Metin Hakverdi

Metin Hakverdi was a Distinguished Visitor at the American-German Institute at Johns Hopkins University during the summer of 2019. He is a Member of the German Bundestag from the Social Democratic Party.

Mr. Hakverdi’s work during this period focuses on issues of structural economic change, equitable transition, and their influence on the political system, voting and democratic institutions. He is concentrating on changes that have affected the energy, steel, and automobile industries in the industrial belt of the United States. Mr. Hakverdi is also assessing future structural changes that will come with advances in automation, digitalization, and globalization as well as the effects of competition.

Mr. Hakverdi will conduct field travel between Detroit and Pittsburgh, where he will conduct interviews with residents of the region on the structural changes of the past, their influence on the population, and their expectations and hopes for the future. Ultimately, these interviews will be made public in Germany, in order to better explain to a German audience the relevance of economic structural changes in the U.S. for an important cross-section of Americans. Many similar structural changes have taken place in German industries as well (coal, shipping/harbors, etc.), so the individual experiences of Americans can contribute to a deeper transatlantic understanding—not only of institutions and national interests, but a sense of a shared destiny in democratic and open societies in times of international competition and turbulence.

Metin Hakverdi has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2013. He went to high school in Simi Valley, California, from 1985-86, studied law at the Christian-Albrecht- University in Kiel and the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and was licensed to practice as a lawyer in 2000. In the Bundestag, he is a member of the Committee for the affairs of the European Union and the Finance Committee. Hakverdi is Chairman of the Working Group on USA/North America within the SPD Parliamentary Group. He is a member of the German-U.S. Parliamentary Friendship Group in the German Bundestag, the Atlantik-Brücke e.V., and Global Bridges e.V. Metin Hakverdi has published numerous papers on the future of work, the liberal order, and populism in academic journals and newspapers.