Vice President
Member of the German Bundestag retired
“If the EMA didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.”
Gabriele Groneberg was born in Essen in 1955. After many years of experience as a foreign language secretary with stays abroad in several countries in North Africa and the Middle East, she joined the SPD in her adopted home of Cloppenburg in 1988, where she worked as an employee of the then Bundestag member Günter Graf and as the head of the regional office of her party.
Ms. Groneberg was previously elected as a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament for the first time in 1996. After two electoral terms, she was elected to the German Bundestag in 2002, where she held a mandate until September 2017. As a member of the German Bundestag, Ms. Groneberg was a member of the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development and a secretary. For the SPD parliamentary group, she also acted as deputy spokeswoman for the working group for economic cooperation and development, where she was responsible for the topics of energy, environment and climate as well as for the countries of the Middle East, North and West Africa and the Sahel zone as well as Sudan.
As a member of the Committee for the Affairs of the European Union, Ms. Groneberg dealt with the priorities of energy, agriculture and data protection. In addition, she was a member of the parliamentary groups for Eastern Africa and the Maghreb States, as well as deputy chairman of the parliamentary group for Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East. For the SPD working group Europe, she acted as rapporteur on issues such as development cooperation and EU-Africa relations.
Ms. Groneberg has been a member of the EMA Executive Committee since 2014. In this function, she actively helped shape and support numerous EMA activities in Germany and the Mediterranean and the Middle East regions. For Ms. Groneberg, associations like the EMA are an essential aspect of social engagement: “Comprehensive and on an equal footing – this is how the EMA works for specific projects with the Arab countries. This valuable work deserves every measure of support. “