Annette Widmann-Mauz

Annette Widmann-Mauz is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), born on 13 June 1966 in Tübingen. The Bundestag biography compiled from her own disclosures records that she is Roman Catholic and married, and that after the Abitur she studied political science and law at the University of Tübingen without completing a degree.

She first entered the Bundestag in 1998 on the CDU state list in Baden-Württemberg, in the election in which the sitting CDU member for Tübingen, Claus-Peter Grotz, lost the constituency. From 2002 she stood in the Tübingen constituency and was directly elected at each federal election thereafter. In 2021 she held constituency 290, Tübingen, with 27.0 percent of the first votes, ahead of the candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens on 25.7 percent. In July 2024 she wrote to CDU members in the district that she would not stand in 2025, after 27 years in parliament, because it was time to pass the baton to younger hands.

From 2009 to 2018 she was Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Health. She had been discussed as a possible health minister; when Angela Merkel formed her next government in 2018, Jens Spahn received the health portfolio and Widmann-Mauz became Minister of State for migration, refugees and integration. She held that office at the Federal Chancellery from 2018 until 2021, and posts she held ex officio in that role ended on 8 December 2021.

On 26 September 2015 the Frauen Union, the CDU’s women’s organization, elected her federal chair at its congress in Kassel with 93.2 percent of the votes. She succeeded Maria Böhmer, who stepped down after 14 years and had previously been the federal integration commissioner; Widmann-Mauz had been the Frauen Union’s state chair in Baden-Württemberg. The organization described itself as the CDU’s largest affiliated association, with about 120,000 members. Her Bundestag biography for the 2021–2025 term still listed her as federal chair. In September 2022 a CDU congress in Hanover adopted a binding quota for women on party executives, limited until the end of 2029: one-third of seats on boards from district level in the following year, 40 percent from 2024 and 50 percent from mid-2025, after 559 delegates voted in favour and 409 against.

Early life and education

Family and schooling

Annette Widmann-Mauz was born Annette Widmann on 13 June 1966 in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg. She grew up in Balingen.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung has described her as the daughter of shoe manufacturers. The Munzinger archive, quoting a line from her own website, reports that she grew up in Balingen with her siblings in what she called a Mittelstand household. She is Roman Catholic. In an interview published by the Stuttgarter Zeitung on 18 October 2018, she said her father had been a Protestant Swabian, her mother a Catholic from the Palatinate, and her grandmother from Baden. She called that parental home regionally mixed, including at the table, and said the mix had left her with a great deal of curiosity. Asked whether the saying “Was der Bauer net kennt” applied, she said it had been frowned on at home and that the family tried everything.

Bundestag biographies list her as married but do not name her husband or give a wedding date. In the 2018 interview she said she lived with her husband and her family in the Tübingen constituency, where she had grown up. A 2025 report in the same newspaper placed that household in Balingen and described her husband as an organic farmer. She took the Abitur, the qualification for university entrance, at the Gymnasium Balingen.

Studies in Tübingen

After school she studied political science and law at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. She did not obtain a degree. The biography issued for the 19th Bundestag says she turned entirely to politics before finishing. The Südwest Presse later wrote that she ended the course after eight years without a qualification and became a professional politician.

A 2018 Süddeutsche Zeitung profile said she had wanted to become a judge or a pastor and that she had broken off the law studies. Parliamentary curricula vitae do not record a completed legal qualification or any professional title in law. A Bundestag biography archived from 2009 already listed the Abitur, the two subjects at Tübingen, and the university post, without presenting her as a graduate. The text for the 19th electoral term adds that she turned to politics before the degree, and the entry for the 20th states outright that the studies were without a degree (ohne Abschluss). In 2013, when Der Spiegel reported on a Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung article about members of parliament whose university studies had ended without a degree, it noted that Widmann-Mauz, then a parliamentary state secretary in the health ministry, sent word that she had no time to discuss the subject.

From 1993 to 1998 she was a staff member on the university’s EU project “European Studies Program (ESP)”. Munzinger describes that post as work on a project of the European Commission and states that she did not finish the degree, concentrating instead on political work. She entered the Bundestag in 1998.

Party career in Baden-Württemberg

Junge Union and local offices

Widmann-Mauz joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its youth organization, the Junge Union, in 1984. From 1985 to 1989 she sat on the state executive of the Junge Union in Baden-Württemberg, and from 1986 to 1989 she was its deputy chair. Over the same early period she entered the district executive of the CDU in the Zollernalbkreis: she was a member from 1985 to 2005 and deputy district chair from 1993 to 2005. From 1999 to 2009 she was a member of the district council (Kreistag) of the Zollernalbkreis. From 1991 she was also a member of the state executive of the CDU Baden-Württemberg, the board from which the later deputy chairmanship was drawn.

State party and federal boards

At the state party congress in Böblingen in December 2003, delegates elected her a deputy state chair with 63.2 percent of the vote. Die Welt reported that figure alongside a broader rebuke to the state leadership: Erwin Teufel, state chair since 1991, was returned for a further two years with 76.9 percent, his weakest result in that office, and general secretary Volker Kauder with 75.3 percent. Bundestag biographies, which rest on the member’s own disclosures, date her deputy state chairmanship from 2003 to 2021. She did not stand again at the state congress in Mannheim on 13 November 2021, where Thomas Strobl was confirmed as state chair and Sigmaringen district administrator Stefanie Bürkle succeeded her as a deputy.

Her first election to the federal executive (Bundesvorstand) came at the CDU’s 25th federal party congress, held in Hanover. On 4 December 2012 she was chosen as one of 26 additional members, with 80.84 percent of the vote. At the 31st congress in Hamburg on 7–8 December 2018 she was elected one of seven further members of the narrower presidium (Präsidium). Of 890 valid votes she received 500, or 56.18 percent—the lowest share among seven candidates for seven seats, all of whom passed the required majority of 446—and she accepted the election.

The Baden-Württemberg executive, meeting on 20 December 2021, nominated her to run again for a presidium seat at the digital federal congress of 22 January 2022, and nominated Andreas Jung for a deputy federal chairmanship. Eight candidates stood for seven places. Widmann-Mauz received 434 votes (45.45 percent), the fewest, and was not elected. Karl-Josef Laumann led the poll with 799 votes, just under 84 percent; Jens Spahn was the last candidate returned, with 575 votes (60.21 percent). Ronja Kemmer, also from Baden-Württemberg, entered the presidium after Friedrich Merz, elected party chair the same day, had called for a Junge Union candidacy. The Bundestag biography for the 20th electoral term records membership of the federal executive from 2012 to 2022 and of the presidium from 2018 to 2022.

The federal chairmanship of the Frauen Union, an office Widmann-Mauz held, does not itself confer a voting seat on the federal executive. Under the CDU statute, the chairs of the party’s federal associations attend meetings of the Bundesvorstand in an advisory capacity.

Member of the Bundestag

Elections in the Tübingen constituency

Widmann-Mauz entered the Bundestag in 1998 as a candidate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Baden-Württemberg. She did not hold the Tübingen direct mandate that year. On the territory later numbered as the 2005 constituency, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) took 47.2 percent of the first votes (68,074) to the CDU’s 38.0 percent (54,820), with Alliance 90/The Greens at 4.8 percent; turnout was 85.4 percent. The seat was held by the SPD’s Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who lost it to Widmann-Mauz in 2002. Bundestag records for 1998 list the district as Wahlkreis 194. Because the constituency itself went to the SPD, Widmann-Mauz’s first seat was a list mandate; she has been recorded as a member continuously from 1998.

Map of Bundestag constituency 290 Tübingen, covering the district of Tübingen and adjoining municipalities of the Zollernalb district.

The district covers the whole of Landkreis Tübingen and, from the Zollernalbkreis, the municipalities of Bisingen, Burladingen, Grosselfingen, Hechingen, Jungingen and Rangendingen. That delimitation was already the legal description of Wahlkreis 291 for the 2005 election, and it is the description of Wahlkreis 290 in the annex to the Federal Elections Act used for later contests. Widmann-Mauz won the direct mandate for the first time on 22 September 2002, in Wahlkreis 291, with 43.4 percent (63,203 first votes) against Däubler-Gmelin’s 40.4 percent (58,832) and 10.3 percent for the Greens. Turnout was 83.1 percent. She defended Wahlkreis 291 in 2005 with 42.9 percent (62,391) to the SPD’s 38.2 percent (55,513); the Greens had 9.8 percent, and turnout was 80.9 percent.

From the 2009 election the same area was numbered Wahlkreis 290. Widmann-Mauz’s first-vote share fell to 38.9 percent (55,188), still ahead of the Greens on 21.6 percent and the SPD on 20.1 percent, with turnout at 75.9 percent. In 2013 the CDU share rose to 46.9 percent (69,354), its highest in this series, against 20.4 percent for the SPD and 16.5 percent for the Greens; turnout was 77.5 percent. In 2017 she held the seat with 35.7 percent (56,446). The Greens, on 19.1 percent (30,197), moved ahead of the SPD on 17.3 percent, and turnout was 81.3 percent.

The 2021 contest in Wahlkreis 290 was the narrowest of her direct wins. Of 198,791 eligible voters, 80.9 percent cast a ballot. Widmann-Mauz received 43,024 first votes (27.0 percent), 2,046 ahead of Christian Kühn of Alliance 90/The Greens, who had 40,978 (25.7 percent). The SPD followed on 18.2 percent. On second votes the Greens led the constituency with 23.4 percent, ahead of the CDU on 21.8 percent and the SPD on 20.4 percent. It was her sixth consecutive direct mandate. She announced in July 2024 that she would not stand in the 2025 federal election. Her membership ended with the 20th electoral term, when the 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025.

Committees and group offices

Inside the CDU/CSU Bundestag group she chaired the Gruppe der Frauen, the group of the parliamentary party’s women members, from 2000 until December 2005, and she sat on the group’s executive (Fraktionsvorstand) from 2000 to 2009. From 2001 to 2002 she was the group’s commissioner for consumer protection and food safety. From 2002 to 2009 she was its health-policy spokesperson, and from 2005 to 2009 she also chaired its health working group. During the 16th term she was a full member of the Health Committee and a substitute member of the Finance Committee.

She was also used in coalition talks. After the 2009 election she was a CDU member of the health-and-care working group, which was led for the Union by Ursula von der Leyen and for the Free Democratic Party by Philipp Rösler. In the 2013 negotiations with the SPD, the Union side of the health talks was led by Jens Spahn; Widmann-Mauz, then a parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Health, was assigned to family policy instead.

In the 20th Bundestag, after the direct mandate of 2021, the parliamentary biography lists her as a full member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and of the Committee on Culture and Media. The same record still shows the mandate as a direct seat for Baden-Württemberg’s Wahlkreis 290, Tübingen.

Health policy

Spokesperson for the CDU/CSU group

From 2002 to 2009 Annette Widmann-Mauz was health-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, and from 2005 to 2009 she also chaired the group’s working group on health. In the grand coalition under Angela Merkel, with Ulla Schmidt of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as federal health minister, she was a principal Union speaker on statutory health insurance.

The main bill was the Act to Strengthen Competition in Statutory Health Insurance. In the final debate on 2 February 2007 she blamed budgets, opaque billing and wage-only contributions for waiting lists, a shortage of doctors in rural areas and eastern Germany, and rationing that hit the sick first. The remedy she defended was a health fund: one income-related contribution, morbidity-adjusted allocations to the sickness funds, and fund-specific extra contributions or bonuses. The bill also widened optional tariffs and replaced physician budgets with a euro fee schedule. She rejected Free Democratic Party (FDP) warnings of nationalization. The Bundestag passed it that day by 378 votes to 206, with eight abstentions. Martina Bunge of Die Linke, chair of the Health Committee, said the opposition had been left only hours to read a large set of amendments.

Parliamentary State Secretary

In the CDU/CSU–FDP cabinet she became Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health, a political deputy’s post rather than the minister’s, and held it from 2009 until March 2018. She served under Philipp Rösler (FDP) and then under Daniel Bahr, sworn in as health minister on 12 May 2011 when Rösler moved to the economics ministry, and from 17 December 2013 under Hermann Gröhe of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Rolf Schwanitz (SPD) had been a parliamentary state secretary there in the previous cabinet; Thomas Gebhart was appointed to the post in March 2018.

Long-term care dominated the statutes of those years. On 29 June 2012 the Bundestag passed the Care Realignment Act with the coalition’s votes. Bahr said people with dementia who had drawn little from long-term care insurance would receive benefits for the first time, and that families could agree time-based contracts with outpatient services. At care level II the monthly care allowance rose by 85 euros to 525 euros. The contribution was to rise by 0.1 percentage points from 1 January 2013, and a subsidy of five euros a month was introduced for private supplementary policies, known as Pflege-Bahr. Elke Ferner (SPD) said a new definition of need for care had again been postponed; Elisabeth Scharfenberg of Alliance 90/The Greens called the subsidy a step out of solidarity. In May 2013 Widmann-Mauz told the sisterhoods of the German Red Cross that the benefit changes, with training and staffing measures, were the government’s answer to demographic pressure on nursing.

Under Gröhe the coalition passed two further acts. On 17 October 2014 the Bundestag adopted the First Act to Strengthen Long-term Care against the opposition: benefits rose, including a one-off four percent increase from 2015, and the contribution went up by 0.3 points to 2.35 percent (2.6 percent for people without children). A tenth of a point was to feed a demographic reserve for about twenty years, to be drawn from 2035. Opposition speakers called that a diversion of contributions onto financial markets and the package too small for the shortage of nurses.

The Second Act, passed on 13 November 2015 by the Union and the SPD — Die Linke voted no and the Greens abstained — replaced three care levels with five grades measured by independence, not by a split between physical and cognitive impairment, from 2017. The government expected up to 500,000 more beneficiaries and raised the contribution by another 0.2 points, to 2.55 percent (2.8 percent without children). Gröhe called equal access for about 1.6 million people with dementia a milestone. Critics warned of staff shortages, higher co-payments in lower grades, and financing left unresolved.

Palliative care was the other subject she presented in public. On 4 July 2013 she chaired the opening of a ministry forum on palliative and hospice care and said hospice practice had to move into ordinary provision. At the first reading of the Hospice and Palliative Care Act on 17 June 2015 she spoke for the government and separated the bill from assisted suicide: the aim, she said, was to ease fear and pain, at home, in a hospice, a hospital or a nursing home.

The next day, on a free vote, she was among the sponsors of the cross-party bill of Michael Brand, Kerstin Griese and others that made it a crime to assist suicide on a repeated, organized basis, as section 217 of the Criminal Code. The Bundestag passed it by 360 votes to 233, with nine abstentions. Help that was not organized for repetition, including by relatives or by a doctor in a single case, stayed outside the offence; the maximum penalty was three years’ imprisonment. On 26 February 2020 the Federal Constitutional Court struck section 217 down. The general right of personality, it held, includes a right to a self-determined death and to seek help from others, and the ban left no practical room for that freedom.

In February 2018, during talks on another grand coalition, the dental magazine zm reported that Widmann-Mauz was expected to succeed Gröhe as health minister, with Gröhe moving to education. Later that month Der Spiegel, citing Bild am Sonntag, reported that Merkel would instead nominate Jens Spahn for the ministry and give Widmann-Mauz a minister-of-state post in the chancellery. Spahn was appointed health minister on 14 March 2018; Gebhart received his warrant as parliamentary state secretary the next day.

Migration, refugees and integration

Appointment and mandate

On 14 March 2018, in Angela Merkel’s fourth cabinet, Annette Widmann-Mauz of the CDU became Minister of State at the Federal Chancellery and Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, succeeding Aydan Özoğuz of the SPD. The Bundestag records the office through 2021; posts held by virtue of it ended on 8 December 2021. Reem Alabali-Radovan (SPD) then became commissioner under Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

She came from health policy, not migration. State secretary in the health ministry since 2009, she had hoped, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, to become health minister; Merkel instead gave her a brief the paper called often belittled. Replacing a predecessor of Turkish origin with a Swabian CDU politician who had no migration biography prompted the question Die Zeit later recorded: “What does she have to do with the subject?” Migrant organisations were sceptical—“A Swabian woman with no migration story, and from the CDU—what was anyone supposed to expect from her?” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s account. By September 2018 Ferda Ataman, of Neue deutsche Organisationen, said Widmann-Mauz wanted to move the issues forward and was an open contact, and hoped she would also press colleagues on participation.

National Action Plan and the expert commission

The programme she coordinated was the National Action Plan on Integration (Nationaler Aktionsplan Integration). The government described about 120 measures, prepared with some 300 partners from the Federation, the Länder, municipalities, business, civil society and 75 migrant organisations, in five phases: before immigration (“steering expectations, giving orientation”); initial integration (“making arrival easier, conveying values”); incorporation (“enabling participation, demanding and supporting performance”); growing together (“shaping diversity, securing unity”); and cohesion (“strengthening cohesion, shaping the future”).

Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the foreground, and Integration Commissioner Annette Widmann-Mauz at an integration summit in the Federal Chancellery.

A cabinet declaration on phase I, adopted on 22 January 2020, covered pre-departure language courses and information. Declarations on phases II and III, adopted on 29 July 2020, stressed German courses after arrival, recognition of qualifications, training, labour-market access and early-childhood education. Phases I to III were presented at integration summits on 2 March and 19 October 2020. The 13th summit, held digitally on 9 March 2021 under Merkel, closed phases IV and V, on diversity in sport, health, housing, media and culture, and on naturalisation, political participation and discrimination. Merkel said “We are all Germany.” Widmann-Mauz said Germany needed everyone’s skills as a country of immigration, and that the pandemic must not reverse earlier gains. About 220,000 integration-course participants were interrupted; the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees put 40 million euros into online teaching. She also took reporters to firms employing refugees in order, she said, to “make invisible integration visible.”

The 2018 coalition agreement of the CDU, the CSU and the SPD stated that steerable immigration—war refugees, temporary protection, family reunification, relocation and resettlement, net of returns, and excluding labour migration—would not exceed 180,000 to 220,000 a year, without touching asylum or the Geneva Refugee Convention. It also promised a commission on the “framework conditions of the capacity to integrate” (Integrationsfähigkeit), reporting to the Bundestag. The cabinet named 25 members in January 2019. Chaired by Derya Çağlar and Ashok Sridharan and accompanied by Widmann-Mauz, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and Labour Minister Hubertus Heil, it sat from 20 February 2019 and on 20 January 2021 presented Gemeinsam die Einwanderungsgesellschaft gestalten. The members set the term Integrationsfähigkeit aside as a “narrowing”: a fixed number of people a society can integrate cannot, they wrote, be measured, because integration depends on many factors and has to be shaped.

They recommended dropping Migrationshintergrund in official statistics, a label the majority called stigmatising, and counting “immigrants and their (direct) descendants”: people who had themselves immigrated since 1950, or both of whose parents had. One immigrant parent would no longer be enough. For 2018 that definition covered 18.1 million people, about 2.7 million fewer than the previous 20.8 million. Barbara John, Susanne Worbs, Daniel Thym and Stefan Löwl filed dissenting or qualifying statements. At the handover Widmann-Mauz said the old term now mixed groups too different to be informative, and called for an understanding of being German that accepted diversity and immigration histories while respecting shared rules and the Basic Law.

CDU interior politician Christoph de Vries told Die Welt that the commission had “deliberately ignored” a mandate to show how much immigration Germany could permanently bear, which he tied to a coalition “target corridor” of at most 220,000 a year. Integration, he objected, was cast as a duty of the state and the majority, not of migrants, while deficits in employment, education and delinquency were set aside; Christoph Bernstiel and Marian Wendt likewise criticised the focus on terminology. Sociologist Ruud Koopmans said the commission followed a fashion of debating labels that would not change the underlying facts, and that lower employment and higher average offending in the migrant population were the prior issue. Ali Ertan Toprak, a CDU member and president of the Federal Working Group of Immigrant Associations, called the report a “huge disappointment” and said integration could succeed only with the receiving society, not against it.

Coalition disputes

Differences with Seehofer and the CSU appeared within days. In a Rheinische Post interview published on 19 March 2018 she said she did not particularly like Leitkultur, long used in CSU argument, “because it does not get us any further.” She wanted a concrete discussion of equality of women and men, freedom of religion, freedom of opinion and non-violence, with the Basic Law and unwritten social expectations as the basis.

Her line on a “lane change” (Spurwechsel) for rejected but employed asylum seekers shifted during 2018. In March she backed courses and work for people with a tolerated stay (Duldung), including a wider “three plus two” apprenticeship rule, but opposed mixing asylum with skilled recruitment or a general change of status. By September the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that she wanted a limited lane change for people who worked and supported themselves, with a cutoff for later arrivals; Seehofer feared a pull effect. On 1 October 2018 he said points drafted with Heil were not a Spurwechsel: tolerated people who could not be removed might work, but anyone obliged to leave should leave. Der Spiegel called the next day’s coalition deal only “a trace of a lane change.”

In April 2020 she pressed Seehofer to carry out a pledge on children in camps in Greece. Ten states in a “coalition of the willing” had agreed at the start of March to take about 1,600 particularly vulnerable people; none had yet left. She said the waiting had to end, that the European Union should at least move people to states still able to receive them during the pandemic, and that Germany could test the children and quarantine them. The government, she said, meant above all to take sick children with their families, with girls under 14 given particular weight.

Frauen Union and gender equality

Leadership of the Women’s Union

Widmann-Mauz chaired the Frauen Union in Baden-Württemberg from 1995 to 2015. On 26 September 2015 its federal delegates’ congress in Kassel elected her federal chair with 93.2 percent, succeeding Maria Böhmer, who after 14 years did not stand. Before about 400 delegates she set a target of “one percent more women a year,” arguing that the association—on its own account the largest CDU grouping, with about 120,000 members—had to recruit younger women.

At the 33rd federal delegates’ congress in September 2019, while she was also the federal integration commissioner, delegates confirmed her with 93.3 percent and unanimously demanded lists half filled by women and an electoral law that would move the Bundestag toward equal participation.

At the CDU’s digital federal congress in January 2022, eight candidates stood for seven ordinary presidium seats. Widmann-Mauz, nominated by Baden-Württemberg and the Frauen Union and a presidium member since 2018, finished last with 434 votes (45.45 percent) and was not returned. Beforehand, Tagesschau reported that the Junge Union had nominated Ronja Kemmer, from her own state, and read that as a slight against her and the quota. A statute change needed an in-person congress, so a plan for 50 percent from 2025 was postponed while opponents hoped the new chairman, Friedrich Merz, would dilute it. Karin Prien said leaving the Frauen Union chair off the presidium would be “a fatal signal.” Kemmer was elected; Widmann-Mauz was not.

She remained federal chair until 24 May 2025, when she did not run at the congress in Reutlingen. Health minister Nina Warken won a contested vote with 62.1 percent against Ina Scharrenbach, North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister for homeland, local government, building and digitalization, on 37.4 percent. Delegates then elected Widmann-Mauz honorary chair, the third after Rita Süssmuth and Böhmer. Local reporting recorded twenty years at the head of the state organization and ten in the federal office, and her decision to leave active party politics. The chair sits ex officio on the CDU federal executive; Spiegel put membership at about 95,000.

Quotas in business and in the CDU

The company-board quota was settled in the 2013 coalition talks, where she led the Union side of the family working group opposite Manuela Schwesig of the SPD. From 2016, supervisory boards of listed and fully codetermined companies were to have at least 30 percent of each sex when seats were filled, and large firms were from 2015 to set binding targets for supervisory boards, executive boards and upper management. She called it a “cultural change inside the companies,” while rejecting a rigid quota for executive boards as neither sensible nor constitutionally possible. In September 2013, twelve years after a voluntary pledge, women held 11.7 percent of leading posts in large firms. On 6 March 2015 the Bundestag passed the Gesetz für die gleichberechtigte Teilhabe von Frauen und Männern an Führungspositionen in der Privatwirtschaft und im öffentlichen Dienst; the opposition abstained. From 2016 the 30 percent rule, with an empty seat if missed, covered about 108 fully codetermined listed companies, and about 3,500 further firms had to publish targets; federal appointments were to reach 50 percent in 2018.

Inside the CDU only a non-binding quorum had applied. On 9 September 2022 the federal congress in Hanover adopted Merz’s compromise by 559 votes to 409, with 11 abstentions—about 57 percent—and limited it until the end of 2029. The statute, noting that decision, sets the women’s share in multi-seat board elections from district level upward at one third from 1 January 2023, 40 percent from 1 January 2024 and 50 percent from 1 July 2025. If fewer women stand, their number sets the quota, and seats still needed may stay empty. Lists are to include at least one woman in every three places and, from 1 July 2025, two further women in the first ten. On 1 January 2030 the pre-2023 wording returns automatically.

Younger delegates and Junge Union motions called a quota symbolic politics and a forced redistribution of offices, and said the real barrier was combining family life with party work. Minister-presidents Hendrik Wüst and Daniel Günther, with Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, argued for it. Merz, long opposed, said nothing else had worked; he noted that the rule applied only if enough women ran, and that more than half of voters were women. Tagesschau described his line as a time-limited quota adopted “if nothing better occurs to us.” The opponents did not turn the vote; conservatives and the Junge Union left disappointed.

After the 2025 election, Tagesschau put women at about 23.1 percent of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group, against 32.4 percent of the house. Most CDU seats came from constituencies, where the party nominated 60 women out of 252, and the CSU 12 out of 47 in Bavaria, so the list rule did not raise the group’s share.

In Reutlingen that May, Widmann-Mauz separated those results from posts that decide. Women, she said, were 44 percent of the presidium, the federal executive and the new cabinet—“that can be shown”—but only four of 20 members of the parliamentary group’s managing executive, and four of 23 working-group chairs and spokespersons. “If the coalition committee is supposed to be the heart and brain of the federal government, it is still missing something essential: women,” she said. Spiegel counted ten men and eight women in the cabinet, men in finance, interior, defence and the foreign ministry, ten men and one woman on the coalition committee, and an all-male inner circle in the chancellery. She said the Frauen Union was “not a cheerleading squad in the political Bundesliga.”

Political positions and public controversies

Marriage and family policy

On 30 June 2017 the Bundestag voted by roll call on a Bundesrat bill opening civil marriage to same-sex couples (“Ehe für alle”). It passed by 393 votes to 226, with four abstentions. In the CDU/CSU, 75 members voted yes and 225 voted no; all four abstentions were from that group. Chancellor Angela Merkel voted no. Widmann-Mauz, the CDU member for Tübingen, voted no and filed a written explanation.

She wrote that she supported full legal equality for registered life partnerships, including adoption after an individual check of the child’s welfare, and their protection beside marriage under Article 6 of the Basic Law. Children, she said, could find a caring environment in such partnerships. She rejected the bill anyway. Citing the Federal Constitutional Court, she argued that the difference of sex was an essential feature of marriage, and that only a man and a woman could conceive a child, so the term could not be redefined by ordinary statute without a constitutional amendment. “Ehe für alle,” she added, was explicitly outside the coalition agreement with the SPD; she called the late push for a vote a calculated breach of trust.

The 2018 Christmas card

In December 2018, while Widmann-Mauz was federal integration commissioner, two greetings circulated. A card from her office to journalists read “Egal woran Sie glauben … wir wünschen Ihnen eine besinnliche Zeit und einen guten Start ins neue Jahr” and did not use the word Weihnachten. The Frankfurter Rundschau, which said it had seen the other card, reported that this version went to about 100 journalists, while a separate greeting to roughly 1,000 addressees wished them “ein friedvolles Weihnachtsfest.”

Armin Laschet, then minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, called a Christmas greeting “a pure matter of course” and the omission wrong. He said he congratulated Muslims specifically at Ramadan and Jewish organisations at their new year, not with “whatever you believe.” Sevim Dağdelen of Die Linke said a misunderstood tolerance was making Christmas invisible. The psychologist Ahmad Mansour said the integration commissioner in particular should be able to congratulate Christians; CDU members Sylvia Pantel and Marc Henrichmann argued that integration required standing by one’s own values. Government spokesman Steffen Seibert replied that she kept Christmas “as the high Christian celebration that it is,” and that her personal card showed it. Earlier in 2018 she had wished Muslims a “blessed and reflective” Ramadan fast and had greeted Jews with “Chanukka Sameach” for Hanukkah. After the criticism she posted “Fröhliche Weihnachten allen in Deutschland!”

Other disputes

In 2008, on a Bundestag health-committee trip to the United States, she used a wheelchair because of a broken foot. Die Welt, citing Spiegel, reported that consul general Rolf Schütte in San Francisco had complained of a light official programme and a cancelled meeting with Californian politicians in favour of sightseeing. Committee secretary Randolph Krüger was reported to have said, “Wir brauchen einen Neger, der den Rollstuhl schiebt,” and did not rule the remark out. Widmann-Mauz said it was “not the standard we are used to.”

In May 2019, after Austria restricted head coverings in primary schools, she called it “absurd” for young girls to wear a headscarf and said measures “from a conversation with the parents to a ban” should be examined. Der Spiegel noted that the Bundestag research service had thought a general ban likely unconstitutional, and reported objections citing religious freedom. In June 2020 she urged replacing Rasse in Article 3 with a reference to racism, telling the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland that “language shapes our thinking” and that the text should not take “the perpetrators’ view.” Union interior spokesman Mathias Middelberg called a change symbolic.

In March 2021 the Kurdish Community in Germany sued the federal government, saying pandemic guidance tied to the integration commissioner’s office was missing in Kurdish and was mostly online. The health ministry said basic information had been available in 22 languages, including Kurdish, since June 2020. In November 2018, after an alleged rape in Freiburg im Breisgau involving mostly Syrian suspects, she demanded arrival courses on sexuality and equality, with “zero tolerance” of sexual abuse, and mentors drawn from men already living in Germany. Pro Asyl opposed the demand.

On 31 January 2025 the CDU/CSU Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz on irregular migration failed, 338 to 349. The AfD voted yes. The CDU/CSU cast 184 yes votes and none against; 12 members, including Widmann-Mauz, did not vote, and none formally abstained. She said she accepted the substance but would not help pass a bill that needed the AfD, a party she called in part confirmed right-wing extremist, citing Germany’s history and democracy. She had withheld her vote the same way earlier that week and criticised the SPD and the Greens for refusing a compromise.

After the chancellery

Final Bundestag term

Widmann-Mauz sat in the 20th Bundestag with a direct mandate for constituency 290, Tübingen. At the 2021 federal election the Christian Democratic Union took 27.0 percent of the first votes there (43,024), 8.7 points fewer than in 2017, and won the constituency. On 25 October 2021, the day before the new Bundestag met, she withdrew her candidacy for the vice-presidency available to the CDU/CSU group; Monika Grütters and parliamentary business manager Michael Grosse-Brömer also stood down. Der Spiegel reported that the withdrawals headed off a contested vote, and group chairman Ralph Brinkhaus called the nominee who emerged, Yvonne Magwas, a "good compromise".

Her term as minister of state, and the ex officio seats tied to the integration portfolio, are recorded as ending on 8 December 2021. She remained a member. From the committees' constitutive meetings on 15 December 2021 she was a full member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and of the Committee on Culture and Media.

In a letter to CDU members in the constituency, sent on the evening of 17 July 2024, she said she would not stand at the next federal election. She wrote that the decision had not been easy, but that she was convinced "that right now is the right moment to pass the baton to younger hands," and that she wanted a new path, "into the open, full of curiosity and confidence." She said she would continue "with full strength" until an election then expected in September 2025. The election was held on 23 February 2025, with Christoph Naser as the CDU candidate in the Tübingen constituency. The 20th electoral term ended on 25 March 2025, when the 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting.

Honors and civic roles

On 22 April 2023 Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann conferred the Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg on Widmann-Mauz and 22 other people in the Knights' Hall of Mannheim Palace.

Annette Widmann-Mauz and Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann hold the certificate for the Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg.

The state government's citation said she had been a Bundestag member for 25 years, chaired the Frauen Union, had spent nine years as parliamentary state secretary to the federal health minister and had last been minister of state in the Chancellery. It stated that she had helped shape health policy in Germany and politics in Baden-Württemberg, and that as a native of Tübingen she had not lost sight of her home region, of what made for living together, or of voluntary work. It also cited patronages of initiatives for children with cancer and for children in intensive care, her role at the German Hospice and Palliative Foundation, and a political sponsorship which the citation said had brought about the release of a young demonstrator in Iran.

The archived Bundestag biography for the 20th term, based on the member's disclosures, lists her on the foundation council of the Jewish Museum Berlin and of the Deutsche Hospiz- und Palliativstiftung, and on the boards of trustees of the Max Planck Society and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The same text names her as patron of the Bundesverband Niere in Mainz, of the Arche Intensivkinder association in Kusterdingen, which supports housing for children on long-term ventilation, and of Kinder brauchen Frieden in Hechingen.

On 24 May 2025 the Frauen Union's federal delegates' conference in Reutlingen elected Nina Warken chair after Widmann-Mauz, in the post for ten years, did not stand again, and elected Widmann-Mauz honorary chair. The company-data service Implisense, drawing on the commercial register, lists CORIVIUS GmbH (Amtsgericht München, HRB 306357; in the register since 24 September 2025; seat in Seehausen am Staffelsee) with Annette Widmann-Mauz and Martin Mauz as managing directors. Its registered object is consulting on economic, strategic and political matters, services linked to advisory and supervisory boards, and the holding of participations.