Katja Meier

Katja Meier (2019)

Katja Meier (born September 10, 1979 in Zwickau ) is a German politician ( Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen ) and Saxon State Minister for Justice and Democracy, Europe and Equality since December 2019 . She has been a member of the Saxon state parliament since 2015 and the top candidate of the Greens in the state elections in Saxony in 2019 .

biography

Katja Meier played in her youth in the Zwickau punk band Harlekins Bass and was active in the youth club of the Zwickau educational and meeting place Buntes Zentrum . After graduating from high school, she studied political science , modern and contemporary history and sociology in Jena , Tartu and Münster from 1998 to 2004 , completing a Magistra Artium in 2004 . She then worked in various functions at Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, most recently from 2010 to 2015 as a consultant for the Saxon parliamentary group.

Meier lives in Dresden .

politics

Meier has been a member of Alliance 90 / The Greens since 2005. As a replacement for Eva Jähnigen , she has been in the Saxon state parliament since September 12, 2015. In her parliamentary group, she works on the subjects of transport policy, legal policy, equality and democracy and is a member of the constitutional and legal committee.

On April 13, 2019, Meier was elected to the first place in the list of the Greens by a state delegates' conference of her party with 97.27 percent of the votes for the state election in Saxony 2019 and thus nominated together with Wolfram Günther as the top candidate of the Greens.

After the election, the Kretschmer II cabinet was formed with a black-green-red coalition , in which Meier took over the office of Saxon State Minister for Justice and Democracy, Europe and Equality on December 20, 2019 . In doing so, she waived her mandate in the state parliament. For she moved Ines grief after.

controversy

After there were riots by alleged left-wing extremists in the Leipzig district of Connewitz on New Year's Eve 2020 , and police officers were also injured, a demo tape of the song "Hurray, May is here" by Meier's former band Harlekins was distributed on the Internet the line “Advent, Advent, a bull is burning. First 1, then 2, then 3 ”. The deputy AfD parliamentary group chairman in the Saxon state parliament, Sebastian Wippel , then called for Meier's resignation. The Saxon CDU member of the Bundestag, Marian Wendt, demanded an “honest and sincere apology”: Playing in this band was “a hard slap in the face of all police officers and emergency services who give everything for our safety” and whose trust Meier needs for their work . Meier said that she always said "not all of the lyrics to which I played bass when I was 16 years old, I share the content over 20 years later". They condemn "any form of violence" that "cannot be justified by anything" and that must be countered with the means of the rule of law.