Johannes Winkel

Johannes Winkel (born 28 October 1991 in Olpe) is a German fully qualified lawyer (Volljurist) and a politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from North Rhine-Westphalia. He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2025, directly elected in constituency 106, Düsseldorf II. Since November 2022 he has chaired the Young Union (Junge Union), the youth organisation of the CDU and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU). On 22 September 2026 the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag elected him a deputy chair, responsible for labour and social affairs, employees, sport and volunteering, in succession to Carsten Linnemann, who had become federal minister of health in July 2026. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that election the same week.

Winkel took his Abitur in 2011 at the Städtisches Gymnasium Kreuztal. From 2011 to 2018 he studied political science and law at the universities of Munich, Bonn and St. Gallen, and he passed the first state examination in law in 2018. He then worked as a research assistant in a commercial law firm and, from 2019 to 2020, at the University of Bonn, completed the legal preparatory service (Rechtsreferendariat) from 2020 to 2022, and passed the second state examination in 2022. Before entering parliament he was a lawyer at SMS group GmbH in Mönchengladbach. He is married. The same biography, which the Bundestag notes is based on members' own disclosures, records that he helped revive the Junge Union branch in Kreuztal in 2010, later chaired the organisation at district and state level, sat on the Landschaftsversammlung Westfalen-Lippe from 2020 to 2023, and was a member of the Federal Convention in 2022.

The election that sent him to Berlin was brought forward after the federal president, at the chancellor's request, dissolved the 20th Bundestag on 27 December 2024 and set the poll for Sunday, 23 February 2025. In Düsseldorf II, Winkel took 28.7 percent of the constituency votes (43,282), ahead of Adis Selimi of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on 23.1 percent. Turnout in the constituency was 80.4 percent of 188,875 eligible voters.

Inside the Union he has been most visible in arguments over defence and pensions. At the CDU federal conference in Berlin in May 2024, as the party voted to phase out the 2011 suspension of conscription, he told delegates that Germany could not defend itself against aggression from outside and that the defence of democracy should not be left to hope. On 5 December 2025 he and Pascal Reddig, described by tagesschau as spokesmen of the Union's Junge Gruppe, were among seven CDU/CSU members who voted against the coalition's pension package. The bill still passed, by 318 votes to 224 with 53 abstentions, two votes above the absolute majority of the whole Bundestag that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had sought. Delegates later re-elected Winkel as Young Union chairman with 265 of 283 valid votes, 16 against and two abstentions, which tagesschau called his best result so far; that report was published on 16 October 2026. As of the Bundestag biography's page status of 31 October 2026, he is listed as a substitute member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and of the Defence Committee.

Early life, education and profession

Family and schooling

Johannes Winkel was born on 28 October 1991 in Olpe, North Rhine-Westphalia. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes rests on the member's own disclosures, records that he is married; neither that biography nor later profiles that discuss his upbringing name his spouse. He grew up in Kreuztal, near Siegen, in a Catholic household that was not a family of the Christian Democratic Union. His father worked in a software company and his mother was a nurse. In his youth he was an altar server and active in the youth wing of the Kolping Society. In 2011 he took the Abitur at the Städtisches Gymnasium Kreuztal. Church youth work preceded party membership: the taz reported that he joined the Young Union at 19.

University and legal training

From 2011 to 2018 Winkel studied political science and law at the universities of Munich, Bonn and St. Gallen. Munzinger's biography gives a finer breakdown of the law course—Ludwig Maximilian University in 2011–2012, Bonn from 2012 to 2018, and St. Gallen in 2014–2015—and states that a scholarship from the gifted-student programme of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation supported the studies. He passed the first state examination in law in 2018, before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne.

During his studies he joined two Catholic student corporations in the Cartellverband, the KDStV Rheno-Franconia in Munich and the KDStV Ascania in Bonn. The association's magazine Academia identified him by the Rheno-Franconia abbreviation R-F. From 2017 to 2019 he was federal chairman of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft katholischer Studentenverbände (AGV), an umbrella of the Catholic student associations CV, KV, UV, RKDB and TCV that is registered as an interest group with the Bundestag. At the AGV's retreat in Feldberg, near Freiburg, representatives of those associations elected him unanimously to succeed Moritz Findeisen. The AGV's account called the 26-year-old from Kreuztal a doctoral student in law and quoted his wish that the AGV become "more political and therefore more influential." Commenting on the coalition agreement then before the public, he said that in some fields the arrangements were "disappointing and offer only few answers to current social problems," and that politics' most urgent task was to bring society back together. The term ended in December 2019, when Felix Drossard was elected at a retreat in Potsdam; the Kartellverband's report of the handover credited Winkel with reopening dialogue with decision-makers in the church, politics and business and with entering debates on freedom of expression and antisemitism.

After the first examination he worked as a research assistant in a commercial law firm and, from 2019 to 2020, as a research assistant at the University of Bonn, a post Munzinger places at the university's Institute for Church Law. From 2020 to 2022 he completed the Rechtsreferendariat, the practical legal traineeship, and in June 2022 passed the second state examination. Official biographies thereafter list his profession as Volljurist, the title for a lawyer who has passed both state examinations. The AGV in 2017 and the taz in November 2022 both described him as pursuing a doctorate, and Munzinger states that after the second examination he worked on a dissertation on "decision-making competences in foreign policy between government and parliament." The Bundestag biography does not record a completed doctorate.

Work before parliament

The occupation the Bundestag requires members to disclose for the period before they take their seats is lawyer at SMS group GmbH in Mönchengladbach. Winkel's own parliamentary biography summarises the same step as work as a Volljurist in an industrial company, beginning after the second examination. SMS group is a family-owned supplier of rolling mills and steelworks; in 2016 Handelsblatt described the firm, then associated with Düsseldorf, as a large plant-engineering company exposed to the global steel glut. The Mönchengladbach post is the employment listed immediately before his membership of the Bundestag.

Career in the Junge Union

Local and state leadership

The Junge Union (JU) is the joint youth organisation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union. Membership runs from the completed 14th year of age and normally ends at 35; an office held at that birthday lasts until the holder leaves it, and only members under 35 may be elected. CDU or CSU membership is not required to join, though state and federal board members are expected to belong to one of the two parties.

A CDU North Rhine-Westphalia biography dates Winkel’s start to 2010, when the JU in Kreuztal was reactivated, and calls him a former Südwestfalen district chairman and former state chairman. Local reporting does not record the ballot in which he became district chairman. In January 2018 he was an ordinary member of the Kreuztal JU board, chaired since 2014 by Julian Siebel. On 30 August 2017, at the Südwestfalentag in Bad Sassendorf, delegates confirmed Bernd Schulte as district chairman with 100 percent and elected Winkel a deputy chairman with 96 percent; the district then had about 4,500 members.

At the 56th Landestagung, held in the Gürzenich in Cologne on German Unity Day and reported by the state JU on 3 October 2020, he succeeded Florian Braun, who had led the organisation for six years and did not stand again. Westfalenspiegel reported that the 28-year-old from Kreuztal had no opponent and received 99 percent; the JU counted more than 200 delegates under coronavirus rules, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger about 250. The meeting put the three candidates for the CDU federal chair — Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen — on one stage and marked the departure of former JU chairman and CDU general secretary Paul Ziemiak. Winkel stressed education, research and industrial innovation, technological openness in climate policy, and a hard line on extremism and crime.

On 2 July 2022 the state congress nominated him unanimously for the federal chair. He did not seek another state term. On 11 February 2023, at the 59th NRW-Tag in Neuss, about 250 delegates elected Kevin Gniosdorz to succeed him; the association dated Winkel’s state chairmanship to 2020–2023.

Federal chairmanship

The Deutschlandtag, the JU’s highest body, elects the federal chairman in every even calendar year, in a ballot separate from the rest of the board.

On 18 November 2022, at the Deutschlandtag in Fulda, delegates elected the 31-year-old Winkel with 86.96 percent. He had no opponent. He replaced Tilman Kuban, who at 35 had reached the age limit and, after nearly four years, did not stand; Kuban left to a standing ovation. The JU gave the same figure and said state associations had backed Winkel on a tour of more than 80 events. He warned of deindustrialisation, said the CDU/CSU should be the first party to make Germany a climate-neutral industrial country, and attacked the climate group Letzte Generation. After the vote he told delegates, “Lasst uns gemeinsam Vollgas geben.”

The Deutschlandtag in Halle (Saale) confirmed him for another two years. Tagesschau, citing the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, reported 239 of 266 valid votes, 25 against and two abstentions. Because the JU, like the CDU, does not count abstentions, it published 90.5 percent; counting them, the share was 89.84 percent, still above 2022. The organisation’s own membership figure, quoted by Tagesschau, was about 90,000. Speakers included CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann and Saxony-Anhalt minister-president Reiner Haseloff, with Merz, then party leader and chancellor-candidate, due on the Saturday.

On 16 October 2026 the Deutschlandtag in Bonn re-elected him with 265 of 283 valid votes, 16 against and two abstentions, which Tagesschau called his best result. Die Welt, again excluding abstentions, calculated 94.3 percent, against 90.5 percent in 2024 and a rounded 87.0 percent in 2022. He was by then a CDU member of the Bundestag and, at 34, still eligible: the ballot fell twelve days before his 35th birthday, after which an office-holder may serve out the term. He said the Union was under severe pressure after three state-election defeats, called for confidence — “Unsere Generation hat mit dieser Union noch einiges vor” — and attacked Manuela Schwesig, the Social Democratic minister-president of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, over Nord Stream 2. Hendrik Wüst urged the federal coalition to stop open quarrels; Merz was due the next day.

Place in the CDU

The CDU statute lists the Junge Union first among the party’s Bundesvereinigungen, whose role is to carry CDU ideas into a particular milieu and to bring that group’s concerns into party policy. Chairs of the federal, state and district associations must be CDU members. Under section 33(4), those federal chairs attend the CDU federal executive in an advisory capacity, with CDU minister-presidents and the state chairs. They are not among the voting members in section 33(1). The party’s published roll places “Johannes Winkel MdB, Vorsitzender der Jungen Union Deutschlands” under Beratende Teilnehmer des Bundesvorstands. The seat goes with the JU office; it is not filled by a CDU congress vote.

Tagesschau and Die Welt describe the JU as the independent youth organisation of the CDU and CSU, in line with the rule that ordinary members need not join either party. Senior CDU figures use the Deutschlandtag as a platform. In Fulda in 2022, Merz and Jens Spahn were billed after Kuban’s farewell. In Halle in 2024, Linnemann said that without a turn in migration policy there was no point governing with the Greens, and argued for contesting the Alternative for Germany on substance rather than through daily talk of a ban. In Bonn in 2026, Wüst and Merz again addressed the congress that confirmed Winkel.

Earlier public offices

Before he entered the Bundestag, Johannes Winkel held two public offices alongside leadership of the Junge Union, the joint youth organisation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union. At its 56th state conference in North Rhine-Westphalia, on 3 October 2020, he became state chairman in succession to Florian Braun. Delegates elected him federal chairman on 18 November 2022.

Landschaftsversammlung Westfalen-Lippe

The Landschaftsversammlung Westfalen-Lippe is the assembly of the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL), a municipal association based in Münster. For its 27 members—nine district-free cities and 18 districts, about 8.3 million people—the LWL carries out regional tasks those authorities do not perform alone, chiefly integration assistance, psychiatric care, special schools and cultural institutions, financed mainly by an annual levy, the Landschaftsumlage. City and district councils choose the assembly, with parties represented in proportion to the municipal elections. It sets the LWL’s guidelines, adopts the budget and elects the director and the heads of department.

The LWL announced on 28 December 2020 the result of the election that formed the 15th assembly. Winkel sat in it for the CDU. His Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members’ own disclosures, dates the membership from 2020 to 2023. A notice by LWL director Georg Lunemann of 6 October 2023, carried in the ministerial gazette, records that he left at the end of 31 August 2023. Barbara Merten (CDU), of Herne, succeeded him from the CDU reserve list from 1 September 2023, under section 7b(6) of the Landschaftsverbandsordnung. The seat therefore covered his state chairmanship of the Junge Union and the first months after he became federal chairman.

Federal Convention

The Federal Convention (Bundesversammlung) elects the federal president. The Bundestag describes it as Germany’s largest parliamentary assembly, with no other task, meeting as a rule only every five years. It comprises every member of the Bundestag and an equal number of delegates chosen by proportional representation in the state parliaments—often state legislators, but also local politicians or other public figures. The ballot is secret and without debate. An absolute majority of the members is required on the first two ballots, and a relative majority on a third. The Bundestag states that the election is regulated by Article 54(4) of the Basic Law.

The 17th Federal Convention met on 13 February 2022 in Berlin’s Paul-Löbe-Haus, not the Reichstag chamber, because it had 1,472 members—736 from the Bundestag and 736 from the Länder—and because of pandemic precautions. Chaired by Bärbel Bas, it re-elected Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the first ballot with 1,045 of 1,437 votes cast (737 required). The other candidates, Gerhard Trabert, Max Otte and Stefanie Gebauer, received 96, 140 and 58 votes; 86 members abstained and 12 ballots were invalid. Individual votes are not published.

The Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia elected the state’s 156 delegates on 16 December 2021. The CDU list received 48 votes. Winkel, not identified there as a Landtag member, was the CDU’s third substitute, after Fabian Schrumpf and Charlotte Quik; substitutes were to move up in that order. The Bundestag directory of the convention, dated 11:30 on 13 February 2022, lists him as a CDU delegate of North Rhine-Westphalia rather than as a Bundestag member. He was then still state chairman of the Junge Union; the federal chairmanship followed in November.

Bundestag candidacy and 2025 election

Constituency and campaign

Düsseldorf II, constituency 106, comprises boroughs 3, 8, 9 and 10 of the city, the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia; the other boroughs form constituency 105, Düsseldorf I. The same four southern boroughs had been numbered 107 at the 2021 federal election, when Andreas Rimkus of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) won the direct mandate with 29.2 percent of the first votes (41,169), ahead of Sylvia Pantel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 24.7 percent (34,801), on a turnout of 74.8 percent.

Map of Bundestag constituency 106, Düsseldorf II, covering the southern boroughs of Düsseldorf.

In February 2024 Rimkus wrote to the Düsseldorf SPD that he would not stand again, giving personal reasons and noting that he would then be 63, so that the party could prepare a successor for the southern seat. On the CDU side, the Friedrichstadt branch nominated Johannes Winkel unanimously in April 2024; he had only recently joined after moving to the city, and the Rheinische Post reported the vote as a large advance of confidence. On 29 June 2024 a district conference of about 250 voting members confirmed him, with no opposing candidate, by 197 votes to 18 for the southern constituency, and the same meeting chose Thomas Jarzombek for Düsseldorf I. Winkel, then 32, federal chairman of the Young Union and a fully qualified lawyer at an industrial-plant manufacturer, told delegates that irregular migration had to be steered and limited. It was his first candidacy for the Bundestag.

The Federal President had first set the election for 28 September 2025. On 27 December 2024, at the chancellor's request, he dissolved the 20th Bundestag and moved polling day to Sunday 23 February 2025. The constituency committee admitted the district nominations on 24 January 2025. Beside Winkel (born 1991 in Olpe), the ballot named Adis Selimi for the SPD (born 1994 in Düsseldorf, a research assistant), Sara Nanni for Alliance 90/The Greens (born 1987 in Datteln, a peace and conflict researcher), Lida Azarnoosh for the Free Democratic Party (a physician), Andrea Kraljic for the Alternative for Germany (an employee), and Lisa Schubert for Die Linke (a student born in 2002). Further candidates came from the Free Voters, Volt, the Marxist-Leninist Party, Bündnis Deutschland and, for WerteUnion, Sylvia Pantel.

In a Rheinische Post questionnaire before polling day, Winkel said Düsseldorf should remain an industrial location, called for an end to what he termed ideological energy policy, and argued for restoring "support and demand" (Fördern und Fordern) in labour-market policy. Selimi, a local SPD branch chair since 2023, stressed security and social cohesion, a minimum wage of €15, lower taxes on food and wages, and investment in local industry. Nanni, a Bundestag member since 2021 and the Greens' spokesperson on security policy, said a stabilising German role abroad would also serve a globally connected city. Kraljic emphasised residents' say over projects in their neighbourhoods, and Schubert named affordable housing, fair access to education and social participation.

Result and mandate

Of 188,875 people eligible to vote, 151,908 cast ballots, a turnout of 80.4 percent, 5.6 points higher than in 2021. Winkel won the first-vote plurality with 43,282 votes, 28.7 percent, up 4.1 points on the CDU's 2021 share. Selimi was second with 34,739 votes (23.1 percent, down 6.1). The Greens took 27,347 (18.2 percent, down 3.2), the AfD 19,574 (13.0 percent, up 7.2), Die Linke 14,024 (9.3 percent, up 5.5) and the FDP 6,250 (4.1 percent, down 5.9). On the second vote the CDU led the constituency with 25.1 percent (38,006 votes), ahead of the SPD on 18.9, the Greens on 17.1, the AfD on 13.0, Die Linke on 11.8, the FDP on 5.4 and the BSW on 4.8 percent.

The 2023 reform fixes the Bundestag at 630 members and ends overhang and compensatory seats. A constituency winner is seated only if the seat is covered by the party's second-vote entitlement in the Land (Zweitstimmendeckung): winners are ranked by their share of valid first votes, and the Land's seats are assigned in that order until the entitlement runs out. In the final allocation, 23 constituency winners nationwide received no seat—15 from the CDU, four from the AfD, three from the CSU and one from the SPD. In North Rhine-Westphalia the CDU was entitled to 47 seats and had won 44 constituencies; all 44 were covered, with three list seats left over. Düsseldorf II, at 28.7 percent, was the lowest CDU first-vote share among those 44 and was marked as covered, so the constituency was not one of those left without a directly elected member.

The newly elected Bundestag held its constituent sitting on 25 March 2025. The parliament lists Winkel as holding the constituency mandate for Wahlkreis 106, Düsseldorf II, and as a member since 2025, directly elected for that district.

Roles in the Bundestag

Committees

Seats on the standing committees of the Bundestag are divided according to the strength of the parliamentary groups, and the group leaderships decide which member sits where. The parliament's account of committee practice is that a member should ordinarily be a full member of only one committee, that every full member has one vote, and that substitute members may attend every meeting but may vote only when they stand in for an absent full member of their own group. Each group also names, for every committee, an Obmann as its main contact with the group leadership.

The Committee on Labour and Social Affairs (Ausschuss für Arbeit und Soziales) held its constitutive meeting on 21 May 2025. It has 42 full members, 14 of them from the CDU/CSU, and the Bundestag's parliamentary news service named Johannes Winkel among those 14. The Defence Committee (Verteidigungsausschuss) was constituted the same day, with 38 full members and 13 from the CDU/CSU. Winkel was not on that list of full members.

The official biography, consulted on 31 October 2026, records a narrower set of committee roles. Under memberships it lists him only as a substitute member (stellvertretendes Mitglied) of both the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and the Defence Committee. It does not list a full membership of either committee, and it does not designate him Obmann. The biography's structured data were last modified on 29 September 2026.

Deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group

At the scheduled re-election of its executive on 5 May 2026, the CDU/CSU group again chose its deputy chairs and the chairs of its working groups (Arbeitsgruppen). It recorded that offices held by the Christian Social Union had been fixed for the whole electoral term at the opening of the parliament, while deputy chairs and parliamentary business managers on the Christian Democratic Union side were chosen in the CDU part of the group.

On 22 September 2026 the group elected Winkel one of its deputy chairs. News reports that day, drawing on the faction, gave him the portfolio for labour and social affairs, employees (Arbeitnehmer), sport and volunteering (Ehrenamt), and described him as the 34-year-old chairman of the Junge Union. He succeeded Carsten Linnemann, who had given up the deputy chairmanship after becoming federal minister of health in July. The federal government had announced that appointment on 29 July 2026. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported the group election later the same week. The faction's own account added that, before the vote, Winkel had been a deputy chair of its working group on labour and social affairs, and that the same sitting elected Christina Stumpp chair of the working group on agriculture, food and Heimat and Josef Oster chair of the working group on local government.

By late October 2026 the published leadership of the labour-and-social-affairs working group was Marc Biadacz as chair and Pascal Reddig as deputy chair; Winkel was not listed among its officers. The Bundestag biography records him as a member since 25 March 2025 for constituency 106, Düsseldorf II.

Intra-group networks

The faction's profile also places him in three internal circles: the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand, the Junge Gruppe and the Arbeitnehmergruppe. A June 2025 flyer of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand described six sociological groups of members inside a CDU/CSU faction it put at 208 members, and described the Parlamentskreis as the largest, with 166. The same flyer says members meet before group sittings to discuss the relevance of forthcoming bills to small and medium-sized firms, and that the circle runs commissions on crafts, labour and social law, and the defence industry. Winkel appears on the faction's Parlamentskreis membership list; he is not among the officers named in that flyer.

The Junge Gruppe, at its constitutive meeting on 25 March 2025, defined its membership as every CDU/CSU member of the Bundestag who was under 35 on election day — then 18 people. It elected Pascal Reddig chair unanimously, Konrad Körner first deputy chair, and Catarina dos Santos-Wintz and Anna Aeikens further deputy chairs. Winkel is carried on the group's membership list, not in that elected leadership. The Arbeitnehmergruppe's published chair is Stefan Nacke, and Winkel is listed among its members.

His place in the 2025 coalition negotiations was not the labour brief he later held in the parliamentary group. The CDU's staffing list of 12 March 2025, for the talks with the SPD, put him in working group 8, on education, research and innovation, chaired by Karin Prien, with Sebastian Gemkow, Thomas Jarzombek, Gordon Schnieder and Christian Tischner. On the same CDU list, working group 5, on labour and social affairs, was chaired by Linnemann and did not include Winkel.

Pensions, labour and social policy

The 2025 pension package

On 5 December 2025 the Bundestag passed the first pension package of the coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) by 318 votes to 224, with 53 abstentions. That was two above the absolute majority of all 630 members, 316, which Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said he wanted. Seven of 208 Union members voted no, two abstained and one did not vote. Among the no votes were Johannes Winkel and Pascal Reddig, spokesmen of the Union’s Junge Gruppe; with one exception the rest came from younger Union members. Die Linke had agreed that its 64 members would abstain, which eased passage because abstentions are not counted on ordinary laws, though some of them did not.

The law holds the pension level, the standard pension relative to average pay, at a minimum of 48 percent through the adjustment of 1 July 2031. Keeping that line until 2031 was largely uncontested in the coalition and was reported to cost €11 billion in 2031 alone. Younger Union members objected that the level would remain higher than without the statute after the line expired. Official projections put the level at 46.3 percent by 2039 with the measure and as low as 45 percent by 2040 without it. Child-raising credits for children born before 1992 rise by six months, to three years, which the government said would give about ten million parents, mostly women, roughly €20 more a month per child from 2027. From 2026 up to €2,000 a month of socially insured pay after the statutory age is tax-free, and occupational schemes are opened to firms outside collective agreements. The Bundesrat cleared the package on 19 December 2025.

Finance minister and SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil called the result a decision for stable pensions and for respect toward contributors. Merz said it was “not the end of our pension policy, but only the beginning,” and promised a second reform in 2026 after a commission. Floor leader Jens Spahn expressed respect for the Junge Gruppe and called for a review of how the coalition had worked. Winkel told phoenix that Germany needed reform decisions, not only debates, and that the fight for “real reforms” was only starting.

Reform proposals after the vote

The Alterssicherungskommission began on 7 January 2026, when Merz and labour minister Bärbel Bas received its chairs, Frank-Jürgen Weise, former head of the Federal Employment Agency, and Constanze Janda, a professor of social law. Bas appointed 13 members to report by mid-year on retirement age, benefits and contributions. Deputy chairs were Reddig (CDU), Florian Dorn (CSU) and Annika Klose (SPD), with eight academics and a non-voting seat for the pension insurance. Reddig’s deputy chair was reported as a concession to the younger members who, with Winkel, had led the revolt against the first package.

On 22–23 June 2026 the commission gave the chancellor and Bas 33 recommendations and asked that they be taken together. The statutory age would rise from 2032 and then by half a year every ten years from 2041. Deduction-free retirement after 45 contribution years would end, with exceptions for especially hard working lives. A mandatory funded tier on a Swedish model would, after a phase-in, take two percent of gross pay, split between employers and employees. The contributor base would widen, the sustainability factor would return, and contribution-free mini-jobs would generally end except for school pupils. Klose said that without structural change the level would keep falling and contributions would rise.

Before the summer break Merz and Bas said they would carry out the plan without cuts; Bas called it a Gesamtkunstwerk. By early October it was unclear what would remain, above all the end of the deduction-free pension after 45 years. Winkel, by then the Union group’s deputy chair for labour and social affairs, said the reform had already been agreed by the commission, the government and the two parliamentary leaderships, and that a bill was needed quickly if it was to pass by year-end. Figures in both the Union and the SPD had questioned parts of the package. Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel backed ending that early pension, arguing that long, physically hard careers were not its typical beneficiaries and that failure on the point would cast doubt on Germany’s capacity to reform. The Bundesrechnungshof warned the budget committee that the further package could lift the pension insurance’s supplementary claim on tax revenue to nearly 46 percent.

Labour-market and industrial positions

On 27 June 2025 the Minimum Wage Commission unanimously recommended a statutory minimum wage of €13.90 an hour from 1 January 2026 and €14.60 from 1 January 2027, short of an SPD demand for €15. Bas said she could “live well” with a rise reaching about six million people and would adopt it by ordinance; she opposed exceptions for seasonal farm workers after Agriculture Minister Alois Rainer had signalled openness to them.

Winkel’s own statements have stressed energy costs, hours and prior contributions. In September 2025 he told Die Welt that industry should use renewables, gas, coal and nuclear power bought abroad, and that the grids and storage of the energy transition were not financeable. He said people in work must keep more of their wage and that the retirement age of 67 had to be applied in practice.

In October 2025 he attacked SPD resistance to the coalition’s Bürgergeld reform as a lost link to workers. In January 2026 he asked for a strategy on rising youth unemployment and said a plan to simplify social administration was not a reform, because it did not limit the social state. Bas said there would be no benefit cuts and that work should pay in a simpler system. Die Linke chair Ines Schwerdtner called that plan an attack on the social state. In February he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that the sustainability factor should return and that family tax splitting, tied to the number of children, should move people from part-time into full-time. In September 2026 he proposed lower benefits for people who had never contributed, which he said would fall disproportionately on migrants without being a rule about nationality.

Defence, conscription and foreign policy

Conscription debate

On 7 May 2024 the federal conference of the Christian Democratic Union in Berlin voted by a clear majority to phase out the suspension of conscription and fold it into a compulsory Gesellschaftsjahr, servable in the Bundeswehr or in social institutions. The Junge Union had tabled an amending motion; the motions committee then put a revised passage into the basic programme: "Wir werden die Aussetzung der Wehrpflicht schrittweise zurücknehmen und die Wehrpflicht in ein verpflichtendes Gesellschaftsjahr überführen. Bis zu dieser Umsetzung fordern wir zur Stärkung der personellen Einsatzbereitschaft der Bundeswehr die Einführung einer Kontingentwehrpflicht."

The interim Kontingentwehrpflicht would muster men and women and call up only as many as the Bundeswehr needed, with motivation weighed in, as in Sweden. Johannes Winkel said, "Wir leben in einem Land, dass sich im Notfall nicht gegen Aggression von außen verteidigen kann", and that democracy's defence should not be left to the "Prinzip Hoffnung". Daniel Günther called the decision a visible signal to Russia. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had suspended conscription in 2011 and its structures were dismantled, though the duty for men in tension or defence remained and the Bundestag can lift the suspension by a simple majority. Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party then opposed a return, while Defence Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democratic Party) had favoured reintroduction because of personnel shortages. In March 2025 Philip Türmer of the SPD Young Socialists called compulsory service "Scheinlösungen" and said the army needed specialists, not 18-year-olds who could "gerade so ein Sturmgewehr halten".

From 2025 Winkel was a substitute member of the Bundestag defence committee. After the cabinet's August bill he told ZDF that questionnaires were a "riskantes Experiment" while Vladimir Putin remained aggressive, citing gaps of about 80,000 soldiers and 140,000 reservists, and he demanded that missed targets trigger conscription automatically. Compulsion limited freedom, he said, but less than an indefensible country, and a service year for both sexes lacked the two-thirds majority he thought a change to the Basic Law required.

On 5 December 2025 the Bundestag passed the Wehrdienst-Modernisierungsgesetz, 323 to 272 with one abstention; the Bundesrat agreed, with effect intended from 1 January 2026. Service stays voluntary unless a later law creates a Bedarfswehrpflicht: from 2026 men must, and women may, answer a questionnaire, and from 1 July 2027 men born in 2008 or later are examined, while compulsory call-up needs a fresh Bundestag decision if volunteers fall short or the threat grows. The target cited at the vote was 255,000 to 270,000 active soldiers by 2035, from a little over 184,000, plus 200,000 reservists. Pistorius said too few volunteers would force a partial draft. Students struck. The Alternative for Germany called it timid; Desiree Becker of Die Linke said young people had "anderes vor, als im Regiment Merz für das Kapital der Reichen den Kopf hinzuhalten"; Sara Nanni of the Greens said it was no answer on total defence or on including every generation and sex.

Ukraine, Israel and security policy

On 24 February 2022, as Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Winkel, then Junge Union chairman in North Rhine-Westphalia, told the Rheinische Post it was "nicht nur ein Angriffskrieg auf die Ukraine, sondern auf die Friedensordnung in Europa und die Demokratie". He stood that morning with a protest poster at the Russian embassy, and a Berlin demonstration by the Junge Union, Young Liberals, Green Youth and Jusos drew 700 people within three hours. He called 5,000 helmets an embarrassment Ukraine would take as cynicism or humiliation, backed Robert Habeck's case for defensive weapons, and rejected keeping peace with "warmen Worten".

On 21 August 2025, after Chancellor Friedrich Merz raised German security guarantees, Winkel said Germany would have to join a European protection force if a settlement came. "Wir können doch nicht auf der einen Seite sagen, dass unsere Abhängigkeit vom US-Militär reduziert und Europa endlich erwachsen werden muss, und auf der anderen Seite die Verantwortung verweigern, wenn es zum ersten Mal konkret wird", he told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. The case was still hypothetical, he said, and he doubted that Russia wanted serious talks, but if it did, "muss Deutschland bereit sein, Truppen in die Ukraine zu entsenden". Michael Kretschmer said German soldiers must not fight in Ukraine, and Jan van Aken called NATO troops there an "Unsicherheitsgarantie", wanting a Blauhelmeinsatz instead.

In August 2025 Merz halted, for the time being, approval of arms exports usable in the Gaza Strip war after Israel said it would expand operations and take Gaza City. Winkel wrote: "Israel macht ab heute die Drecksarbeit für uns, nur ohne deutsche Waffen." The Junge Union posted: "Staatsräson abgehakt? Ein Bruch mit den Grundsätzen der Unionspolitik". Roderich Kiesewetter called the pause a grave strategic error and a concession to an "antisemitischen Mob" and to Hamas; the CSU said it had not been consulted. Defence-committee chair Thomas Röwekamp said the cabinet had acted together, solidarity with Israel was intact, and taking cities was a "neue Qualität" Germany would not arm, while air and naval defence continued. Benjamin Netanyahu said Germany was rewarding Hamas. Lars Klingbeil said solidarity remained but that "Falsches muss benannt werden"; Adis Ahmetovic wanted more, including suspension of the EU association agreement.

Party direction and public reception

The 2021 campaign reckoning

At the Junge Union Deutschlandtag in Münster in October 2021, weeks after the CDU/CSU Bundestag defeat, Johannes Winkel, then North Rhine-Westphalia chair, turned the congress into a reckoning with the campaign. On the Saturday he told CDU general secretary Paul Ziemiak and CSU general secretary Markus Blume that if the youth organisation would not speak plainly, “then we have really lost,” and blamed them for the Jusos and Olaf Scholz having been more united than the CDU and the CSU — “an absolute impertinence.” Delegates called the Union “far too arbitrary in substance,” citing Wahl-O-Mat items left blank; federal chair Tilman Kuban said clear answers were sometimes welcome. A congress paper said Armin Laschet “could not reach the people as many had hoped” and that the candidacy had been “no one-man show, neither in victory nor in defeat.” Winkel closed more mildly once the secretaries-general put on the organisation’s white sneakers: they were going “in the same shoes in the same direction.”

To Bild he went beyond one campaign. Angela Merkel’s leadership, he said, had “systematically destabilised and hollowed out” the CDU: under what he called asymmetric demobilisation, the Union avoided uncomfortable subjects and covered conflicts with public money. There was still no migration concept, he argued — “a clear yes to immigration into the labour market” and “a quite clear limit on migration into the welfare systems” — and the 2011 nuclear exit had been “not a rationally grounded decision, but the result of an agitated debate.”

AfD, migration and coalition politics

Winkel has refused cooperation with the Alternative for Germany while arguing that the CDU should not leave migration to it. In a Rheinische Post interview of 17 September 2023, after the CDU in Thuringia carried a motion with AfD votes, he said there must be no cooperation and that the party should make policy independently of the AfD rather than grant it a veto. Anyone who worked with it, he said, betrayed “the Christian brand core of the CDU”; an AfD-tolerated minority government was impossible because it would need political arrangements and the parties were “diametrically opposed” on fundamentals. He still called the property-transfer-tax vote a policy success, not a taboo breach, and warned against labelling every position outside the SPD and the Greens as far-right. On migration, a sense of reality had been lost: the welfare state could be used independently of asylum law, while the route into work stayed bureaucratic.

After the September 2024 elections in Saxony and Thuringia he told Welt that “the trust-killer is migration policy” — not help for others, but the sense that residents’ security no longer counted — and called centre votes for the AfD alarm signals, not proof that eastern Germans were less democratic. The refusal of cooperation, he said, followed from the CDU’s founding as a break with National Socialism. Federal cooperation with Sahra Wagenknecht’s party was “unthinkable,” though Land talks on security or deportations might be explored; a coalition with Die Linke remained barred.

In the 2025 CDU/CSU–SPD talks the CDU listed him on working group 8, “Education, research and innovation,” chaired by Karin Prien. The Rheinische Post called him a coalition rebel: the Union had moved far toward the SPD on finance, so the SPD had to move on the economy and migration. He later called the contract a “predominantly positive surprise,” citing a migration turn and higher BAföG, yet warned that an agreement which “hurts nobody” could become a problem, including on conscription and pensions. At the October 2026 Deutschlandtag in Bonn, re-elected with 265 of 283 valid votes, he said there would be no work with the AfD “as long as the AfD takes völkisch positions and tolerates extremists,” a question of “character, not of poll numbers.” He also attacked SPD minister-president Manuela Schwesig over Nord Stream 2, saying she had “let herself be bought by Russia” and sold the project as climate protection, and rejected her charge that the CDU had been “inhuman” toward labour minister Bärbel Bas.

Reception

Bild called the Münster speech the sharpest criticism there and Winkel a “Hoffnungsträger” of the youth organisation. The Augsburger Allgemeine, on Bonn in 2026, wrote that the youth wing once loyal to Friedrich Merz had become an opponent, and rendered his speech as a diagnosis of a party “intellectually hollowed out,” still governing “as if we were still in the year 2010,” with no “eternity guarantee for people’s parties.” He had tried to stay “hard on the substance” but “smart in the language”; a Bavarian delegate then told Merz to ask the federal president to dismiss him. Inside the Junge Union the margins stayed large — 94.3 percent of votes for or against him in 2026, after 87 percent in 2022 and 90.5 percent in 2024 — alongside that friction with the chancellor.