Ernst Bartholomé

Ernst Bartholomé was born in 1940. The notices of his death and the standard lists of office holders give that year, but they do not publish a full date or place of birth, nor details of his parents, schooling or private family life. Those facts have not been set out in the publicly available reports used for this page.

Bartholomé was a member of the Christian Democratic Union. In 1983 he became Landrat of the Landkreis Ludwigshafen, succeeding Paul Schädler, who had held the office since the local government reform of 1969. He remained in the post until 2001, a tenure of 18 years, and was in turn succeeded by Werner Schröter of the SPD.

As Landrat he headed the Kreisverwaltung and chaired the Kreistag. The district surrounds Ludwigshafen am Rhein but does not include the city itself, and it covers communities on the Rhine plain such as Schifferstadt, Mutterstadt, Limburgerhof and Römerberg. One of his last documented official appointments was on 26 October 2001.

In 1991 his CDU group entered a coalition with the FDP and the Greens, who held four seats on the Kreistag. The Greens had already spent the previous two years in a coalition with the SPD and the FWG. The new black, yellow and green alliance lasted until 1999 and is widely described as Germany's first Jamaica coalition. Green politicians Willi Tatge and Heinz-Peter Schneider later recalled the partnership as productive and largely harmonious and spoke of Bartholomé with great respect, saying that nature conservation and a careful use of resources had mattered to him and that work on waste disposal had moved forward. They remembered sharper disagreements in social and asylum policy during the wars in the Balkans, and said the district had housed refugees in a decentralised way.

Little about Bartholomé's private life has been made public in the reports of his death. He died in Speyer, the cathedral city just south of the district he had led. Regional newspapers described a long illness but did not disclose further personal details.

Ernst Bartholomé died in Speyer on 6 November 2026 at the age of 86, after a long illness. The Mannheimer Morgen reported the death the same day, in an article by Stephan Alfter, and Ludwigshafen Direkt and other regional outlets followed. The precise medical cause was not made public.

He was 86, which is consistent with the year of birth, 1940, given in public lists of the district's Landräte. No formal statement from his family, and no details of funeral or memorial arrangements, had been widely published in the first reports of his death.

Bartholomé's 18 years as Landrat place him among the longer-serving chief executives of the district that is now the Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis. He is remembered in particular for the Jamaica coalition of 1991 to 1999, an early example in Germany of Christian Democrats governing locally with the Greens and the Free Democrats. Later Green office holders in the district recalled him with respect and pointed to shared work on nature protection and waste disposal. The district itself was renamed the Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis after he had left office, taking effect on 1 January 2004.