Fabian Jacobi

Fabian Jacobi (born 19 June 1973 in Münster) is a German lawyer and a politician of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2017, sitting for North Rhine-Westphalia on the state list rather than as the winner of a constituency seat. In the 21st electoral term the Bundestag lists his occupation as Rechtsanwalt and records him as an ordinary member and Obmann of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, as an ordinary member of the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and Rules of Procedure, of the Subcommittee on European Law and of the Wahlausschuss, and as a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs.

The parliamentary biography, which the Bundestag states is based on the member's own information, says that he went to school in Essen, passed the Abitur in 1991 and then performed civilian service, and that he studied law in Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen. Since 2006 he has practiced as a lawyer in Cologne with insolvency law as his specialty.

He joined the AfD in March 2013. The same account places him on the party's North Rhine-Westphalia executive from 2013 to 2022 and again from 2024 to 2026, and names him spokesperson of the Cologne district association from 2022 to 2024. At the federal election of 23 February 2025 the Federal Returning Officer recorded him as elected from second place on the AfD list in North Rhine-Westphalia, with a candidacy in constituency 092, Cologne I. In that constituency he received 13.2 percent of the first votes (20,022); Sanae Abdi of the SPD won the direct seat with 24.9 percent.

On 22 March 2022 the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court dismissed his organ-dispute application over nominations for a Bundestag vice-presidency (2 BvE 2/20). For a sitting in November 2019 he had said he would propose an additional candidate of his own in a second ballot, after the AfD group had already nominated a member; the presiding vice-president rejected that proposal as inadmissible. The Senate held that Article 38(1) of the Basic Law generally includes an individual member's right to make nominations in elections the Bundestag conducts, but that limiting the right to parliamentary groups was a tenable and constitutionally permissible reading of the Bundestag's rules of procedure.

On 5 March 2026 the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported that leaked customer files of Hier & Jetzt, a magazine issued from 2005 to 2013 with the subtitle "radikal rechte Zeitung" and edited by Arne Schimmer of the National Democratic Party of Germany, listed Jacobi as having ordered single issues in 2010 and 2011. He told the paper that he had ordered two copies after reading a review, that he had never subscribed, and that a question about his motives was "impertinent"; he wrote that the NPD's entry into the Saxon parliament had been reason to look more closely, and he invoked the right to inform oneself from generally accessible sources. Two days earlier WDR reported that Jacobi, identified there as deputy state chair, was challenging Martin Vincentz for the state leadership and stood accused in the executive of having sent allegedly falsified application documents of the former state business manager Klaus Esser to the state arbitration court and to the Aachen public prosecutor, which was investigating Esser on suspicion of document forgery, without telling the rest of the board.

Early life and education

Upbringing and schooling

Fabian Jacobi was born on 19 June 1973 in Münster in Westphalia, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. His Bundestag biography, which the parliament publishes with the note that members supply their own biographical details, places his schooling in Essen, in the Ruhr. The profile issued by the Alternative for Germany group in the Bundestag is more precise about the span of that upbringing: it says his childhood and youth, from kindergarten through civilian service, were spent in Essen. The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, introducing the newly elected members from Cologne in September 2017, likewise described him as having grown up in Essen. None of these accounts names his parents or the school he attended.

He passed the Abitur, the general school-leaving qualification for university entrance, in 1991, and then performed Zivildienst. While conscription was still in force, that service was the civilian substitute assigned to young men who had been recognized as conscientious objectors. Conscientious objection has been a basic right under the Basic Law since 1949, and objectors worked in hospitals, nursing homes and other social institutions rather than in the armed forces; more than 2.5 million men served in that way before the Zivildienst ended with the suspension of conscription in 2011. Jacobi's published biographies do not name the institution to which he was assigned or the length of his service.

University and legal training

After civilian service he studied law in Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen. The Bundestag biography gives no enrolment dates, does not identify which university in Berlin he attended, and does not record a first state examination. For the Referendariat, the practical preparatory service that follows university legal study, he returned to North Rhine-Westphalia; the parliamentary group's profile states that he passed the second juridical state examination in 2005 and that from 2006 he worked in Cologne as a lawyer in insolvency administration. The shorter Bundestag text omits the examination year. The published chronology therefore runs from the Abitur in 1991 to the second examination in 2005 without intermediate dates.

Under the German Judges Act, the qualification for judicial office is acquired by completing a university law degree with a first examination and a subsequent preparatory service with a second state examination. The preparatory service lasts two years. The Federal Lawyers' Act makes that qualification — or certain European equivalents — the condition for admission to practise as a Rechtsanwalt.

The Bundestag biography likewise dates his Cologne practice from 2006 and gives insolvency law as his specialisation. Disclosures filed with the Bundestag list his occupation before he became a member as that of a lawyer with Dr. Wolfgang Delhaes in Cologne, and list continued paid work as a lawyer in the city. The transparency project abgeordnetenwatch records the activity carried on alongside the mandate as freelance legal practice. In September 2017 the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger described the then 44-year-old as a jurist whose office, concentrated on insolvency law, was in Cologne's Altstadt.

Legal career

Fabian Jacobi is admitted as a lawyer (Rechtsanwalt) in Cologne. The nationwide official register kept by the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer records 9 June 2006 as both the date of his admission and the date of his first admission, and gives his bar membership as Cologne (Rechtsanwaltskammer Köln). The entry names the practice Kanzlei Fabian Jacobi, with the office address Rauhe Hecke 6, 51107 Cologne, and the professional title Rechtsanwalt; it does not display a specialist title (Fachanwaltsbezeichnung). The email address listed there is post@rechtsanwaltjacobi.de.

His Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members' own information, says that he studied law in Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen and has been a lawyer in Cologne since 2006, with insolvency law (Insolvenzrecht) as his focus. The profile published by the Alternative for Germany group in the Bundestag adds that he returned to North Rhine-Westphalia for the legal traineeship (Referendariat), passed the second state examination in 2005, and from 2006 worked in Cologne in insolvency administration (Insolvenzverwaltung). The archived biography for the 19th electoral term (2017–2021) likewise records the second state examination and practice as a lawyer from 2006.

The occupation he was required to disclose for the period before he joined the Bundestag is given as lawyer with Dr. Wolfgang Delhaes in Cologne. Delhaes, who holds the specialist title Fachanwalt für Insolvenzrecht, states that in 2007 he founded DR. DELHAES Rechtsanwälte and DR. DELHAES Insolvenzverwaltung and took over the Cologne and Bonn offices of the insolvency firm Metzeler – van Betteray, where he had been a partner since 1997. The Cologne address published in that firm's imprint is Neue Weyerstraße 9. The parliamentary filings do not give Jacobi's dates, status or individual matters in that practice, and the firm pages consulted do not name him. No case names appear in the disclosures.

Members may keep a profession beside the mandate. Paid work must be notified to the President of the Bundestag within three months, and the amount must be stated if it exceeds 1,000 euro in a month or, failing that, 3,000 euro in a calendar year. Where the income consists of turnover, the published figure is profit before tax rather than gross receipts. Facts covered by a lawyer's duty of confidentiality need not identify the client. Abgeordnetenwatch, using those filings, records a freelance practice as a lawyer for the 20th term (2021–2025) and the 21st term (2025–2029), entered on 25 October 2022 and last changed on 1 August 2025, and separately records the pre-mandate work with Delhaes. The archived biography for 2021–2025 publishes two anonymised clients under that practice: for Mandant 1, 2,751.72 euro profit before tax in 2023; for Mandant 2, 9,795.00 euro in 2023 and 3,751.80 euro in 2024. The 19th-term biography does not list a paid legal activity alongside the mandate. The current biography again lists "Rechtsanwalt, Köln" as paid work beside the mandate but, in the form published, gives no client amounts for the 21st term. The constituency office at Unter Käster 1, 50667 Cologne, is a separate parliamentary address from the office in the bar register.

Party activity in the Alternative for Germany

State and district offices

Fabian Jacobi joined the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in March 2013. In the biography he supplied to the Bundestag, he lists uninterrupted membership of the state executive of the AfD in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2013 to 2022, the spokespersonship of the Cologne district association (Bezirksverband Köln) from 2022 to 2024, and a further period on the state executive from 2024 to 2026.

At the state congress in Siegen on 5 February 2022, outgoing chair Rüdiger Lucassen did not stand, saying he would not block a change of generation. Jacobi lost to Martin Vincentz, a Landtag member and deputy leader of the state parliamentary group. Of 456 delegates who cast a vote, Vincentz received 63.03 percent and Jacobi 31.18 percent, a party spokeswoman told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Delegates had already rejected the dual leadership Jacobi favored, and he also failed to become first deputy chair; that post went to the Cologne Landtag member Sven Tritschler.

He returned to the state executive at the congress in Marl on 24 February 2024. Vincentz, with no opponent, was re-elected with 78.33 percent. The state association’s account of the executive constituted after that congress named Jacobi first deputy state spokesperson, with Kay Gottschalk second deputy and Klaus Esser third. In February 2026 WDR still described him as one of the vice-chairs in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The second spell on the executive ended at the congress in Marl on 7 and 8 March 2026. Jacobi and the Bundestag member Christian Zaum had proposed themselves as a dual leadership against Vincentz. About 53 percent of roughly 500 delegates voted to keep a single chair, so Jacobi stood alone, WDR reported. Vincentz was re-elected with 54.77 percent. Die Tageszeitung reported 54.7 percent for Vincentz and 43.4 percent for Jacobi.

Place in the party's internal spectrum

Published accounts have not described Jacobi as an organizer of the nationalist current associated with Björn Höcke. They have, however, repeatedly presented him as a candidate put forward by that current’s allies in the North Rhine-Westphalian party, including at the March 2026 congress where he spoke against Vincentz.

Earlier coverage did not place him in a wing. After the 2017 federal election the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger wrote that the then little-known 44-year-old lawyer could not be assigned to any clear AfD faction and was not regarded as ultraright. Ingo Schumacher, spokesperson of the Cologne district association, called him the association’s “Satzungspapst” for the detail with which he worked through election rules.

In 2022 the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung described Vincentz as, compared with some colleagues in the Landtag and at federal level, still moderate in manner. At the February 2024 congress the Rheinische Post reported that he intended to act against extremist forces in the state association, and that his camp then took a setback when Matthias Helferich won one of the ordinary seats on the executive.

In 2026 the challenge was launched from the völkisch camp. On 5 February the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported that the völkisch wing around Helferich had announced Jacobi and Zaum as a joint ticket. Zaum, the paper wrote, stood for that wing and had links to the youth organization Generation Deutschland; Jacobi was expected to win delegates who might balk at a candidate known only as close to Helferich. Inside the party, it said, the Cologne lawyer was known as an assembly chair, a stickler for the statutes and a media-shy loner. The same article noted that Vincentz’s attempt to push back the völkisch camp around Höcke and Helferich had lost support. t-online described Helferich as belonging to the party’s Höcke wing and wrote that this camp had entered Jacobi and Zaum because it wanted a dual leadership in place of Vincentz, whom it counted with the comparatively moderate side. Die Tageszeitung reported that the right-wing extremist wing around Helferich had campaigned for the Jacobi–Zaum ticket, and that the two also had support from Höcke, who in late February toured the state and spoke at AfD events in Dortmund and Düsseldorf.

WDR separated that backing from membership of the current. Before the congress it wrote that Jacobi belonged to no party tendency, while recording that parts of the membership found him controversial and that the candidacies were supported by Vincentz’s opponents, among them Helferich. From Marl it reported that he had the support of the right-wing extremist camp even though he himself was not part of it, and described his speech as colorless: he appealed for party unity against what he called the “extremism of the other parties.”

Bundestag elections

2017

Jacobi stood for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) at the federal election of 24 September 2017 in constituency 93, Köln I. The district is the part of Cologne made up of the boroughs of Porz and Kalk in full and, within the Innenstadt borough, the districts Altstadt-Nord, Deutz and Neustadt-Nord. On the AfD state list for North Rhine-Westphalia he was sixth; the list admitted in the Ministerialblatt named him as a lawyer living in Cologne.

The direct mandate went to Karsten Möring of the Christian Democratic Union, with 43,683 first votes (31.6 percent), 884 ahead of Martin Dörmann of the Social Democratic Party (42,799; 31.0 percent). Jacobi received 11,952 first votes (8.6 percent) and finished fourth, behind Schwanitz of Alliance 90/The Greens (13,535; 9.8 percent) and just ahead of Yilmaz of Die Linke (11,898; 8.6 percent). Turnout was 72.6 percent: 139,718 voters out of 192,574 eligible. The AfD's second votes in the constituency were 12,290 (8.9 percent).

In North Rhine-Westphalia the AfD polled 928,425 second votes (9.4 percent) and was allocated 15 seats. Jacobi did not win Köln I. He entered the 19th Bundestag from the state list and has been a member since 2017.

2021

The district kept the number 93 and the same territory at the election of 26 September 2021. Jacobi was again the AfD candidate in Köln I and stood third on the party's North Rhine-Westphalia list.

Sanae Abdi (SPD) won the constituency with 38,985 first votes (27.9 percent). Lisa-Marie Friede (Greens) was second with 33,405 (23.9 percent) and Möring third with 31,636 (22.6 percent). Jacobi received 8,789 first votes (6.3 percent), 2.4 points below 2017, and placed fifth, behind Reinhard Houben of the Free Democratic Party (11,490; 8.2 percent) and ahead of Madeleine Eisfeld (Die Linke; 7,213; 5.2 percent). Turnout was 73.9 percent (140,901 of 190,630 eligible). AfD second votes in the constituency were 8,363 (6.0 percent).

The state returning officer's final list of successful state-list candidates places Jacobi third for the AfD, in a run of AfD names from list place 1 through place 12. Statewide the party received 717,510 second votes (7.3 percent). The constituency mandate was Abdi's; Jacobi sat in the 20th Bundestag through the state list.

2025

At the election of 23 February 2025 the same area was numbered constituency 92, still under the name Köln I. Jacobi was the admitted AfD constituency candidate, a lawyer born in 1973 and resident in Cologne, and the Federal Returning Officer records his state-list place as 2.

Abdi held the seat with 37,717 first votes (24.9 percent), 456 ahead of Serap Güler of the CDU (37,261; 24.6 percent). Roman Schulte (Greens) took 30,496 (20.1 percent). Jacobi received 20,022 first votes (13.2 percent), a gain of 6.9 points, and finished fourth, ahead of Kalle Gerigk (Die Linke; 16,894; 11.1 percent) and Fardad Hooghoughi (FDP; 4,672; 3.1 percent). Turnout rose to 80.2 percent (153,110 of 190,951 eligible). AfD second votes in the constituency were 18,853 (12.4 percent); Die Linke's were 22,716 (14.9 percent).

The Federal Returning Officer lists Jacobi as elected on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list in place 2, and as having also stood in constituency 092. In the state the AfD received 1,770,379 second votes (16.8 percent). His membership of the 19th, 20th and 21st Bundestage has in each case come through that state list rather than through a direct mandate in Köln I.

Parliamentary work

Committees and offices

Since taking his seat in the Bundestag in 2017, Fabian Jacobi of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has sat mainly on the parliament’s legal bodies. In the 19th legislative period (2017–2021) the archived biography lists him as an ordinary member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection (Ausschuss für Recht und Verbraucherschutz) and as a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs, the Subcommittee on European Law (Unterausschuss Europarecht) and the Wahlausschuss. The Wahlausschuss proposes the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court whom the Bundestag elects.

In the 20th period (2021–2025) he was an ordinary member of the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and Rules of Procedure (Ausschuss für Wahlprüfung, Immunität und Geschäftsordnung), of the legal-affairs committee (listed there as the Rechtsausschuss), of the Wahlausschuss and of the separate Wahlprüfungsausschuss, and a deputy member on European Union affairs and European law. The archive also names him Obmann of the legal-affairs committee. In the Bundestag glossary an Obmann or Obfrau is each group’s principal contact on a committee—one per group—who helps set that group’s line, its agendas and the planning of deliberations.

The biography for the 21st period, dated 31 October 2026, again lists him as Obmann and ordinary member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, and as an ordinary member of the rules, immunity and election-scrutiny committee, of the Subcommittee on European Law and of the Wahlausschuss. He is only a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs. The page does not list the Wahlprüfungsausschuss. The AfD holds three of the Wahlausschuss’s twelve seats in this term, beside five for the CDU/CSU, two for the Social Democratic Party of Germany and one each for Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke.

Legislation and plenary debates

A recurring subject of his speeches has been the duty to file for insolvency, and the attachment of changes in that law to other bills. On 25 March 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, he said the AfD would in principle support a temporary suspension, but that any extension should be decided by parliament and that unviable firms should not be kept on as what he called “undead zombies.” On 17 September 2020 he opposed a further suspension of the over-indebtedness ground, calling the memorandum’s claim of continuing uncertainty an insufficient basis and warning that dropping the ground would be a lasting change, not an emergency step. On 17 December 2020 he said the Sanierungs- und Insolvenzrechtsfortentwicklungsgesetz, rushed for 1 January, implemented a 2018 European Union directive rather than a pandemic measure, and that a January suspension had to be widened the same evening because aid applications could not yet be filed. On 28 January 2021 he objected when the finance committee attached a further extension to a tax-deadline bill, arguing that a committee may decide only what the plenary referred to it.

On 24 June 2021, at the second and third reading of the bill to unify foundation law (Bundestagsdrucksache 19/28173; committee texts on Drucksachen 19/30938 and 19/31118), he said the legal-affairs committee had two days earlier retitled the bill so that it also amended the Infection Protection Act. He argued that the committee was not responsible for that statute and that the attachment avoided a first reading and the health committee, calling it an undermining of ordinary legislation and “a cultivated contempt for parliamentary procedure.” He opposed keeping entry rules—proof of vaccination, a test, or quarantine for returns from a risk area—after the “epidemic situation of national significance” had ended. The group would vote for the foundation reform separately and reject the infection-protection articles. The plenary then split the second reading. The foundation-law provisions passed with the CDU/CSU, the SPD and the AfD; the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Left abstained. Articles 9 and 10, on which the AfD had demanded a roll-call, passed by 408 votes to 210, with two abstentions. In the final vote the AfD abstained with those three groups, and the bill passed with the governing parties. Speakers for the Free Democrats and the Left had also called the attachment alien to the foundation reform.

The next day Correctiv examined a separate claim by the AfD member Peter Boehringer that the same change had “hidden” a tightening which would newly restrict bodily integrity and allow compulsory-vaccination ordinances. Correctiv rated the claim mostly false. The amendment created no new restriction of fundamental rights and no vaccination mandate; it extended, by up to one year after the epidemic situation ended, an existing power to require quarantine or a negative test of travelers from risk areas. The naming of affected rights followed the constitutional citation requirement already in the statute since November 2020, and a health-ministry spokesperson called such attachments a relatively frequent time-saving practice.

On 20 October 2022 Jacobi repeated the procedural objection. Changes to the COVID-19 insolvency-suspension statute had been added the day before, in the legal-affairs committee, to a bill abolishing the matrimonial-property register. Loosening insolvency law in the banking crisis, the pandemic and the energy-price crisis, he said, held down case numbers at the insolvency courts instead of changing what he called a disastrous energy policy.

In the 21st period he was a named sponsor of AfD group bills on expression. The bill of 8 October 2025 (Bundestagsdrucksache 21/2085) would bar house searches in prosecutions for offences against personal honour. The bill of 6 October 2026, on safeguarding freedom of expression in social networks (Bundestagsdrucksache 21/8369), would amend the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz so that the liability exemptions in Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act, would not apply where an intermediary checked user content by criteria other than compatibility with general law. Removal limited to unlawful content would keep the privilege.

Constitutional litigation

Nomination of Bundestag vice-presidents

In the 19th Bundestag one of six vice-presidencies fixed on 24 October 2017 stayed vacant. Nominees of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) group did not obtain a majority; the other groups' candidates were elected. The group's nominee, the member Podolay, failed a first ballot on 26 September 2019.

For the second ballot on 7 November 2019 the group again nominated Podolay, and Jacobi gave notice that he would also nominate the member Renner. The President of the Bundestag, then Wolfgang Schäuble, told him the proposal would not be admitted, and the presiding vice-president rejected it: an individual member, she held, had no right to nominate a vice-president. Jacobi argued that Article 38 of the Basic Law gave him, at least from the second round, a right of nomination of his own.

He brought an organ dispute against the President (2 BvE 2/20). An interim order was rejected as inadmissible on 7 July 2021. After a hearing on 10 November 2021, the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court dismissed the application by judgment of 22 March 2022 as unfounded.

Article 38(1), second sentence, the Senate held, protects equal participation in parliamentary will-formation, including internal elections and, in principle, a member's right to nominate. Limits must serve an interest of equal rank, including the functioning of parliament, and be proportionate; under Article 40 the Bundestag regulates its own affairs, and review of its rules is confined to evident unsoundness and fair application. Reserving nominations to groups, in light of the rule that each group has at least one vice-president, met that test: it tied the presidium to a candidate enjoying the group's confidence, without removing the member's vote or the chance to argue inside the group.

The same day the Senate dismissed a parallel application by the AfD group (2 BvE 9/20) as manifestly unfounded under § 24 of the Federal Constitutional Court Act. Any interest under the rules in a vice-president was subject to election by the members. The election required by Article 40(1), first sentence, is free, and a group has no right that its nominees be elected or that procedure be arranged to that end.

Bremen state election lists

Before the 14 May 2023 election to the Bürgerschaft of Bremen, two AfD boards in Bremen filed lists. A rump board around deputy chair Sergej Minich, from a congress on 8 May 2022 that elected no chair, was backed by the federal executive. An emergency board including Heinrich Löhmann and Frank Magnitz, installed by the state arbitration court on 20 October 2022 and confirmed by the federal arbitration court, filed a city list on 6 December 2022 after an assembly called by a notice in the Weser-Kurier. Minich and Mertcan Karakaya signed a rival list on 16 January 2023. Jacobi acted as a deputy Vertrauensperson for that slate and, with Minich, attended the Bremen constituency election committee on 9 March 2023; Löhmann appeared for the emergency board.

A party may file only one list in a constituency. On 17 March 2023 the Bremen constituency committee rejected the rump list because two lists were traceable to AfD assemblies, contrary to § 7(2), second sentence, of the Bremen Electoral Act; Bremerhaven admitted an AfD list the same day. On 23 March the state election committee unanimously dismissed the complaint because § 18(2), first sentence, requires a personal signature of the state executive: it treated the emergency board as that executive, the arbitration rulings as binding, and the signatures of Minich and Karakaya as insufficient, and it quashed the Bremerhaven admission on the same ground. The AfD did not appear on the ballot.

In a brief of 20 March 2023 Jacobi argued that a newspaper notice was not a valid invitation under § 19, so the December list was not the party's and only the January list should have been considered; he also relied on a Berlin regional-court judgment of 16 March 2023 on who represented the association. The state committee did not treat the rump board as entitled to sign.

On 18 April 2023 the rump board, through Minich and Karakaya, brought an organ dispute (St 3/23) against the Senator for the Interior, seeking a finding that legal supervision under Article 21 of the Basic Law required the lists to be admitted. On 27 April the State Constitutional Court refused an interim order (St 4/23) as inadmissible: challenges to preparations for an election are reserved to post-election scrutiny. It found no electoral error of extraordinary weight that might justify an exception, and the same day rejected interim applications by the emergency board (St 1/23 and St 2/23). The rump board withdrew the main claim on 3 July 2023, and St 3/23 was discontinued on 7 August 2023.

Political positions

Judiciary and constitutional procedure

On 10 October 2024 Jacobi opposed bills by the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP, with Stefan Seidler (printed papers 20/12977 and 20/12978), to put into Articles 93 and 94 of the Basic Law rules then left to statute: the Federal Constitutional Court's rank, the binding force of its decisions, two senates of eight judges, a twelve-year term, an age limit and no re-election, plus a power for the Bundestag to let the other chamber elect a judge if one failed. The memorandum said this would also guard against attempts, seen in some European countries, to question judicial independence. Jacobi defined democracy as a free popular will and a real chance to change policy by election. Entrenching rules already treated as successful was unnecessary, he said; the point was that a blocked vote could pass to the Bundesrat, where only Land governments sit and the Alternative for Germany was absent, once an opposition held more than a third of the Bundestag.

On 19 December 2024 he called those clauses packaging for a refusal to talk to the AfD and a wish to keep the court "divided among themselves." The Bundestag passed the amendment by 600 votes to 69. An amendment he led (printed paper 20/14306) would instead have deleted the substitute election, required candidates to appear in public, and restored published reasons for refusing a constitutional complaint a hearing, arguing that an informal group had taken over the choice and that the shift could breach democracy and federalism. On 10 October he accepted a limited trial of online money claims, but said digital justice must remain an offer—a right to an analogue life—and that counsel, not the court, should shape the pleadings.

Migration, criminal law and emergency powers

On 25 September 2026, on a government bill to amend the Code of Administrative Court Procedure (printed paper 21/7824), SPD and CDU/CSU speakers presented email objections, more single judges and fines of up to 25,000 euro for authorities that ignore judgments as ways to shorten cases. Jacobi blamed an "absurd" mass of asylum litigation on "the absurd idea of conferring on all humanity an enforceable claim to move into our small piece of the world," which only an AfD majority would limit. Email objections were sensible, he said, but weakening the court's duty to investigate of its own motion, and excluding late argument more easily, would cut protection against the state to relieve an overload the state had caused.

On 27 June 2024, on a bill (printed paper 20/11848) finishing an EU terrorism directive by widening offences in the Strafgesetzbuch and surveillance powers, he said open borders had deliberately created much of the threat, and that new powers were lawful only inside the Basic Law. During the coronavirus pandemic, on 24 June 2021, he opposed grafting onto a foundation-law reform clauses that would keep section 36 ordinances—vaccination proof, tests or quarantine for returnees from risk areas—after the "epidemic situation of national scope" ended. That skipped a first reading and the health committee, he said, and once the situation ended the statute itself treated the danger as gone. A bill he signed on 8 October 2025 (printed paper 21/2085) would bar house searches for offences against honour, including section 188, as a privilege that chills freedom of expression, contrary to the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

European policy

On 22 September 2022 Jacobi opposed a government bill (printed paper 20/3441) letting Germany agree to add breaches of EU sanctions to the crimes in Article 83(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, so minimum rules on offences and penalties could follow. The draft cited uneven enforcement of more than forty regimes—in two states breaches were not crimes—and rare prosecutions after Russia's attack on Ukraine. He called consent a step toward the Bundestag's "self-abolition." The Federal Constitutional Court, he said, had let the treaty through but required a statute for each such transfer, because a community that cannot decide criminality by its own values loses self-government; this one would cover any future European Union foreign policy.

The same day he opposed cutting the voting age for the European Parliament from 18 to 16 (printed paper 20/3499). Sponsors said 18 excluded people already taking responsibility; he answered that at 16 one cannot fully contract, marry, face adult criminal law or be conscripted, and that the cut would add school-age voters after climate protests had favoured the governing parties. On 15 January 2020 he opposed a Bundesrat bill, later passed with up to three years' imprisonment or a fine, for a section 90c against denigrating the EU flag and anthem and for punishing destruction of foreign flags, after Israeli flags were burned in Berlin in 2017 and a Turkish flag in Nuremberg in 2019. An AfD amendment, heavily defeated, called that an excessive curb on opinion and art. Jacobi said it guarded symbols where section 90a names the republic and the constitution, for a body that "is not a state at all, and neither can nor may become one," so as to deter criticism by the threat of trial.

Disputes in the North Rhine-Westphalia AfD

The Esser documents

The dispute turned on Klaus Esser, a Düren member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia and an ally of state chair Martin Vincentz. He was business manager of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2020 until he entered the Landtag in 2022, and until August 2024 a deputy state and group chairman.

In the summer of 2024 the Rheinische Post reported that he had used falsified certificates, including one for the first state examination in law, to obtain that post. Esser denied it, called the claims an internal attack, and resigned his party and group offices while remaining a deputy. The Aachen public prosecutor's office opened preliminary inquiries after two criminal complaints and, in November 2024, searched his home in Düren.

In January 2026 prosecutors sought a penalty order (Strafbefehl) of 13,500 euros — 90 daily rates of 150 euros — for the forged examination certificate and unauthorized use of the title "Master of Laws". The Landtag lifted his immunity. Ninety daily rates would not have left a criminal record, which starts at 91. Esser called it a "timid attempt" to close the case with a symbolic fine and an "organised smear campaign", and said he would object; a separate inquiry into irregular new-member admissions in Düren had already been closed. By 11 March 2026 he had objected to an order of the Amtsgericht Düren. The objection stopped the order becoming final and required a trial, for which no date had been set.

In September 2024 the state executive opened a party-exclusion proceeding on both the certificates and the admissions. Jacobi, a lawyer, Bundestag member and then deputy state chairman, conducted it as the executive's counsel. On 23 October 2025 he rejected a settlement as "beyond discussion", writing that Esser's "legal violations with considerable criminal energy" would expose the AfD to ridicule if he stayed. On 27 October a board majority removed Jacobi and accepted an 18-month ban on party office, backdated to August 2024 and so largely served, covering only the admissions. The qualification allegation was dropped "because of limitation and lack of provability"; WDR reported that the application file had been missing since Vincentz took the chair in 2022.

In July 2025 Jacobi had already sent the papers to the state arbitration court — "Apparently both certificates are forged" — and to the Aachen prosecutor's office, without telling the rest of the executive, including Vincentz. He called that "standing practice", because mail to the whole board was regularly leaked, and said he had told Kay Gottschalk, who remembered only a remark about a source, not the forwarding. After Vincentz said in January 2026 that he would complain over the missing file, which should by then have been deleted, Jacobi said he held it, in WDR's account via a former employee's application mailbox at the federal office. Colleagues accused him of withholding it so they would believe "the central pieces of evidence were not available and could not be obtained". The executive declined to comment.

Esser told federal managing director Hans-Holger Malcomeß that Jacobi had obtained the data illegally and that he would file a complaint. In an email reported on 6 March 2026, Malcomeß rejected that. The federal office's lawyers and its external data-protection officer had found in January that there was "no data-protection violation" and that Jacobi, as counsel, had been authorised to read the file and forward it. On their account he had opened a former board member's archived mailbox with that person's consent, citing a legitimate interest in investigating a suspected offence against the state association.

Contest for the state leadership

Critics in a camp WDR called the state party's far right treated the settlement as a "fall from grace", arguing that Vincentz had sought to expel the Dortmund Bundestag member Matthias Helferich while sparing an ally.

On 28 October 2025 the federal co-chairs Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla wrote that the federal executive was joining the exclusion proceeding and "expressly does not associate itself with any declarations of the original applicant aimed at ending the proceeding". WDR reported that it was open whether that joinder would change the outcome. Esser said he assumed the case was already legally closed.

At the state convention in Marl on 7 March 2026, about 500 delegates first decided, by 53 percent, that the association should have only one chair. That blocked a joint candidacy of Jacobi and the Bundestag member Christian Zaum, which the taz reported had been promoted by the grouping around Helferich. WDR reported that Jacobi had that camp's support without himself belonging to it. He then stood alone. Vincentz was re-elected with 54.77 percent of the votes in the hall; the taz reported 54.7 percent for Vincentz and 43.4 percent for Jacobi. Jacobi told the delegates that Vincentz was concerned "not with the good of the AfD, but only with that of Klaus Esser".

Reception

Hier & Jetzt

On 5 March 2026 the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported that leaked customer files of Hier & Jetzt listed the Cologne Bundestag member Fabian Jacobi in three files, as a buyer of single issues in 2010 and 2011 and on a subscriber and billing list. Published from 2005 to 2013 with the subtitle “radikal rechte Zeitung,” it was a debate magazine that functionaries of the National Democratic Party of Germany intended for the extreme right beyond the party. The Saxon branch of the NPD youth organization, the “Junge Nationalisten,” published it first; from 2009 an NPD-aligned educational association did. Arne Schimmer, an NPD member of the Landtag of Saxony, edited it from 2009 until it closed.

Jacobi said he had ordered two copies after a review and had never subscribed. He called a question about his reasons “impertinent.” To “a West German, bourgeois-socialized contemporary,” he wrote, the NPD was only “an irrelevant fringe party with bizarre campaign spots and near-zero results”; its entry into the Saxon parliament had been “reason enough” “to take a closer look at the phenomenon.” He cited the Basic Law right to inform oneself from “generally accessible sources.”

The same files, the paper said, also named Carlo Clemens, an Alternative for Germany (AfD) deputy in the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, and Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia. Clemens said that as a student he had received one free sample “out of naive interest,” had not known of the NPD link, and had taken nothing further. Höcke did not reply. With a circulation in the mid-hundreds, against 25,000 for the NPD paper Deutsche Stimme in 2009, it was a niche title; Jan Schedler of the University of Bochum said one had to know it to find it. Schimmer, cited from the 2010 Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie, addressed readers from radical conservatives and the New Right to “national socialists, völkisch writers and national revolutionaries.”

Media and political responses

In 2017 the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger described the new Cologne deputies as people “about whom very little is known to the public,” wrote that the 44-year-old Jacobi belonged to no clear wing and was not regarded as ultra-right, and quoted a district spokesperson calling him the local “Satzungspapst.” He had said the AfD was required “in order to remedy a malfunction of democracy.”

On 5 February 2026 the paper separated him from Christian Zaum in a challenge to state chair Martin Vincentz. Zaum, it said, stood for the völkisch wing around Bundestag member Matthias Helferich, whom it called right-extremist; Jacobi was to reassure delegates wary of a candidate known only as close to Helferich. Inside the party he was an assembly chair, a stickler for the statutes and a “media-shy loner.” The article said the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution had not classified the North Rhine-Westphalia AfD; it named no personal classification of Jacobi. Westdeutscher Rundfunk on 3 February called the pair “two unknown candidates” and wrote that Jacobi belonged to no party current. On 3 March it said he was supporting “the right-extremist camp within the AfD” against Vincentz.

For 2025–2029 he holds list place 2 for Cologne I without winning the constituency, abgeordnetenwatch records, and from 25 March 2025 is Obmann of the AfD group on the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection—a specialist brief, not the national profile the same reporting gives Höcke.

Der Spiegel later published a checked table of the 1,108-page 2025 AfD report by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, drawn from more than 1,100 quotations the office took from functionaries. Two posts of 22 December 2021, both from X, name Jacobi on page 661 under Rechtsstaatsprinzip: “Wenn der Staat uns damit droht, daß er im Umgang mit uns keine roten Linien mehr kennt, muß das umgekehrt auch für uns im Umgang mit dem Staat gelten,” and “Daß eine Regierung diesen Schluß auslöst, macht ihr Handeln zum Fehler; daß sie es vorsätzlich tut, zum Verbrechen.” The table gives him no separate personal classification.