
3. ^ Carsten Sieling: Regional structural policy and conversion. A comparative study of conversion strategies in Bremen and Lancashire. Lit, Münster 1999.
4. ↑ CV. In: Rathaus.Bremen.de.
5. ↑ xxx xxxx xx: Bremen senators without denomination . ( weser-kurier.de [accessed on November 3, 2017]).
6. ↑ Jürgen Hinrichs: Who is Carsten Sieling? Numbers fox is supposed to save Bremen. In: Weser-Kurier , May 19, 2015.
7. ^ ^{A b} Ulrich Schulte: Sieling becomes mayor of Bremen. SPD left is looking for a new leader. In: Die Tageszeitung , May 20, 2015.
8. ^ Studio talk with Carsten Sieling - SPD-Linke found "Magdeburg Platform". (No longer available online.) In: Radio Bremen TV . November 15, 2014, archived from the original on July 17, 2015 ; accessed on May 20, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Reinhard Bingener: SPD-Linker should become the new mayor. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 18, 2015.
10. ↑ Bremer SPD elects Carsten Sieling as candidate for mayor. In: Focus Online , June 2, 2015, accessed June 12, 2015.
11. ↑ Dr. Carsten Sieling. Resume.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. PDF. In: BDEW.de ; Gewoba report from February 2010.  
12. ↑ Weser-Kurier March 29, 2014
13. ↑ Supervisory Board of ArcelorMittal Bremen GmbH. ( Memento of the original from August 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Bremen.Arcelormittal.com , accessed on August 12, 2015.  
14. ↑ Lisa Caspari: TTIP: "Gabriel must represent our standards in relation to the USA". Interview with Carsten Sieling. In: Die Zeit , February 21, 2015.
15. ↑ Lisa Caspari: SPD: "Many social democrats do not want the data retention". Interview with Carsten Sieling. In: Die Zeit , June 12, 2015.
16. ↑ “Black zero” or public growth impulses? Carsten Sieling and Axel Troost on red-red-green communication potentials. In: Institute Solidarity Modern (website), February 9, 2015.
17. ^ Drugs: Bremen Prime Minister Sieling wants to legalize cannabis. In: Spiegel Online , July 19, 2015.
18. ↑ Doris Simon: Refugee Policy: “We have an obligation to help these people”. Interview with Carsten Sieling. In: Deutschlandfunk , July 21, 2015.