Franziska Brantner

Franziska Katharina Brantner (born 24 August 1979) is a German politician of the Green Party who has been serving as a member of the German Parliament since 2013. Since 2024, she has also been serving as co-leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, alongside Felix Banaszak.

In addition to her parliamentary mandate, Brantner served as Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz from 2021 to 2025. In this capacity, her portfolio included European affairs, trade policy, and digitization. Moreover, she was also the ministry's Special Coordinator for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

Brantner was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2009 to 2013.

Brantner grew up in Neuenburg am Rhein in western Baden-Württemberg. After graduating from the bilingual Deutsch-Französisches Gymnasium in Freiburg im Breisgau and gathering her first international experiences working at the offices of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. she studied political science with focus on International Affairs and European Policy at the Sciences Po in Paris and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in New York City, where she graduated in 2004.

In 2010, Brantner defended her PhD thesis "The reformability of the United Nations" at the University of Mannheim where she used to be a research associate at the department for Political Science II at Thomas König lab. Brantner lectured in Mannheim International Policy. From 2006 to 2007, she worked as a research associate at the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford.

During the conference "Peking+5" of the UN Plenum in 2000 (following the UN World Women Conference of Peking in 1995) and until 2005 Brantner was Vice President of the "Youth Caucus" belonging to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She also worked as a consultant for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Women’s Rights Organisation of the UN. In Brussels she coordinated a project in cooperation with the French presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2008, which developed the European master plan for the resolution 1325 of the UN Security Council.

In 2010, Brantner was (along with Richard Gowan) co-author of a study concerning the EU Human Rights Policy on behalf of the European Council on Foreign Relations. According to the study, 127 out of the 192 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted against EU stances on human rights, up from 117 previous year; only half of democratic countries outside the Union voted with it most of the time. For the Bertelsmann Foundation, she worked in Brussels on the subjects of European Foreign Affairs and European answers to the banking crisis.

Brantner was a couple with former Green Party politician Boris Palmer until 2013. The couple have a child born in May 2010.