Andrea Nahles

Andrea Maria Nahles (born 20 June 1970) is a former German politician who has been the director of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) since 2022.

Nahles is best known for having served as leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from April 2018 until June 2019 and the leader of the SPD in the Bundestag from September 2017 until June 2019. She served as a Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and SPD Youth leader. From 2020 to 2022, she was the president of the Federal Posts and Telecommunications Agency.

Nahles is known within the party for criticising Gerhard Schröder's Agenda 2010. In June 2019, in the aftermath of the SPD's result in the 2019 European elections, she announced her resignation as leader of the SPD and as parliamentary leader of the SPD. For the transition period until a new SPD-leader was elected, Manuela Schwesig, Malu Dreyer and Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel acted as her successors. Nahles left the Bundestag on 31 October 2019.

Early life and education

Born in 1970 in Mendig, Rhineland-Palatinate, to a bricklayer and an office clerk, Nahles grew up in the rural Eifel region in West Germany. She finished high school (Abitur) through a continuing education program in 1989. She obtained an MA after studying politics, philosophy and German studies at the University of Bonn for 20 semesters (10 years), during which time she was an assistant to a member of parliament.

In 2004, Nahles began working towards a doctorate in Germanistics. She abandoned her dissertation in 2005 when she returned to the Bundestag. The title of her planned dissertation was "Walter Scott's influence on the development of the historical novel in Germany".