The FDP member of the Bundestag Bijan Djir-Sarai is an experienced parliamentarian. But his speech at the Epiphany meeting of the FDP on Thursday in Stuttgart will mark a whole new chapter in his political career. Djir-Sarai is to be elected General Secretary at the next party conference and replace Volker Wissing, who is now in the cabinet as Minister of Transport.
Party leader Christian Lindner swaps one confidante for another: Djir-Sarai, like Christian Lindner, comes from the state association of North Rhine-Westphalia, they have known each other for a long time. But the “funny Rhinelander” as he calls himself, is intended for more. The native Tehran should bring more diversity to the liberals. Without a quota, of course.
The 45-year-old is not considered a harassment, in interviews he chooses his words carefully – and is sometimes quite funny. This is especially noticeable to those who bother him with rather stupid questions due to his non-German roots. According to his own accounts, when asked what he felt when he was naturalized, he replied that when he received the certificate, he immediately felt an emerging lactose intolerance.
Like his colleague from the Greens, Omid Nouripour, he names Cem Özdemir as a role model for his path into politics. When he heard him speak to him in the Bundestag, it became clear to him that you don’t have to be blond and blue-eyed to go into politics. However, his path then led him to the liberals, for whom he has already made politics on many levels, also at the same time. After his election to the Bundestag from 2009 to 2014, he remained deputy district administrator in the Rhein-Kreis Neuss. He later came to work there as a department head in the district administration when the FDP was thrown out of the Bundestag in 2013. Since 2017 he has been back in the Bundestag and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee again. Soon he will have to take care of the FDP’s domestic policy.
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