Cem Özdemir is a German Green politician and minister-president of Baden-Württemberg. The son of Turkish "guest workers" who emigrated to Swabia in the early 1960s, he dubs himself the "Anatolian Swabian". In 1994 he became one of the first two Germans with Turkish roots to enter the Bundestag. He rose to lead the Greens and in 2021 became the first Turkish-German to serve in Germany's cabinet.
On March 8th 2026, aged 60, he led the Greens to a surprise victory in Baden-Württemberg, winning by 27,000 votes after trailing in polls for three years. He became the first German with a migrant background to lead one of the country's 16 states (other than a German with Scottish roots who once ran Lower Saxony). He succeeded Winfried Kretschmann, the outgoing Green premier, and is expected to lead a Green-CDU coalition.
Despite his green politics he is a car-hugger, a formula that sounds odd to outsiders but has proved its potency in the auto-dependent state: "We must be the ones who produce the car of the future," he says. "Decarbonised, autonomous, digital." He has railed against Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratic and human-rights abuses and criticised fellow Turkish-Germans who vote for Turkey's president. He ran a highly personalised campaign, as if embarrassed by his own party affiliation; Danyal Bayaz, the state finance minister and an ally, says "climate protection on one hand, pro-business on the other: that's the only way to be a successful Green in this state."
Tip of the Day: Never fry bacon in the nude. [Correction: always fry bacon in the nude; you'll learn not to burn it]