Jürgen Hardt

Jürgen Hardt (born 30 May 1963 in Hofheim am Taunus) is a German economist and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009 for a North Rhine-Westphalia constituency covering Solingen, Remscheid and part of Wuppertal. He won that seat in 2009 with 39.0 percent of the first votes, when it was numbered 104, and again in the 2025 federal election, as constituency 102, with 32.4 percent (55,860 votes). Since 7 September 2015 he has been foreign-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

The Bundestag biography, which rests on the member’s own disclosures, records that he is Protestant, married and has one child. He passed the Abitur in 1982 at the Taunus-Gymnasium in Königstein im Taunus, then served until 1986 as a naval officer in the Bundeswehr, leaving as Oberleutnant zur See after duty as a ship-safety officer and technical diver on the frigate Augsburg. From 1986 to 1993 he studied economics at Heidelberg University and the University of Cologne; his diploma thesis dealt with regulatory aspects of the 1992 pension reform.

He joined the CDU in 1981. From 1992 to 1998 he worked at the party’s federal headquarters as head of the social-policy department and office manager to secretary-general Peter Hintze, then from 1999 to 2001 as European-policy adviser to the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. From 2001 to 2009 he was head of corporate communications at the Vorwerk group in Wuppertal. Locally he chaired the CDU in Wuppertal from 2003 to 2014, sat on the city council from 2004 to 2009, and has been deputy chairman of the CDU’s Bergisch Land district association since November 2005.

On 10 April 2014 the federal government decided that he would become Coordinator for Transatlantic Cooperation in the Federal Foreign Office, responsible for civil-society, cultural and information-policy relations with North America; the Bundestag biography dates the post from April 2014 to April 2018. The Foreign Office release described him at the time of that decision as deputy European-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU group, a member of the Defence Committee and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. The group elected him foreign-policy spokesperson on 7 September 2015, in succession to Philipp Mißfelder, who had died on 13 July 2015. In the 2021 federal election Ingo Schäfer of the Social Democratic Party won the constituency, then numbered 103, with 32.6 percent of the first votes, while the CDU received 27.6 percent; election-night reporting in Solingen named Hardt as the CDU’s first-vote candidate, and he stood 22nd on the CDU state list. He sat in the 20th Bundestag and, in the 21st, holds the direct mandate, is a full member and parliamentary whip (Obmann) of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and is deputy leader of the German delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Early life and education

Schooling and family background

Jürgen Hardt was born on 30 May 1963 in Hofheim am Taunus, in Hesse. The Bundestag biography describes him as Protestant, married, and the father of one child. In a January 2025 interview he identified his wife as Claudia Hardt and said that the couple have a daughter.

He passed the Abitur in 1982 at the school in Königstein im Taunus that official biographies call the Taunus-Gymnasium. Its building on the Falkensteiner Straße opened in 1962. When Hardt finished school the institution was still the Taunusschule, an additive comprehensive school since 1977/78 whose Gymnasium stream continued to offer the Abitur; the Gymnasium was renamed Taunusgymnasium only in 2006.

Hardt joined the Christian Democratic Union in 1981, before the Abitur. He has said that, as a pupil, he entered both the Young Union and the CDU because of the party’s stance on the NATO Double-Track Decision. In that account he supported additional missile deployments against what he called a growing Soviet nuclear threat to Germany, and he noted that the Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt had taken a similar position.

Naval service

From 1982 to 1986 he served in the German Navy of the Bundeswehr, first as an officer candidate and then as an officer, and reached the rank of Oberleutnant zur See.

The Bundestag biography lists him as ship-safety officer (Schiffsicherungsoffizier) and technical diver on the frigate Augsburg. That ship, pennant number F222, was a Köln-class (Type 120) frigate built by H. C. Stülcken Sohn in Hamburg. It was commissioned on 7 April 1962 and decommissioned on 30 March 1988, so it was still in commission for the whole of his active service. In September 2021 the Westdeutsche Zeitung reported his account, given to editor-in-chief Lothar Leuschen, that he had spent 20,000 nautical miles aboard German warships and had been a Bundeswehr diving-operations leader until a torn lung ended that diving career. On his own website he dates a diving accident to 1985 and writes that it finally ruled out commanding a submarine. The newspaper described him at that time as an Oberleutnant zur See of the reserve. In 2025 he called the four years before university a period that had marked him strongly and of which he was proud.

Economics studies

From 1986 to 1993 he studied economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre) at Heidelberg University and the University of Cologne, and qualified as a Diplom-Volkswirt. His diploma thesis examined the regulatory-policy aspects (ordnungspolitische Aspekte) of the 1992 pension reform. His curriculum vitae says the thesis was written in Cologne under Professor Watrin. Christian Watrin held Cologne’s chair in economic policy and directed the university’s Institute for Economic Policy from 1971 until his retirement in 1995.

The reform that supplied the thesis topic was passed by the Bundestag in 1989 and took effect only in 1992, its start having been delayed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Its central provisions linked annual pension adjustments to net rather than gross wages, set a general retirement age of 65 with an exception for severely disabled people, and introduced actuarially neutral deductions for drawing a pension early.

During the same student years he was federal chairman of the Association of Christian Democratic Students (Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten) from 1987 to 1989.

Pre-parliamentary career and local politics

CDU headquarters and parliamentary staff

Jürgen Hardt joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in 1981, according to the biography published by the Bundestag, which states that members supply their own life histories. During economics studies at Heidelberg University and the University of Cologne, dated there to 1986–1993, he became federal chairman of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS), the CDU-aligned student association. The RCDS list of federal chairs records the 1987–1989 term under the spelling “Jürgen Hard.” A Deutsche Presse-Agentur report in taz on 10 March 1987 named the newly elected Jürgen Hardt, speaking after the 40th delegate assembly. He said coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party had ignored education policy and the situation of about 1.3 million students, and he called for ending full-loan BAföG, restoring at least a partial grant and raising the number of students assisted.

That biography, repeated by the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, places him at CDU federal headquarters from 1992 to 1998 as head of the social-policy department and office manager to secretary-general Peter Hintze, then from 1999 to 2001 as European-policy adviser to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Hintze’s term was the late period of Chancellor Helmut Kohl: in May 1992 Der Spiegel described Kohl as having chosen the 42-year-old as general secretary, and after the 1998 election defeat Die Welt reported that Hintze would leave the post at the party congress of 7 November.

Corporate communications at Vorwerk

In 2001 he became head of corporate communications at Vorwerk & Co. KG in Wuppertal, a post the Bundestag biography dates until 2009. The chamber’s disclosure of work before his mandate lists him as a senior employee (leitender Angestellter) of Vorwerk & Co. KG in Wuppertal, with protection against dismissal. The 2008 report of WSW Wuppertaler Stadtwerke GmbH named him on the supervisory board as a city councillor and as head of corporate communications and of the coordination office of Vorwerk’s management; the city’s 2008 report used the same senior-employee description. A Westdeutsche Zeitung interview on 28 September 2007 still identified him, then 44, as Vorwerk’s communications chief and as Wuppertal CDU chairman.

At a gala in the Kurhaus in Wiesbaden, the Deutsche Public Relations Gesellschaft and the F.A.Z.-Institut awarded the company, not Hardt by name, the 2005 Deutscher PR-Preis in the events category for the project “Familien-Managerin 2004.”

Wuppertal city council and district party offices

The Bundestag and state-party biographies date his chairmanship of the Wuppertal CDU from 2003 to 2014. In January 2012 the Rheinische Post still described him as district chairman of nine years’ standing. On 26 September 2004 he won a council seat. Results certified on 6 October and published on 23 October named him as the councillor for Wahlbezirk 51, Barmen-Mitte, where the CDU candidate took 1,134 of 3,037 valid votes against 861 for the Social Democratic Party; 3,112 of 7,839 eligible voters took part.

The city’s 2008 report lists him as a member of the council and the culture committee, of the Döppersberg planning commission, and of the commission seeking a strategic partner for WSW AG, dissolved after its last meeting on 15 September 2008. He chaired the committee for the economy, urban development and city marketing and sat on the supervisory boards of WSW Energie & Wasser AG, WSW Wuppertaler Stadtwerke GmbH and WSW mobil GmbH. In the 2007 interview he argued that the state had to reform municipal-finance equalisation and fund, or offset, tasks it gave the cities. He called a dispute over school lunches overblown, saying the welfare state would not collapse if low-income parents paid one euro, and he cited the Schwebebahn renovation, the Stadtwerke restructuring, a new opera house and Döppersberg as projects the CDU-led city had secured.

In January 2012 the Rheinische Post reported that a greeting from mayor Peter Jung in a CDU council-group paper had been altered, replacing thanks to a CDU Bundestag member with praise of group chairman Bernhard Simon. Hardt called the change an inexcusable failure and apologised to residents; Simon denied involvement, and managing director Manfred Kirmse said he alone had rewritten the passage. The Bundestag biography dates a further office, deputy chairman of the CDU Bergisches Land, from November 2005. The executive elected at the 34th Bezirksparteitag on 20 January 2025 in Bergisch Gladbach still listed him as a deputy chairman, beside chairman Herbert Reul.

Elections and Bundestag membership

Constituency of Solingen–Remscheid–Wuppertal II

Jürgen Hardt has been the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate in the Bundestag constituency of Solingen–Remscheid–Wuppertal II, in North Rhine-Westphalia, at every federal election since 2009. For 2021 and 2025 the Federal Returning Officer defined the seat as the whole of the independent cities of Solingen and Remscheid plus, within Wuppertal, borough 4 (Cronenberg) and borough 9 (Ronsdorf); Wuppertal’s other boroughs form the neighbouring constituency. The name has stayed the same while the number has followed statewide renumbering: Wahlkreis 104 in 2009, Wahlkreis 103 in 2013, 2017 and 2021, and Wahlkreis 102 in 2025.

Election results, 2009–2025

On 27 September 2009 Hardt won the direct mandate with 39.0 percent of valid first votes (62,365), ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 34.3 percent (54,910). Turnout was 70.5 percent of 229,927 eligible voters, and the CDU took 32.0 percent of second votes in the constituency. The state returning officer recorded him as elected.

In 2013 the CDU first-vote share rose to 44.3 percent (70,269), 5.3 points above 2009, against 33.4 percent for the SPD, on a turnout of 71.2 percent. In 2017 he was again directly elected, with 38.2 percent (61,871), 6.1 points below 2013, ahead of the SPD on 30.8 percent. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 9.5 percent of first votes, and turnout was 73.6 percent.

The election of 26 September 2021 broke that sequence. The state returning officer recorded Ingo Schäfer (SPD) as elected, with 32.6 percent of first votes (52,852), against Hardt’s 27.6 percent (44,778), down 10.6 points from 2017. Alliance 90/The Greens received 12.9 percent, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) 10.7 percent and the AfD 7.6 percent, on a turnout of 74.2 percent; the CDU’s second-vote share in the constituency was 24.3 percent. Hardt remained in the Bundestag on the CDU state list for North Rhine-Westphalia, where he held place 22. The biography for the 20th legislative term states that he was elected through that list, while still associating him with Wahlkreis 103.

In 2025, in Wahlkreis 102, Hardt regained the direct mandate with 32.4 percent (55,860), 4.8 points above 2021. Schäfer, again the SPD candidate, took 27.4 percent (47,237). The AfD rose to 18.5 percent of first votes, ahead of the Greens on 8.7 percent, Die Linke on 7.5 percent and the FDP on 3.2 percent. Turnout was 80.2 percent of 216,618 eligible voters. The Federal Returning Officer lists him as the member elected in the constituency, which is the mandate given on his page for the 21st Bundestag.

Committees and parliamentary offices

In the 17th Bundestag an official biography dated 5 January 2012 listed Hardt as an ordinary member of the Defence Committee and of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union. A report published on 21 December 2009 identified the new member for Solingen, Remscheid and Wuppertal II as a member of the inquiry then opened into the 2009 Kunduz airstrike in Afghanistan. Under Article 45a of the Basic Law, the Defence Committee has the rights of a committee of inquiry and must investigate a matter if a quarter of its members so demand.

The archived biography for the 18th term lists him as an ordinary member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and as a substitute on the EU Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee, holding the direct mandate for Wahlkreis 103. From September 2015 that biography also names him as chair of the CDU/CSU working group on foreign affairs (Arbeitsgruppe Auswärtiges).

In the 19th term he remained an ordinary member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and was directly elected again in Wahlkreis 103. He was a substitute on the EU Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee, the Joint Committee and the subcommittee on foreign cultural and education policy, and a substitute on the Defence Committee’s first inquiry under Article 45a, into consultancy contracts (“Beraterverträge”).

In the 20th term, after entering on the list, the archived biography lists him as an ordinary member and as Obmann of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the CDU/CSU, an office recorded separately from ordinary membership and from the committee chair. The committee was constituted on 15 December 2021 with 46 ordinary members. Michael Roth (SPD) was elected chair, and Hardt was one of 13 CDU/CSU members. He was also a substitute on the EU Affairs Committee, the Joint Committee and the subcommittee on the United Nations, international organisations and civilian crisis prevention.

For the 21st Bundestag his biography again lists him as an ordinary member and as Obmann of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and as a substitute on the EU Affairs Committee and the subcommittee on foreign cultural and education policy. The committee has 42 ordinary members, 14 of them from the CDU/CSU, including Hardt; Armin Laschet was elected chair.

Coordinator for transatlantic cooperation

Appointment and mandate

The office of coordinator for German-American cooperation was created in 1981 and was later renamed and extended to Canada. It is based at the Federal Foreign Office under the title Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation in the Field of Intersocietal Relations, Cultural and Information Policy. The ministry charges the holder with promoting societal and cultural ties with the United States and Canada, including science, contacts with Jewish organisations and personal networks. Holders it names include former minister of state Hildegard Hamm-Brücher and the political scientist Werner Weidenfeld.

From 6 July 2011 the post was held by Free Democratic Party politician Harald Leibrecht, who described it as explaining each side’s positions when governments disagreed. Christian Democratic Union politician Philipp Mißfelder succeeded him at the start of 2014 and resigned that April, after about three months, to concentrate on the treasurership of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia.

On 10 April 2014 the federal government decided that CDU member of the Bundestag Jürgen Hardt would take the post, subject to cabinet confirmation. Then deputy European-policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU group and a member of the defence committee and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, he said he would strengthen civil-society contacts and explain German views to American audiences. He served from the late years of Barack Obama’s presidency until April 2018, into the presidency of Donald Trump.

Outreach in the United States and Canada

On his first official visit, to Ottawa on 16 and 17 June 2014, he met Foreign Minister John Baird and other ministers and parliamentarians and argued for a quick conclusion of the EU–Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which he said would keep high standards for citizens on both sides. In Atlanta on German Unity Day that October he said disputes over spying and National Security Agency data collection were not closed, but that common ground outweighed them. He called the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) primarily a strategic project for setting common standards.

CETA was signed in 2016 and has applied provisionally since 21 September 2017.

On 9 November 2016 he congratulated Trump, called the partnership a cornerstone of German foreign policy and said Germany and Europe would have to assume more responsibility, citing Syria, Iraq, the Minsk agreement, Russia and NATO. On 30 January 2017, days after the inauguration, he went to Washington, D.C., criticised early steps on tariffs and on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries, and sought equal treatment for Germans with a second citizenship and reassurance on NATO. He told Der Tagesspiegel that a meeting with White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn had shown, close to Trump, a limited grasp of how the European Union works. Reuters reported his argument that trade policy is an EU competence and cannot be negotiated with individual member states. He said the US secretaries of state and defence, and a call between Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel, had confirmed the American role in NATO, that higher German defence spending had been decided before the election, and that he saw no early change to sanctions on Russia.

From 4 to 6 March 2018 he returned to Washington for Congress, the State Department and the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, arguing against ending the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and promoting Deutschlandjahr USA, due to open in October 2018.

Handover in 2018

On 11 April 2018 the federal government appointed CDU Bundestag member Peter Beyer to succeed Hardt, who had held the post since 2014. The same decision named Dirk Wiese to succeed Gernot Erler, coordinator since 2014 for intersocietal cooperation with Russia, Central Asia and the Eastern Partnership countries, and a Foreign Office spokesman thanked both outgoing office-holders. Hardt described the coordinator’s post as an honorary office he had carried out with growing public interest.

Beyer, a member of the Bundestag since 2009, said transatlantic relations had been the focus of his work on the Foreign Affairs Committee. He called relations with the United States and Canada, alongside European integration, a central pillar of German foreign policy, described the United States as Germany’s most important trading partner outside Europe, and said his task was to promote intersocietal dialogue as a bridge-builder.

Foreign-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU

Succession and responsibilities

In the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, the foreign-policy spokesperson chairs the working group on foreign affairs. Chairs are the politically responsible spokespersons for their subjects: they prepare bills and motions, discuss tactics and sit on the extended group executive, while deputy chairs coordinate the working groups by portfolio. The foreign-affairs group follows the Foreign Affairs Committee and comprises the Union's full and substitute members there.

The office fell vacant when Philipp Mißfelder, the group's foreign-policy spokesperson, died of a pulmonary embolism on 13 July 2015, aged 35. Later that month the Rheinische Post reported that the succession was heading toward Hardt, who had already taken over from Mißfelder as the federal government's coordinator for transatlantic cooperation. His base in North Rhine-Westphalia was described as decisive: Peter Hintze, chair of that state's Landesgruppe, was said to be holding the post for North Rhine-Westphalia, while Roderich Kiesewetter, identified as Mißfelder's deputy, was from Baden-Württemberg. On 6 September the ARD capital studio reported that Johann Wadephul was also preparing to stand, and that resistance to Hardt had grown, with him described as little-profiled and with members resenting regional claims on posts.

On 7 September 2015 the group elected Hardt, by a large majority, chair of the working group and thus foreign-policy spokesperson. He had moved in July from the Defence Committee to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Two days later, opening for the Union on the Foreign Office budget, he said he would continue his predecessors' practice of seeking constructive dialogue inside the coalition, with the government and with the opposition, and he called a cross-party consensus on the main foreign-policy questions an asset of German diplomacy.

Other Union offices share the external brief. Defence is separate: in December 2021 the CSU Landesgruppe nominated Florian Hahn to chair that working group, and from the 21st Bundestag Thomas Erndl has been the joint group's defence spokesperson. From 2021 to 2025 Thomas Silberhorn was spokesperson for transatlantic relations alone. The Landesgruppe also names its own speakers: Erndl for international affairs and security from January 2022, when he was also deputy chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Alexander Radwan for foreign affairs from 2025. The joint working group remains mixed: in the 21st Bundestag Hardt chairs it, with Kiesewetter as deputy, and members come from Bavaria as well as from CDU state groups.

He was returned to the chair at the start of later terms. In late January 2018 a Wuppertal report said he was confirmed with just under 96 percent of the votes, leading 16 full committee members and a 32-member working group and sitting on the executive as chair. In December 2021 he was elected again, over a working group of 13 full and 13 substitute committee members. In the 20th Bundestag the administration listed him as Obmann of the CDU/CSU in the Foreign Affairs Committee. After the 2025 election the faction site still listed him as spokesperson and working-group chair.

Government, opposition and coalition talks

The post is a group office, not a ministry. From September 2015 through the rest of Angela Merkel's chancellorships the Union governed with the SPD, and Hardt held the spokespersonship alongside the separate government appointment as transatlantic coordinator. In the talks that produced Merkel's fourth cabinet he sat in the working group on foreign, defence and development policy. He told Deutsche Welle in February 2018 that the group had finished most of its text by a Thursday evening, leaving arms exports linked to the war in Yemen to the party leaders. He welcomed tighter guidelines without a new arms-export law, which he said would have narrowed case-by-case discretion, and he cited both the Turkey line—"no chapters closed and no new ones opened"—and a pledge that development, crisis-prevention and humanitarian spending would rise in step with defence spending.

After the 2021 election the Union opposed the cabinet of Olaf Scholz. Hardt said it would set its own accents from opposition, while foreign policy also required unity among democrats, and that he had promised constructive opposition work to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, with room for argument on Russia, China, trade and Africa. The Obmann role was the committee side of that brief.

After the February 2025 election the CDU's list of negotiators placed Hardt in working group 12, on foreign affairs and defence, development cooperation and human rights, chaired by Wadephul and also including Michael Brand, Serap Güler, Henning Otte and Norbert Röttgen. Hardt said the changed foreign- and security-policy setting required clear guidelines for Germany's role. On 6 May 2025, after Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor, the Bundestag was told that Wadephul would be foreign minister and Hahn a minister of state in the Foreign Office. Hardt remained the group's parliamentary spokesperson rather than entering the ministry.

Security policy, NATO and the war in Ukraine

Defence spending and the alliance

Hardt treated higher German defence spending, and a continued role in nuclear sharing, as conditions of cohesion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization before the full-scale war. In a February 2019 commentary in Die Welt, while the Christian Democratic Union was still in government, he linked the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the 2014 breach of Ukraine’s borders and called for a response coordinated in the alliance. Unilateral NATO nuclear disarmament would be naive, he wrote, while others kept nuclear arms; Germany, as the largest European ally, had to retain carrier systems and “take part and have a say.” A plan to reach only 1.5 percent of gross domestic product for defence by 2024 fell short of the pledge, made in 2002 and reaffirmed in 2014, to move toward 2 percent. He wanted 1.5 percent by 2021, both for the Bundeswehr’s backlog and for a stronger European Union.

After the 2022 invasion he said the €100 billion special fund could not replace a higher regular budget. For NATO’s 75th anniversary in April 2024 he compared the alliance, given the threat from Vladimir Putin, to motor liability insurance, and said burden-sharing required more than 2 percent of GDP from the annual budget, because the fund paid for large procurements rather than running costs. In June 2025 he wrote in the Handelsblatt that lifting the debt brake for defence underpinned greater German and European weight in NATO, and that equipment spending had to be matched by work on hybrid threats and cyber attacks.

In a June 2026 Bundestag interview after the NATO Parliamentary Assembly met in Vilnius, he described the mood as unity and determination and said earlier efforts were not enough. Allies should reach 5 percent of GDP well before 2035. Host Lithuania was already there; Germany was “on the way” but still had to do more. The United States expected more European conventional forces as it looked toward the Pacific, while a separate European nuclear umbrella would be only a second-best, too costly and too slow. A German armoured brigade of about 5,000 being built in Lithuania was the Bundeswehr’s first permanent combat formation abroad. He cited the accession of Finland and Sweden as proof the alliance remained attractive.

Russia and military support for Ukraine

In February 2015, after further advances by pro-Russian separatists, he told WDR that sanctions on Russia should be tightened, accusing Moscow of a clear breach of the Minsk agreements. Other CDU figures quoted in the same debate rejected arms for Ukraine as dangerous. By January 2022 his line on weapons had changed. He told Die Welt that Germany should drop its “strict anti-attitude,” examine requests for defensive weapons and in some cases approve them; anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, he said, would not seriously threaten Russia. After a German admiral called Crimea lost, he said those remarks had no backing in the Bundestag’s democratic parties: “Crimea is part of Ukraine.” The government of Olaf Scholz still refused deliveries.

In June 2022, after Berlin ended the ban on heavy weapons dating from Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, he told the New Statesman that not arming Ukraine had failed as de-escalation, that Germany should go further, and that Putin should not be offered a “face-saving solution.” The clearest dispute with Scholz concerned the Taurus KEPD 350. On 22 February 2024 the Bundestag rejected a motion by the CDU and the Christian Social Union calling for immediate delivery of requested German systems, including Taurus, by 182 votes to 480, with five abstentions. A coalition motion on “long-range” weapons that did not name Taurus passed. Asked by Hardt whether that meant Taurus, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said he could not answer. The CDU itself was not united: in August 2024 Saxony’s minister-president Michael Kretschmer, an opponent of deliveries from the outset, urged less spending on weapons for Ukraine. Hardt said the CDU/CSU Bundestag group was unanimous that Putin would negotiate as an equal only if he risked a serious defeat, and that Ukraine still needed arms “from the free world.”

Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz he maintained the aim of Ukrainian strength but no longer campaigned in public for particular weapons. In December 2025 he told n-tv he was not optimistic about an early peace. Only Ukraine could decide whether to accept a deal between Donald Trump and Putin; if Kyiv refused, Europeans would keep up large-scale support. He could imagine territorial cessions only as part of a comprehensive peace, not while Putin continued to fight. He told Deutsche Welle that Moscow had to decide on proposals discussed in Berlin with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In May 2026 he told Ukrinform that victory meant restoring Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders and returning deported children. Ukraine claimed no Russian land; if it chose concessions, Germany would support that choice, but Russian troops still had to leave. On Taurus, which his group had demanded in opposition, he said the chancellor would not discuss the missile in public and that drones had made it less urgent than two or three years earlier. A ceasefire had to precede credible talks; Putin’s refusal of that order was one reason they had stalled. He called a 28-point plan linked to talks in Florida unacceptable, and said renewed economic ties with Russia would require an end to large-scale rearmament and occupation. NATO would be stronger if Ukraine joined, he added, and any settlement acceptable to Kyiv should carry security guarantees, ideally through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe or the United Nations.

Israel, Iran and the Middle East

Relations with Israel and the Gaza war

Hardt, foreign-policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, was elected vice-president of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft over the weekend of 18 June 2022. He called the unpaid post a mandate for the bilateral friendship and against antisemitism. Disclosures list it as honorary, and the society still names him in the role.

After the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 he treated the security of Israel, the formula associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel, as German Staatsräson. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 9 June 2025 he listed Hamas in the south, fire from Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi militias, and two missile attacks by Iran, which financed those groups. Germany, he said, therefore supplied the weapons needed for defence. A Palestinian state should wait until Hamas was destroyed and the Gaza Strip no longer endangered Israel. Settlement-building in the West Bank stayed condemned, and weapons of war were already barred where international law was violated.

He had opposed earlier recognition on 23 May 2024, after Spain, Ireland and Norway acted. Hamas, he told phoenix, would sell the step as proof that its “freedom struggle” worked—“the worst conceivable message”. A two-state solution remained the aim, but under the Oslo Accords recognition came at the end of talks; he called the moves a verkehrte Welt and urged Berlin not to follow. In September 2025 he said statehood did not exist because the Palestinian National Authority did not control Gaza, so recognition would hand Hamas a “perfect pass”.

That June interview also covered criticism of the war. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said he did not understand Israel’s aim in Gaza; Hardt called the public remark “wise”, because it met German concern about the humanitarian situation, while contact with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stayed private. Curtailing the European Union association agreement would be “a fatal signal” while Israel “fights for its survival”.

After Merz in August 2025 stopped exports usable in Gaza, Hardt told t-online that Union policy was unchanged but Israeli policy had “shifted massively”: the hostages and the fall of Hamas had slipped from view while “radical forces in the Israeli cabinet” hurt Israel’s standing. He called the pause necessary, citing aid that had not improved and plans for Gaza City that did not separate fighters from civilians. Hoffmann called the pause a break with continuity; Mayer doubted it was the right tool.

On 18 September 2025 he split sanctions in kind. Entry bans and asset measures against radical settlers should extend to ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom he accused of illegal occupation plans for Gaza. Removing customs preferences would do “great damage” when Israel needed economic strength against Hamas and Iran.

Iran’s nuclear programme

Hardt defended the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action while he was coordinator for transatlantic cooperation, a post the cabinet gave to Peter Beyer on 11 April 2018. On 13 October 2017 he told the Westdeutsche Zeitung the accord covered only the nuclear programme and, because Iran had deceived partners before, imposed checks of unprecedented scope; inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed compliance. It was not meant to curb support for Syria’s ruler or Hezbollah. New US sanctions, he warned, could let Tehran exit and restart an arms race; with Russia and China also parties, Europe should press Washington to stay in.

On 1 May 2018, after Netanyahu presented documents on a past weapons effort, he told Welt the display was “political scenery” for a decision by Donald Trump, due by 12 May, on restoring sanctions. Many Israeli politicians and officers, he said, thought the deal imperfect but better than none; technical ability to build a bomb argued for its limits on uranium, heavy water and centrifuges. Trust had not grown, and a US withdrawal risked “a complete cancellation”.

During Israeli strikes in June 2025 he told Welt that Germany would have preferred talks, but once Israel took “this risky path” he hoped the programme would be set back. The JCPOA had been “relatively inadequate” yet “more than nothing”; the IAEA, he said, had found breaches, and Tehran knew it was “militarily totally inferior”. On 25 February 2026 he said on n-tv that limited US strikes could again be “a path we could support” if Iran was nearing a bomb. On 2 March, after further strikes, he told SWR Aktuell that legality—which Washington had asserted at the United Nations—was not urgent, because Germany was not fighting. He asked whether a regime seeking to destroy Judaism worldwide should get the bomb “to make real what Adolf Hitler dreamed of”, and whether international law alone answered that. Adis Ahmetović of the Social Democratic Party answered that refusing to name breaches made the law absurd, unlike the finding that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was illegal.

International parliamentary work and affiliations

NATO Parliamentary Assembly and other assemblies

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is institutionally separate from NATO. Created in 1955, it is a forum in which legislators from allied countries discuss Alliance security; it brings together about 280 members of parliament from NATO’s 32 member states and serves as a link between the Alliance and national parliaments. The Bundestag sends twelve members, distributed across the Assembly’s five committees, and the Bundesrat sends six.

Jürgen Hardt, of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union group, is recorded by the Assembly as a member since 2010. The Bundestag’s report on the spring session in Riga, from 28 May to 1 June 2010, lists him among the German delegates. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the German delegation and its deputy head. At the 71st annual session in Ljubljana, the Defence and Security Committee on 11–12 October 2025 elected him by acclamation to the vacant chair of the Sub-Committee on Future Security and Defence Capabilities. The same ballot chose Jorgen Berglund of Sweden as vice-chair and Spyridon Kyriakis of Greece as rapporteur, and Hardt is on the meeting’s attendance list. In a Bundestag interview after the 2026 spring session he called the mood one of unity and determination and said existing efforts were insufficient, with five percent of gross domestic product for defence as one pillar of change.

He also sits in three other assemblies. With the Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is a statutory organ of the Council of Europe. It is mainly consultative, provides political impetus for European conventions, decides some appointments, and meets for four part-sessions a year in Strasbourg. Its member record lists Hardt as a substitute from 27 January 2014 to 23 January 2022 and from 10 October 2022 to 22 June 2025, and as a representative from 23 June 2025 in the Group of the European People’s Party. On 5 June 2025 the Bundestag approved the parties’ joint slate of German representatives, on which he was a full CDU/CSU member rather than a substitute. From 23 June 2025 the Assembly lists him as an alternate on the Committee on Political Affairs and Democracy; it records him as a full member of that committee in earlier stretches, including from 23 January 2018 to 23 January 2022.

The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, the parliamentary body of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, has 323 members whose main task is inter-parliamentary dialogue on the OSCE’s comprehensive-security agenda. Hardt is an alternate on the German delegation. The Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly was constituted in Paris on 25 March 2019. It has 50 members from the Bundestag and 50 from the French National Assembly, and is intended to meet at least twice a year, alternating between Germany and France. Hardt is a substitute member.

Associations and think tanks

His parliamentary disclosure lists three unpaid posts outside the Bundestag. The Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, in existence since 1966, describes itself as the central non-partisan organisation in Germany through which supporters of Israel work on civil-society, cultural and scientific relations and against antisemitism. At its members’ assembly in Cologne in June 2022 it elected a 14-member presidium and chose Hardt as vice-president for the CDU, with vice-presidents from the FDP, the Greens and the SPD, under the new president Volker Beck.

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (German Council on Foreign Relations) was founded in 1955 as an independent, non-partisan body for research and debate on foreign and security policy. Hardt is an unpaid member of its Präsidium. The Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (German Institute for International and Security Affairs) is an independent institute that advises the Bundestag and the federal government on foreign and security policy. Its Stiftungsrat is the highest supervisory body; members serve without pay, and Hardt sits on it as a member of the Bundestag.

Domestic positions and public reception

Votes and party leadership

Hardt’s recorded domestic votes include both whipped CDU/CSU lines and one prominent free vote, on same-sex marriage. On 30 June 2017 the Bundestag adopted the Bundesrat bill opening marriage to persons of the same sex, by 393 votes to 226 with four abstentions; the official division list places him among the CDU/CSU members voting no. Two days earlier he had called the push by the SPD, with the Left and the Greens, to force a Friday roll-call a “schweren Vertrauensbruch”. He said he would oppose both the agenda change and the bill. Marriage, he wrote, was fixed in law, culture and tradition as the union of a man and a woman, and he rejected the charge of homophobia.

On 23 February 2024 he voted against the Cannabis Act. He told the Wuppertaler Rundschau the legalisation was “gesundheitspolitisch fatal und im höchsten Maße verantwortungslos”, citing risks to young people and extra work for order offices in cities such as Wuppertal.

After the knife attack in Solingen on 23 August 2024, in the constituency he represents, he told Deutschlandfunk he was shocked and that festivals needed new security arrangements. The following January he voted for both Union texts on migration: the non-binding “five-point plan” of 29 January 2025, carried by 348 votes to 344, and the Influx Limitation Act of 31 January, which failed by 349 to 338. Tagesschau reported that the January majority, including 75 votes from the AfD and 80 from the FDP, depended on AfD support. Friedrich Merz said he wanted majorities only in the “democratic centre”; SPD parliamentary leader Rolf Mützenich said the Union had left that centre, and the Greens called it a black day for democracy.

In the 2018 contest for the CDU chair he told the Rheinische Post that Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer best represented the party “vom Konservatismus bis zur christlichen Sozialethik” and embodied its “Herz und Verstand” more than Merz. Jens Spahn was the third candidate; whoever won, Hardt said, had to include the others, because “Die CDU braucht alle drei.” After the digital congress of 16 January 2021 he called Armin Laschet, who defeated Merz and Norbert Röttgen, “den besten der Bewerber”, and said a joint chancellor candidate with the CSU should be settled only in the spring.

Media profile and criticism

Criticism of his line as foreign-policy spokesman has turned on how he ranks international law against allied security. On 2 March 2026, after Israeli and US strikes on Iran, he told SWR that their legality had to be checked but was not the priority, because Germany was not fighting. Israel’s security came first. He asked whether a regime intent on destroying Judaism worldwide should be allowed a nuclear weapon to do what “Hitler geträumt hat”. Deutschlandfunk reported a reply from SPD politician Adis Ahmetović: not naming breaches of international law led that law ad absurdum, and it hurt credibility because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been called illegal.

On the ZDF programme hosted by Markus Lanz on 14 May 2025, with aid into the Gaza Strip blocked for more than two months, Hardt, described as vice-president of the German-Israeli Society, said Germany should supply the weapons Israel needed against Hamas. He added that he could not follow Israel’s Gaza strategy, that a lasting occupation would breach international law, and that aid should resume. Asked whether withholding aid was a war crime, he called it one of the most horrific humanitarian catastrophes of the present. Lanz interrupted—“Nein! Stopp”—and said that sounded like a natural event. Hardt answered that harming civilians by withholding aid would be a war crime, but that Israel’s claim the goods reached Hamas had first to be disproved.