Christoph de Vries

Christoph de Vries (born 4 December 1974 in Hamburg) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2017, elected on the Hamburg state list while standing in the Hamburg-Mitte constituency. Since 6 May 2025 he has been parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, under Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt. The Bundestag biography, drawn from his own disclosure, describes him as a Roman Catholic, married, with three children, and as a graduate sociologist (Diplom-Soziologe).

De Vries passed his Abitur in 1994 at the Catholic Sankt-Ansgar-Schule in Hamburg-Borgfelde and completed a sociology degree at the University of Hamburg. He joined the Junge Union and the CDU in 1995. From 2001 to 2011 he was a district councillor in Hamburg-Mitte, chairing the CDU group from 2004 to 2008 and serving as deputy chair from 2008 to 2011. From 2011 to 2015 he sat in the Hamburg Parliament, as the CDU's family-policy spokesman and as its lead member on the special committee on the death of the foster child Chantal and on the parliamentary inquiry into the death of the girl Yagmur.

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025) he was a full member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and of the Parliamentary Control Panel. At the 2025 federal election de Vries again stood in Hamburg-Mitte and held third place on the Hamburg CDU state list. In that constituency the CDU received 31,834 first votes (17.0 percent) and 29,570 second votes (15.7 percent), behind Falko Droßmann of the Social Democratic Party, who won the seat with 51,554 first votes (27.5 percent), and Emilia Fester of the Greens (40,350 first votes, 21.5 percent). After Felix Klein left the post of federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and the fight against antisemitism to head Germany's mission to the OECD, a ministry spokesman said on 28 August 2026 that de Vries would carry those duties until a successor was named. Tagesschau later reported that he had held the remit on an interim basis and that the delay in a permanent appointment had drawn criticism.

Public argument over de Vries has centred on how he speaks about migration and Islam. On 5 July 2021, at a panel in Frankfurt on political Islam, he said Germany was not an immigration country "simply because there is a genuine German people" ("ein genuin deutsches Volk"), in contrast to the United States and Australia, which he described as formed wholly from immigrant groups. He told the Hamburger Morgenpost that a Nazi meaning had been far from his mind, that he had meant a population settled for centuries, and that anyone who comes to Germany and integrates is German. In March 2024 Der Spiegel reported that, after a court ruling had led the interior ministry to withdraw a report on anti-Muslim hostility, de Vries called a revised version "toxic" and pressed for it not to be published again.

Early life and education

Childhood and family

Christoph de Vries was born on 4 December 1974 in Hamburg. The biographies issued by the Bundestag, which the parliament states are based on members' own information, record that he is married and has three children; they do not name his wife, his children or his parents. A profile in the HafenCity Zeitung of 4 February 2025, published before that year's federal election, called him a native of Hamburg and an enthusiastic father. It reported that he lived with his family in Lurup–Osdorf, that he and his wife then had two daughters, aged 16 and 14, and a son, aged 8, and that his wife taught English and music at a primary school. The same profile said he had played table tennis for the Spielvereinigung Blankenese, a club in Blankenese, since the age of 11.

Schooling and university studies

In 1994 he passed the Abitur at the Catholic Sankt-Ansgar-Schule in Borgfelde. Bundestag biographies state that he has been a member of the Junge Union and the Christian Democratic Union since 1995; the 2025 newspaper profile said he joined the CDU shortly after the Abitur.

The Sankt-Ansgar-Schule in Hamburg-Borgfelde, the Catholic school where de Vries took his Abitur in 1994.

He then studied sociology at the University of Hamburg. The biography for the 19th electoral term (2017–2021) gives the minor subjects as economics, political science and psychology, and dates the Diplom-Soziologe to 2002. The same self-reported entry places him, from 2004 to 2015, as a scientific employee in the budget-policy unit of Hamburg's finance authority. The biographies for the 20th electoral term and for the current term repeat the school, the university and the diploma, but print the graduation year as 2022 and do not repeat the minor subjects. That later year does not fit the 2004 start of employment in the earlier biography. Both figures are the member's own statements. The archived Bundestag pages note that the biographical details rest on those self-reports. His own website also dates the diploma to 2002. Abgeordnetenwatch lists the qualification as Diplom-Soziologe and the year of birth as 1974, without a graduation date, and the HafenCity Zeitung profile describes the same course, including the three minor subjects, again without a year.

Private life

The biographies for the 19th and 20th electoral terms list him as Roman Catholic. The current Bundestag biography still records the marriage and the three children, but it does not state a denomination. The HafenCity Zeitung described him as a believing Catholic and wrote that, in the interview, he spoke about the Catholic faith as well as about family and health. The newspaper also identified him as a supporter of Hamburger SV and as an active table-tennis player at the Blankenese club. On his own website he writes that his support for HSV goes back to childhood and that he has played at the Blankenese club for almost 40 years. Neither that profile nor the Bundestag biographies gives the names of his wife or his children.

Professional career

Hamburg finance authority

From 2004 to 2015 Christoph de Vries was a wissenschaftlicher Angestellter, a salaried graduate specialist, in the Grundsatzbereich Haushalt, the principles section of the budget administration in the finance authority (Finanzbehörde) of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. The biography issued for the 19th Bundestag sets that post beside his 2002 Diplom in sociology from the University of Hamburg, with economics, political science and psychology as subsidiary subjects. The CDU/CSU group’s short profile compresses the same background to “Dipl.-Soziologe, ltd. Angestellter (Haushalt)”: a graduate sociologist and senior employee in budget work.

The Finanzbehörde is the finance department of the Senate; the authority is now the Behörde für Finanzen und Bezirke. Its budget office, the Amt Haushalt und Aufgabenplanung, works under a Haushaltsdirektor and is charged with financial planning, the budget plans, reporting, the budget accounts, the annual accounts and the management reports. Inside that office, Abteilung 21 (Grundsatzangelegenheiten Haushalt, Finanzpolitik) covers budget and financial planning and policy, budget and treasury law, the classification of the budget, annual and consolidated accounts, personnel costs and the establishment plan, and the budgets of the Senate and the personnel office, of the Hamburgische Bürgerschaft, and of general financial administration. The biographies place de Vries in that principles area. They do not itemise the files he was given.

The salaried post ran at the same time as his local mandates. The same chronologies list him as a member of the district assembly of Hamburg-Mitte from 2001 to 2011 and of the Bürgerschaft from 2011 to 2015, with the finance-authority employment continuing until 2015.

Staff of the CDU parliamentary group

In 2015 both the finance-authority post and his membership of the Bürgerschaft ended. He then joined the staff of the parliamentary group of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the Bürgerschaft. From 2015 to 2017 he was stellvertretender Geschäftsführer (deputy managing director) and Leiter Strategie und Kommunikation (head of strategy and communication) of the CDU-Bürgerschaftsfraktion Hamburg. The 19th-term Bundestag biography already recorded that dual function as dating from 2015.

On the current Bundestag page the staff post is the entry under “Berufliche Tätigkeit vor der Mitgliedschaft im Deutschen Bundestag”: “CDU-Bürgerschaftsfraktion, Hamburg”, “Stellv. Geschäftsführer, Leiter Strategie und Kommunikation”. Abgeordnetenwatch, which republishes members’ disclosures, lists the same occupation for the CDU-Bürgerschaftsfraktion and marks it as activity before membership of the Bundestag. The longer biographies retain the finance-authority years; the disclosure line is the job he held immediately before taking his Bundestag seat on 24 October 2017.

He no longer sat in the Bürgerschaft, so the title was a staff post rather than an elective office, and the Bundestag files it as prior employment rather than as a mandate. The Hamburg CDU group describes the staff of its Geschäftsstelle as preparing the group’s political work, gathering and assessing information for the members, supporting the specialist working groups, helping to draft parliamentary questions and Bürgerschaft motions, preparing public statements and press conferences, and organising visits, events and the day-to-day running of the group. The title de Vries held combined deputy direction of that office with responsibility for the group’s strategy and its public communication.

Politics in Hamburg

Junge Union and party entry

The Bundestag biography of Christoph de Vries, published from members' own disclosures, states that he has belonged to the Junge Union and the CDU since 1995. It places that membership at the start of his party career in Hamburg and does not record a chairmanship or other leading office in the youth organization.

District assembly of Hamburg-Mitte

The same biography records him as a member of the Bezirksversammlung Hamburg-Mitte from 2001 to 2011, chair of its CDU group from 2004 to 2008, and deputy chair from 2008 to 2011. Hamburg elects its borough assemblies on the same day as the state parliament, so the vote of 20 February 2011 ended that local term as he entered the Bürgerschaft.

Hamburg Parliament

On 20 February 2011 the CDU took 21.9 percent of the state-list vote. De Vries stood eighth on the CDU state list, with 3,122 personal votes, and tenth on the party list in constituency 1, Hamburg-Mitte, with 2,956 votes. He sat in the 20th Hamburgische Bürgerschaft from 2011 to 2015 as the CDU group's family-policy spokesman, and he signed on Abgeordnetenwatch in that capacity.

At the election of 15 February 2015 the CDU fell to 15.9 percent of the state-list vote and 20 of 121 seats, 18 of them constituency seats and only two from the state list. The SPD took 45.6 percent and 58 seats. Hamburger Abendblatt reported that the CDU group shrank from 28 members to 20 and that the two remaining list places went to Dietrich Wersich and Joachim Lenders. De Vries did not return, nor did Friederike Föcking, Hans-Detlef Roock or Christoph Ploß.

Inquiries into the Chantal and Yagmur cases

On 19 June 2012, about half a year after eleven-year-old Chantal died of methadone in the care of drug-dependent foster parents who received it as a heroin substitute, the Bürgerschaft set up an eleven-member special committee chaired by the SPD deputy Gunnar Eisold. The same day the finance authority, which supervises the boroughs, published an internal audit. As reported then, the youth office of Hamburg-Mitte had not examined the foster parents' suitability "vollständig und ordnungsgemäß," the general social service had known of the catastrophic living conditions since at least 2004, and the placement itself was in question. Prosecutors were investigating the foster parents, the biological father and the social service. Markus Schreiber, the SPD head of the Hamburg-Mitte borough office, left that post in 2012 because of the death.

The committee was formally the Sonderausschuss „Zum Tod des Mädchens Chantal.“ Its papers name de Vries as Schriftführer and as rapporteur of the report of 19 December 2012; his Bundestag biography also calls him the CDU Obmann. On 19 September 2012 the committee heard evidence on foster care in Hamburg City Hall, with social senator Detlef Scheele present. The December report concerned the CDU motion on protecting children in foster families and children of methadone patients: the CDU withdrew several demands, one point passed unanimously, and two were rejected by the SPD, the FDP, the Greens and Die Linke against the CDU.

A follow-up audit, closed on 13 June 2012, reviewed 20 case histories from 50 files in other boroughs and found that the defects were not a single-case failure. File-keeping, casework and supervision showed the same patterns, information was lost between offices, and steering was weak even though the social service's protective duty was clearly regulated. The auditors called for consistent use of the rules, real professional supervision, and documentation that could withstand later review.

Three-year-old Yagmur, from Mümmelmannsberg, died on 18 December 2013 of injuries inflicted by her mother, after a life under youth-office supervision that did not stop months of abuse. The mother was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment at the end of November 2014. On 18 December 2014 the parliamentary inquiry, chaired by the CDU deputy André Trepoll, adopted a final report of 543 pages after 20 sittings and about 100 hours since March. The SPD, CDU, Greens and FDP voted for it; the Left did not take part and had refused the deliberations, while the CDU, FDP, Greens and Left each sought minority opinions.

The report put the greatest failures in the borough social services. Information was "mangelhaft," staff lost the overview, and when the parents moved from Eimsbüttel to Mitte the file was not fully transferred, so warnings about the child dropped out; youth workers then agreed to send her back to her parents. One employee said she had had no time to read all the files, the office did not react when Yagmur stopped attending Kita, and prosecutors had closed an inquiry into earlier life-threatening injuries without questioning the mother. De Vries, the CDU Obmann, said the prosecutor should at least have asked whether a pancreatic injury could be tied to the mother. The Tageblatt read the report as concluding that Yagmur might still have lived had the authorities done their duty, and quoted him: "Es gab ein Totalversagen öffentlicher Stellen." It contained 32 proposals, including stricter rules on returning children.

Before publication the CDU demanded the resignations of Scheele and of Andy Grote, the SPD borough chief in Hamburg-Mitte. De Vries said a 2012 staffing review had already shown Scheele that many youth-office posts were understaffed, yet no further posts for core child-protection work had been created for two years, and that Grote was responsible for reduced documentation and help-interview requirements at Yagmur's office. He wanted child and youth welfare run centrally, and Trepoll asked both men to draw personal consequences. Melanie Leonhard, the SPD Obfrau, called this electioneering before the report could be read, and said it did not justify resignations, though the factions agreed on the recommendations. After adoption, the CDU and the Greens still sought Grote's resignation, and the CDU and the FDP Obmann Finn-Ole Ritter still sought Scheele's.

The Yagmur Gedächtnisstiftung later listed de Vries on its Kuratorium as the CDU Obmann and as initiator of the inquiry. Lezius closed the foundation in 2023 after its funds ran out; it had marked each 18 December with a memorial in the Rathaus.

Bundestag elections

List places and the Hamburg-Mitte constituency

Christoph de Vries stood three times as the direct candidate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Bundestag constituency 18, Hamburg-Mitte, at the federal elections of 2017, 2021 and 2025. He did not win the constituency on any of those occasions and entered the Bundestag each time on the Hamburg CDU state list.

The federal returning officer's description of the district was the same at all three elections. From the borough of Hamburg-Mitte it includes the inner-city quarters of Hamburg-Altstadt and Neustadt, St. Pauli, St. Georg and HafenCity, the port and Elbe-island areas of Steinwerder, Waltershof, Finkenwerder and Neuwerk, and Billbrook, Billstedt, Borgfelde, Hammerbrook, Hamm, Horn, Kleiner Grasbrook, Rothenburgsort and Veddel; the rest of that borough, including Wilhelmsburg, belongs to constituency 23. From the borough of Hamburg-Nord it includes Barmbek-Nord, Barmbek-Süd, Dulsberg, Hohenfelde and Uhlenhorst, with the remainder of Hamburg-Nord in constituency 21.

Because the Hamburg CDU won only some, or none, of its seats in constituencies, list order determined who else entered. On 8 December 2016 a state delegate assembly placed Marcus Weinberg first, Rüdiger Kruse second and de Vries third. The state list admitted for 2021 put Dr. Christoph Ploß first, Franziska Hoppermann second and de Vries third. For 2025 the federal returning officer recorded de Vries as elected from place 3 on the Hamburg list.

The 2017 election

On 24 September 2017, 175,731 of 243,543 people eligible to vote in Hamburg-Mitte cast a ballot, a turnout of 72.2 percent. De Vries received 42,149 first votes, 24.2 percent of the valid first votes and 3.7 percentage points below the CDU share in the constituency in 2013, and finished second. Johannes Kahrs of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) won the seat with 53,795 votes, or 30.9 percent. The CDU polled 40,909 second votes in the constituency, 23.5 percent.

Across Hamburg the CDU received 266,312 second votes, 27.2 percent, and four of the state's 16 Bundestag seats: one constituency and three from the list. Ploß took the constituency seat, in Hamburg-Nord, with 59,441 first votes (33.5 percent). The state returning officer then named Weinberg, Kruse and de Vries, in that order, as the CDU members elected from the state list.

The 2021 election

The election of 26 September 2021 brought a sharp fall in the CDU vote in the constituency. Of 242,078 eligible voters, 179,637 participated, a turnout of 74.2 percent. De Vries received 23,231 first votes, 13.0 percent and 11.2 percentage points less than in 2017, and placed third. Falko Droßmann of the SPD won with 59,229 votes (33.2 percent), ahead of Manuel Muja of Alliance 90/The Greens with 46,326 (26.0 percent). The CDU's second votes in the constituency were 19,982, or 11.2 percent.

In Hamburg as a whole the CDU's second-vote share was 15.4 percent, on a turnout of 77.8 percent, and the party won none of the six constituencies. Its three seats, one fewer than in 2017, all came from the state list and went to Ploß, Hoppermann and de Vries. Hamburg again returned 16 members.

The 2025 election

The federal president set the election for 23 February 2025 after dissolving the 20th Bundestag on 27 December 2024. In Hamburg-Mitte, 189,443 of 243,955 eligible voters took part, a turnout of 77.7 percent, 3.4 percentage points higher than in 2021. De Vries received 31,834 first votes, 17.0 percent, a gain of 3.9 points, but finished third, just ahead of Die Linke on 31,019 votes (16.5 percent). Droßmann held the constituency with 51,554 first votes (27.5 percent), and Emilia Fester of the Greens was second with 40,350 (21.5 percent). The CDU's second votes in the constituency were 29,570, 15.7 percent, up 4.5 points.

Statewide the CDU received 216,935 second votes, 20.7 percent of the valid second votes and 5.3 points more than in 2021. The federal returning officer's list of members elected in Hamburg comprises six constituency winners and seven members returned from state lists. Of the CDU members, Ploß won Hamburg-Nord with 28.1 percent of the first votes, while Hoppermann was elected from list place 2 and de Vries from list place 3.

Work in the Bundestag

Interior committee and related bodies

Christoph de Vries, a Hamburg member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has sat in the Bundestag since 24 October 2017. In the 19th electoral term his full committee seat was on the interior committee. The standing committees of that term were set up on 17 January 2018, and the committee constituted itself on 31 January 2018 with 45 members; the Bundestag’s account of the sitting names him among the ordinary members for the CDU/CSU. In the 20th term the Committee on Internal Affairs and Homeland (Ausschuss für Inneres und Heimat), then with 46 ordinary members, constituted itself on 15 December 2021 and again listed him as an ordinary CDU/CSU member, one of 13 from the joint faction. The archived biography for 2021–2025 records that seat, together with the Parliamentary Control Panel, under his formal Bundestag offices, as distinct from the self-reported biographical note.

The Bundestag describes the committee’s field as running from immigration and asylum policy to civil protection and disaster response: oversight of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and its subordinate authorities, preparation of legislation, and expert hearings, with public security set against individual rights. Abgeordnetenwatch’s roll shows no other full committee seat for him in either term. For 2017–2021 it lists him as a substitute on the Finance Committee, the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs, and the first committee of inquiry, into the terrorist attack at Breitscheidplatz. It records no substitute seats for 2021–2025.

Parliamentary oversight of the intelligence services

The Parliamentary Control Panel (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium, PKGr) is the body Article 45d of the Basic Law requires the Bundestag to appoint for control of federal intelligence activity; a federal statute sets the detail. Under the Kontrollgremiumgesetz the federal government is subject to the panel’s control in respect of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the Military Counterintelligence Service (Militärischer Abschirmdienst) and the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst). The government must keep the panel informed about the services’ general activity and about matters of particular importance, and the panel may demand reports on other matters; the statute also provides for access to files and to the services’ premises. Members are elected at the start of each term by a majority of the members of the Bundestag. The panel as a body continues to sit after a term ends until the next Bundestag has decided on its composition.

The 19th-term roll does not list de Vries on the panel. On 24 March 2022 the Bundestag fixed the 20th-term panel at 13 members. The CDU/CSU voted against that figure and failed to have it cut to 11. The same day the House elected de Vries on the groups’ joint nomination, with 503 votes in favour, 58 against and 56 abstentions (25 invalid), above the 369 votes then required. Nominees of the Alternative for Germany and Die Linke were not elected.

The line “Mitglied im PKM” in the self-reported 20th-term biography is not this panel. The current Bundestag biography spells the same affiliation out as membership of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, and the group’s own list includes him.

Section 2(4) of the statute provides that a member loses the seat on becoming a member of the federal government or a parliamentary state secretary, and that a successor is to be elected without delay. Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor on Tuesday, 6 May 2025. De Vries has written that his appointment as parliamentary state secretary in the interior ministry followed on the Wednesday, when he and Daniela Ludwig received their certificates from Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt after the handover of the ministry. Because the outgoing panel remained in office until the new Bundestag acted, that appointment ended his membership by statute. On 26 June 2025 the House installed a panel of nine. The CDU/CSU members elected were Heiko Hain, Marc Henrichmann and Alexander Throm; de Vries was not among them. The self-reported passage of his current Bundestag biography still lists both the interior committee and the control panel; the administration states that such biographical text rests on members’ own information, while the faction profile now lists the state-secretary office and not those two bodies.

Regional and bilateral parliamentary groups

Parlamentariergruppen are cross-party associations, reconstituted each term, through which members keep contacts with other parliaments by conferences, visits and meetings. They have no statutes or budget of their own. The Council of Elders sets their number and structure, chairs follow faction strength, and a member may belong to at most three.

The biographical note printed by the Bundestag, expressly based on the member’s own statements, lists de Vries as a member of the German–Austrian and German–Polish parliamentary groups and as chairman of the ARGE Elbe, and as a member of the board of the CDU/CSU group for expellees, resettlers and German minorities. Those entries were not part of the formal list of Bundestag offices in the 20th-term biography, which was limited to the interior committee and the control panel. The CDU/CSU parliamentary group, which classes the expellees’ body as one of its sociological groups, currently lists him as a deputy chairman of the Gruppe der Vertriebenen, Aussiedler und deutschen Minderheiten, under chairman Klaus-Peter Willsch, and as a member, without a listed office, of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand.

Interior, migration and security policy

Asylum, borders and returns

As a CDU member of the Bundestag from Hamburg, Christoph de Vries argued for a narrower asylum system before he joined the government. On 8 November 2018, in the first reading of a bill to list Georgia, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as safe countries of origin, he said the label would limit claims he called abusive and speed procedures without ending individual examination. He said Western Balkan applications had fallen 85 percent since 2015 after those states were listed, and blamed the Greens for blocking the Maghreb step.

Before the 2025 election he set out a CDU list he called a turn in asylum policy: turning people back at internal EU borders, which he said would restore the Dublin Regulation rule that the first state of entry examines the claim; ending family reunification for subsidiary protection and voluntary admission programmes, including for Afghanistan; removing Syrians and Afghans obliged to leave and stopping new admissions from Syria and Afghanistan; cancelling protection after travel home; and cutting benefits for people under an enforceable duty to leave to subsistence level. He tied this to Islamist terrorism and to what he called a disproportionate share of suspects from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. A dpa fact-check found that an office evaluation had added overlapping rows of a government table and overstated sexual offences by "Zuwanderer" (asylum seekers, protected and tolerated persons, and people present unlawfully). The Federal Criminal Police Office told dpa a claim of more than 52,000 rapes of women by such suspects since 2017 was wrong; the tables count suspects, not convictions.

The CDU/CSU–SPD government enacted parts of that agenda; the migration department was not assigned to de Vries. On 27 June 2025 the Bundestag suspended family reunification for subsidiary protection for two years, ending a quota of up to 1,000 visas a month, by 444 votes to 135. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) said limitation was returning to residence law. The SPD called it a hard compromise; the Left and Greens called it cruel, churches and human-rights groups objected, and municipal associations welcomed it. The Act of 17 July 2025, in force from 24 July, withholds reunification under section 36a until 23 July 2027, leaves humanitarian admissions under sections 22 and 23 open, and adds "limitation" to the Act's purpose.

On 2 June 2025 the Berlin administrative court held that three Somali applicants who sought asylum at Frankfurt (Oder) on 9 May, after arriving from Poland, could not be returned that day without a Dublin procedure. The Federal Police had cited a safe third country. The court found no shown threat justifying Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, though the procedure could run at the border. De Vries still defended the controls. The Hamburger Abendblatt quoted him as confident of flights to Syria and as claiming 550 smuggler arrests and about 11,000 refusals — his figures, not an independent release.

On 23 December 2025 the Interior Ministry said Germany had removed a convicted offender to Damascus for the first time since 2011, a 37-year-old sentenced in North Rhine-Westphalia for aggravated robbery, assault and extortion, and the same morning a second Afghan offender within a week. It said talks would allow regular removals of offenders and people classed as threats. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said the civil war was over. From January to September 2025 more than 17,600 people were removed, about a fifth more than a year earlier, mostly to Turkey, Georgia and Spain.

Public security, crime and Islamism

De Vries has linked irregular migration from the main asylum countries of origin to violent and sexual crime, and has sought wider powers over communications data. On 29 September 2022 he backed time-limited storage of IP addresses to trace child sexual abuse, calling an address the only usable digital lead and child protection more important than data protection. He urged use of the margin left by the Court of Justice of the European Union and supported then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on compulsory retention of connection data.

Those statistics do not themselves prove the link: they cover reported crime, and Tagesschau noted that only about 30 percent of suspects are convicted. The 2025 figures Dobrindt presented showed about 5.5 million offences, down 5.6 percent, and violent crime down 2.3 percent, while rape and especially serious sexual assault rose 8.5 percent to 14,454. Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, tied part of that rise to more reporting.

Critics say his Islamism line blurs conservative Muslim practice with extremism. In June 2023 the Independent Expert Group on Hostility towards Muslims, appointed after the racist Hanau shootings by then-Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, called that hostility widespread. Its first text cited de Vries for an unclear line against the AfD and for folding "regular structures of Islam and strictly religious behaviour of an orthodox-conservative section" of Muslims into the case against Islamist extremism. Imad Mustafa, who studied the debate for the group, said this put very large numbers of Muslims under general suspicion. De Vries demanded the report stay unpublished or that his name be removed; the ministry later deleted it at his request so republication would not be delayed. He maintained that Islamist extremism was the threat, to be met with bans and police powers together with action against right-wing and left-wing crime.

Parliamentary state secretary

On 6 May 2025 de Vries became Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of the Interior in Merz's cabinet. The ministry chart of 1 September 2026, under Dobrindt, gives him public security; federal-police affairs except tasks performed in Bavaria, reserved to the other parliamentary state secretary, Daniela Ludwig (CSU); civil defence, disaster relief and weapons law; and democracy and society, including integration, religious communities, national minorities and combating antisemitism. He also has the minister's office, cabinet and parliament, press and planning; protocol and citizen information; and the staff for crisis reaction, hybrid threats and civil-emergency coordination. Migration, refugees and returns sit with Ludwig, not with him.

Interim responsibility for Jewish life and antisemitism

The same chart still listed the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism as vacant. Felix Klein, commissioner since May 2018, was leaving in September 2026 to head Germany's permanent representation at the OECD in Paris. On 28 August 2026 a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said de Vries would carry the duties until Dobrindt named a successor. On 14 October 2026 the government appointed Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission's coordinator against antisemitism, to start in Berlin on 28 October. Tagesschau reported that de Vries had held the work after Klein left at the end of August, and that the delay had been criticised while antisemitic incidents stayed high. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, welcomed her. The interim was an administrative bridge, not a programme de Vries announced.

Controversies and reception

Remarks on a German people and an integration scale

On the evening of 5 July 2021, at a panel in Frankfurt entitled “Politischer Islam in Deutschland – Gefahr für den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt,” de Vries said Germany was not an immigration country “einfach deshalb, weil es ein genuin deutsches Volk gibt.” The Hamburger Morgenpost reported that he set this against the United States and Australia, which he described as formed only from immigrant groups, and called Germany merely a Zuwanderungsland. A clip spread about two weeks later. He told the paper that “Realität Islam,” which he said was under intelligence watch, had issued it and stripped the context. Politicians of Die Linke and the Greens called the remarks völkisch; Zaklin Nastic, a Hamburg Left spokeswoman, said the Hamburg CDU was on a “schwarz-braunem Krawallkurs” and had insulted Hamburgers with a migration history.

He said a Nazi sense of “genuin” had been “völlig fern” to him: he had meant a population settled for centuries, with substantial immigration only for about a hundred years, and that anyone who arrives and integrates is German. Omitting Indigenous peoples had been a mistake, he said; in a Facebook post of 20 July 2021 he wrote that mentioning them expressly would have been “richtiger und historisch zutreffender,” called the clip a “Rufmordkampagne,” and said racism was foreign to him.

nd, using the full recording, reported a further ranking: Russian Germans stood “auf demselben Niveau wie die Biodeutschen,” “fleißige” and “bildungsaffine” Asians came “kurz dahinter,” and Turkish migrants and, more recently, people from the Arab world stood “am unteren Ende dieser Integrationsskala.” Correctiv described the ranking again in a candidate check of 12 December 2024. A question on Abgeordnetenwatch of 4 June 2025 said he had invoked a study by Ruud Koopmans and asked which one. He replied on 21 July that he had already answered “mehrfach ausführlich,” and on 12 September again declined to name a title.

The expert report on anti-Muslim hostility

An expert group on hostility toward Muslims, appointed by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) after the racist Hanau shootings, published “Muslimfeindlichkeit – Eine deutsche Bilanz” in June 2023. Der Spiegel reported that the original text treated statements by Union members of the Bundestag such as de Vries as an “unklare Abgrenzung von der AfD”: dangers of Islamist extremism were stressed with some justification, while “reguläre Strukturen des Islams und strengreligiöse Verhaltensweisen eines orthodox-konservativen Teils” of Muslims were drawn into the argument. It called the AfD the only Bundestag party with a “manifest muslimfeindlichen Programm,” and found “latente Formen” in the CDU/CSU, and sometimes other parties, through diminished recognition of Islam and a conflict image of it.

The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg ordered the Interior Ministry to remove passages on the journalist Henryk M. Broder, whom the report accused of having “dämonisiert” Muslims, and the ministry took the text offline. In a letter to Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD), reported by Spiegel on 20 March 2024, de Vries asked that even a revision of this “toxischer Bericht” not be published. At a minimum, he wrote, his name and the CDU/CSU group must not be tied to Muslimfeindlichkeit, or they would reserve legal action, lest the CDU be placed “in die Nähe von Extremisten.”

The AfD, the firewall and January 2025 votes

On 29 January 2025 a five-point Union migration plan passed narrowly with AfD, FDP and non-attached votes. Tagesschau reported that Friedrich Merz had said he would accept votes from the AfD, which it called in part right-wing extremist, and that Angela Merkel called that course wrong. On 31 January SPD parliamentary leader Rolf Mützenich spoke of a “Sündenfall,” and Katharina Dröge of Alliance 90/The Greens said alliances with right-wing extremists corroded parliamentary democracy.

The same day the Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz—restoring “Begrenzung” in residence law, suspending family reunification for subsidiary protection, and widening federal-police removal powers—failed by 338 votes to 349, with five abstentions. De Vries wrote that he had supported it “aus voller Überzeugung,” citing the attacks in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich and a reunification suspension he said had already applied in 2016–2018. On 17 February 2025 he wrote that Merz had neither ended the firewall nor announced cooperation: “Eine Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD haben wir mehr als einmal deutlich ausgeschlossen und dabei wird es auch bleiben.” Measures to protect the public, he added, must not be dropped for tactical reasons.

In September 2026 he wrote that a ban case was pointless until the Cologne administrative court ruled on a “gesichert rechtsextremistisch” label, because a Federal Constitutional Court test is stricter than one by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and includes “qualifizierte Vorbereitungshandlungen.” Restraint was due, he added, toward a party with millions of voters, and “Wegregieren” remained the best means against the AfD.

The Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung anniversary

On 12 April 2025 de Vries stood in for Philipp Amthor at the 75th anniversary, in Hamburg, of the Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung, the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen’s paper. The paper said that, as chairman of the CDU/CSU group for expellees, Aussiedler and German minorities, he called himself a regular reader, cited a long expellee passage in the coalition agreement, and criticised Claudia Roth for equating expellees with 1970s guest workers. Among guests it named Wilhelm von Gottberg, a former Landsmannschaft speaker, whom the Bundestag archive lists as an AfD member in 2017–2021.

After he was named a designated parliamentary state secretary, t-online reported on 30 April 2025 that the Hamburger Bündnis gegen Rechts had called the paper one of the main outlets of the “Neuen Rechten,” between “Konservatismus und Rechtsextremismus.” He told the Hamburger Abendblatt that he had spoken in his official function, that the paper carried voices from the centre, including a June 2022 interview with former mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi, and that the charges were “an den Haaren herbeigezogen.”

The 2026 attack on his car

In the night of 17–18 June 2026, during the interior ministers’ conference in Hamburg, butyric acid was poured on de Vries’s private car at his home in Hamburg-Lurup. Police said the owner reported a foul smell on Thursday morning; the spokeswoman did not name him. An online text signed “FREE ALL ANTIFAS – Feuer und Flamme der Repression!” called him a “rechten Kulturkämpfer mit ideologischen Überschneidungen zur AfD,” and Hamburg state protection investigated criminal damage. The text also referred to an arson attack that night on the car of Erik Janke, head of police commissariat 16, in Henstedt-Ulzburg; NDR reported that the car burned out, and Schleswig-Holstein state protection led that case. That claim has not been verified. The Hamburg police union called the acts “menschenverachtenden Extremismus”; Omid Nouripour, a Bundestag vice-president, and the Hamburg AfD group also condemned them.

Standing in the CDU

Offices in the Hamburg CDU

On 23 May 2016 the delegates of the CDU district association Hamburg-Mitte elected Christoph de Vries, then 41 and a former member of the Hamburg Parliament, as district chairman with 88 percent of the vote. He succeeded Herlind Gundelach; the ten local branches had agreed the slate beforehand, and he thanked her for having left older conflicts in the association behind. The Bundestag biography, drawn from the member's own information, dates the chairmanship from 2015. On 15 February 2024 a district congress re-elected him unanimously, for a fifth consecutive term.

On 11 June 2016 a state congress of the CDU Hamburg confirmed Roland Heintze as state chairman with 95 percent and elected four deputies: Friederike Föcking, Christoph Ploß, Birgit Stöver and de Vries. He remained a deputy as the state leadership changed. On 23 June 2018 the delegates re-elected him with 86 percent, alongside Anke Frieling, Natalie Hochheim and Ploß. On 26 September 2020, after the CDU's 11.2 percent in that February's state election, Ploß succeeded Heintze with 177 votes in favour, 29 against and six abstentions, reported as 86 percent. De Vries was again elected a deputy, with Frieling, Hochheim and Philipp Heißner.

Those four deputies were confirmed on 25 June 2022, at a congress addressed by federal party and parliamentary-group chairman Friedrich Merz. Ploß was re-elected with 42 votes against and ten abstentions, about 74 percent counting the abstentions and just over 78 percent without them. On 24 February 2024 Dennis Thering, state chairman since April 2023, received 203 of 215 valid votes (94.4 percent), and the four deputies were re-elected without opponents. On 6 June 2026 Thering took 184 votes to 28 against, with one abstention (86.4 percent); Frieling, Heißner, de Vries and Hochheim were again returned unopposed.

Alignment with the national party leadership

Before the CDU's January 2021 leadership election, Bild surveyed Hamburg's 16 delegates. Twelve, including Ploß, said they would vote for Merz, and none was recorded for Armin Laschet; the paper's listing marked de Vries for Merz. After Laschet won, de Vries wrote in Die Welt on 18 January 2021 that he had spent the weekend calming party friends and that some members saw the result as a deep estrangement between officials and the base. That August, with Laschet the Union's candidate for chancellor, he invited Merz to open the Hamburg campaign at the Hamburger Dom. The Hamburger Morgenpost called him an avowed Merz supporter: he described Merz as one of the best minds in the CDU and said he could rarely disagree with him, while also saying the party wanted Laschet as chancellor.

The state party placed him third on the federal list. On 15 July 2024 a delegate assembly put Ploß first, with 88 percent, Franziska Hoppermann second and de Vries third for the 2025 Bundestag election. After that election Merz nominated him as parliamentary state secretary in the interior ministry, to work with the designated minister Alexander Dobrindt of the CSU. De Vries said that, once the government was in office, he would press for what he called an "Asylwende", against extremist threats and for priority to public safety. Thering called the nomination an outstanding success and recognition of the Hamburg CDU's result. At the election to the Hamburg Parliament on 2 March 2025 the CDU took 19.8 percent of the state-list votes, behind the SPD on 33.5 percent and ahead of the Greens on 18.5 percent. The Bundestag lists him as parliamentary state secretary of the interior.

The nomination came with public criticism of his earlier remarks on migration. On 30 April 2025 t-online reported objections, including from a Hamburg alliance against the right, which returned to disputed statements of his on immigration. Sina Imhof, chair of the Hamburg Greens, congratulated him but said it was regrettable that he had repeatedly drawn attention with questionable remarks. The Hamburg Greens called Merz's decision irritating.