Günter Krings

Günter Krings (born 7 August 1969 in Rheydt, now part of Mönchengladbach) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2002 and holds the direct mandate for the Mönchengladbach constituency in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Federal Returning Officer recorded him as the winner of that constituency at the 2025 federal election.

The Bundestag's biography, based on his own disclosures, lists him as Protestant Reformed. He passed the Abitur in 1989 and studied law and history at the University of Cologne from 1989 to 1994, taking the first state examination in law that year. A Fulbright scholarship then took him to Temple University in Philadelphia, where in 1995 he completed a master of laws in United States and international law. After a legal traineeship that included a stage at the German Association of Cities, he passed the second state examination in 1997, worked until 2002 as a research assistant at Cologne's Institute for Constitutional Law, and received a doctorate in law in 2002. He has practised as a lawyer in Mönchengladbach since 1998, with his admission suspended between 2013 and 2021, and since 2010 has held an honorary professorship at the same institute.

Krings joined the Junge Union in 1983 and the CDU in 1985. In parliament he chaired the CDU/CSU young group from 2002 to 2005 and the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development from 2006 to 2009, served as the group's legal counsel in 2008–2009, and was a deputy parliamentary group chair from 2009 to 2013. While in that last office he argued for an ancillary copyright for newspaper and magazine publishers, calling the proposed right in 2010 a guarantee of diversity and a driver of innovation. From 2013 to 2021 he was parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The Rheinische Post reported on 16 December 2013 that he would support the incoming interior minister Thomas de Maizière, together with Ole Schröder. He remained in the post after Horst Seehofer became federal minister of the interior, building and home affairs in the cabinet formed in 2018. The office ended with the change of government: on 8 December 2021, after Olaf Scholz was elected chancellor, the Bundestag recorded Mahmut Özdemir, Johann Saathoff and Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter as the interior ministry's new parliamentary state secretaries.

Since December 2021 he has been the CDU/CSU group's spokesman on legal policy, and since 2017 chair of its North Rhine-Westphalia state group, the largest in the caucus. On 13 May 2025 the group elected him deputy chair once more, responsible for law and consumer protection, interior affairs, expellees, resettlers and German minorities, and petitions. In constituency 108 at the 2025 election he received 50,331 first votes, 36.4 percent, ahead of Gülistan Yüksel of the Social Democratic Party on 26.2 percent, with turnout at 77.3 percent. On 19 December 2025 he lost the chairmanship of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, by 21 votes to 28 with one abstention, in the foundation's first contested election for the post. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had proposed Krings for the job.

Early life and education

Family and schooling

Günter Krings was born on 7 August 1969 in Rheydt, now a borough of Mönchengladbach in North Rhine-Westphalia, and is evangelisch-reformiert (Reformed Protestant). He grew up in Herrath, a village in the southwest of the city about five kilometres from Schloss Wickrath, and has continued to live in the family house there. From 1976 to 1980 he attended primary school in Mönchengladbach-Beckrath, then the Hugo-Junkers-Gymnasium in Rheydt, where he passed the Abitur in 1989.

His father sat for the Christian Democratic Union on the council of Wickrath while that place was still an independent municipality. Krings was the first in the family to take the Abitur and to attend university; the Rheinische Post described the household as not an academic one. By his own account he was born at the Elisabeth-Krankenhaus in Rheydt, and the family had lived in Herrath for eleven generations.

University, traineeship and doctorate

From 1989 to 1994 Krings studied law at the University of Cologne as a scholarship holder of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and in 1994 passed the first state examination in law before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne with the grade “gut”. For 1989–1991 the parliamentary biography of the 15th Bundestag also records basic studies in history at Cologne and names the University of Wisconsin–Madison, without a separate degree. In 1992 he took a summer course in American law on a grant from the Westhaus Foundation. From 1991 to 1994, and again during his traineeship, he worked part-time as a student and research assistant at the university’s Institute for Public Law and Institute for the Law of the Legal Profession, under Klaus Stern and Martin Henssler.

In 1994–95 he studied United States and international law at the School of Law of Temple University in Philadelphia as a scholar of the Fulbright Program, and received a Master of Laws. The 15th-term parliamentary biography records that degree as summa cum laude.

The Referendariat ran from 1995 to 1997. Stations named in the contemporary Bundestag biography were the 7th civil chamber of the Cologne regional court, the Cologne public prosecutor’s office, the legal department of the city of Erkelenz, the Deutscher Städtetag (German Association of Cities) in Cologne, and the law firms Kapellmann, Fellinger, Porzelt and Oehmen und Partner in Mönchengladbach and Bruckhaus, Westrick, Stegemann in Düsseldorf. He passed the second state examination in 1997, again graded “gut”.

He then worked as a research associate at Cologne’s Institute for Constitutional Law until the doctorate. The current Bundestag biography dates that post from 1997 to 2002; the 15th-term biography dates it from 1998. His later profile at the law firm Kapellmann also gives 1998, names Professors Friauf and Höfling as the institute’s directors, and states that the constitutional-law dissertation was supervised by Professor Kluth. In 2002 he received the degree of Dr. jur. The thesis appeared in 2003 with Duncker & Humblot as Grund und Grenzen grundrechtlicher Schutzansprüche. Die subjektiv-rechtliche Rekonstruktion der grundrechtlichen Schutzpflichten und ihre Auswirkung auf die verfassungsrechtliche Fundierung des Verbrauchervertragsrechts (Schriften zum Öffentlichen Recht, vol. 931, 417 pages). The publisher’s summary says the book treats duties to protect fundamental rights as subjective claims of the individual, rather than only as objective functions of those rights, and concludes that an autonomous consumer generally cannot rely on them in consumer-contract law.

Legal and academic career

Legal practice

Krings has practised as a Rechtsanwalt in Mönchengladbach since 1998. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members’ own disclosures, states that the admission was suspended from 2013 to 2021, while he was a parliamentary state secretary; the North Rhine-Westphalia CDU biography gives the same interval and places the admission at the Landgericht Mönchengladbach. Before he entered the Bundestag he reported his occupation as that of a self-employed lawyer in Mönchengladbach. The register of members’ interests now lists a paid activity as a freelance associate (freier Mitarbeiter) of Kapellmann und Partner Rechtsanwälte mbB there. The firm states that he has been with the office since 2003 and names public law as his field of advice.

Teaching, doctorate and publications

The Bundestag biography records a post as research assistant at the Institute for Constitutional Law (Institut für Staatsrecht) of the University of Cologne from 1997 to 2002, together with teaching at the Kölner Journalistenschule. The CDU biography dates the assistantship to 1998–2002 and specifies the journalism-school work as public law from 1997 to 2002, identifying the school with the Institut für Publizistik. It also lists a lectureship in constitutional law in 2001–2002 at the Fachhochschule für öffentliche Verwaltung of North Rhine-Westphalia, in the training of police officers. According to the Bundestag account he has held a lectureship (Lehrauftrag) at Cologne since 2004 and, since 2010, an honorary professorship in constitutional law at the Institute for Constitutional Law. The law faculty lists him among its honorary professors, with a link to the institute, and the university’s Forschungsstelle Nachrichtendienste describes him as a member of that centre in his capacity as honorary professor.

The doctorate (Dr. jur.) was taken at Cologne in 2002, and the thesis appeared in 2003 with Duncker & Humblot in Berlin as volume 931 of Schriften zum Öffentlichen Recht, running to 417 pages. The title is Grund und Grenzen grundrechtlicher Schutzansprüche; the subtitle is Die subjektiv-rechtliche Rekonstruktion der grundrechtlichen Schutzpflichten und ihre Auswirkung auf die verfassungsrechtliche Fundierung des Verbrauchervertragsrechts. As the table of contents sets it out, the book reconstructs constitutional duties to protect fundamental rights (Schutzpflichten) as subjective rights. It covers their recognition in the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court, including the abortion time-limit judgments; protected interests and sources of danger, among them private persons, conduct abroad, self-harm, man-made environmental risks and natural forces; and legal consequences, including who owes the duty and how the Untermaßverbot relates to the Übermaßverbot. A further part treats consumer-contract law: indirect third-party effect (mittelbare Drittwirkung), limits on duties of protection inside contract, and the social-state principle as another constitutional basis for consumer protection.

Shorter pieces itemised by the firm concern the religion clauses of the United States Constitution, constitutional limits on the legal status of non-marital cohabitation and of registered life partnerships for same-sex couples, the administrative contract (with Wolfram Höfling), deployment of the Bundeswehr against terrorist dangers (with Christian Burkiczak), and a 2003 commentary on the right of petition in Article 17 of the Basic Law in the Berliner Kommentar zum Grundgesetz. In 2014 he and Winfried Kluth edited Gesetzgebung: Rechtsetzung durch Parlamente und Verwaltungen sowie ihre gerichtliche Kontrolle for C. F. Müller, in the series C. F. Müller Wissenschaft and in association with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesetzgebung. The national bibliography records XXXVIII and 1,050 pages; the publisher describes the book as covering parliamentary and executive law-making at federal, Land and municipal level, and judicial review of that law-making.

The imprint of the 2025 annual index of the Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik names Krings and Brigitte Zypries as editors (Herausgeber). The Bundestag’s disclosure of outside earnings lists that editorship with Verlag C. H. Beck at 500 euro a month gross. He is also named on the editorial advisory board (Herausgeberbeirat) of the Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Sicherheitsrecht, another periodical of C. H. Beck. The Cologne research centre states that he publishes regularly on security-related questions of public law.

Christian Democratic Union

Youth organization and local offices

Günter Krings joined the Junge Union in 1983, at the age of 14, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1985. At his election as chairman of the Mönchengladbach CDU in 2010, he said he had been in the party since the age of 16.

A 2021 profile in the Rheinische Post reported that opposition to lignite mining drew him into politics: the Mönchengladbach district of Wanlo was then at risk of being cleared for the mine, and he took part as a teenager in a protest movement that he credited with helping to preserve it. He described choosing the CDU because it was a “C party”—church-related, Christian and pragmatic.

From 1989 to 1994 he chaired the Junge Union branch in Wickrath, and from 1992 to 2003 its Lower Rhine district association; during the overlapping law studies at the University of Cologne he held a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

District, state and professional associations

From 1998 to 2014 Krings was deputy chairman of the CDU district association for the Lower Rhine, and from 2011 to 2019 deputy state chairman of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsvereinigung of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia. In November 2014 a district assembly in Krefeld elected him chairman in succession to Ronald Pofalla, who had led the association since 2000 and did not stand again. Krings received 44 of 85 votes; Hermann Gröhe, then federal minister of health, received 41, and Pofalla was elected honorary chairman unanimously. The district comprises the CDU organizations in Kleve, Krefeld, Mönchengladbach, Neuss, Viersen and Wesel.

Delegates re-elected Krings in late September 2024 at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Halle in Mönchengladbach with 97.7 percent; CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann addressed the congress, and Heike Troles of Neuss succeeded Gröhe as a deputy chair. The district association reported a further confirmation, with 97.8 percent, at its Niederrheintag in the same hall in early September 2026, with federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt as guest, and said he had then led the district for twelve years.

In the city association he was the only candidate when the Mönchengladbach CDU met in May 2010. He received 240 of 248 possible votes and succeeded Norbert Post. In October 2020, after a decade in the post, he told the local executive that he would not stand again. Members chose a successor on 26 June 2021 at an outdoor meeting in the Sparkassenpark. The Landtag member Jochen Klenner won 65 percent of the vote; city councillor Martin Heinen was the other serious candidate.

Krings has sat on the CDU state executive in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2005. The executive’s published list includes him both as Lower Rhine district chairman and as chairman of the state’s group in the Bundestag. He has also taken part in the Evangelischer Arbeitskreis of the CDU.

On 3 December 2009 the CDU federal press office announced that members and delegates of the state lawyers’ associations had unanimously elected him chairman of the Bundesarbeitskreis Christlich-Demokratischer Juristen (BACDJ). He succeeded Norbert Röttgen, chairman since 2001, who did not stand after becoming federal environment minister. The working group advises the CDU presidium and federal executive on legal policy. Krings was re-elected unanimously in September 2011, and the BACDJ website continues to list him as chairman.

In January 2017 the North Rhine-Westphalian members of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group elected him chairman of their Landesgruppe, the largest state group in the parliamentary party. He defeated Ralf Brauksiepe, until then acting chairman, by 35 votes to 22, with one abstention, and succeeded Peter Hintze, who had led the group since 2006 and had died the previous November.

Bundestag elections

Entry in 2002 and subsequent terms

Krings entered the Bundestag with the constitutive sitting of the 15th electoral term on 17 October 2002, after the federal election of 22 September 2002. He was directly elected in constituency 110, Mönchengladbach, in North Rhine-Westphalia. As the Christian Democratic Union candidate he received 62,671 first votes, 43.6 percent of the valid votes, against 60,892 (42.4 percent) for the Social Democratic Party; turnout was 74.4 percent of 195,672 eligible voters. The direct seat had been held since 1998 by the SPD’s Hildegard Wester, and Krings’s narrow win returned it to the CDU.

He has been a member continuously since 2002. On 18 September 2005 the state returning officer recorded him as elected with 66,715 votes, 47.9 percent, to the SPD’s 54,170 (38.9 percent), on a turnout of 72.5 percent. On 27 September 2009 he won again with 55,784 votes, 45.6 percent, against 33,852 (27.7 percent) for the SPD, whose nominee was Hermann-Josef Krichel-Mäurer; turnout fell to 63.9 percent. The constituency was numbered 109 for the elections of 2013, 2017 and 2021.

On 22 September 2013 Krings took 63,843 votes, 50.8 percent, his highest share in the series, with the SPD second on 36,665 votes (29.2 percent) and turnout at 66.2 percent. On 24 September 2017 he was returned with 57,766 votes, 44.3 percent; Gülistan Yüksel of the SPD, the leading challenger, received 31,766 votes (24.4 percent), and turnout was 69.3 percent. On 26 September 2021 his share dropped to 45,550 votes, 35.6 percent, still ahead of the SPD on 37,548 (29.3 percent). That margin, 6.3 percentage points, was the smallest since 2002; turnout was 70.0 percent of 185,185 eligible voters.

The Mönchengladbach constituency

The seat is the Mönchengladbach constituency in North Rhine-Westphalia. For the 2013 and 2025 elections the Federal Returning Officer described it as consisting of the independent city of Mönchengladbach. It was numbered 110 in 2002, 2005 and 2009, 109 from 2013 through 2021, and 108 in 2025.

At the election of 23 February 2025 Krings won constituency 108 with 50,331 first votes, 36.4 percent. Yüksel, again the SPD candidate, was runner-up with 36,259 votes, 26.2 percent. The Alternative for Germany took 25,280 first votes, 18.3 percent, compared with 9.1 percent in 2017 and 7.7 percent in 2021. Turnout was 77.3 percent of 181,209 eligible voters.

A reform of the federal electoral law in force from June 2023 fixed the Bundestag at 630 members and left the number of constituencies at 299. Seats are allocated from the second-vote result alone, and overhang and compensatory mandates no longer apply. A candidate with a relative majority of first votes receives a mandate only if the seat is covered by the party’s second-vote entitlement in that Land: constituency winners are ranked by first-vote share, and those with the weakest shares are left without a seat once the quota is used up, so the constituency stays vacant. On 30 July 2024 the Federal Constitutional Court held that this second-vote coverage procedure is compatible with the Basic Law. It found the five-percent threshold unconstitutional in its then form, but ruled that, until Parliament replaces it, parties below five percent are excluded only if their candidates did not finish first in at least three constituencies.

At the 2025 election, 23 constituency winners did not enter the 21st Bundestag for lack of second-vote coverage, chiefly candidates of the CDU and the Christian Social Union, along with four from the AfD and one from the SPD. Mönchengladbach was not among those constituencies. The Federal Returning Officer lists Krings as elected for constituency 108, and the Bundestag records his mandate as that constituency seat.

Parliamentary roles, 2002–2013

Committees and group offices

From 2002 to 2005 Krings chaired the Junge Gruppe of the joint Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) group in the Bundestag: the Union members under 35 on election day, whose chair sits on the group executive.

In 2008 group chairman Volker Kauder proposed him as Justitiar, the legal counsel, after Hermann Gröhe became a minister of state in the Chancellery. Then 39, and the youngest member of the executive board, he was elected by secret ballot with more than 95 percent of the votes. Until 2009 the post covered constitutional and parliamentary law.

In November 2009 the CDU members elected him deputy chairman, with 174 votes and 96 percent, in succession to Wolfgang Bosbach, who instead chaired the Interior Committee. Krings took legal and interior policy, sport, and the concerns of expellees, refugees and resettlers. His later positions on data retention and family law, which fell inside that brief, are treated below. The Bundestag biography of 2012 still listed him as deputy chairman, and also on the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and Rules of Procedure.

Federalism reform and sustainable development

In the 15th term he deputized for Norbert Röttgen on the Commission of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat on the Modernization of the Federal Order (2003–2004), and the biography records him as a project-group leader. With Tanja Gönner he filed commission paper 0019, “Unseren Föderalismus erneuern!” (“Let us renew our federalism!”), in which younger CDU and CSU members of the Bundestag and the state parliaments called the federal order dilapidated because amendments and cooperation had blurred competences.

He was then a full Bundestag member of the second commission, on federation–Länder financial relations, whose constitutive sitting the Bundesrat set for 8 March 2007, listing him among the CDU/CSU members under the designated co-chairs Peter Struck and Minister-President Günther Oettinger.

From 2006 to 2009 he chaired the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development. On 5 April 2006 the CDU/CSU, the Social Democratic Party, the Free Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens moved to re-establish it, as in the previous term, to accompany the national sustainability strategy across committees and to report at least every two years.

Copyright and the press publishers’ right

As deputy chairman he was a principal Union advocate of an ancillary copyright for press publishers (Leistungsschutzrecht). He told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the Union stood fully behind the right, aimed at commercial use of newspaper articles online. He broke with Siegfried Kauder, CDU chair of the Legal Affairs Committee, who withheld support over freedom of information. Krings said he did not know which constitution Kauder meant—“It cannot be the Basic Law”—and that Kauder did not speak for the Union. Publishers’ associations called the right indispensable to a free press; Google and copyright scholars opposed it.

On 1 March 2013 the Bundestag passed the bill by 293 votes to 243, with three abstentions: most of the CDU/CSU–FDP majority in favour, the opposition against as a bloc. Krings said it closed a copyright gap, that a free internet needed a fair framework, and that information had to have a price if paywalls were to work. He called it a contribution to freedom of the press against services that “harvested” content, and said search-engine “snippets” were covered once they went beyond single words.

The Eighth Act Amending the Copyright Act, published on 14 May 2013 and in force on 1 August 2013, gave the producer of a press product an exclusive, transferable right, lasting one year, to make it or parts of it publicly available for commercial purposes, except single words or the smallest excerpts. The right could not be used against the author, who was to share in the remuneration, and it did not cover uses other than by a commercial search engine or a comparable commercial service.

heise online reported that lawyers thought Google’s snippets might need no licence, and quoted Justus Haucap, former head of the Monopolies Commission, that the aim was to help publishers obtain money from Google and that uncertainty would feed warning letters, especially against bloggers. In the debate Volker Beck (Greens) asked when a short extract became a long one; Thomas Oppermann (SPD) called the late redraft work for lawyers; Brigitte Zypries said it lacked clarity and left journalists unprotected; Petra Sitte (Die Linke) said it strengthened the stronger party; and Konstantin von Notz called the vague terms a worsening of the draft.

Interior Ministry, 2013–2021

Appointment and responsibilities

In mid-December 2013, as the third Merkel cabinet was formed, Chancellor Angela Merkel offered Krings a post as Parliamentary State Secretary (Parlamentarischer Staatssekretär) at the Federal Ministry of the Interior. He accepted, and served with Ole Schröder under the returning interior minister, Thomas de Maizière. Parliamentary state secretaries are members of the Bundestag attached to a minister. They are not members of the federal government; they support the minister and speak for the ministry in parliament.

He remained when the fourth Merkel cabinet took office on 14 March 2018. Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union headed a ministry enlarged to include building and Heimat, and the Bundestag listed Krings beside Stephan Mayer and Marco Wanderwitz. The post ended on 8 December 2021, when Olaf Scholz became chancellor and Mahmut Özdemir, Johann Saathoff and Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter of the Social Democratic Party became the interior state secretaries. From 1 November 2017 to 11 April 2018 Krings also held, interim, the office of Federal Government Commissioner for Ethnic German Resettlers and National Minorities.

Internal security and data retention

Krings had pressed for telecommunications data retention (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) before entering the ministry. In June 2012, as a deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU group, he called Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger of the Free Democratic Party a “brake block” (Bremsklotz) on the government and said she should if necessary be outvoted in cabinet. In the 2013 coalition talks he described a constitutional application of the European Union’s Data Retention Directive as long overdue, against her refusal to restore the regime the Federal Constitutional Court had quashed in 2010.

Days into office he turned that pressure on the new Social Democratic justice minister, Heiko Maas, who had said he would leave a draft on ice until the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled. Krings told the Berliner Zeitung there was “no reason to wait” and that any indication from the court could be taken up in parliament. The court annulled the 2006 directive in 2014 because the storage obligation was not limited to what was necessary. The coalition then introduced a narrower national law. At first reading on 12 June 2015 Krings defended it as effective and measured—“wirksam und maasvoll”—and as compatible with the 2010 constitutional judgment. On 16 October 2015 the Bundestag passed it by 404 votes to 148, with seven abstentions: traffic data for ten weeks, mobile location data for four, no content, and access only for serious offences under a judicial order. Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens voted no; some SPD members opposed the bill or abstained, and the Greens said they would sue.

On 21 December 2016, in Tele2 Sverige, the Court of Justice held a general and indiscriminate retention duty incompatible with European Union law. In June 2017 the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia gave the provider SpaceNet interim protection. The Federal Network Agency then declined to enforce the duty, or to open fine proceedings, until the main case was decided. Krings called it remarkable that a federal authority would decide not to apply a statute still in force. After La Quadrature du Net (6 October 2020) he wrote, on 19 November, that the ruling concerned French, Belgian and British law, not the shorter German periods—four weeks for location data and ten for traffic data—and that IP addresses were often the first or only investigative lead. After the 2017 pause the 2015 obligation was largely not enforced.

Migration, resettlers and national minorities

During the 2015 European migrant crisis Krings backed Merkel while stressing a ceiling. He told the Rheinische Post that the “signal of mercy” had to be joined to the signal that Germany could not take every refugee arriving in Europe, and that she needed “no coaching” to say both. In the February 2016 coalition dispute over Asylum Package II he called unrestricted family reunification to unaccompanied minors “not humane, but irresponsible”, because it would encourage sending children alone on a dangerous journey; cabinet drafts, he said, had already been agreed with the SPD departments. Before the Integration Act he told Focus that cohesion would be “acutely threatened” by parallel societies, that learning German and obeying rules going “far beyond our Basic Law” had to be both supported and required, and that people still dependent on benefits should not receive a permanent right to stay.

Under Seehofer the argument became whether the 2015 border decisions had been lawful. As CSU chairman he had spoken of a “rule of injustice” (Herrschaft des Unrechts). In October 2018, before the petitions committee, on a petition demanding a stop to what it called illegal mass immigration, Krings said the scope of humanitarian discretion was a legitimate political dispute, but that the government could not accept a charge of breach of law. Schengen borders, he said, had already been open before 2015; stationary controls came afterwards at three crossings into Austria.

The ministry also houses the commissioner for ethnic German resettlers and national minorities, an office created in 1988 and extended in 2002 to the recognized national minorities. Hartmut Koschyk left it on 31 October 2017, having not stood again for the Bundestag. Krings agreed to hold it until the next government named a successor and took it up on 1 November 2017.

On 11 April 2018 the cabinet appointed Bernd Fabritius, a Romanian-German and then chairman of the Federation of Expellees, and released Krings. Seehofer thanked him and said the choice showed a special responsibility toward late resettlers and expellees, German minorities abroad, and the national minorities in Germany. Krings, on taking the office, had described the same field: late resettlers, German minorities remaining in eastern Europe and the successor states of the Soviet Union, the German minority in Denmark, and the national minorities in Germany.

Opposition and return to the group leadership

Legal-policy spokesman, 2021–2025

The Bundestag biography records that Krings was parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 2013 to 2021 and, from December 2021, legal-policy spokesman (rechtspolitischer Sprecher) of the CDU/CSU group. It also dates his chairmanship of the group's North Rhine-Westphalia Landesgruppe from 2017, so that office ran through the opposition years.

On 20 September 2022 the European Court of Justice held Germany's general and indiscriminate data retention unlawful, while allowing targeted storage for serious crime and, under a strict proportionality test, general storage of IP addresses in such cases. The Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted Krings, as legal-policy spokesman, calling for a statutory basis "without delay" so IP addresses could be stored for serious crime, including child sexual abuse. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser argued the same way, including on sexual violence against children. Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) called the judgment a good day for civil liberties and said suspicionless retention would be struck from the law; with Alliance 90/The Greens, he preferred a "quick freeze", securing data only after a concrete suspicion.

On 29 September 2022 the Bundestag debated a CDU/CSU motion (printed paper 20/3687) asking the government for a workable storage rule so digital traces of child sexual abuse could be tied to a suspect. Andrea Lindholz, for the group, called quick freeze a placebo because deleted data cannot be frozen; other groups attacked the motion as a return to general retention, and it was referred to the legal-affairs committee.

On 30 July 2024, after the Federal Constitutional Court ruled on the coalition's electoral reform, Krings told Deutschlandfunk that striking down parts of it was a major defeat for the coalition. He objected to the court's acceptance that overhang mandates (Überhangmandate) could be abolished, called that reasoning thin, and said the judgment would make frequent further changes to electoral law more likely.

Deputy parliamentary group chairman

On 13 May 2025 the CDU/CSU group completed its executive (geschäftsführender Vorstand) and elected Krings a deputy chairman (stellvertretender Fraktionsvorsitzender), responsible for law and consumer protection, the interior, expellees, resettlers and German minorities, and petitions. Jens Spahn was already chairman, and Alexander Hoffmann, leader of the CSU Landesgruppe, had been elected first deputy the week before. The post returned Krings to a deputy chairmanship he had held from 2009 to 2013. Neither the Bundestag text archive nor the group's press notice states a vote tally.

For the 21st Bundestag, the biography dated 28 October 2026 lists him as a deputy member of the committees on culture and media, legal affairs and consumer protection, foreign affairs, the interior, and petitions; as a full member of the Mediation Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss); as a deputy member of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss); and as deputy chair of the German-British parliamentary group. The narrative text, which the Bundestag says rests on members' own information, still called him legal-policy spokesman from December 2021 and did not record the May 2025 election. It also did not list the committee that elects federal judges (Richterwahlausschuss) or the joint parliamentary scrutiny group for Europol. In December 2025 tagesschau.de still described him as deputy leader for interior and legal affairs and as chair of the North Rhine-Westphalia Landesgruppe, the largest in the CDU/CSU group.

Konrad Adenauer Foundation

On 19 December 2025 the members' assembly of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation held the first contested election for its chair in the foundation's 70-year history. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer won on the first ballot with 28 votes to 21 for Krings and one abstention, and succeeded Norbert Lammert. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the same 28-to-21 margin and called Krings the candidate of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Der Spiegel added that she was the first woman to lead the foundation, and that Lammert had said in September he would leave after eight years.

In mid-November Merz had written to Lammert recommending Krings and praising his experience in politics and scholarship in Germany and abroad. Tagesschau, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel each described the result as a defeat for Merz, who had proposed the chair of his North Rhine-Westphalian Landesgruppe. Kramp-Karrenbauer had beaten Merz for the CDU chair in 2018. Krings was nevertheless elected to the board that day: the Bundestag's register of outside posts lists him as a board member of the foundation from 19 December 2025.

Constitutional and family-law positions

Marriage, partnership and adoption

On 5 November 2010, after a majority of the Länder justice ministers had favoured adoption by registered life partners, Krings, then a deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group, and its legal-policy spokeswoman Andrea Voßhoff issued a statement headed "Every child needs a father and a mother." They rejected joint adoption by same-sex partnerships and said the Christian–liberal coalition would not find a majority for it. Adoption, they wrote, had to concern only the child's welfare: homosexual people could care devotedly, but the parents' different sexes were decisive for a child's development and not for the legislature to set aside, and the Basic Law treated marriage as a community of man and woman under special state protection. Thomas Steins, deputy chairman of the Lesbians and Gays in the Union, called such reservations a "downright scandal"; queer.de read the statement as a claim that gay and lesbian people were the worse parents.

In a festschrift essay for Karl Heinrich Friauf, reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 10 August 2011, Krings criticised the Federal Constitutional Court for equating marriage with the registered life partnership. Of the First Senate's decision of 7 July 2009 on a surviving partner's pension, he wrote that the court was "preparing the way for the complete equal treatment of marriage and the registered life partnership, ignoring the exceptional protective arrangement of Article 6(1) of the Basic Law and letting the norm, insofar as it relates to marriage, run empty." No other constitutional norm, he said, had been made so obsolete; it was ordinary law, not the constitution's choice of one form of life, that had to justify itself.

Before the free vote of 30 June 2017 on marriage for same-sex couples, Krings, then parliamentary state secretary in the Interior Ministry, told the Rheinische Post that the interior and justice ministries had always held that "marriage for all" required a constitutional amendment, and that the bill probably breached the right to marriage. He said he would vote no, and that life partnerships were no longer discriminated against because the legal consequences were the same. The Bundestag changed the Civil Code by 393 votes to 226, with four abstentions, without amending the Basic Law. Asked in 2025 why he had voted against, he wrote that his doubts—over the state–church relationship and over reservations he attributed to the SPD-led justice ministry—had not been borne out, and that he supported the law in force.

Constitutional Court candidacies

In autumn 2018 Krings was discussed in the Union as successor to Ferdinand Kirchhof, chairman of the First Senate, on a seat expected later to carry the presidency of the Federal Constitutional Court. Der Spiegel reported that Andrea Nahles had dropped SPD objections, but that Anton Hofreiter of the Greens would not back a serving interior state secretary, for fear it would look as if Interior Minister Horst Seehofer were sitting in Karlsruhe. Union, SPD and Green leaders, with the FDP willing to follow, agreed instead on Stephan Harbarth. Queer.de quoted the Green members Ulle Schauws and Sven Lehmann that anyone who had "repeatedly denied lesbians and gay men their fundamental rights" was unfit to defend them on the court, and the site called that record "queerfeindlich."

For the Second Senate seat Peter Müller left in 2023—a Union nomination not reserved for a judge of a supreme federal court—the CDU backed Krings and the CSU the former Bavarian justice minister Winfried Bausback. After Bausback was dropped the nomination stayed with the CSU, so Krings was not the substitute; the name then discussed was the federal prosecutor general Peter Frank, whom the Bundesrat elected on 24 November 2023. On 27 January 2022 the Bundestag elected Krings to the Richterwahlausschuss, which with the federal government fills judgeships at the other supreme federal courts.

Equality clause and anti-discrimination law

Krings has opposed adding "sexual identity" to Article 3(3) of the Basic Law. In September 2025, as Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg sought a Bundesrat initiative to insert it, he told Legal Tribune Online that unequal treatment for sexual orientation was already barred by Article 3(1), the court's case law, the General Equal Treatment Act and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and that the catalogue should be changed only with great restraint. The phrase was too indefinite, he said, and would make it hard "to ensure that paedophiles, too, cannot invoke this provision, because for that group of people none of us wants protection against discrimination." The Länder replied, citing the court, that Article 3(3) protects groups structurally exposed to discrimination rather than arbitrary categories.

After the Bundestag hearing on the Self-Determination Act on 28 November 2023, Krings said the bill would not protect adults or minors from hasty decisions, and that it was "disconcerting" if parents could change a child's legal sex until 14 and if, from that age, adolescents could do so against their parents.

Public roles, honors and reception

Associations, church and civic offices

Outside the Bundestag and his CDU party posts, Krings has held legal, church and European offices that are almost all unpaid. His Bundestag biography, based on his own information, states that he has chaired the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesetzgebung since 2007 and has sat on the board of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristen-Vereinigung (DAJV) since 2004. The society lists him as chairman, and Abgeordnetenwatch records the post as honorary. The DAJV lists him as head of its group on constitution, legislation and public law, a group it dates to 2004.

On 4 July 2007 Europa-Union Deutschland elected him one of three deputy chairs of its Bundestag group, under the FDP member Michael Link, and he remains on the group’s membership list in the 21st Bundestag.

The biography describes him as evangelisch-reformiert. His outside-activity filing lists membership of the Landessynode of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland and, on an honorary basis, of the synod of the church district Gladbach-Neuss. On 18 October 2024 the trustees of the Stiftung Forum Recht confirmed Bettina Limperg, president of the Federal Court of Justice, as chair and elected Krings deputy chair, succeeding Carsten Körber.

Abgeordnetenwatch and the Bundestag list him as an editor of the Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik at C.H. Beck, at 500 euros gross a month, with 17,500 euros gross recorded as of 30 September 2024. He is also listed as a paid freelance lawyer with Kapellmann und Partner in Mönchengladbach; his admission to practise was dormant from 2013 to 2021. The CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia lists him as unmarried.

Honors

On 1 August 2024 the office of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier published recipients of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. “Krings, Günter, Dr., Mönchengladbach” appears under the Verdienstkreuz am Bande, the Cross of Merit on ribbon. Names are generally released four months after conferral, and the list gives no individual reasons.

Reception and criticism

Commentators have treated Krings as a legally fluent conservative. Before the December 2025 vote for chair of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, taz called him a heavyweight of the Union group who had won Mönchengladbach directly since 2002 and who was strong in argument and sure of the facts, while placing him on the conservative side of Friedrich Merz: for retention of telecommunications data, against liberalizing abortion law, and for deporting Syrians without a permanent right of residence. Merz had written to outgoing chair Norbert Lammert praising his “extensive experience in many fields of politics and scholarship.” On 19 December 2025 the members’ assembly elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer by 28 votes to 21, with one abstention, in what tagesschau called the foundation’s first contested chair election in 70 years and a defeat for Merz.

The same contrast marked the path to the Federal Constitutional Court. taz reported that in 2018 he was regarded as a candidate for Karlsruhe, but that Union support faded after Volker Kauder lost the group leadership and that Alliance 90/The Greens, needed for a two-thirds majority, found a move from the government bench — he was then an interior state secretary — inappropriate. Stephan Harbarth was chosen instead. Queer.de later recalled a 2018 statement by the Green members Ulle Schauws and Sven Lehmann that someone who had repeatedly denied lesbians and gay men their fundamental rights was not suited to defend those rights on the court. In November 2023 Legal Tribune Online, citing what it had been told, still described him as the CDU’s candidate in talks over a vacancy, while reporting that the proposal right for that seat was to stay with the CSU.

Internet-policy critics have also questioned his security arguments on technical grounds. In January 2011 netzpolitik.org challenged a guest article comparing spam filters with site-blocking infrastructure; the lawyer Jörg Heidrich, quoted there, called the comparison wholly misguided in both law and technology. The side-job file has not itself become a conflict-of-interest dispute: the editorial fee and the Mönchengladbach law-firm role are itemized under the Bundestag’s conduct rules, and the association, church and foundation posts are marked honorary.