Benning became a member of the CDU in 2001. She has been active in local politics since 2002 and was a directly elected member of the city council of Münster from 2004 to 2013. From 2004 to 2012 she was Deputy Chair of the CDU faction in the Münster Council, from 2008 to 2013 planning spokeswoman for the CDU Council faction. In the 2013 elections, Benning ran for the direct mandate in the constituency of Münster, which she won with 38.8% of the first votes. In the Bundestag, she is a member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety. On the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment, she serves as her parliamentary group’s rapporteur on STEM education and the Deutschlandstipendium scholarship scheme. She is also a member of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development. In addition to her committee assignments, Benning is a deputy member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In this capacity, she serves on the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development as well as on the Sub-Committee on Media and Information Society. In 2019, she was the Assembly’s rapporteur on sustainable urban development. Benning is also a member of the German-French Parliamentary Friendship Group and the non-partisan Europa-Union Deutschland, which is committed to a federal Europe and the European unification process. Within the CDU/CSUparliamentary group, Benning belongs to the Münsterland Circle which brings together all parliamentarians from the eponymous region in Westphalia; it also includes Anja Karliczek and Jens Spahn, among others.
In June 2017, Benning voted against her parliamentary group’s majority and in favor of Germany’s introduction of same-sex marriage. Ahead of the Christian Democrats’ leadership election in 2018, Benning publicly endorsed Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to succeed Angela Merkel as the party’s chair. In 2019, she joined 14 members of her parliamentary group who, in an open letter, called for the party to rally around Merkel and Kramp-Karrenbauer amid criticism voiced by conservatives Friedrich Merz and Roland Koch.
Personal life
Benning is married and has two daughters and two sons. From 1990 until 1993, the family lived in Paris. In 2008, she survived cancer. In her free time, Benning is a beekeeper.
