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| This article is part of a series on the politics and government of Germany |
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| Foreign relations |
State elections were held in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen on 13 May 2007 to elect the Bürgerschaft (city and state legislature).
Bremen, officially the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, is the smallest and least populous of Germany's 16 states. A more informal name, but used in some official contexts, is Land Bremen.
The Bremische Bürgerschaft is the legislative branch of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in Germany. The state parliament elects the members of the Senate (executive), exercises oversight of the executive, and passes legislation. It currently consists of 83 members from eight parties. The current majority is a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Alliance '90/The Greens, supporting Mayor and Senate president Carsten Sieling. The 68 delegates of the city of Bremen also form the Stadtbürgerschaft, while Bremerhaven has its own local parliament.
After the elections, Jens Böhrnsen, the SPD prime minister, was able to pick his future coalition partner. He could either continue the grand coalition with the CDU (since 1995) or form a red-green coalition (SPD and Greens). Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) was said to be annoyed that Böhrnsen hadn't opted for either a grand coalition or a red-green coalition before the election; she claimed that he "had to say how it should go on" with Bremen. [ permanent dead link ]. This election is thought to be a landmark for The Left Party.PDS since it is their first success on state level in the former West. Negotiations on a red-green government began after the elections and were successfully concluded on 16 June 2007, resulting in the first red-green state government since the red-green coalition ended on the federal level.
Jens Böhrnsen is a German politician of the SPD. From 2005 to 2015, he has served as the President of the Senate and Mayor of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, that is, the head of government of the city-state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. From 1 November 2009 until 31 October 2010 he was President of the Bundesrat and ex officio deputy to the President of Germany. Because of that he was acting head of state of Germany after the resignation of President Horst Köhler on 31 May 2010 and before the election of Christian Wulff as Köhler's successor on 30 June 2010. After voting for the SPD losses of more than five percentage points in the state election on May 10, 2015 Böhrnsen declared the next day that he would retire as head of government. His successor in the office of the Bremen government was Carsten Sieling, who was officially nominated on 18 May 2015 by the Bremen SPD.
West Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, was a country in Central Europe that existed from 1949 to 1990, when the western portion of Germany was part of the Western bloc during the Cold War. It was created during the Allied occupation of Germany in 1949 after World War II, established from eleven states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Its capital was the city of Bonn.
