# Bernd Baumann

# Bernd Baumann

Bernd Baumann (born 31 January 1958 in Wanne-Eickel, which in 1975 was united with Herne in North Rhine-Westphalia) is a German economist and a politician of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany (AfD). He has been a member of the Bundestag since October 2017, returned on the party's state list in Hamburg, and throughout that time the AfD parliamentary group's first parliamentary managing director (Erster Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer). In the current term he is an ordinary member of the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) and of the Interior Committee, and of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss), and he is the AfD's candidate in the Hamburg-Altona constituency.

The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own disclosures, lists his occupation as Kaufmann (businessman) and records that he is non-denominational and married. He attended school and a Gymnasium in Bochum, served basic military service, studied economics and then worked as a university assistant at the Seminar for Economic Policy at the Ruhr University Bochum. His doctoral thesis, *Offene Gesellschaft, Marktprozess und Staatsaufgaben*, appeared in 1993 with Nomos as a 413-page volume in the series Wirtschaftsrecht und Wirtschaftspolitik. From 1989 he was assistant to the chief executive of a media company, then held management and editorial posts at media companies in Munich and Hamburg, and later worked freelance in investor relations.

He joined the Hamburg AfD in 2013 and became district chairman in Altona. In 2014 he entered the Altona district assembly, and in 2015 the Hamburg Parliament, where he was deputy chairman of the AfD group, its spokesman on the committees for the economy and for labour, social affairs and integration, and a deputy member of the interior committee. In 2016 he became chairman of that group, and he has sat on the state executive of the Hamburg party since 2015.

At the 2025 federal election he again stood in Hamburg-Altona and received 11,911 first votes (7.6 percent), while the AfD took 10.9 percent of second votes across Hamburg. In one of his first Bundestag speeches, in November 2017, he cited figures from the International Organization for Migration to argue that security in large parts of Syria had improved and that many hundreds of thousands of people had gone back; the *Süddeutsche Zeitung* reported that those figures mostly counted people displaced inside Syria and that the organization did not describe the returns as necessarily voluntary, safe or sustainable. In the night of 3 November 2025 a car registered to his wife was set on fire outside their house in Hamburg-Othmarschen; the fire spread to three other cars and nobody was hurt, and state-protection police classified it as left-wing politically motivated arson after treating a claim of responsibility as authentic.

## Early life and education

### Childhood and schooling

Bernd Baumann was born on 31 January 1958 in Wanne-Eickel, then an independent city in the Ruhr in North Rhine-Westphalia. The offices (*Ämter*) of Wanne and Eickel had been joined on 1 April 1926 to form that city, and the former *Amtshaus* in Wanne became its town hall; bomb damage from the Second World War was repaired after 1945. On 17 October 1973 Herne and Wanne-Eickel signed a territorial-change agreement for a union on 1 January 1975, after 32 other models had been discussed and dropped. The reorganization law had its third reading on 8 May 1974, and the two cities became one city of Herne at the start of 1975, when Baumann was 16. The city of Herne records that not everyone in Wanne-Eickel accepted the merger, which its own history pages call a *Städte-Ehe*. Parliamentary biographies nevertheless continue to give the birthplace as Wanne-Eickel rather than Herne.

*The town hall of Wanne-Eickel in the 1970s, before the city was merged into Herne.*

Published accounts say little about his family or the schools he attended. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own statements, records that he went to school and a *Gymnasium* in Bochum, that he is non-denominational, and that he is married. *Kürschners Volkshandbuch* draws its biographies from direct inquiries to members, who are asked to check the entries; the edition standing as of 8 June 2026 adds that he took the *Abitur* at a *Gymnasium* in Bochum. Neither source names the school, his parents, or a spouse, and no wedding date is given.

### Military service and university

After the *Abitur* he performed compulsory military service in the Bundeswehr. The Bundestag text calls that service *Grundwehrdienst*; *Kürschner* uses the broader term *Wehrpflicht*. In a *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* interview of 12 March 2025, Susanne Gaschke put it to him that he had been a conscript in the late 1970s, during the Cold War, when the Eastern bloc was treated as the adversary and the United States as the ally; he answered on the geopolitics of that period without disputing the dating. In an interview on the *funk* channel, published on 12 February 2025 under the title *Kreuzverhör*, he said that he had served and that he had been trained as a gunner (*Richtschütze*) on a Leopard main battle tank. Later in the same conversation he called himself a tank soldier and said he knew, from talking with former crews, how terrible it was to die in a tank. The biographies do not name a unit, a garrison, or the length of his own service. For men conscripted in the Federal Republic, the statutory basic term was 15 months from 1 January 1973 until it was reduced to 12 months on 1 October 1990.

He then studied economics (*Wirtschaftswissenschaften*) at Ruhr University Bochum. The North Rhine-Westphalian parliament decided in July 1961 that the first new university in the Federal Republic would be located in Bochum; the university was inaugurated in June 1965, and the first lectures began that November. *Kürschner* records the degree as *Diplom-Ökonom* and lists him next as a *wissenschaftlicher Assistent* at the university's Seminar für Wirtschaftspolitik. The Bundestag biography uses a different title for that post, *Hochschulassistent* at the Seminar für Wirtschaftspolitik of the University of Bochum, and does not say whether the wording is meant as a formal career grade or as a general description of a research assistantship. Neither source dates the diploma or the assistantship, names a supervisor, or lists other coursework. The German National Library's record of his later book states that the work was also a doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of Bochum in 1991, which independently places that doctorate in Bochum; the argument of the thesis is a separate subject.

## Dissertation and economic ideas

### Doctoral thesis

Bernd Baumann received his doctorate at the Ruhr University Bochum in 1991. His Bundestag biography, drawn from his own information, states that he studied economics and then worked as a *Hochschulassistent* at the university’s Seminar für Wirtschaftspolitik, and it gives the thesis the short title “Offene Gesellschaft, Marktprozess und Staatsaufgaben”. The German National Library records the full title as *Offene Gesellschaft, Marktprozess und Staatsaufgaben: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ökonomischer Theorien zur Erklärung der Funktionsweise offener Sozialsysteme und zur Legitimation staatlichen Handelns in offenen Gesellschaften*, and notes that the 1993 book is at the same time the Bochum dissertation of 1991. Those catalog records name neither the examiners nor a grade.

The subtitle asks what economic theory can explain about open social systems, and what can legitimate state action in an open society. The first part of the contents opposes “constructivism” to “evolutionism”. It reconstructs classical rationalism, consensus theories of truth, empiricism, utilitarianism and logical positivism as attempts to justify law and the state from a secure base—a priori reason, an ideal consensus, or a utility principle that assumes the future is already known. A chapter on evolutionary epistemology instead takes criticism, not justification, as the working principle, and discusses objective knowledge without a knowing subject, the autonomy of Karl Popper’s “world 3”, and science as open intersubjective control. On politics, that chapter says the open society has no concrete collective goal, treats freedom as a negative concept rather than a list of original claim-rights, and distinguishes “output democracy”—a constitutionally limited elite exposed to criticism—from “input democracy” as the people’s self-rule.

The second part contrasts open and closed systems. Closed systems are tied to mechanistic causality, reversible time and equilibrium; open systems to immanent causality, irreversible time, and change the contents say even an all-knowing “mechanistic demon” could not anticipate. Sections on cybernetics use W. Ross Ashby’s variety theorem and treat open systems as gaining knowledge while they act. The market is then set between a mechanistic equilibrium reading of neoclassical economics—Arrow–Debreu, Pareto optimality, and models patterned on physics—and a market-process account in which “data” arise from interaction and interpretation rather than being given in advance. Abstract legal rules, called external institutions and elements of Popper’s third world, are what that account says turn competition into a coordination procedure.

The third part turns to the state. One section presents the market as a knowledge-gaining process rather than an allocation machine, grouping order-and-institutions arguments of Walter Eucken, Hans Albert and Friedrich August von Hayek and separating entrepreneurship from mere ownership of capital. Freedom is defined as autonomy over one’s own goals—“freedom instead of allocation”. Later chapters separate a rule-setting state, a producing state and a redistributing state, criticize derivations of public goods, natural monopoly and regulation that start from “given data”, and treat minimum security as something that cannot be read off a single welfare function. The last chapter prefers output democracy to input democracy and describes the state as rule-setter for the “genotype” of open systems, as a producer, and as an instrument of redistribution or minimum security. Nomos’s description—a publisher’s summary, not a review—says the book joins Hayek, Popper and Albert with modern systems theory (time, information, causality and creativity) and with market-process economics, arguing that mechanistic Enlightenment models do not explain open processes.

### Publication and reception

Nomos in Baden-Baden published the dissertation on 2 June 1993 as a first-edition hardcover of 413 pages, ISBN 3-7890-2976-9 (978-3-7890-2976-9). The national bibliography describes it as XV, 413 pages, 23 cm, volume 132 of *Wirtschaftsrecht und Wirtschaftspolitik*, and normalizes the title to the post-1996 spelling *Marktprozess*; the publisher’s page keeps the 1993 spelling *Marktprozeß*.

Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker founded the series in 1967. Florian Bien, a later editor, wrote in 2020 that it concerns the interaction of law and economic policy, that competition law supplies most of the titles, and that economists as well as lawyers published qualification theses in it. The national bibliography assigns Baumann’s volume the subjects open society, market development, self-regulation, regulation, evolutionism and evolutionary economics. Its scanned contents list five figures, among them diagrams of open and closed systems and one of the United States regulatory system. Nomos lists the edition as out of stock.

Daniel Kiwit reviewed the book in *ORDO: Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft*, volume 45 (1994), pages 347–355, indexed by JSTOR as “Offene Gesellschaft, Marktprozeß und Staatsaufgaben: Betrachtungen zu dem gleichnamigen Buch”. That entry records the review; it does not state Kiwit’s verdict. An OpenAlex search under the title returned no work record and no counted citations. The 1993 book remains the academic monograph under Baumann’s name in the national bibliography.

## Professional career

### Media companies

Baumann's Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is drawn from members' own accounts, places the start of his business career in 1989, as assistant to the chief executive of a media conglomerate. The same note says that he then held a number of posts in management and in the editorial offices of media companies in Munich and Hamburg. It does not name the employers, the job titles or the years.

The firms are named in the trade press, not in that self-disclosure. On 16 October 1997 the media-industry service *kress*, discussing a *Handelsblatt* article of the same day headlined "Bauer: Neues Nachrichtenmagazin geplant" ("Bauer: new news magazine planned"), described Dr. Bernd Baumann as a former assistant to the publisher Hubert Burda. It added that he had later been an editor on the German edition of *Forbes* and, most recently, head of the economics section (*Ressortleiter Wirtschaft*) of *Ergo*, a news magazine in development at the Heinrich Bauer Verlag in Hamburg.

*Ergo* had still not been published when *Die Tageszeitung* reported on the project on 5 August 1995. The paper described a Hamburg newsroom turning out successive dummy issues and wrote that a section head, Bernd Baumann, had been criticised by colleagues for about twenty minutes over a story on apprenticeships that labelled *Hauptschule* pupils as lazy in general. On 27 January 1996 the same paper reported that the Bauer Verlag had ended what it called the longest trial period in German newspaper history: the publisher's statement, as relayed there, said the dummy issues had never met the intended standard, and that after the editors-in-chief left no successor had been found.

*kress* returned to Baumann in that October 1997 item in connection with another Bauer project. It reported that for more than a year, and only on a very small scale, he had been preparing sample pages, on the publisher's instructions, for a business-oriented news magazine with the working title *Offensiv*, conceived as a kind of *Focus* concentrated on economic subjects. The service wrote that Bauer had authorised neither a fully staffed development desk nor a market launch, and that no dummy issue existed. It also questioned whether, after what it called the *Ergo* "disaster", advertisers would buy space, and it did not report a launch.

The parliamentary reference to management posts, as distinct from editorial ones, is not itemised in the 1995 and 1997 reporting. That the unnamed conglomerate of 1989 was Burda's is a claim from the *kress* profile; the Bundestag text leaves the company unnamed and marks the career sketch as self-reported.

### Investor relations

The same self-reported biography states that Baumann afterwards worked freelance in investor relations. It names no firm, no clients and no dates. In the order printed by the Bundestag, that work follows the media posts and precedes his entry, in 2013, into the Hamburg branch of the Alternative for Germany. No company filing or press report has been found that identifies a practice, a client or income from this work, so the statement rests on his disclosure to parliament.

The Bundestag lists his occupation as *Kaufmann* (merchant, or businessman). Under the separate heading for matters members must make public, the current biography reads "Keine veröffentlichungspflichtigen Angaben" — no information subject to mandatory publication. The archived biographies for the 19th Bundestag (2017–2021), the term in which he first sat, and for the 20th (2021–2025) use the same wording.

Those declarations fall under the code of conduct in sections 45 onwards of the Members of the Bundestag Act. The note on his page states that members file them within three months of taking their seats, report later changes within three months, and that an item is published only after the data have been checked against the duty to publish. Across the three terms, nothing meeting that test is listed for Baumann. The media posts and the freelance investor-relations work appear only in the biographical paragraph, not as disclosed outside activities of a sitting member.

## Politics in Hamburg

### Entry into the AfD

Bernd Baumann joined the Hamburg branch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2013 and became chairman of its district association in Altona. Before he held a parliamentary seat, *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* reported, the self-employed consultant had helped shape what it called the party’s comparatively restrained campaign for the [2014 European Parliament election](/facts/2014-european-parliament-election-in-germany) and had advised federal chairman [Bernd Lucke](/people/bernd-lucke) inside the nationwide campaign leadership.

On 25 May 2014 Hamburg elected its district assemblies (Bezirksversammlungen). The AfD, standing for the first time, entered every assembly. In Altona it took 3.3 percent of the district vote, its weakest result in the city, and two seats; turnout there was 45.8 percent, the highest of the seven districts. Baumann was returned from first place on the AfD district list, and the second seat went to Claus-Dieter Schülke by personal votes. The Social Democratic Party led the district with 30.0 percent and 16 seats.

At a state congress in the Handwerkskammer on 3 and 4 October 2014, 128 voting members set the list for the February election to the Hamburg Parliament (Hamburgische Bürgerschaft). State chairman Jörn Kruse took first place with 113 votes and spoke of aiming at about a dozen of 121 seats, roughly 10 percent. The congress confirmed Baumann, Dirk Nockemann and Joachim Körner for places two to four. Baumann said Hamburg was “the gateway to the world, and not the door to crime,” citing burglaries in early 2014, and that “left-wing violence runs like a trail of blood through the city.”

### District assembly and the Bürgerschaft

On 15 February 2015 the AfD entered the Bürgerschaft for the first time, with 6.1 percent of the state votes (214,833) and 6.2 percent of the constituency votes, taking eight seats, all from the state list and none of the constituency mandates. Turnout was 56.5 percent, and the SPD remained the largest party with 45.6 percent and 58 seats.

Baumann, running number 2 on the AfD state list behind Kruse, was elected in list order rather than by personal votes, as were Nockemann, Körner, Detlef Ehlebracht and Andrea Oelschläger; Ludwig Flocken and Alexander Wolf entered on personal votes. His Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is drawn from members’ own accounts, lists him from 2015 as deputy chairman of the AfD group, as the group’s lead member (Obmann) on the committees for economic affairs and for labour, social affairs and integration, and as a deputy member of the interior committee.

In late September 2016 the group replaced Kruse’s sole chairmanship with a joint chair for Kruse and Baumann, by then state spokesman, for twelve months. Kruse called it a concession to a party in which, he said, his position was a known problem, and said he would stop interviews and refer reporters to Baumann, whom he called a close friend. *Die Welt* read the move as a step-by-step loss of authority and reported friction, including an occasion on which Baumann was said to have told Nockemann to keep quiet. Flocken had already left to sit as an independent; the paper reported fears that if Kruse and others followed, fewer than six members would cost the AfD its group status in the Rathaus.

After the 2017 federal election — Baumann’s move to the Bundestag is treated separately — the Hamburg group said Alexander Wolf would replace him as co-chair beside Kruse, and that Peter Lorkowski of Harburg would take the Bürgerschaft seat. By a letter of 18 October 2017 Baumann resigned the mandate with effect from 24 October. The state returning officer then declared Lorkowski, number 7 on the AfD state list, elected under the Bürgerschaft election law, and Lorkowski accepted the same day.

### State leadership

Baumann was already one of Kruse’s deputies when, after [Frauke Petry](/people/frauke-petry) became a federal chair, Kruse announced in July 2015 that he would leave the Hamburg leadership. Kruse told *Die Welt* that the party had become “a right-wing party to which I no longer wish to belong,” gave up federal offices, and said he intended to remain group chairman so as not to unsettle the Bürgerschaft group.

On Saturday 3 October 2015, at a congress in the Bürgerhaus in Wilhelmsburg, Baumann, then 57, defeated district assembly member Kay Gottschalk by 68 votes to 49 and became spokesman of the state executive. Dirk Nockemann, a former Hamburg interior senator from the Schill party and likewise a deputy to Kruse, did not stand, saying work as deputy group chairman could not be combined with the state chair. Alexander Wolf, Körner and Julian Flak were elected deputies, and Gottschalk was left without a board post. A discussion of the state of the branch, attended by 106 voting members, was held with journalists excluded.

Baumann said that “a hundred million people in the Orient and in Africa are being lured by the opening of the borders and by promises from Chancellor Angela Merkel,” and that the AfD was the only effective force against that course; he also demanded more deportations. He said he felt “both wings” in himself, the economic and the national-conservative. *Die Welt* noted that, when the Hamburg posters were presented, he had called Pegida “a civic movement with frayed edges” and had sharpened the asylum and internal-security lines beyond Kruse’s draft. The *taz* reported an argument between Baumann and Nockemann in the hall and, after the vote, a dispute over whether the old executive had resigned in due form.

Baumann did not stand again when the branch met on 25 November 2017 at the Forum Alstertal in Poppenbüttel. Nockemann beat Alexander Wolf, by then co-chair of the Bürgerschaft group, by 74 votes to 54; both the ballot and a review of the outgoing executive were closed to the public after weeks of internal quarreling. *Die Welt* reported a sharp exchange among Nockemann, Baumann and Kruse after the treasurer identified which members of the group had paid their contributions to the party. Opening the congress, Baumann told delegates that nobody could stop the AfD except the AfD itself. His Bundestag biography records him as a member of the Hamburg executive from 2015.

## Bundestag membership

### Federal elections

Bernd Baumann has been a member of the Bundestag since October 2017. At the federal elections of 24 September 2017, 26 September 2021 and 23 February 2025 he was returned for Hamburg on the state list of [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany), not by winning a constituency. Each time he was the party's direct candidate in Hamburg-Altona, constituency 19 (numbered 019 in Bundestag records), and stood at place 1 on the Hamburg AfD list.

In Altona in 2017 he received 7,425 first votes, 5.1 percent, while the AfD list took 8,028 second votes, 5.5 percent. The constituency went to Matthias Bartke of the Social Democratic Party, with 41,947 votes (28.9 percent). Across Hamburg the AfD polled 76,511 second votes, 7.8 percent. In the official allocation of seats that share produced one Hamburg seat for the party. Statistikamt Nord's final report names Baumann as the only AfD member elected there, via the state list. The federal returning officer's register of those elected recorded him at list place 1, with a candidacy in constituency 019.

On 26 September 2021 his Altona first-vote total fell to 5,191, or 3.4 percent, and the AfD's second votes in the district to 5,036, or 3.3 percent. [Linda Heitmann](/people/linda-heitmann) of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) won the seat with 45,063 votes (29.7 percent). In Hamburg as a whole the AfD took 50,537 second votes, 5.0 percent. The seat calculation again allotted the party a single Hamburg mandate. The state list admitted in July 2021 opened with Baumann, and the register of members elected to the 20th Bundestag again listed him at place 1.

At the election of 23 February 2025 he received 11,911 first votes in Altona, 7.6 percent, against 11,602 AfD second votes in the district, 7.3 percent. Heitmann held the constituency with 43,372 votes (27.5 percent). Hamburg-wide the AfD rose to 113,608 second votes, 10.9 percent. The federal seat calculation allotted the party two seats in the state, both from the list. The Landeswahlausschuss had placed Baumann first and Alexander Wolf second on the AfD list admitted in January 2025. The register of those elected names both men in that order, Baumann again with a candidacy in constituency 019.

### Parliamentary managing director

On 26 September 2017 the new AfD Fraktion elected [Alexander Gauland](/people/alexander-gauland) and [Alice Weidel](/people/alice-weidel) as its co-chairs; 80 of the 93 members the group then had voted for the pair. The next day the group chose its parliamentary managing directors: Baumann, for Hamburg, together with Jürgen Braun, [Michael Espendiller](/people/michael-espendiller) and Hansjörg Müller. The German Press Agency reported that Baumann was elected Erster Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer, the group's first managing director, with 70 of 92 votes according to the party, and that a member said Gauland had proposed him.

In the Bundestag's own account, every Fraktion has parliamentary managing directors who conduct its day-to-day parliamentary and internal business in close coordination with the chair. They prepare plenary sittings, arrange agendas with the other groups and in the Council of Elders, gather members for important divisions and keep the group together in those votes. Inside the Fraktion they coordinate its bodies and take part in filling the group's seats on Bundestag committees, and they act as its intermediaries with the federal government, the Bundesrat, the party and outside associations.

Baumann has kept the post through later electoral terms. On the evening of 30 September 2021, when the group elected Weidel and Tino Chrupalla as chairs with about two-thirds of the members' votes, the press agency reported that the Hamburg member was again chosen parliamentary managing director by a large majority, with [Stephan Brandner](/people/stephan-brandner) as his deputy. After the 2025 election, dpa reported from the group's constitutive meeting that Weidel and Chrupalla had been confirmed with 135 of 144 votes cast and that Baumann remained Erster Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own statements, records that he has held that office since October 2017.

### Committees and the Council of Elders

The same biography lists him, for the current electoral term, as an ordinary member of the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) and of the Interior Committee (Innenausschuss), and as an ordinary member of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss). It records the mandate as one obtained on the Hamburg state list, alongside the candidacy in Hamburg-Altona.

The Council of Elders consists of the Bundestag president, the vice-presidents and further members, chosen for experience rather than age. It supports the president in running the house, fixes the dates of sitting weeks and agrees the plenary agenda as the session approaches, and is where disputes between the groups are raised and mediated. On the distribution of committee chairs and the parliamentary work plan it advises rather than decides: it makes recommendations, from which the plenary can depart. Seats are shared out by the relative strength of the Fraktionen, and the parliamentary managing directors are among the members. They meet in advance, in what the Bundestag calls PGF rounds, to go through the conduct of business; those arrangements then feed into the Council, which sits in every sitting week under the president, with a representative of the federal government present.

The Interior Committee's field runs from policy on foreigners and asylum to civil protection and disaster relief. Besides parliamentary scrutiny of the [Federal Ministry of the Interior](/organizations/federal-ministry-of-the-interior) and its subordinate authorities, it prepares legislation before the plenary can adopt it and holds hearings to take evidence on points of detail.

The Joint Committee of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat is convened as an emergency parliament in a state of defence, if the Bundestag cannot meet in time because of insurmountable obstacles or is not quorate. It has 48 members and, under Article 53a of the Basic Law, is two-thirds Bundestag members, appointed in proportion to the strength of the groups, and one-third members of the Bundesrat. Under Article 115e it decides by a majority of two-thirds of the votes cast, and at least by a majority of its members, and it may not amend the Basic Law.

## Political positions

### Migration and interior policy

As the Alternative for Germany group's first parliamentary managing director and a full member of the Bundestag Committee on Internal Affairs, Bernd Baumann has used plenary debates to demand the return of people he says have no right to stay. In the current-affairs hour of 18 January 2024, after Correctiv reported a November 2023 meeting in Potsdam, he said the AfD had "always" demanded the "Rückführung beziehungsweise Remigration" of every migrant without a legal claim to protection: about 300,000 finally rejected asylum seekers, plus foreigners shielded only temporarily as civil-war refugees. That protection, he said, ends when a war ends: "In Syria the war is over, so 600,000 Syrians must go back," and Social Democrat-governed Denmark was already sending Syrians home. He called that remigration the enforcement of the constitution, not a breach of it, and described the Potsdam round as a private discussion club whose speaker could not be laid at the door of the AfD or the CDU/CSU.

Other speakers treated the subject as expulsion rather than routine removal. Interior minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democratic Party) called the plans behind the meeting a "menschenverachtender Albtraum"; SPD chair [Lars Klingbeil](/people/lars-klingbeil) said the AfD wanted to drive millions out of the country, and an SPD interjection disputed that the war in Syria was over. Two days earlier Baumann had told the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* that "Remigration," just named the 2023 *Unwort des Jahres*, was a "vernünftiges Wort" with nothing to do with mass deportation. The University of Marburg jury said that, as used in 2023 by the Identitarian movement, right-wing parties and extremist groups, the word was a euphemism for forced removal up to mass deportations of people with a migration history. In July 2025 he told ZDF's *Morgenmagazin* that the term was "im Kern ein benutzbares Wort," that hundreds of thousands of civil-war refugees had to return by lawful means, and that this had nothing to do with "irgendwelcher rechter Leute" such as Martin Sellner; he also called for verbal "Abrüstung" by every group, his own included "in gewisser Weise."

### Economy and the state

On 12 March 2025 Baumann told the *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* that plans by the Union and the SPD to exempt defence spending above 1 percent of gross domestic product from the debt brake, and to add a €500 billion infrastructure fund, were "skrupellos." [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz), he said, had promised not to touch the brake and to cut spending instead; pushing the change through the outgoing Bundestag, because a two-thirds majority would be missing in the new one, was an abuse of power and a deception of voters. After a "Konfrontationsschreiben" to the Bundestag president failed to stop her recalling the old parliament, he said, members of both parliaments and both AfD groups had asked the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) for an emergency ruling.

Rearmament, he said, could come from the current budget: "allein 70 Milliarden" a year on what he called illegal mass migration (30 billion federally, 20 billion in the Länder, plus uncounted municipal costs), about 50 billion by dropping a climate policy he called failed, cuts to development aid, and a recast of Bürgergeld so it would no longer resemble an unconditional basic income. Tax revenue, he added, was already extremely high and only needed to be spent sensibly; the newspaper left the sums as his assertions. His Bundestag biography, from his own disclosure, records a doctorate on "Offene Gesellschaft, Marktprozess und Staatsaufgaben," but the interview did not present the cuts as an application of that thesis.

### Parliamentary tactics

From the managing director's post Baumann speaks for the group on the agenda and the rules of procedure. On 10 November 2021 he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that debates of 31 and 67 minutes were "ein Plan zur Benachteiligung der AfD": three and seven minutes for his group, where a slightly longer slot would have added a minute, against four minutes in a 30-minute debate the term before. Next day he called 31 and 67 "krumme Zahlentricks" under the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method, cutting only the AfD to three minutes in the shorter format used for about three quarters of debates, and said back-room deals devalued millions of votes. Free Democratic Party members interjected that the group was smaller after the election; SPD manager Gabriele Katzmarek said time followed strength, the fifth-largest group had no claim to the FDP's share, and the others would not allow a "Kasperletheater."

Opening the 21st Bundestag on 25 March 2025, he said on a point of order that Union, SPD and Greens had delayed the sitting so the old majority could amend the Basic Law three times—about €1 trillion in credit, an end to the debt brake, and a climate-neutrality duty—and called that "Wahlbetrug." He said a 2017 rules change, a dispute he had already raised in November 2021, had stopped Alexander Gauland, the oldest member, from opening the house. After the chair, [Gregor Gysi](/people/gregor-gysi), twice told him to stay on the rules and that his time was over, he finished: "Mit Ihren Tricks werden Sie unseren Aufstieg nicht verhindern." CDU/CSU manager [Thorsten Frei](/people/thorsten-frei) replied that the 2017 rule was settled practice, not a novelty, and that repeated election was a more reasonable test than age alone.

## Controversies and disputed statements

### The 2017 opening speech

On 24 October 2017, at the constitutive sitting of the 19th Bundestag, Bernd Baumann spoke for the Alternative for Germany against a rules change adopted by the outgoing Bundestag shortly before the election. The member who presides until a president is elected is the longest-serving member willing to serve, not the oldest. Wolfgang Schäuble declined, and Hermann Otto Solms of the Free Democratic Party opened the sitting. Baumann called the change a "ruse" to shut the AfD out. Since 1848, he said—from the Frankfurt Parliament through Stresemann, Adenauer, Brandt, Kohl and early [Merkel](/people/angela-merkel) governments—the oldest member had opened the constitutive sitting. In 150 years, he said, the rule had been broken only once: in 1933 Hermann Göring broke it to exclude opponents, "at that time Clara Zetkin."

A dpa fact check that day, carried by the *Westdeutsche Zeitung* and treated in a parallel *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* check, rated the claim partly right and partly wrong. Zetkin, of the [Communist Party](/organizations/communist-party) of Germany, had opened the Reichstag as *Alterspräsidentin* in August 1932 and given a speech that afterwards became customary. She could not have been the oldest member in March 1933: the historian Heinrich August Winkler told dpa that Göring, as Reichstag president, had unlawfully barred KPD deputies from exercising their mandates. At the elections of November 1932 and March 1933 the Nazi Party stood Karl Litzmann, seven years older than Zetkin, which historians read as an attempt to stop her speaking again. In March 1933 Göring abolished the office, so that not even a member of his own party held it. Age had a long tradition as the criterion, the check noted, but had not always been applied: Adenauer more than once declined. Christian Lindner interrupted the "150 years" claim with "That is simply not true." Those checks did not record a reply from Baumann.

### Migration figures and costs

On 22 November 2017 Baumann opened debate on an AfD motion for talks with Damascus on the return of Syrians who had sought protection in Germany. He said security in large parts of Syria had improved substantially, the Islamic State was practically defeated, and, on [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) figures, many hundreds of thousands of Syrians had already gone home. He sought safe entry to pacified areas, an amnesty, review and start-up aid, and called [Bashar al-Assad](/people/bashar-al-assad) a dictator who would nonetheless remain president.

The motion, Drucksache 19/48, cited the [International Organization for Migration](/organizations/international-organization-for-migration): more than 600,000 Syrians had, it said, used the improved situation in the first seven months of 2017 to return, 405,420 of them to Aleppo governorate. The *Süddeutsche Zeitung*, under the heading "Alternative Fakten für Deutschland," wrote that the IOM account of August did not describe a safer country. Of those roughly 600,000 people, 93 percent had never left Syria. In the same months more than 800,000 were newly displaced, about a tenth of those who went back had to flee again, and the organization said a return was not necessarily voluntary, safe or sustainable. Stephan Harbarth (CDU/CSU) called the motion a sleight of hand for omitting, a few lines later, more than 800,000 people displaced in the same period, many for a second or third time.

On *Maischberger* on 14 March 2018 Baumann said that after years of "no money," "suddenly there are 100 billion a year, just to cope with a refugee crisis," for federation, Länder and municipalities together, and that Hamburg had spent a billion euros in 2016 on refugee accommodation against a budget of 12 billion. An ARD fact check said it could not confirm 100 billion euros a year. A May 2016 finance-ministry projection had the federation providing about 93.6 billion euros in total through 2020, including action against causes of flight abroad; federal spending on those headings in 2016 was about 21.7 billion, of which 7.1 billion was for causes of flight. The Cologne Institute for Economic Research estimated all-government spending of about 19.7 billion euros in 2017, rising on its projection to 28.5 billion in 2020. The Federal Statistical Office said there was no official total and that estimates had to be used; none of the reckonings reached 100 billion a year. Hamburg's social-affairs authority put 2016 spending on accommodation and integration at about 897 million euros, including health care, education and cash benefits as well as housing.

### Historical comparisons

On 18 November 2020, on a point of order as the Bundestag took up amendments to the Infection Protection Act during the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic) in Germany, Baumann said: "Today's bill is an empowerment of the government such as there has not been since historical times." He did not say "Enabling Act." Citing former CDU minister [Rupert Scholz](/people/rupert-scholz), he called the proceeding unconstitutional, said amendments reached the health committee an hour before it sat, and moved to send the bill back.

[Carsten Schneider](/people/carsten-schneider) of the SPD answered that "empowerment" was a keyword for a comparison with the Enabling Act of 1933. Social Democratic deputies, he said, had passed lines of the SA and SS to vote against that law, while Communist deputies were already excluded. [Bärbel Bas](/people/barbel-bas) said equating the bill with the 1933 act relativized the Holocaust, and that the draft narrowed a general clause by defining and time-limiting measures. Marco Buschmann of the FDP called the coalition text a bad bill that did not erect a dictatorship.

The next day Justice Minister [Christine Lambrecht](/people/christine-lambrecht) told the Funke newspapers that comparing the infection-law changes with the National Socialist Enabling Act was "an infamous comparison, which mocks the victims of the Nazi regime and for which I have no understanding whatsoever." The 1933 act, she said, had disempowered parliament and handed legislation to [Adolf Hitler](/people/adolf-hitler); the new statute, she argued, strengthened the Bundestag by stating which restrictions were possible and on what conditions. Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee said the AfD managing director had tried "in a perfidious way" to place the infection statute near that act. Thomas Krüger, president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland that those who defamed the infection law as an "Enabling Act" were trying to capture political processes and discredit democracy, not displaying a lack of civic education. All 84 Communist deputies, he said, were imprisoned or had fled at the 23 March 1933 vote, as were 26 [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats), and the Reichstag afterwards barely legislated; parliament could repeal the infection statute at any time.

### Staff and intelligence-service assessments

In March 2024 Bayerischer Rundfunk reported that the AfD group and its members employed more than 100 people active in organizations German domestic-intelligence offices had classified as right-wing extremist. The group declined to discuss individuals, citing data protection, and said such a classification carried no automatic legal effects.

One person named was Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, then on Baumann's staff. By her own account, the report said, she was active with the women's initiative Lukreta. The North Rhine-Westphalia office wrote that Lukreta was a grouping with "substantive and personal links" to the Identitarian Movement Germany. She also moderated video for Ein Prozent, which the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had the previous year classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor and described as a networking agency whose campaigns disparaged migrants as a group. Kaiser replied—in terms the report described as similar to her employer's—that the offices' judgment of the AfD and its "oppositional milieu" was "thoroughly shaped by party politics and consequently no yardstick for my political action."

## Public profile

### Television and press

As Erster Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer of the Alternative for Germany group in the Bundestag, Bernd Baumann has repeatedly spoken for the group on national television. The ARD talk show *maischberger*, hosted by Sandra Maischberger, booked him opposite politicians of the CDU and the SPD. On 12 February 2025 he debated [Philipp Amthor](/people/philipp-amthor) on what separated the CDU and the AfD late in the federal campaign. On 25 March 2026 he faced [Ralf Stegner](/people/ralf-stegner) on welfare-state reform and foreign policy. On 18 August 2026 he appeared with [Nathanael Liminski](/people/nathanael-liminski) before the Saxony-Anhalt election, in an edition on that vote and the *Brandmauer* against cooperation with the AfD. On 28 September 2026 he was again a guest, opposite minister-president [Sven Schulze](/people/sven-schulze), on coalition options after the election.

News outlets have used him in the same capacity. tagesschau.de carried an interview on his party's result in the Bundestag election of 23 February 2025, and on 6 May 2025 a clip, framed around what the programme called a setback for Friedrich Merz, in which Baumann said Merz had "of course been punished." A further tagesschau interview, dated 1 February 2026 on the site, concerned the AfD's relationship with [Donald Trump](/people/mig-donald-trump). On 6 October 2026 he was a guest on Markus Lanz's ZDF talk show, asked to respond to the election of fellow AfD politician Tobias Rausch as president of the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag. The Bundestag biography also lists a personal website and accounts on YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Telegram.

### Personal life

The Bundestag biography, drawn from his own disclosure, states that Baumann is non-denominational and married, and gives no further information about his family. He lives in a house in Hamburg-Othmarschen, in the borough of Altona. A car destroyed outside that house in November 2025 was registered to his wife, according to his Berlin office. After an earlier posting of the address he told Welt TV that his wife was "really afraid," and that he had fitted steel doors and acquired a dog so that she could sleep again.

### Attacks and security

In the night of 2–3 November 2025, at about 3:20 a.m., a car parked in front of the house was set on fire. Hamburg police said the flames spread from that vehicle to three others and that the fire service extinguished the blaze. The *Berliner Zeitung* reported that nobody was injured. Baumann's office said state-protection officers woke him at about 5 a.m., and that the car it described as his was registered to his wife; a video released by the office showed several burnt-out vehicles.

On 3 November *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* reported that state protection was investigating suspected politically motivated criminal damage. The next day Hamburg police told news agencies that the case was being treated as arson and as a politically motivated act from the left, and that state protection considered a claim posted on Indymedia authentic. The post said that the writers had destroyed Baumann's BMW with an incendiary device on the night of 3 November, and it included an English threat that "MAGA freaks" would follow [Charlie Kirk](/people/charlie-kirk) "to hell."

The November fire was not presented as a first attack at the address. NDR, citing the AfD, reported a similar fire in August 2024 in which a tenant's car, not Baumann's, burned outside the house. Baumann told *Welt* that the latest blaze was the fifth car in about a year to burn in front of the property, that Hamburg prosecutors often closed such cases, and that he did not believe there was real pressure to find those responsible. He said paint and arson attacks had already been repeated, that police protection afterwards had lapsed, and that he felt relatively unprotected despite officers' goodwill. About three weeks earlier, *Welt* reported, Indymedia had published his home address with those of two other AfD politicians in Hamburg.

Baumann told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that he had briefly thought of leaving front-line politics, especially because of what he described as a murder threat that he should follow Kirk to hell, but that stepping back would change nothing. He said at a press conference the same day that what had happened only motivated him to continue. Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla called an attack on a leading representative of what they termed the largest opposition group an attack on democracy, and noted that property of uninvolved citizens had also been destroyed. Opening the Bundestag's sitting week, President [Julia Klöckner](/people/julia-klockner) said there was no "supposedly good or right" violence in a democracy and that no political conviction justified such attacks; political argument, she said, belonged in words and not in deeds. *Welt* reported applause from every parliamentary group.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/bernd-baumann