Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party who serves as a member of the German Bundestag and as Parliamentary State Secretary in Chancellor Angela Merkel's third and fourth cabinet. Schwarzelühr-Sutter is an outspoken advocate and expert for sustainable development and nuclear safety, recognized both nationally and internationally.
Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter joined the Social Democratic Party in 1994 and has been a member of the executive board of the SPD party organization for Waldshut since 1995. Since 2001 she has been the chairwoman of the SPD constituency party for the district of Waldshut. She was a member of the municipal council of her home town of Lauchringen from 1999 to the end of 2013. Since 2004 she has also been a member of the district council of the rural district of Waldshut. Since September 2007 she has been a member of the SPD executive board in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and from 2008 to 2009 she headed the national SPD Executive Committee's working group on sustainable mobility. From 1997 to 2005 Schwarzelühr-Sutter worked as an advisor and communications coordinator/strategist for, a member of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament.
In the German federal election of 2005, Schwarzelühr-Sutter was elected to the Bundestag as a party list candidate. In parliament, she has since served on the Committee on Transport, the Committee on Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, and the Committee on Economic Affairs and Technology. By 2007, Schwarzelühr-Sutter was reportedly being groomed by the SPD as a future leader. In the 2009 federal elections, she was placed at number 16 on the party list and narrowly missed re-election to the Bundestag but was automatically re-elected in 2010 as designated successor following the death of Hermann Scheer. Schwarzelühr-Sutter was re-elected in the 2013 federal election. In the negotiations to form a Grand Coalition of the Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the SPD following the elections, she was part of the SPD delegation in the working group on economic policy, led by Ilse Aigner and Hubertus Heil. On 17 December 2013 Schwarzelühr-Sutter was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety in Merkel's third cabinet. In this capacity, she has represented successive ministers Barbara Hendricks and Svenja Schulze in political and parliamentary affairs, particularly in her designated special areas of climate change mitigation, nuclear reactor safety, conservation, and the environment and health. She has led or been a member of German delegations on various topics, including the Small Islands Development Conference for Small Island Developing States, the conference of the treaty states of the Biodiversity Convention, and negotiations on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. She represents Germany at the High-Level Political Forum for Sustainable Development held annually at the United Nations in New York City. In addition, Schwarzelühr-Sutter served as deputy chairwoman of the German-Swiss Parliamentary Friendship Group from 2011 until 2017. In the negotiations to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership following the 2017 federal elections, Schwarzelühr-Sutter was part of the working group on energy, climate protection and the environment, led by Hendricks, Armin Laschet and Georg Nüßlein.
