Georg Kippels

Rudolf Georg Kippels (born 21 September 1959 in Bedburg) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from North Rhine-Westphalia. He has been a member of the Bundestag since 22 October 2013 and holds the direct mandate for Rhein-Erft-Kreis I in the Rhein-Erft district. Since May 2025 he has been Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health. On 29 July 2026 Federal Minister Carsten Linnemann appointed him to that post together with Christiane Schenderlein.

The federal returning officer records the candidate as Dr. Rudolf Georg Kippels. He is Roman Catholic and married. He completed the Abitur at the Silverberg-Gymnasium in Bedburg, performed military service from 1978 to 1979, passed the first state examination in law in Cologne in 1985 and the second in Düsseldorf in 1989, and took a doctorate in Cologne in 1990. He has worked as a self-employed lawyer in Bedburg since 1989. The Bundestag lists his admission to practise as suspended since 7 May 2025 and names the partnership Rechtsanwälte Dr. Georg Kippels und Hans Peter Dresen GbR among his disclosable activities.

Kippels joined the CDU in 1980. He sat on the Bedburg city council for the CDU from 1994 to 2024 and was local mayor (Ortsbürgermeister) of Bedburg-Mitte from 2000 to 2020. He is deputy district chairman of the CDU in the Mittelrhein region, district chairman of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion for that association, and a member of the Wirtschaftsrat der CDU.

From the 18th to the 20th electoral term he was a full member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, and from 2015 a full member of the Health Committee. In the 19th and 20th terms he sat on the Subcommittee on Global Health, and in the 20th term he was the CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s spokesperson (Obmann) on both the Health Committee and that subcommittee. In the 18th term he was a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs. At the 2025 federal election he took Wahlkreis 90 with 71,833 first votes (35.0 percent), ahead of Aaron Luca Spielmanns of the Social Democratic Party on 26.1 percent, in a constituency where turnout was 83.7 percent. Deutsches Ärzteblatt wrote in April 2025 that he had won the Rhein-Erft-Kreis I direct mandate at each federal election since he entered the Bundestag in 2013.

On 28 April 2025 CDU chairman Friedrich Merz announced that designated health minister Nina Warken would be accompanied by Tino Sorge and Kippels as parliamentary state secretaries. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members’ own information, dates his tenure from May 2025 in the 21st electoral term. After Warken became head of the Federal Chancellery and minister for special tasks, Linnemann assumed the health portfolio on 29 July 2026 and appointed Kippels and Schenderlein as his parliamentary state secretaries.

Early life and legal career

Family background and schooling

Georg Kippels was born on 21 September 1959 in Bedburg, in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, records him as Roman Catholic. In a February 2025 interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, he said he had grown up in a politically interested household: for his father, an interest in politics was taken for granted, the daily newspaper was read in the morning and the Tagesschau watched in the evening, and the subjects were then discussed with him at length.

He took the Abitur at the municipal Gymnasium in Bedburg, the qualification official biographies attribute to the Silverberg-Gymnasium. The school’s own chronology dates its predecessor, the Rheinische Ritterakademie, to the opening of Bedburg Castle as a school on 1 May 1842; from 1966 the school was the Städtisches neusprachliches Gymnasium Bedburg, and in 1998 the town council gave it the name Silverberg-Gymnasium. No published biography states the year of the Abitur. After leaving school he performed military service (Wehrdienst) with the Bundeswehr from 1978 to 1979.

University, state examinations and doctorate

The Bundestag and Federal Ministry of Health curricula vitae record a first state examination in law in Cologne in 1985 and a second in Düsseldorf in 1989, followed by a doctorate in Cologne in 1990. Neither notice names the university at which he studied. Under the German Judiciary Act, qualification for judicial office is acquired by completing a university course in law with a first examination and a subsequent preparatory service (Referendariat) with a second state examination.

In 1990 the University of Cologne accepted his law dissertation, Die Inhaltskontrolle von Allgemeinen Geschäftsbedingungen im kaufmännischen Geschäftsverkehr nach § 9 Abs. 2 AGB-Gesetz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Klauselverbote der §§ 10 und 11 AGB-Gesetz. The union catalogue, which also carries a German National Library number for the work (910191263), describes it as a Cologne university dissertation of that year: a German text of 22 preliminary pages and 327 pages, with no place of publication recorded, and classes the author as Georg Kippels, born in 1959. The thesis examines judicial control of standard contract terms in commercial dealings under the Standard Business Terms Act (AGB-Gesetz) then in force, in particular the general clause in section 9(2) and the lists of prohibited clauses in sections 10 and 11. Short biographical notices otherwise give only the year and place of the doctorate.

Law practice in Bedburg

He has practised as a self-employed lawyer (Rechtsanwalt) in Bedburg since 1989. In the Bundestag’s register of disclosable interests, his occupation before he entered parliament is given as lawyer in Bedburg, and a paid activity alongside the mandate is entered for the civil-law partnership Rechtsanwälte Dr. Georg Kippels und Hans Peter Dresen GbR, also in Bedburg, with his position described as that of a self-employed lawyer. The German Bar Association’s lawyer directory lists the office as Dr. Kippels, Dresen, Dr. Kippels at Langemarckstraße 14, and enters Dr. Georg R. Kippels with the fields of construction law, public-law contracts and administrative law; Petra Kippels and Hans Peter Dresen are listed as further lawyers at the same address.

The parliamentary disclosure records his admission as resting since 7 May 2025, and the Bundestag biography, as carried on the parliament’s website in October 2026, still described the admission as resting for the time being. The same biography places the start of his service as a parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health in May 2025. Under the Act on the Legal Status of Parliamentary State Secretaries, the rules of the Federal Ministers Act apply to that office, including the prohibition on members of the federal government practising another profession alongside it. Where a lawyer holds a public office without being appointed to the civil service, and the rules of that office forbid personal practice, the Federal Lawyers’ Act provides that the bar chamber may, on application, appoint a representative.

Local politics and party offices

Georg Kippels has been a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) since 1980. His municipal offices were in Bedburg, in the Rhein-Erft-Kreis of North Rhine-Westphalia; above the town he has held posts in the CDU Rhein-Erft, the Bezirksverband Mittelrhein and CDU-affiliated associations.

Bedburg council and local mayoralty

He was a CDU city councillor (Stadtverordneter) in Bedburg from 1994 until 2024, and from 2004 to 2014 he chaired the CDU group on the council.

The town is divided into eleven localities. For each, the council elects an Ortsbürgermeister for its term, taking local vote shares into account. The office-holder links residents and the administration, forwards requests and complaints to the council, and carries out representative duties and some routine business.

On 13 November 2000 the council elected Kippels Ortsbürgermeister of the central locality, listed by the city as Bedburg and in his Bundestag biography as Bedburg-Mitte. He served until 31 October 2020, following Walter Bünnagel, whose term the city records as ending on 6 September 2000 with the note that Bünnagel had died. René Falke succeeded him on 3 November 2020.

Kippels gave up the council seat with effect from 1 December 2024. Michael Stupp, chair of the CDU council group, said the step, after 30 years on the council, was taken so that Kippels could concentrate on the Bundestag election. The seat passed to Wolfgang Esser, chair of the CDU city association in Bedburg and Kippels's substitute candidate (Koppelkandidat), whom Kippels said should prepare the inner-city ward for the municipal election of September 2025.

District and association offices in the CDU

The Bezirksverband Mittelrhein comprises the CDU in Cologne, Bonn, Leverkusen, Rhein-Sieg and the Rhein-Erft-Kreis. In 2017 the party put its membership there at about 18,000, in a region of about 2.5 million people.

An archived Bundestag biography for the 19th electoral period (2017–2021)—entries the parliament says rest on members' own information—lists him as deputy Kreisvorsitzender of the CDU Rhein-Erft and as deputy chair of the CDU Mittelrhein. At a Kreisparteitag in Bergheim-Oberaußem on 27 September 2019, with no opposing candidates, he was re-elected one of three deputies with 90.2 percent, beside Romina Plonsker and Elsdorf mayor Andreas Heller. Frank Rock, chair since 2017, was confirmed with 93.3 percent.

On 8 October 2021 a meeting in the Frechen town hall elected Plonsker to succeed Rock and chose Thomas Okos, Gudrun Baer and Gregor Golland as deputies. The board elected on 5 April 2025 in Pulheim again names those three as deputies. Kippels is listed as a co-opted member by virtue of his Bundestag seat, not as an elected deputy chair.

On 16 November 2017, before about 90 delegates, the Mittelrhein Bezirksparteitag confirmed Axel Voss as Bezirksvorsitzender for a third time, with nearly 90 percent, and elected Kippels one of four deputy chairs, with Martina Engels-Bremer, Martin Schenkelberg and Bernd Petelkau. He remains a deputy chair on the elected board, chaired by Nathanael Liminski, alongside Florian Braun, Björn Franken and Nadine Heuser. A CDU North Rhine-Westphalia biography dates that deputy chairmanship from 2009; the November 2017 meeting is the election reported at the time, and the 19th-term biography treats the Rhein-Erft and Mittelrhein offices as distinct.

In 2017 he became Bezirksvorsitzender of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion (MIT) for Mittelrhein. The MIT magazine reported from Siegburg that he succeeded Raymund Witte, who after eight years did not stand again; Frank J. Schönhardt and Andreas Stolze were elected deputies, and Hendrik Wüst, then the MIT's state chair, thanked Witte. The state party biography and the 19th-term Bundestag entry also list him from 2017 as an assessor on the MIT federal executive. The current Bundestag biography still names him MIT Bezirksvorsitzender for Mittelrhein and a member of the Wirtschaftsrat der CDU e.V., which describes itself as a platform for the social market economy associated with Ludwig Erhard.

On the Senioren-Union Rhein-Erft executive formed on 4 December 2023 he is the assessor for Bedburg, under district chair Sibille Simons. On 6 March 2024 the Bedburg association elected him chair unanimously. He had been deputy; a new board was required after the death of chair Dietmar Heffels. He said he wanted to give older people a more confident voice and to add political information for seniors to the association's excursions and meetings.

Bundestag elections

The constituency

Rhein-Erft-Kreis I is a constituency of the German Bundestag in North Rhine-Westphalia. It was numbered 91 for the federal elections of 2013, 2017 and 2021 and 90 in 2025. In each delimitation it comprised the same seven municipalities of the Rhein-Erft-Kreis: Bedburg, Bergheim, Elsdorf, Frechen, Hürth, Kerpen and Pulheim. The district's other municipalities lay in a neighbouring constituency. In 2021 that seat was number 92, and in 2025 number 91 (Euskirchen – Rhein-Erft-Kreis II); both combined the district of Euskirchen with Brühl, Erftstadt and Wesseling.

On 31 December 2023 the constituency covered 525.3 square kilometres and had 344,800 inhabitants, 656.4 per square kilometre. The area was unchanged in the structural data for the 2021 election. Part of the territory is in the Rhenish lignite district. RWE places the Hambach opencast mine between Jülich, in the district of Düren, and Kerpen, and describes a planned wooded lake landscape between Elsdorf and Kerpen after mining. The Rhein-Erft-Kreis administration presents the district as part of the economic change that followed the decision to stop generating electricity from lignite.

Results from 2013 to 2021

Georg Kippels of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a lawyer from Bedburg, was the CDU constituency candidate in 2013, 2017 and 2021. Through 2021, the candidate with the most first votes received a seat — a Direktmandat — whether or not second votes covered it.

On 22 September 2013, turnout in constituency 91 was 73.9 percent of 247,721 people entitled to vote. The CDU took 83,598 first votes, 47.3 percent, 7.9 percentage points above 2009. Dierk Timm of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), a business graduate from Pulheim, was the only SPD candidate and finished second with 63,676 votes (36.0 percent), 19,922 behind. Alliance 90/The Greens received 5.6 percent, Die Linke 4.4 percent, the Pirate Party 3.7 percent and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) 3.0 percent. Second votes: CDU 42.3 percent, SPD 30.8, Greens 6.9, FDP 5.7, the Left 5.2, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), with no constituency candidate, 3.7 percent. The 18th Bundestag sat for the first time on 22 October 2013.

On 24 September 2017 turnout was 76.9 percent of 248,982 eligible voters. Kippels won with 74,207 first votes (39.2 percent, down 8.1 points). Timm, again the SPD candidate, received 58,792 (31.1 percent). Christian Pohlmann (FDP) took 9.3 percent and Franz Pesch (AfD) 9.0 percent; Rüdiger Warnecke (Greens) had 5.5 percent and Zeki Gökhan (Left) 4.5 percent. Second votes were CDU 33.5 percent, SPD 26.3, FDP 14.4 and AfD 9.5.

On 26 September 2021 turnout was 78.2 percent of 249,035 eligible voters, and the CDU margin fell to 4,777 votes. Kippels received 63,635 first votes (33.0 percent, down 6.2 points). Aaron Luca Spielmanns (SPD), born in 1998, received 58,858 (30.5 percent). The Greens rose to 13.2 percent (up 7.7 points). Stefan Westerschulze (FDP) took 9.1 percent, Eugen Schmidt (AfD) 7.0 percent and the Left 3.1 percent. Second votes were almost even: CDU 28.5 percent, SPD 28.3, Greens 14.3, FDP 12.5 and AfD 6.9.

The 2025 federal election

The election was held on 23 February 2025. A 2023 amendment to the Federal Elections Act ended the rule that a first-vote plurality by itself produced a seat. From 2025 a party candidate is elected only with the most first votes in the constituency and with that place covered by the second votes for the party's Land list (Zweitstimmendeckung). Winners are ranked inside each Land by their share of the valid first vote, and only as many are seated as the second-vote allocation allows, within a Bundestag fixed at 630 members.

Of 247,391 people entitled to vote, 207,151 voted, a turnout of 83.7 percent (up 5.5 points). The final result names Dr Rudolf Georg Kippels (CDU) as elected in the constituency with 35.0 percent: 71,833 first votes, 2.0 points above 2021. Spielmanns, again the named runner-up, received 53,545 votes (26.1 percent, down 4.4 points), 18,288 behind.

The constituency committee had admitted eight candidates. With Kippels and Spielmanns were Jeremy Jason (AfD, Kerpen), Björn Leschny (Greens, Pulheim), Stefan Westerschulze (FDP), Fritz Laser (Die Linke), Ulrich Wokulat (Free Voters) and Franz Pesch (Bündnis Deutschland). First-vote shares for those parties were 16.7 percent for the AfD (34,348 votes, up 9.7 points), 10.2 percent for the Greens (down 3.0), 6.4 percent for the Left, 3.7 percent for the FDP (down 5.4), 1.3 percent for the Free Voters and 0.6 percent for Bündnis Deutschland. Second votes: CDU 31.6 percent (up 3.2), SPD 19.7 (down 8.6), AfD 16.7 (up 9.8), Greens 11.6, the Left 7.2, FDP 5.0 and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht 4.3 percent.

In the final seat calculation the CDU result in constituency 090, entered at 35.0 percent, was 30th among the party's North Rhine-Westphalian constituency pluralities and was marked covered by second votes. A preliminary list published by the Federal Returning Officer the day after the election named 23 constituencies whose first-vote leader received no seat; none was in North Rhine-Westphalia. Tagesschau reported the same 23 — 15 CDU, four AfD, three CSU and one SPD — in other Länder, not in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Parliamentary work

Dr. Georg Kippels of the Christian Democratic Union has been a member of the Bundestag since 22 October 2013. The biography on the Bundestag website, which notes that such details come from members themselves, records him as an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development in the 18th, 19th and 20th electoral terms, as an ordinary member of the Committee on Health from 2015, and as an ordinary member of the Subcommittee on Global Health in the 19th and 20th terms. For the 20th term it lists him as Obmann of the CDU/CSU group in the Health Committee and in that subcommittee, and it confines a deputy seat on the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union to the 18th term. In the 21st term the biography gives his function as Parliamentary State Secretary for health from May 2025. The Federal Ministry of Health states that Federal Minister Carsten Linnemann appointed him Parliamentary State Secretary on 29 July 2026. He is not on the 21st-term member lists of the Health Committee or the development committee.

Development committee

On the member lists of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development for the 18th, 19th and 20th terms, Kippels appears as an ordinary member, with no Obmann or spokesperson label. In the 20th term the committee had 24 members. Its 21st-term member list does not include him.

Health committee and the global-health subcommittee

In the 20th term the Health Committee, which prepares decisions for the plenary, had 43 members. Kippels is an ordinary member on the lists for the 18th, 19th and 20th terms; the biography dates the seat from 2015. In the 19th term the CDU/CSU Obmann on that committee was Michael Hennrich. In the 20th term the list names Kippels as Obmann and Tino Sorge as Sprecher of the CDU/CSU group.

The Subcommittee on Global Health was created in the 19th electoral term under the Health Committee to take up cross-border questions, including infectious diseases such as Ebola and tuberculosis, antimicrobial resistance and migration, and to coordinate the parliamentary bodies concerned. It had nine ordinary members. Heike Baehrens of the Social Democratic Party chaired it, and Andrew Ullmann of the Free Democratic Party was deputy chair; Kippels was an ordinary CDU/CSU member. The agenda of its 16th sitting, on 13 November 2019, included a report by Kippels on a trip to Africa with then Health Minister Jens Spahn, with digitalisation and Ebola as the stated themes.

The subcommittee continued in the 20th term under the Health Committee. Its member list shows 16 ordinary members, with Ullmann as chair, Johannes Wagner of Alliance 90/The Greens as deputy chair, and Kippels as CDU/CSU Obmann. In January 2024 the association of substitute health-insurance funds, the vdek, described him as his group's Obmann and as rapporteur for European health questions, international and global health policy, migration and health, medicines and pharmacies, and the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care. Deutsches Ärzteblatt later reported that the subcommittee lapsed under parliamentary discontinuity when the governing coalition ended early, and that Ullmann said Kippels had signed a letter to the then President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, asking for it to continue. The administration had not then confirmed a decision, the journal reported, while CDU member Sascha van Beek, the group's global-health rapporteur, expected the full Health Committee to take the subject because a smaller Bundestag made further subcommittees harder to fill. The 21st-term Health Committee page does not list a Subcommittee on Global Health, and Kippels is not among its members.

Group roles and other assignments

An Obmann or Obfrau is not the chair of a committee. The Bundestag glossary describes the Obleute as each group's main contact with its leadership: one per group in every committee, they help fix the group's line, agree agendas and the planning of deliberations, and report the detail of the work back to the group. That was Kippels's office for the CDU/CSU in the 20th term on both the Health Committee and the Subcommittee on Global Health, separate from the Sprecher designation given to Sorge on the Health Committee list.

Inside the CDU/CSU group he also belonged to the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand. A flyer dated November 2024 describes that circle as the largest of six sociological groupings in a CDU/CSU Bundestag group of 196 members, with 140 members of its own, and names Kippels as chair of its commission on the health economy and health-care provision. The June 2025 edition still places him on the board, but identifies him as Parliamentary State Secretary for health rather than as chair of that commission. The 18th-term member list of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union records him as a deputy member, and the biographies do not extend that seat past the 18th term.

Health policy

As Obmann of the CDU/CSU group—the Christian Social Union included—in the Bundestag Health Committee in the 20th term, Georg Kippels tied insurance finances, hospitals, pharmacies and pandemic rules together.

Insurance, hospitals and long-term care

In January 2024 he told substitute funds in North Rhine-Westphalia that benefits extraneous to statutory health insurance had to be refinanced, and that Bürgergeld had widened the gap. The labour minister, he said, knew a larger transfer to Health Minister Karl Lauterbach was required to cover those recipients in full, “but he does nothing.” He added that much of the programme of the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party remained unfinished, and that hospital reform was needed if uncontrolled insolvencies were not to undermine area-wide care.

The Bundestag passed the Hospital Care Improvement Act on 17 October 2024 by 373 votes to 285, with one abstention. The CDU/CSU said members were deciding “im Blindflug” for lack of a timely impact analysis; spokesman Tino Sorge called it a “Frechheit” that governing groups had seen the simulation earlier. Lauterbach defended standby pay equal to 60 percent of former case-based revenue and 65 service groups, and said Germany had a few hundred hospitals too many.

The St. Hubertus-Stift in Bedburg, in his constituency, closed at the end of January 2025, affecting about 160 staff. A restructuring plan had been accepted in August 2024, but the operator cited the state’s December 2024 hospital plan, which would end endoprosthetics there from 2026, plus losses, an investment backlog and weak occupancy. Kippels called it “very sad”: too many factors had ruled out keeping the hospital.

On long-term care insurance he wrote in June 2023 that the Care Support and Relief Act, passed on 26 May by the governing parties, fell “by far” short. Rises in co-payment supplements, care allowance and outpatient benefits did not even match inflation, so burdens on people needing care and their relatives “continue unchecked.” Rejected CDU/CSU amendments included a joint respite and short-term-care budget from 2024 and restored Bundestag control of contribution rises.

Pharmacies, medicines and digital health

On the 2023 shortage law he called the result “a disappointment.” Stockpiles assumed drugs “could previously have been produced in sufficient quantity”; capacity was missing, or generics did not pay. The act meant “a lot of bureaucracy” and was “only a placebo.” Paula Piechotta of Alliance 90/The Greens said years of pharmaceutical dialogue had been the real placebo. The SPD, Greens and FDP voted in favour; the CDU/CSU, the Alternative for Germany and Die Linke voted against. In the first reading he said a Union-proposed pharmaceutical summit had never met, and that fifty cents for pharmacists—“the fighters at the counter”—was not realistic compensation. Piechotta answered that policy should follow the patient, not the loudest lobby.

At the wholesalers’ association Phagro in October 2025 he said supply needed both local pharmacies and wholesale, and that without pharmacies the system would be “far less worth” what it was. Coalition-agreement figures for the dispensing fee and wholesale margin were, he said, only half the task. He criticised mail-order bonuses closed to local pharmacies and asked both trades to see government as “an honest broker of the various interests.” In July 2025, at a Berlin panel hosted by the manufacturer MSD, he urged pharmacy vaccination for people who delay shots—“Saturday morning, pick up rolls, pick up cold cuts and get vaccinated”—and called French pharmacies’ right to give inactivated vaccines a “shining example.”

On the electronic patient record he said on 9 November 2023 that data were “the material from which health care will in future be built,” if used for the common good, but that trust mattered as much as technology. Insurers advising patients from those data was “extraordinarily worrying”; that task belonged with doctors and pharmacists, and opt-out had to respect informational self-determination. On 14 December he called the draft “unfinished” because billing-data advice threatened the doctor–patient relationship and “common-good” use still lacked a shared definition. The CDU/CSU abstained. The coalition passed the Digital Act and the Health Data Use Act; the AfD opposed them.

The COVID-19 pandemic

In the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kippels told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger on 24 November 2021 that the measles rule at day-care centres had left him very critical of a vaccination mandate, but that he had changed his mind and now found one defensible, like the duties to wear a seat belt, hold a licence and attend school. In the same survey, SPD member Dagmar Andres called a mandate unavoidable, CDU colleague Detlef Seif “the very last resort,” FDP member Markus Herbrand only a temporary duty in facilities and occupations, and AfD member Rüdiger Lucassen rejected what he called compulsory vaccination.

On 26 January 2022, in a whip-free debate without a government bill, he said individual interests had to give way if a mandate was what kept nurseries, hospitals, schools and care homes working, and that he tended toward rapid, population-wide vaccination plus a register. On 2 February he told the Bundestag’s youth site he wanted a general mandate from age 18: a limit at 50 would tell younger people they needed neither protection nor a part in herd immunity. He rejected cross-party conscience motions and had “hardly any understanding left” for the cabinet’s refusal to table its own bill; any Union text, for him, included a register.

None passed. On 7 April 2022 a compromise—a mandate from 60, plus counselling for younger unvaccinated adults—drew 296 votes for and 378 against. Tagesschau blamed the timing, after the Omicron wave had begun to ebb; a coalition split, with Lauterbach still wanting a duty from 18 and FDP politician Wolfgang Kubicki rejecting forced self-protection; and the Union’s refusal to compromise.

Development cooperation and global health

Development-policy priorities

From 2013 Georg Kippels of the Christian Democratic Union sat on the Bundestag Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development. On 12 September 2024, in the first reading of the 2025 estimates for the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, he called the draft “a black day for German development policy.” He put the ministry at €6.119 billion when he joined the committee and €12.425 billion at the end of Gerd Müller’s tenure in 2021, and said the draft cut it by about 25 percent — 8.7 percent, against 1.8 percent for the federal budget. On his figures the next Global Fund replenishment had slipped from €1.3 billion to €1 billion, a Gavi sum from €750 million toward €400 million, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative by 46 percent and the United Nations Population Fund by 18 percent, which he called inconsistent with feminist development policy. Against a coalition promise of official development assistance at 0.7 percent of gross national income, he calculated at most 0.66 percent with in-donor refugee costs and 0.52 percent without them. He cited a VENRO warning that projects would stop, argued for cooperation led by partner countries, and said post-COVID-19 plans for health systems in Africa with German industry had not been carried out.

On 14 June 2018 members from the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and Greens formed a parliamentary advisory board on neglected tropical diseases with the German Network against Neglected Tropical Diseases (DNTDs). Kippels chaired it and said the roughly 1.5 billion people affected were “as a rule the poorest of the poor.” The network’s list for the 20th Bundestag still named him chair. In January 2022 the development ministry noted Germany as the first Western endorser, after Rwanda, Nigeria and Tanzania, of the Kigali Declaration, a government signature behind the WHO road map to 2030. At a DNTDs reception in Berlin on 25 June 2025, as parliamentary state secretary and former chair, he said the programmes still mattered in tight budgets and belonged in talks between ministries.

He also sat on the Parliamentary Advisory Board for Population and Development, formed in 2003 by the Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung, which provides the secretariat and which lists contraception, HIV prevention and sexual and reproductive health and rights among its aims, within Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 5. The foundation named him a member when the board reconstituted on 10 July 2025, with Sascha van Beek as spokesperson. No separate statement of his on sexual and reproductive health is on record beyond the 2024 objection to the UNFPA cut.

Global health institutions and pandemic preparedness

The Subcommittee on Global Health was created in the 19th Bundestag, under the Health Committee, for cross-border infections, antimicrobial resistance and migration. In May 2023, on 75 years of the World Health Organization, he called the 2018 founding “an idea of the grand coalition,” to be tested in the budget. His site in 2019 had called it his initiative after the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic. Deutsches Ärzteblatt later named him CDU/CSU Obmann and reported in July 2025 that the body was unlikely to return. Former chair Andrew Ullmann (FDP) said Kippels had co-signed a letter to President Bärbel Bas asking that it continue; Johannes Wagner (Greens), former deputy chair, called that outlook, with development cuts, a “fatal signal.”

In December 2023 the CDU/CSU sought open talks on a WHO pandemic agreement and a rebuttal of misinformation. The motion treated unequal access to medicines and vaccines as a reason for a binding text, and asked for prevention, alignment with the International Health Regulations, a One Health approach, universal health coverage and stable WHO finance, while opposing weaker patents on vaccines and medicines on the ground that a waiver would not speed manufacture or share supply more fairly. On 22 February 2024 Kippels defended solidarity with the WHO, called travel limits linked to South Africa a failure of solidarity after South African science, and rejected the AfD account of the talks.

Member states adopted the Pandemic Agreement by consensus on 20 May 2025, after a committee vote of 124–0 with 11 abstentions. A pathogen access and benefit-sharing annex was still open; the agreement is the second instrument under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution. As parliamentary state secretary he told the Global Health Hub Germany on 15 September 2025 that the agreement was a “strategic instrument.” He named health systems, universal coverage, non-communicable diseases, mental health and antimicrobial resistance, and said the United States’ exit from global-health finance had left a gap Germany could not fill alone. He recalled the Hub’s first parliamentary steering committee and an extra €10 million for the WHO from Health Minister Nina Warken at the Assembly. At the World Health Summit in Berlin in October 2026 he called for stronger institutions, durable finance and political will, citing an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa.

Parliamentary State Secretary

Appointment in the Merz cabinet

After the February 2025 federal election, a CDU/CSU–SPD coalition formed the Merz cabinet under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. On 28 April 2025 Merz said the designated health minister, Nina Warken (CDU), would be joined by two parliamentary state secretaries with health-policy experience: Tino Sorge, the CDU/CSU group's health spokesperson in the previous Bundestag, and Georg Kippels, a member of the Bundestag since 2013 who had most recently spoken for the Union on the subcommittee on global health.

A parliamentary state secretary (Parlamentarischer Staatssekretär) is not a member of the federal government. The Act on the Legal Status of Parliamentary State Secretaries of 24 July 1974 lets members of the government be assigned such secretaries. They must sit in the Bundestag, except in a case attached to the Chancellor, and they support that minister in a public-law office of their own kind, not as civil servants. At the health ministry they stand in for the minister in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, at cabinet and public appointments, and answer opposition questions. Civil-service state secretaries keep charge of the administration.

Warken succeeded Karl Lauterbach (SPD) at the Federal Ministry of Health on the afternoon of 7 May 2025. The handover had been delayed a day because Merz was elected chancellor only on a second ballot. The ministry's account of that day records her appointing Kippels, and separately Sorge, as parliamentary state secretaries.

Portfolio and legislative files

In June 2025 Tagesspiegel Background reported an internal split of subjects. Sorge took digitalisation and innovation, pharmaceuticals, statutory and private health insurance, and the ministry budget. Kippels took pharmacies, global health policy, medical devices, narcotics, the law of the health professions, long-term care, and the public-health service and prevention, with some departments shared.

He spoke for the ministry on the pharmacy bill, the Apothekenversorgung-Weiterentwicklungsgesetz, in the Bundesrat on 30 January 2026, after the chamber adopted a critical opinion. Länder ministers including Andreas Philippi (SPD, Lower Saxony), Diana Stolz (CDU, Hesse) and Katharina Schenk (Thuringia) wanted a higher fee per prescription pack, and they asked the government to drop easier branch pharmacies and a limited right for pharmaceutical technical assistants to stand in for a pharmacist. Kippels called both changes flexibility for supply, especially outside the cities, and the assistant rule pragmatic rather than a break in the profession. A higher fee promised in the coalition agreement still stood, he said, but statutory-insurance finances had to be considered. The bill did not need the Bundesrat's consent; a first Bundestag reading was listed for 26 February 2026. Stolz said parts of the draft still needed work, and Philippi called a fee adjustment essential.

On the evening of 8 October 2026 he introduced the bill on data and digital innovation in health care (GeDIG) at first reading. He said data used well would support a fairer and more efficient service: a developed electronic patient record, prevention prompts, an electronic referral, and a digital assessment of need meant to avoid unnecessary consultations. The Bundestag referred the bill to the health committee. Janosch Dahmen of Alliance 90/The Greens called much of it overdue and pointed to amendments, including an electronic hospital admission. Stella Merendino of Die Linke said the draft trampled on data protection. The German Medical Association and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians warned that letting sickness funds evaluate more data would cross a line; Association president Klaus Reinhardt said judging individual risk belonged in the doctor–patient relationship.

Long-term care was on that June 2025 list, but the public presentation of the care-insurance overhaul stayed with the ministers. Warken had opened a care reform, and her successor was expected to complete it. By June 2026 the ministry had circulated a draft Pflegeneuordnungsgesetz, combining contribution changes with prevention, rehabilitation and a claim to professional care guidance from 2028.

The 2026 cabinet change

A wider CDU reshuffle followed the resignation of Jens Spahn as chair of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. On 27 July 2026, after a CDU presidium meeting, Merz announced that Christiane Schenderlein, until then minister of state for sport and voluntary service in the Chancellery, would replace Sorge. Sorge said he would have preferred to stay at what he called a central switch-point of health policy, and objected that the decision was given first to party bodies and the press rather than in a personal conversation. Eastern CDU associations had already objected to Schenderlein leaving the Chancellery.

On 29 July 2026 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave Carsten Linnemann, until then CDU general secretary, the certificate as federal minister of health. Warken became the first woman to head the Chancellery, as minister for special tasks, and Thorsten Frei left that post to chair the CDU/CSU group. The same day the ministry recorded that Linnemann appointed Kippels as his parliamentary state secretary, so Kippels continued in the office he had held since May 2025 while Sorge left it.

Their oath before the Bundestag was set for 9 September 2026, after the summer recess. Merz cited the cost of recalling members. Sophie Schönberger of the Free University of Berlin said Article 64 of the Basic Law ruled out taking up duties before the oath, and Christoph Schönberger of the University of Cologne called the delay a disregard of the constitution and of parliament. The government said the timing was permissible. Steinmeier noted the constitutional rule and that the oath was planned for the first sitting after the recess.

Outside interests and public scrutiny

Disclosed earnings and the law firm

Members of the Bundestag must notify the President of paid work beside the mandate, company and public posts, association offices and partnership stakes. Entries are published once a disclosure duty is confirmed, and changes must be reported within three months. Kippels’s own comments are referred to his website.

The archived biography for the 18th electoral term lists paid work as a lawyer in the Bedburg firm Rechtsanwälte Dr. Kippels und Hans Peter Dresen GbR as “2013, Stufe 5, Gewinn; 2014, Stufe 3 Gewinn; 2015, Stufe 4 Gewinn,” and 22 clients only as “Mandant 01” to “Mandant 22” for 2013–2015. Under the ten-step scale in printed paper 17/12670, Stufe 1 was 1,000 to 3,500 euro and the next ceilings were 7,000, 15,000, 30,000 and 50,000 euro, so his published steps were Stufe 5, 3 and 4. “Gewinn” means a distributed profit share where a gross partnership fee could not be fixed. Published sums are gross, not taxable income.

The 19th-term archive again names the partnership as a paid activity and as a participation, with no step or euro figure. The 20th-term archive does the same and adds “Mandant 1, Privatangelegenheit,” still without an amount. The biography current on 29 October 2026 still lists the firm under both headings. It describes him as self-employed and states that the lawyer’s admission has rested since 7 May 2025 (“Zulassung ruhend seit 7. Mai 2025”). No euro sum for the firm is printed.

That is the day the Federal Ministry of Health presented him, with Tino Sorge, as a new Parliamentary State Secretary, at the handover from Karl Lauterbach to Nina Warken. The Bundestag biography says he has held the post since May 2025, “bei der Bundesministerin für Gesundheit.” The ministry leadership page, dated 29 July 2026, states that Federal Minister Carsten Linnemann appointed him on that day and dates the office from 29 July 2026.

Honorary board seats

Other current entries are marked ehrenamtlich (unpaid). He is chairman of the supervisory board of the Bedburger Kleinwohnungs-Genossenschaft eG in Bedburg and a member of the representative assembly of Volksbank Erft eG in Elsdorf, neither line carrying an end date.

Three advisory roles ended in 2025: membership of the Parliamentary Advisory Board for Population and Development of the Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung on 16 June 2025; the chair of the parliamentary advisory board of the Deutsches Netzwerk gegen vernachlässigte Tropenkrankheiten on 27 May 2025; and the chair of the advisory board of GHA – German Health Alliance on 1 July 2025. The 20th-term archive shows the GHA post as membership, then the chair from 23 June 2022. No payment is stated.

Transparency debates

On 26 March 2021, after a one-hour debate, the Bundestag voted on the committee recommendation on a motion by Die Linke (printed paper 19/12) to amend the code of conduct. The roll call was 382 yes, 118 no and 67 abstentions; the Bundestag’s account says this rejected the motion. The name list puts Kippels in the yes column, with every voting member of the CDU/CSU group (209 yes, none against).

On 11 June 2021 the Bundestag passed a joint bill of the CDU/CSU, the SPD, Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens “to improve the transparency rules for members of the German Bundestag” (printed paper 19/28784, as amended in committee). The AfD and the FDP abstained. Income from a side activity is now published to the euro and cent if it exceeds 1,000 euro in a month or, if not, 3,000 euro in a calendar year.

On 28 June 2021 Kippels replied on abgeordnetenwatch.de, a private transparency platform and not a regulator, to a constituent who asked about the March vote. He wrote that the majority rejected the Left motion, which he identified as printed paper 19/12, for “einige Unzulänglichkeiten,” while the CDU/CSU had promised its own bill. He said he expressly welcomed the 11 June law, which would publish notifiable side income and stake income to the euro and cent above 1,000 euro a month or 3,000 euro a year, disclose stakes from 5 percent rather than 25 percent, ban paid lobbying of the government or the Bundestag and mandate-related lecture fees, and bar cash donations to members. He called the aim greater transparency and restored trust. The same profile states that he has not signed the site’s Transparenz-Versprechen, a voluntary pledge rather than a legal duty.

Personal life and civic engagement

Family and residence

Georg Kippels was born on 21 September 1959 in Bedburg. The Bundestag biography, compiled from members' own disclosures, describes him as Roman Catholic and married. A candidate profile in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger before the February 2025 federal election, based on information he supplied, gives his place of residence as Bedburg. A curriculum vitae on his website, dated 6 January 2026, names his wife as Petra Kippels, a lawyer.

Associations in Bedburg

In Bedburg he has been active in the Bedburger Narrenzunft von 1886, a society in the Rhenish carnival tradition. The guild states that he joined in 1990 after attending a Prunksitzung at Bedburg Castle, later sat on its Elferrat and joined the Funken, and was Prinz Georg I. in the 1996/97 session, the society's 111th anniversary year. He became deputy chairman in 1997 and, on 4 April 2001, was elected first chairman in succession to Hans Schievenbusch.

He held that office for 22 years. At a members' meeting in the Bedburger Mühle, reported on 25 April 2023, he did not stand again, saying that his duties often took him from Bedburg to Berlin and further afield and that modern carnival needed its leadership nearby. Following guild custom, he nominated the next chairman: Wolfgang Moll, previously deputy chairman, was elected unanimously, with Lars Dresen and Stephan Engels alongside him. In January 2024, in the society's 138th year, the Narrenzunft appointed Kippels honorary chairman.

He has also taken part in the town's Schützenfest tradition. In a constituency newsletter of 31 October 2024 he referred to himself as Ehrenleutnant of the St. Sebastianus Bruderschaft Bedburg and as a member of the Schützenzug Bückeburger Jäger von 1967, describing the brotherhood's Königsehrenabend at its clubhouse on the Augustinerallee, where one year's royal couple is discharged and the next presented. The January 2026 curriculum vitae lists membership of Lions Club Bergheim/Erft, a club of Lions Clubs International.

The same carnival interest appears in parliament. On 9 February 2023 he joined the founding board of the cross-party Parlamentskreis „Karneval, Fastnacht, Fasching“ in the Bundestag. The Saarbrücker Zeitung reported on 17 February 2026 that the circle, an informal interest group rather than an official parliamentary body, was then led by Kippels of the CDU and Sanae Abdi of the SPD. Separately, the Bundestag's register of disclosable interests lists him as unpaid chairman of the supervisory board of the Bedburger Kleinwohnungs-Genossenschaft eG, a housing cooperative in Bedburg.