Reinhard Bütikofer

Bütikofer was active in the student's movement and one of the "K-gruppen", the Maoist Communist League of West Germany (Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland; KBW). From the 1980s onwards, he became active in Heidelberg municipal politics for the Green-Alternative List.

In 1984, Bütikofer was elected into the town council of Heidelberg and became a member of the Green Party, the starting point of his political career with Alliance 90/The Greens. In 1988, he was elected in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. He was Member of the Landtag until 1996.

After a year of parental leave, in 1997 Bütikofer became co-chairman of the Green Party in Baden-Württemberg, alongside Monika Schnaitmann. Two years later he was elected secretary general of the federal party. In December 2002 he became co-chairman of the federal party (alongside Angelika Beer) and was reelected in 2004 and 2006 (alongside Claudia Roth). On 3 March 2008 he announced not to stand again as a party chairman and to run for European Parliament in 2009, to which he was elected.

Since 2009, Bütikofer is a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the German Green Party. He is a member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), and a substitute member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defense (SEDE). As shadow rapporteur, he has authored reports on the evaluation of the European Endowment for Democracy (2015), on the impact of developments in European defence markets on the security and defence capabilities in Europe (2015) and on green growth opportunities for SMEs (2015).

In addition, Bütikofer is a member of the parliament's delegation for relations with the United States and the Transatlantic Legislators' Dialogue and the chair of the delegation for Relations with China.[2] He also serves as a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on SMEs.[3]

Bütikofer is the Green Group's spokesperson on industrial policy, and speaker of the delegation from the German Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) to the European Parliament.

In the negotiations to form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats – both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) – and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) following the 2017 national elections, Bütikofer is currently part of the 14-member delegation of the Green Party.

Following the 2019 elections, Bütikofer was part of a cross-party working group in charge of drafting the European Parliament's four-year work program on foreign policy.[4]

In the negotiations to form a so-called traffic light coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) following the 2021 federal elections, Bütikofer was part of his party's delegation in the working group on foreign policy, defence, development cooperation and human rights, co-chaired by Heiko Maas, Omid Nouripour and Alexander Graf Lambsdorff.[5]

Following the Qatar corruption scandal at the European Parliament, it was found that Reinhard Bütikofer is, by far, the Member of the European Parliament, who has travelled the most during the current legislature. These travels were financed by third parties or non EU states with, so far, a total of 22 voyages and 47 hotel nights. Among the countries he visited there are, amongst others, India, China, Russia, the United States and Australia.[6]

In 2005, Bütikofer complained that because Germany has no winner-take-all political system, there were only a few Green party members in the foreign service, even after Joschka Fischer had been foreign minister for seven years; by contrast, hundreds of supporters of the Christian Democratic Union served in the Federal Foreign Office.[7] In 2010, Bütikofer characterized his party as representing “a certain lifestyle,” noting that, mostly urbanized, many belong to the professions and are politically and socially engaged. “They sit on school boards. They are active in their churches or sports clubs. They support nongovernmental organizations,” he said.[8]

Under Bütikofer’s leadership, a two-year-long effort to negotiate a revised immigration law was abandoned by the Green Party in 2004, citing concerns about, among other things, that any regulations allowing easier detentions or expulsions of terror suspects would subvert Germany's civil rights protections.[9]

When the European Commission issued a strategy paper in 2010 which proposed pursuing more bilateral trade agreements and investing in infrastructure in Africa as a means to increase alternative sources of rare earth metals, hoping to break China’s dominance of the market for the strategic minerals, Bütikofer demanded an “innovative industrial policy that reduces the use of resources” instead.[10]

When German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced in 2005 his intentions to lift an arms embargo on China that had been in place since the crackdown on student-led opposition demonstrators near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, Bütikofer opposed the plan and instead called for a joint approach together with the United States.[11]

Since 2020, Bütikofer has been serving as co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).[12] Also in 2020, he was one of 40 fellow Members of the European Parliament from five political groups who called for EU member states and the Commission to cut European public funding for Chinese 5G vendors Huawei and ZTE in a letter, arguing the two are "high-risk" companies that pose a security threat to network security in Europe.[13]

Following the assassination of journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya in 2008, Bütikofer characterized the human rights situation in Russia as "deteriorating". He also criticized Russia's behaviour towards Georgia as "almost unbelievably arrogant", referring to the country's confrontation with Georgia and its decision to sever all transport and postal links in 2008. He is an advocate of "a more open and more clear-cut language from the West, including Germany [...] if we just don't want to be standing by."[14]