Catarina dos Santos-Wintz

Catarina dos Santos-Wintz (born Catarina dos Santos Firnhaber on 8 July 1994 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a German lawyer and a politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She has been a member of the Bundestag since 2021. At the 2025 German federal election she won the direct mandate in constituency 87, Aachen II, in North Rhine-Westphalia, with 40.1 percent of the first votes. On 7 September 2026 the joint parliamentary group of the CDU and the Christian Social Union elected the then 32-year-old its first parliamentary managing director (Erste Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin), with 90.9 percent of the votes cast.

She was born in Lisbon to a Portuguese mother and a German father. She grew up in Eschweiler, near Aachen. According to the Bundestag biography, which rests on her own statements, she took the Abitur in 2012 at the Bischöfliche Liebfrauenschule in Eschweiler, studied law at the University of Cologne from 2012 to 2017 with a specialisation in tax law, and from 2018 to February 2020 completed her legal traineeship with stations in Aachen, Cologne and Lisbon. She then practised as a lawyer, in a firm concerned with corporate succession, until 2023.

Dos Santos-Wintz joined the CDU in 2014, while she was a student, and later held local offices in the StädteRegion Aachen and on the CDU’s North Rhine-Westphalia executive. For the 2021 German federal election the CDU placed her 15th on its North Rhine-Westphalia list and nominated her in Aachen II, then constituency 88, under the name Catarina dos Santos Firnhaber. In that constituency the CDU received 54,808 first votes (32.5 percent), behind the Social Democratic Party on 58,189 (34.5 percent), and she entered the Bundestag through the list. In 2025 she defeated the SPD’s Claudia Moll, who received 53,747 first votes (30.5 percent) to dos Santos-Wintz’s 70,541 (40.1 percent). The seat covers the StädteRegion Aachen apart from the city of Aachen.

The Bundestag group’s press notice says her policy work has concerned foreign and European affairs and digitalisation. She had been a parliamentary managing director of the CDU/CSU group since May 2025. She succeeded Steffen Bilger, who became federal transport minister at the end of July 2026, after Thorsten Frei proposed her for the senior post during a reshuffle under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Reporting on that office describes it as the post that runs the government group’s daily parliamentary business—speaking times, procedure and majorities—and as second in the group only to the chair. In 2022 CNN Portugal described her as the first Portuguese deputy in the Bundestag and, at 27, the youngest CDU member elected to that parliament.

On 6 October 2026 the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt elected Tobias Rausch of the Alternative for Germany as its president, the first time an AfD politician had held that office in a German state. The next day dos Santos-Wintz called the vote a deep break for the country, said the extra votes beyond the AfD and BSW could not be attributed because the ballot was secret, and rejected the claim that the Union had helped to elect him. She said she could not reconcile such a vote with her own conscience, and that the CDU’s incompatibility resolution toward the AfD remained in force.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Catarina dos Santos-Wintz was born on 8 July 1994 in Lisbon, Portugal. In August 2021 she was still introducing herself as Catarina dos Santos Firnhaber, and said she had grown up in Eschweiler and still lived there; biographies issued after her marriage use the name dos Santos-Wintz and record that she is married and Catholic. Her mother is Portuguese and her father German. They met and lived together in Portugal in the 1980s and, after her birth, moved to Germany. She has said the first place they lived was Aachen, in the far west of North Rhine-Westphalia, and that the family arrived in August 1994, when she was about a month old and had no memory of the journey. Her Bundestag biography states that she grew up in the StädteRegion Aachen; in a later interview she described growing up near Aachen rather than in the city itself.

She went to a German school and never to a Portuguese one, and has said that, having lived in Germany throughout childhood, her German is stronger than her Portuguese. As a child she was often asked about her origins, including comments on how well she spoke German. Her mother’s family is from Ferragudo, in the Algarve. The family returned to Portugal regularly, especially in summer and in some years at Christmas, Easter or other holidays, to visit relatives. She has recalled summers there with cousins of her own age, including sleeping on the sand, and missing Portuguese food during the longest period she spent away. Around the ages of 13 and 14 she weighed how much of herself was Portuguese and how much German, a question she has associated with children who have dual nationality, though she has said it did not preoccupy her every day. She has described living between the two cultures as a privilege and has said that she identifies as both Portuguese and German. A grandmother in Portugal followed her early appearances in public.

School and university

In 2012 she passed the Abitur at the Bischöfliche Liebfrauenschule in Eschweiler. The Diocese of Aachen lists the school, at Liebfrauenstraße 30, as a state-recognized private Catholic Gymnasium in its own sponsorship, one of the Gymnasien it runs between the Lower Rhine and the Eifel.

Assembly hall of the Bischöfliche Liebfrauenschule in Eschweiler, with rows of tables, tall windows, and a stage at the far end.

From 2012 to 2017 she studied law at the University of Cologne, with a focus on tax law. Under section 5 of the German Judiciary Act (Deutsches Richtergesetz), the qualification for judicial office is acquired by completing a university law course with the first examination—a university specialization together with a state examination in the compulsory subjects—and a subsequent preparatory service with the second state examination. At Cologne’s law faculty, tax and accounting law is one such specialization (Schwerpunktbereich “Steuerrecht und Bilanzrecht”), taught for its links with public and private law and for its European and international elements. She has said that she wanted to be a lawyer and that she studied law in Cologne.

The preparatory service, the Rechtsreferendariat, ran from 2018 until February 2020, with stations in Aachen, Cologne and Lisbon. During that training she spent three months in Lisbon at the German-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Câmara de Comércio e Indústria Luso-Alemã), later describing it as the opportunity she had long wanted to live in Portugal. The second state examination is the examination with which the Judiciary Act says that preparatory service ends. By August 2021 she was working as a Rechtsanwältin.

Legal career

Training and practice

The biography published by the Bundestag states that Catarina dos Santos-Wintz studied law at the University of Cologne from 2012 to 2017, with tax law as her area of concentration, and completed the Referendariat—the practical legal training that follows university study—from 2018 to February 2020, with stations in Aachen, Cologne and Lisbon. An editorial note on that page states that the biographical text rests on the member’s own information. Parliamentwatch (abgeordnetenwatch.de) reproduces the same self-description and lists her professional qualification as Juristin.

In issue 23.2020 of the newsletter Stifterbrief, published by UnternehmerKompositionen Rechtsberatungsgesellschaft und Steuerberatungsgesellschaft mbH of Meerbusch, she is credited, under the name Catarina dos Santos Firnhaber, as a Rechtsanwältin and as the author of a note on Sozialhilfeträgerregress, the recovery by social-welfare bodies of care costs from relatives. The same note describes her as the firm’s contact for tax-structuring advice and for legal questions connected with foundations. Her Bundestag biography says that until 2023 she practised as a lawyer in a firm focused on corporate succession and foundations. The archived declarations for the 20th Bundestag name that employer: the Meerbusch company is listed as her occupation before she entered parliament and, separately, as a paid activity alongside the mandate until 31 December 2023. Those filings also record a distinct line, “Rechtsanwältin, Eschweiler”, both before membership and as paid work beside the mandate.

Disclosed professional roles

Paid work beside a Bundestag seat is governed by the conduct rules in sections 45 and following of the Members of the Bundestag Act (Abgeordnetengesetz). A member must notify the President, within three months of taking the seat and within three months of any later change, of the last occupation before the mandate and of paid activities carried on during it, including continuation of an earlier profession. If income from such an activity exceeds €1,000 in a month or, if it does not, €3,000 in a calendar year, the gross amount—including compensation, equalisation payments and benefits in kind—must be stated. The Bundestag’s own account of the rules says that, since their transfer into the Act on 19 October 2021, those sums are published to the cent; the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) adopted implementing provisions on 12 May 2022. Parliamentwatch displays a parallel listing whose categories, dates and figures track the official biographies.

On dos Santos-Wintz’s forms the lawyer entries carry no euro amount. In the 20th-term archive the Meerbusch company and the Eschweiler practice are named without figures, while other lines on the same page give monthly gross sums for municipal offices. In the current biography the Meerbusch firm remains only under professional activity before membership; the only lawyer line under paid activities beside the mandate is “Rechtsanwältin, Eschweiler”, with neither an amount nor an end date. Parliamentwatch records that entry as freelance legal work, captured on 30 January 2023 and last changed on 17 November 2025, assigned to both the 2021–2025 and 2025–2029 terms, and without an income figure.

Her self-reported biography also states that she has been Counsel of the Diáspora Portuguesa since 2022. The Conselho da Diáspora Portuguesa, an association constituted on 26 December 2012 at the Belém Palace under the high patronage of the President of Portugal, who serves as its honorary president, lists her as a member since December 2022 and places her in its public-sector category for Germany. That membership does not appear among the itemised paid side activities on the Bundestag disclosure pages.

Local politics

Party membership

Dos Santos-Wintz has been a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2014, according to the biography carried by the Bundestag, which states that its biographical details rest on the member’s own information. In a CDU North Rhine-Westphalia interview on 30 August 2021 she said she had entered party work by chance, after meeting the chair of the CDU in Eschweiler on a commuter train and then sitting in on a meeting of the city association’s board. In that interview she described her offices at the time as membership officer (Mitgliederbeauftragte) of the CDU’s Aachen Land district association, deputy chair of the CDU city association in Eschweiler, district chair of the Junge Union and a member of the Junge Union’s state executive in North Rhine-Westphalia.

A notice from the Junge Union’s Aachen Bezirksverband, published by the Eschweiler paper Filmpost, said that in the weeks before its congress on 7 August 2023 she had led the Bezirksverband on an acting basis. Delegates meeting in the Bezirksamt Eilendorf elected Florian Weyand as Bezirksvorsitzender, and the same notice listed dos Santos-Wintz among the Kreisvorsitzende attached to the new board, identified with the Aachen-Land branch. Her place in the Eschweiler CDU city association was later that of an assessor rather than a deputy chair. At a members’ meeting in the Festhalle Dürwiß, reported by the association in December 2024, Frank Meyers was elected chair in succession to Thomas Schlenter, with Patrick Nowicki and Renée Stühlen as deputies; dos Santos-Wintz was one of ten Beisitzer. The Bundestag biography continued to list her as membership officer of CDU Aachen Land and as a member of the CDU state executive in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The state-executive seat is dated by party-congress results. At the 45th Landesparteitag in Hürth on 28 October 2023 she was elected one of 31 further members of the Landesvorstand, with 466 of 613 valid votes (76.0 percent) in that ballot. The 47th Landesparteitag, in Bonn on 30 August 2025, again included her among the 31 further members, and the party’s Landesvorstand page lists her as a Beisitzerin.

Eschweiler and the StädteRegion Aachen

Her first elected offices date from the North Rhine-Westphalia municipal elections of 13 September 2020. In Eschweiler she stood for the CDU in Wahlbezirk 24 (Weisweiler II) for the 50-seat council. Dietmar Krauthausen of the Social Democratic Party won the ward with 595 votes (56.03 percent); dos Santos Firnhaber, the name under which she was listed, received 252 votes (23.73 percent), on a turnout of 52.08 percent. She entered the council nevertheless, on place 8 of the CDU reserve list. The CDU took 14 of the 50 seats.

Eschweiler town hall, the seat of the city council.

For the Städteregionstag, the directly elected assembly of the StädteRegion Aachen, the official list of those returned placed her third on the CDU reserve list. In that election the CDU won 31.9 percent of the vote and 23 of 72 seats, 17 of them direct mandates and six from the reserve list; turnout was 53.2 percent. By the August 2021 interview she described herself as deputy chair of the CDU group in the Städteregionstag and as its spokesperson on mobility, and said she had represented Eschweiler in the assembly since 2020 while also sitting on the town council.

She kept both local seats after taking a seat in the Bundestag in 2021. The register published with her Bundestag profile records the Eschweiler council membership as ending on 31 October 2025, and the Städteregionstag membership as continuing, with the allowance for that seat still listed into 2026. She was not among the 50 people elected to the new Eschweiler council on 14 September 2025, when the CDU won 16 seats. On the same day she won a direct mandate to the Städteregionstag in Wahlbezirk 12, the district covering the Lyzeum area, Kinzweiler and St. Jöris, Hehlrath, Dürwiß, Fronhoven and Neu-Lohn. Of 7,885 valid votes she received 3,799 (48.18 percent), ahead of Karl of the SPD (20.80 percent) and Krauthausen of the Alternative for Germany (16.99 percent); turnout in the district was 68.75 percent. Across the StädteRegion the CDU took 36.74 percent and 27 of 74 seats, the assembly having been enlarged from 72, on a turnout of 59.11 percent. The CDU group’s list of its 27 members still names her as one of several deputy chairs.

The same members’ register attaches a small number of company seats to the local mandates. It records an honorary place on the transport advisory board of Aachener Straßenbahn und Energieversorgungs-AG and a deputy supervisory-board seat at AWA Entsorgung GmbH, both until 1 January 2026, and from that date a seat on the supervisory board of Rhein-Maas Klinikum GmbH in Würselen, disclosed at 2,400 euros gross a year.

Federal elections

In both the 2021 and 2025 German federal elections, Catarina dos Santos-Wintz stood in the Bundestag constituency Aachen II in North Rhine-Westphalia. The seat takes in nine municipalities of the StädteRegion Aachen: Alsdorf, Baesweiler, Eschweiler, Herzogenrath, Monschau, Roetgen, Simmerath, Stolberg (Rhld.) and Würselen. The city of Aachen, the district’s remaining municipality, forms the neighbouring constituency. That municipal composition was unchanged between the two elections. A statewide renumbering moved the seat from number 88 in 2021 to number 87 in 2025; the name Aachen II stayed the same.

2021 election

On 26 September 2021 the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate was listed as Catarina dos Santos Firnhaber. The party’s North Rhine-Westphalia slate placed her 15th and also named her for constituency 88. The direct mandate went to Claudia Moll of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the final result Moll received 58,189 first votes (34.5 percent) and dos Santos Firnhaber 54,808 (32.5 percent), a margin of 3,381 votes, or two percentage points.

The next candidates were Lukas Benner of Alliance 90/The Greens, with 19,976 votes (11.8 percent); Michael Winterich of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), with 12,632 (7.5 percent); Birgit Haveneth of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), with 12,055 (7.1 percent); and Johannes Koch of Die Linke, with 4,496 (2.7 percent). Smaller totals went to Eckhard Heck of Die PARTEI (2,893 votes, 1.7 percent), Josef Helmut Keischgens of the Free Voters (2,034, 1.2 percent) and Axel Susen of dieBasis (1,704, 1.0 percent).

Of 226,420 people eligible to vote, 170,670 did so, a turnout of 75.4 percent. On the second vote the SPD led with 53,408 votes (31.6 percent), ahead of the CDU on 49,838 (29.5 percent). The Greens received 19,918 (11.8 percent), the FDP 17,892 (10.6 percent), the AfD 12,409 (7.3 percent) and Die Linke 5,259 (3.1 percent). Moll’s constituency win left dos Santos Firnhaber to enter the Bundestag from the state list. The state returning officer’s final return of successful list candidates records “Santos Firnhaber, Catarina, dos”, a lawyer living in Eschweiler, at place 15.

2025 election

At the snap election on 23 February 2025 the same territory was constituency 087. She stood as Catarina dos Santos-Wintz. The notice of admitted nominations described her as a lawyer and member of the Bundestag, resident in Eschweiler, and Moll, again the SPD candidate, as a geriatric nurse born in Eschweiler and living there. The final count gave dos Santos-Wintz 70,541 first votes (40.1 percent), 7.6 points more than in 2021, and Moll 53,747 (30.5 percent), 3.9 points fewer. The Federal Returning Officer lists dos Santos-Wintz as elected in constituency 087 with 40.1 percent. The law used for this election did not make a constituency plurality by itself a guarantee of a seat, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk noted that entry still depended on the full count. Her mandate was allocated. Moll, the runner-up in the constituency, was returned from place 18 on the SPD state list.

The other admitted candidates finished as follows: Florian Müller of Die Linke, 13,330 votes (7.6 percent); Anna Kysil of the Greens, 13,269 (7.5 percent); Andreas Wollermann of the Free Voters, 12,919 (7.3 percent); Natalie Maria Pütz of the FDP, 8,191 (4.7 percent); and Marcel Willy Peter Verkooyen of Volt Germany, 4,001 (2.3 percent). The AfD had no constituency candidate. For the neighbouring seat, Aachen I, the City of Aachen recorded that the constituency committee on 24 January 2025 unanimously rejected the AfD nomination because the candidate had been selected at a joint members’ meeting covering constituencies 86 and 87, rather than by a separate vote of the members eligible in each constituency. The StädteRegion’s notice of nominations admitted for Aachen II, dated 31 January 2025, does not include the AfD, and the result table shows no AfD first votes, 7.5 points below 2021.

Turnout was 81.1 percent: 182,361 voters out of 224,835 eligible. There were 175,998 valid first votes. Invalid first-vote papers numbered 6,363 (3.5 percent), 2.4 points higher than in 2021. On the second vote the CDU led with 57,089 votes (31.5 percent, up 2.1 points). The SPD fell to 37,900 (20.9 percent, down 10.6 points). The AfD, available only on the party ballot, rose to 34,595 (19.1 percent, up 11.8 points). The Greens received 17,002 (9.4 percent), Die Linke 12,306 (6.8 percent), the FDP 7,599 (4.2 percent) and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht 7,376 (4.1 percent).

Roles in the Bundestag

Committees and interparliamentary bodies

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025), dos Santos-Wintz sat for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in its joint group with the Christian Social Union (CSU). She was a full member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Legal Affairs Committee and that committee’s subcommittee on European law, and a full member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly. The archived biography, which rests on the member’s own information, also described her as a member of the Council of Europe. A report by the German delegation on the April 2024 session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg listed her, as of that session, as a full member of the Assembly’s committee on migration, refugees and displaced persons and as a substitute on its committee on social affairs, health and sustainable development. On the Bundestag’s list of parliamentary-group officers of 12 July 2024 she was a deputy chair of the German–Portuguese parliamentary group; the chair was Timo Schisanowski of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In the 21st term the policy committees became deputy seats. The Bundestag’s structured record gives 25 March 2025 as the start of her ordinary membership of the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) and of deputy membership of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation — the successor to the digital committee — the Foreign Affairs Committee, the EU Affairs Committee and the Wahlausschuss. The Wahlausschuss has twelve members, drawn from the groups by proportional representation, and proposes the judges whom the plenary elects to the Bundestag’s half of the Federal Constitutional Court. The narrative biography on the same page, which still calls her a parliamentary managing director rather than first managing director and still uses the former name of the digital committee, also names a deputy seat on the legal affairs committee. That seat is not in the structured list, whose schema was last modified on 29 September 2026.

The 21st-term list further records her as a full member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, the Joint Committee and the Mediation Committee, as a substitute in the German delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and as chair, rather than deputy chair, of the German–Portuguese parliamentary group. It does not list the Council of Europe. The Franco-German assembly is made up of 50 members of the Bundestag and 50 of the French National Assembly and is intended to meet at least twice a year. The Joint Committee, under Article 53a of the Basic Law, has 48 members, two-thirds from the Bundestag and one-third from the Bundesrat, and is the emergency parliament if the Bundestag cannot meet in time in a state of defence. The Mediation Committee has 16 members from each chamber, named according to group strength, and looks for agreement when a bill passed by the Bundestag does not find a majority in the Bundesrat.

Parliamentary business management

On 13 May 2025 the CDU/CSU group elected a new executive. Steffen Bilger had already been chosen, on 5 May, as first parliamentary managing director (Erster Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer); Reinhard Brandl, the CSU’s managing director, was his deputy. Hendrik Hoppenstedt, dos Santos-Wintz and Felix Schreiner were elected as the further managing directors. In the Bundestag’s account, a group’s parliamentary managing directors conduct its day-to-day parliamentary and internal business, work closely with the chair, prepare plenary sittings, and plan them with the other groups and in the Council of Elders. That council comprises the president, the vice-presidents and 23 further members named by the groups in proportion to their strength. It sets the annual sitting weeks and, at short notice, the agenda and the length of each plenary debate, and it draws up the Bundestag’s own budget estimate. Her recorded seat on the council dates from 25 March 2025, so it began before she entered the managing-director team in May.

The first managing director’s post fell vacant at the end of July 2026, when Bilger became federal minister of transport. The vacancy was part of a reshuffle under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. It followed the resignation of Jens Spahn as group chair in mid-July. The new chair, Thorsten Frei, proposed dos Santos-Wintz, described in that account as one of three CDU managing directors in the joint group with the CSU. On the evening of 7 September 2026 the group elected her with 90.9 percent of the votes. Frederik Bouffier, the member for Gießen, a lawyer who entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2025, was elected to the managing-director post she left.

The post is filled by the group itself. Since 6 May 2025 the CDU/CSU has governed with the SPD under Merz; that coalition held 328 seats when he was elected chancellor. Reporting the nomination, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur described the first managing director as directing the daily work of the governing group and negotiating speaking times, procedure, majorities and parliamentary tactics. The Bundestag’s own account of the office places that planning in contact with the other parliamentary groups, which in this Bundestag includes the SPD as coalition partner. The biography still published on 26 October 2026 had not been brought into line with the September vote: its narrative continued to say only that she had been a parliamentary managing director since May 2025.

Legislative and policy work

In the 20th electoral term dos Santos-Wintz was a full member of the Bundestag’s Committee on Digital Affairs and its Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, and a deputy member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. In the 21st term she is a deputy member of the committees on European Union affairs, digital affairs and state modernisation, and foreign affairs.

Digital policy

In an October 2022 interview for the Bundestag’s youth portal she criticised the digital organisation of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. The Digital Strategy, she said, lacked lighthouse projects, came about a year late, and had no dedicated budget, while Germany often had no timely Council position. She called the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport “Etikettenschwindel”: data retention stayed at the justice ministry and games policy at the economy ministry. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/CSU, she said, wanted “an end to the digital chaos” through a ministry that really joined technical and legal responsibility.

She was the CDU/CSU speaker on the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, the bill accompanying the European Union’s Digital Services Act. On 18 January 2024 she called the DSA, in force since 16 November 2022, “an important European success” against illegal hate speech and disinformation. Citing the Federal Statistical Office, she said about 27 per cent of internet users in Germany had encountered online hate in the first quarter of 2023. The draft, she argued, narrowed section 3(2) of the Network Enforcement Act, which had required social networks to report specified crimes, including offences against the sexual self-determination of children, to the Federal Criminal Police Office. Only offences threatening life or safety remained, and there was no clear catalogue of reportable content. She called the delay incomprehensible, including after images of the 7 October 2023 attacks spread online.

On 21 March 2024, at second and third reading, she said hearings, including a meeting with agency heads that she credited to opposition pressure, had shaped amendments, but practice was still neglected. Extra federal posts did not, she said the BKA had told the committee, staff state criminal police offices. Small and medium-sized firms had little time left, and who was covered was being judged from one commissioned study rather than official statistics; the coalition rejected a CDU/CSU transition period. The group backed action against online hate and criminal content, she said, but authorities, users and business would complain, so the law needed repeated evaluation. Her verdict was “knapp daneben ist auch vorbei”—a near miss is still a miss. The CDU/CSU voted against the bill, which passed with the Social Democratic Party, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party; the Union motion was defeated.

On 18 October 2024, against an Alternative for Germany motion to seek abolition of the DSA, she called it one framework for illegal content, not only criminal hate speech but also trademark piracy and unsafe products. Trusted flaggers had to show expertise and could lose status via the Federal Network Agency; police reports, she said, covered threats to life or safety, not insults. A comment on her candidacy—“Haven’t they found a proper German for the post?”—was racist and false, she said, but not clearly a crime, and freedom of expression required her to bear it. “Hate speech” was a political label unless the speech was already unlawful.

On the European proposal known as Chatkontrolle, she told Abgeordnetenwatch on 17 October 2025 that she had “for years actively opposed breaking end-to-end encryption” and that the CDU/CSU would accept “no suspicionless control of digital communication”. Confidentiality was a fundamental right; child protection, including an EU centre giving police reliable data on identified abuse material, had to leave encryption intact, which she said many experts thought possible. On 3 September 2026 she wrote that the European Parliament on 22 July 2026 had not adopted a final rule but had again extended a temporary ePrivacy derogation, so that some providers could keep scanning voluntarily for known child-sexual-abuse material. She called the extension defensible because those tools had helped uncover crimes and identify victims, yet said protection of children must not mean “suspicionless surveillance of the private communication of all citizens”. What she wanted was not a blanket “Chatkontrolle” but proportionate, technically responsible measures, without playing child protection off against data protection.

In the March 2025 coalition talks the CDU’s published list put her in working group 3, Digitales, chaired for the CDU by Manuel Hagel.

Europe, foreign affairs and German–Portuguese relations

On 4 November 2022 she replied to a constituent who had asked her to back a complete trade embargo on Russia. The European Union, the United States and allies, she wrote, had answered Russia’s “horrific war of aggression” against Ukraine with unprecedented sanctions on trade, energy, industry, finance and individuals, and the CDU/CSU had pushed from the outset to widen them. She pointed to export and import bans, including technology, oil-and-gas equipment, coal and crude oil, and to the October 2022 package that created an oil-price cap. While the war continued, she wrote, the group would keep up that pressure to force Putin to negotiate.

On 16 October 2025, before the European Council, she said Russia’s attack had “shown us our own vulnerability and, at the same time, how strong we can be when we act together.” Drone flights and cyberattacks on hospitals, energy firms and the Bundestag required resilience that was economic and technological as well as military. Citing Mario Draghi, she asked for a “regulatory change of culture”, including a practicality test of the Artificial Intelligence Act and the Data Act, lest regulation become “an investment-prevention programme”, and she tied digital sovereignty to the EU Cyber Solidarity Act and an interior-ministry “Cyberdome”.

In a 29 May 2026 interview with Diário de Notícias she said aid to Ukraine was “not only solidarity with Kyiv” but “a question of European security”: defeat would leave Europe more vulnerable politically, militarily and economically, so Germany had to spend more on defence. German leadership in the EU, she said, meant consensus rather than imposition; the tie between Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron had to work, as did joint European defence procurement. Germany could learn, she added, from Portugal’s digitalisation of the state.

For 2021–2025 the Bundestag lists her as deputy chair of the German–Portuguese parliamentary friendship group, then chaired by Timo Schisanowski of the SPD; the current biography lists her as chair. The Conselho da Diáspora Portuguesa lists her as a counsellor since December 2022. In the same interview she called herself “the deputy of the Portuguese in Germany”, as the only one in the Bundestag.

Political positions

Migration and European borders

Dos Santos-Wintz has argued that Germany should stay open to lawful immigration and to people with a right to protection, while limiting irregular entry. In February 2025 she told the Lusa news agency that Germany was a country of immigration and cited Portuguese residents as contributors, but that migration no longer looked ordered to people already there, which she tied to weaker integration and cohesion. Those entitled to protection should receive it, she said, and abuses should be fought.

On 29 January 2025 the Bundestag passed a non-binding CDU/CSU motion by 348 votes, including 75 from the AfD and 80 from the FDP. It demanded border refusals of asylum seekers, a de facto entry ban—including for people intending to claim asylum—for those without valid documents outside European free movement, detention until removal, and permanent checks. A bill to write “limiting” irregular migration into residence law, end family reunification for subsidiary protection, and let the federal police seek deportation custody failed on 31 January. On 10 February she endorsed those steps, citing overloaded municipalities, while saying skilled migration should continue and that, raised near Aachen and attached to open borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, the demands were far from easy for her.

In Expresso on 29 May 2026 she said her district, beside the Netherlands and Belgium, meant that “we live the Europe of open borders in a very concrete way,” and that introducing checks had also been hard for her. She contrasted people who want to work, and who meet slow recognition of qualifications, with people who arrive with no right to remain. Reception capacity had been under pressure since 2015, she said, and social tension followed where it was lacking. Since 16 September 2024 Germany has checked all its land borders inside the Schengen Area, a temporary last resort first ordered by Nancy Faeser. In August 2026 Alexander Dobrindt notified the European Commission of an extension to mid-March 2027; EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner had asked that the checks end.

On 6 January 2026 she wrote that Friedrich Merz’s “Stadtbild” remarks had not been an attack on origin or appearance: racism was real, she said, but the issue was steering irregular migration, not rejecting people with a migration background, and she had not felt targeted though she was not born in Germany.

The CDU’s stance toward the AfD

The CDU’s Hamburg congress of 7–8 December 2018 resolved that the party “rejects coalitions and similar forms of cooperation both with the Left Party and with the Alternative for Germany.” It repeated that after the 2019 murder of Walter Lübcke and, on 7 February 2020, after Thuringia: no cooperation with the AfD “neither in direct nor in indirect form.” In February 2025 she told Lusa there would be no alliance with a party that threatened democratic values, because a coalition with the AfD would mean the CDU “selling its soul,” and she separated that ban from occasional votes.

On 6 October 2026 the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt in Magdeburg elected the AfD’s Tobias Rausch, 35, president on a secret first ballot: 48 of 82 votes, 29 against and five abstentions, the first AfD Landtag president in Germany. The AfD holds 39 seats and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht five; the BSW had pledged support, so at least four votes came from other parties. The CDU leadership had told its 15 members to abstain, one was absent ill, and only five abstentions were cast. The SPD, the Greens and the Left, eight members each, had said they would vote no. The AfD had won the state election of 6 September 2026 with 43.8 percent, without a majority of its own; the state party, classed as confirmed right-wing extremist since 2023, is challenging that label. Ulrich Siegmund was to stand for minister-president in December, with Sven Schulze remaining caretaker.

n-tv calculated that at least nine of the 14 CDU members present had not abstained, which could be no votes, yes votes, or both; Schulze said some had planned to vote no. If the SPD, Greens and Left all voted no, five of the 29 noes and the four yeses above the AfD–BSW total would be CDU votes. Tagesschau did not treat that as fact, because the ballot was secret. SPD leader Lars Klingbeil called it a breach of a taboo and said the CDU, not only the BSW, had to explain; general secretary Tim Klüssendorf wanted those responsible in the CDU identified. Merz called the result a historic rupture, incompatible with CDU values, but said the votes need not have been the CDU’s and warned of political “false-flag operations.”

On 7 October, in n-tv’s Frühstart, dos Santos-Wintz, the Union group’s parliamentary business manager, called it “a deep cut for our country,” the first AfD Landtag president, and said it followed from voters giving the AfD and the BSW an absolute majority of seats. She said investigation was for the Landtag group, not for her as a federal politician. Anyone who voted for Rausch after a canvass for no votes or abstentions had to reconcile that with their conscience—“I, at any rate, could not.” She “really strictly” rejected the claim that the Union had helped him into office, because the ballot was secret and she did not know the source of the votes. She ruled out CDU votes for Siegmund in December and said the incompatibility resolution “remains.”

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Coverage in German and Portuguese media

In August 2026 German reporting presented Catarina dos Santos-Wintz chiefly as a rapid appointment inside the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its joint Bundestag group with the CSU. On 13 August the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran a portrait by Peter Carstens, “Der Maschinenraum der Union bekommt eine neue Spitze.” It described the 32-year-old lawyer and member of the Bundestag, a native-born Portuguese woman in the paper’s wording, as one of four parliamentary managing directors for the past year, preparing compromises between the Union and the Social Democratic Party. She was, the FAZ wrote, to head that “engine room” and, if elected after the summer break, become Erste Parlamentarische Geschäftsführerin—a place others reach only after decades.

A day earlier, Die Zeit reported, with AFP and dpa, that she was to succeed Steffen Bilger, newly transport minister under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as the Union’s Fraktionsmanagerin. Faction leader Thorsten Frei, in a message relayed by dpa, called her “an outstanding colleague who will exercise this important office forcefully,” well networked and assertive, and praised her deliberative, collegial manner. Zeit added that she had been in the Bundestag since 2021, was already a parliamentary managing director and a member of the Council of Elders, and in 2025 had won Aachen II directly with 40.1 percent against the SPD’s Claudia Moll.

Portuguese coverage has instead stressed a dual background and described her as the first Bundestag member of Portuguese descent. In a telephone interview published by Público on 19 February 2025, and headlined as praise for Merz’s posture on Ukraine, the paper wrote that the previous election had made her the first Luso-German in the Bundestag. She said she had not known that when elected, that she still checked biographies and had found no one else, and that she hoped the Portuguese community in Germany would “involve itself more and better.” On 20 February Expresso published an interview titled “Catarina dos Santos-Wintz, deputada luso-alemã: ‘A Alemanha também pode aprender com Portugal’.” The same day she told the Lusa agency, “When I was elected, I did not know that I was the first Portuguese woman in the German federal parliament,” and said the CDU would keep an “absolute line of separation” from any party that threatened its democratic values.

On 29 May 2026 Expresso interviewed her again after a visit to Portugal. It described her as the daughter of a German father and a Portuguese mother, born in Lisbon and raised in the Aachen region, and the youngest CDU deputy when she entered the Bundestag at 27. She said internal border controls had “also cost” her, because her district borders the Netherlands and Belgium and she lives “open-border Europe in a very concrete way,” while separating people who come to work, and face barriers such as recognition of qualifications, from people without a right to stay. The paper said she believed the Christian Democrats could still contain the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Personal life

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members’ own information, records that she was born on 8 July 1994 in Lisbon, grew up in the StädteRegion Aachen, and is married and Catholic. In Lisbon in May 2026 she told Diário de Notícias that she had grown up near Aachen, spoke German better than Portuguese, and had never attended a Portuguese school. From about 13 or 14, she said, she had asked how Portuguese and how German she was—a question she linked to children with dual nationality—and that “only when I entered parliament did I feel that I resolved my identity,” because she worked with Portuguese institutions from the start. She said she was now both, “though on punctuality I am a bit more German,” and recalled summers in Ferragudo, her mother’s family’s town, and missing Portuguese food.