# Karl-Heinz Brunner

# Karl-Heinz Brunner

Karl-Heinz Brunner (born 14 March 1953 in Munich) is a German business administrator and politician of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) (SPD). He sat in the Bundestag for Bavaria throughout the 18th legislative period (2013–2017) and the 19th (2017–2021), elected on the Bavarian state list and associated with constituency 255, Neu-Ulm. At the 2013 election he was the SPD candidate in that district and held place 21 on the state list, in a field that included Georg Nüßlein of the [Christian Social Union in Bavaria](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria); the SPD received 29,420 first votes, 18.4 percent. He left parliament after the 2021 election, having again sought the Neu-Ulm direct mandate and declined an unpromising place on the state list.

Before federal office he was first mayor of Illertissen from 1990 to 2002 and, from 1996, a member of the Neu-Ulm county council, chairing the SPD group there from 1998 to 2012. He attended school in Wasserburg and in Lindau on Lake Constance, and studied business administration, court administration (Rechtspflege) and management in Reutlingen, Munich, Starnberg and Pressburg (Bratislava). From 1978 to 1990 he worked at the local court and the public prosecutor’s office in Kempten. From 2002 to 2005 he took a postgraduate management course at Comenius University in Bratislava, completing it as doktor filozofie (PhDr.). He told the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that the English-language thesis compared public–private partnerships across the European Union, and that the Bavarian science ministry had allowed him to choose the Slovak or the German form of the style. The same report described the degree as a “small doctorate”, closer on international standards to a master’s qualification, which a transitional rule still permitted him to render as an unqualified “Dr.” in Bavaria and Berlin because the examination preceded 1 September 2007, and it recorded that the Memmingen prosecutor’s office discontinued a 2009 investigation into misuse of titles because the law supplied no offence.

In both terms he was a full member of the Defence Committee and of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, and Obmann (parliamentary spokesperson) of the subcommittee on disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation. During the 19th term he also served on the defence committee’s first inquiry, into external consulting contracts (“Beraterverträge”), and as a substitute member of the Foreign Affairs Committee; the official biography lists membership of the [NATO Parliamentary Assembly](/organizations/nato-parliamentary-assembly). Beside the mandate he was managing partner of Illertisser Sonnenschein GmbH & Co. KG, a solar-power company in Babenhausen, worked as a business consultant and as a legal-services provider under section 10(1) no. 1 of the Legal Services Act, and lectured at the Biberach University of Applied Sciences.

He joined the SPD in 1982. In August 2019 the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* reported that the then 66-year-old, a member of the conservative Seeheimer Kreis, would seek the party chair alone rather than in a male–female duo, after telling the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that he wanted the race to reflect the party’s full range and that he saw an overhang of opponents of the grand coalition and of the left. *Bild* later reported that he withdrew before the ballot. In September 2020, at 67, he told the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that he is gay and had lived with his partner in Berlin for about twenty months, and that he would run again as an openly gay candidate; the report described him as Old Catholic, married to a woman and the father of two children, and noted that in 2019 he had become the SPD parliamentary group’s spokesperson on lesbian and gay issues, succeeding Johannes Kahrs. At the 2021 election Alexander Engelhard of the CSU, from Weißenhorn, won Neu-Ulm; official figures gave the CSU 37.2 percent of first votes (69,676) and the SPD 16.0 percent (29,960), on a turnout of 78.0 percent. The *Augsburger Allgemeine* reported that Brunner then turned to advising companies, gave up the Neu-Ulm SPD chair in October 2021, shifted his base toward Berlin, and in February 2022 resigned the county council — his last political office in the district — with Daniel Fürst due to take the seat.

## Early life and education

### Childhood and schooling

Karl-Heinz Brunner was born on 14 March 1953 in Munich. Biographies issued for his time in the Bundestag, which the parliament says rest on members' own statements, and the curriculum vitae of the SPD parliamentary group place his youth and schooling in Wasserburg and Lindau (Bodensee), on Lake Constance. Neither notice names a school, records an Abitur or any other leaving examination, or says anything about his parents or siblings.

### Studies in administration and management

The same accounts state that he then studied business administration (Betriebswirtschaftslehre), Rechtspflege and management in Reutlingen, Munich, Starnberg and Preßburg, the German name for Bratislava. The SPD vita places those studies after his school years and before employment from 1978 at the local court and the public prosecutor's office in Kempten, and it names Bratislava again for a postgraduate course from 2002 to 2005. The Bundestag header gives his occupation as Betriebswirt. The notices name no German institution, diploma or date for the earlier courses, and they do not record a scientific doctorate from a German university, the two state examinations required for judicial qualification, or admission as a Rechtsanwalt.

### The Bratislava doctorate

The Bundestag biography describes the later course as postgraduate study in management at the Komenius-Universität Preßburg, Comenius University, from 2002 to 2005, ending in the degree doktor filozofie. In an interview published by the Augsburger Allgemeine on 4 March 2011 he gave a slightly different start, saying that he had enrolled in 2003, after being voted out as mayor of Illertissen, had studied economics, and in 2005 had been examined on an English-language thesis comparing public-private partnerships across the European Union; the degree, he said, was doktor filozofie (PhDr.).

Comenius University states that, under the Slovak Higher Education Act (Act No. 131/2002), a holder of the title magister may take a rigorózna skúška, including defence of a thesis, after which the university awards doktor filozofie (PhDr.) in social-science programmes, among others, on a route it lists separately from third-cycle doctoral study. A January 2023 sheet of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts classes so-called small doctorates from Slovakia and the Czech Republic as degrees the country of origin does not place on that third, doctoral level of the Bologna classification. Brunner, writing on Abgeordnetenwatch on 10 March 2014, called his own award a "small" doctorate and said that it was not comparable with a scientific doctorate in Germany.

He told the newspaper that the Bavarian ministry had told him to choose the Slovak or the German abbreviation, and that he had taken "Dr." as the more usual form. It reported that, during an unsuccessful Bundestag candidacy, an anonymous complaint alleged misuse of titles, professional designations and badges, and that the public prosecutor's office in Memmingen discontinued the investigation in 2009 because, on the law as it stood, there was no offence to pursue. The ministry sheet says that the ministry issues no binding individual ruling on the permitted form, and that use in a form Bavarian law does not allow is punishable under section 132a of the Criminal Code.

Where admission to a small Czech or Slovak doctorate preceded 1 September 2007, the Bavarian sheet does not exclude the abbreviation "Dr." without a subject or university suffix, the form it otherwise reserves for an EU doctorate from a scientific procedure. It warns that this is only the ministry's assessment, not binding on courts, that other Länder may differ, and that it can be advisable, especially online, not to use "Dr." Berlin allows that abbreviation for a small doctorate awarded by 6 September 2007, or one to which the holder had been admitted by then, only where the Senate or another German science ministry had authorized it. The Augsburger Allgemeine wrote that a pre-2007 exception let Brunner use an unadorned "Dr." in Bavaria and Berlin, and that living in Illertissen kept the abbreviation available outside Bavaria. The archived Bundestag page styles him "Dr. Karl-Heinz Brunner" and "Betriebswirt".

## Professional career

### Court and prosecution service in Kempten

From 1978 to 1990 Brunner worked at the Amtsgericht, the local court, and at the public prosecutor’s office in Kempten in the Allgäu. The Bundestag biography for the 19th legislative period, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, and a profile issued by the SPD Bundestag group record those two postings and give no grade, function or field of work. A June 2019 account published by Onetz, drawn from an SPD press notice of a discussion in Schwandorf, described him as a Rechtspfleger and as a self-employed legal adviser. The court and prosecution employment ended in 1990, the year he became mayor of Illertissen.

### Consulting, legal services and the solar company

The same official accounts date a self-employed practice from 2005 and describe him as a Wirtschaftsberater (business adviser), a Verwalter (administrator) and a Rechtsdienstleister (provider of legal services), and as managing partner of a solar-power company. The mandatory disclosure of paid activity beside the mandate in the 19th Bundestag is more specific. It lists “Unternehmensberater und Rechtsdienstleister gemäß § 10 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 RDG”, with the place of business given as Illertissen, in the district of Neu-Ulm.

Under section 10(1) no. 1 of the Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz, natural and legal persons and partnerships with legal capacity who are registered with the Federal Office of Justice may, on the basis of special expertise, provide Inkassodienstleistungen, meaning debt-collection services. The disclosure uses that registration category. It does not record admission to the bar as a Rechtsanwalt. In August 2021 Brunner told the transparency platform Abgeordnetenwatch that before entering parliament he had worked as a freelance collection-services provider and business adviser; that from 2013 he had taken on no new mandates; and that fees from earlier mandates still arrived irregularly, on average about 500 euros a month, or 6,000 euros a year. Neither the disclosure nor that reply defines the word Verwalter used in the biographies.

The solar interest named in the same disclosure is Illertisser Sonnenschein GmbH & Co. KG of Babenhausen. The Bundestag lists Brunner both as its geschäftsführender Gesellschafter, or managing partner, and as holding a participation in the firm. The partnership was entered on 10 August 2006 at the Amtsgericht Memmingen under HRA 11325. The registration notice states its object as the construction of a photovoltaic installation of 82.93 kilowatt-peak on the roof of the Haupt- und Realschule at Dietenheimer Straße 66–68 in Illertissen, and thereafter the production and sale of electricity, essentially by operating that plant as renewable energy within the meaning of the Renewable Energy Sources Act. The notice describes a Kommanditgesellschaft whose personally liable general partner is Solar Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH of Babenhausen (HRB 11429), with authority for each general partner to represent the firm alone. Brunner is not named in that notice as the general partner. On 21 July 2011 the registered business address changed from Jochumstraße 39 to Marktplatz 2 in Babenhausen. A commercial-register information service continued to list the partnership as active and as neither dissolved nor struck off. Brunner put his annual receipts as managing partner, as of 2021, at between 2,500 and 3,500 euros.

### Lectureship at Biberach

From 2012 the Bundestag and SPD-group biographies record a part-time lectureship, a nebenamtliche Lehrtätigkeit, at Biberach University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Biberach) in Biberach an der Riß. In the 19th-period disclosure the paid post is given as Dozent at Hochschule Biberach, Biberach/Riß. Brunner said in August 2021 that the assignment comprised 0.5 semester weekly hours plus examinations, given largely as block seminars on Saturdays, and brought about 1,500 euros a year. Those accounts still used the present tense in 2021. They do not name the subject of the teaching.

## Local government

### Mayor of Illertissen, 1990–2002

From 1990 to 2002 Karl-Heinz Brunner of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was Erster Bürgermeister, the directly elected first mayor, of Illertissen in the Neu-Ulm district of Bavarian Swabia—the town's chief executive, not a deputy mayor. The Illertissen SPD's centenary chronicle records that on 18 March 1990 he led the first round with 47.59 percent, ahead of Mayer-Reiter of the Freie Wählergemeinschaft (26.25 percent), Maier of the Christian Social Union (20.71 percent) and Dr. Dantz of the Free Democratic Party (5.44 percent), then won the runoff with 84.76 percent. It records another runoff win, of 84.86 percent, in March 1996, when the SPD took nine council seats.

The project most closely tied to the 1990 campaign was the Nautilla leisure pool. At that March's candidates' debate Brunner alone said openly that he favoured a pool, after an initiative had collected 2,844 signatures for a school and indoor bath. Ground was broken on 20 August 1990, and the council built a leisure centre with a slide, heated outdoor pools and a sauna rather than a school pool alone. It opened on 23 October 1992 at a cost of 16.7 million Deutsche Marks and drew about 300,000 visitors a year by the mid-1990s. In November 2000 a council majority voted to sell it for a symbolic one mark. After public opposition, including a meeting with the *Illertisser Zeitung*, the council reversed the sale and kept the pool municipal.

The Historische Schranne, a grain store of 1697 beside the town hall, was more disputed. Predecessor Hermann Kolb (1971–1990) had begun the conversion because the Rathaus was short of space, and the cost was an issue in the 1990 election. Finished under Brunner, it opened on 1 May 1993 as a single citizens' hall with a movable partition, after town architect Hans Joachim Lüddemann dropped a layout broken up by timber posts. The bill rose from about 4.52 million Deutsche Marks, toward which the government of Swabia had offered 1.57 million in 1989, to 5.5 million. In the mid-1990s Brunner also set up a committee that revived the children's festival for 1996 as the Historisches Kinderfest, thereafter held every four years.

In 1999 Illertissen and Loket (Elbogen), in the Czech Republic, turned an older patronage into a formal twinning, signed by Brunner and Loket's then mayor, Jan Hadrava, at Loket Castle. Both returned for the twentieth anniversary in 2019.

The local SPD nominated him unanimously again in December 2001, but its chronicle calls the March 2002 election a defeat in which the party also lost two council seats. The Bavarian statistical office records that Marita Kaiser, a business executive born in 1957, won on a joint CSU and Freie Wählergemeinschaft ticket on 3 March 2002 with 65.5 percent and took office on 1 May as full-time first mayor. Illertissen then had 15,704 inhabitants (31 December 2000). Brunner stayed on the town council and, the SPD chronicle says, gave up that mandate in 2006 for professional reasons.

### Neu-Ulm county council

Brunner sat on the Kreistag of Neu-Ulm from 1996 and chaired its SPD group from 1998 to 2012, according to the Bundestag biography drawn from his own disclosures for the 2017–2021 term. On 1 September 2021 Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann awarded him the Kommunale Verdienstmedaille in Bronze at Friedberg's Wittelsbacher Schloss, one of eight honours that day for service to local self-government in Swabia. The state invitation listed him as a Kreistag and Bundestag member and as former first mayor of Illertissen. The laudation reported by the *Augsburger Allgemeine* credited the mayoral years with work on social policy and welfare associations and with a decisive part in the Loket agreement, and his years as faction chair with a share in district decisions on infrastructure, hospital renovation and waste management. Then-mayor Jürgen Eisen and Landrat Thorsten Freudenberger attended. He resigned the Kreistag seat in February 2022, which the *Augsburger Allgemeine* described as his last political office in the district.

### Transport boards and civic offices

From 1998 Brunner represented the SPD on the supervisory board of the Donau-Iller-Nahverkehrsverbund GmbH (DING) in Ulm. His disclosure for the 19th Bundestag term still listed that seat beside the Kreistag membership. DING coordinates local public transport in the Alb-Donau, Biberach and Neu-Ulm districts and in Ulm and Neu-Ulm. The same biography lists five years as head of a district branch of the Deutsche Verkehrswacht, the road-safety organisation, and the chairmanship of the Freundeskreis supporting the Illertissen–Loket twinning, without dates for either.

## Party career in the SPD

### Local and Swabian offices

Karl-Heinz Brunner joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1982. From 1985 to 1990 he chaired the local branch (Ortsverein) Kempten-Nord, in the Allgäu. From 1988 to 1990 he was also district chair of the SPD in Kempten and deputy chair of the Allgäu-Bodensee sub-district (Unterbezirk). From 1998 to 2009 he chaired the SPD organization for Bundestag constituency 255, which covered Neu-Ulm, Günzburg and Unterallgäu.

From 2008 the parliamentary group’s biography lists him as deputy chair of the SPD district of Swabia (Bezirk Schwaben), and from 2013 as a member of the Bavarian party’s Landesparteirat, its state party council. He later chaired the Neu-Ulm district association. In a report dated 13 January 2017, the *Augsburger Allgemeine* referred to him as SPD Kreisvorsitzender there, in coverage of a dispute over whether the city of Neu-Ulm should leave the county. On 1 November 2021 the *Südwest Presse* reported that Daniel Fürst and Maren Bachmann were leading the Neu-Ulm association. When Brunner announced a federal leadership bid in August 2019, the *Augsburger Allgemeine* also described him as chair of the Wirtschaftsclub der Bayern-SPD.

### The Seeheimer Kreis and the 2019 leadership bid

Within the Bundestag group Brunner belonged to the Seeheimer Kreis. The *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* and *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)*, reporting in August 2019, described that current as the conservative wing of the SPD. Its own account dates the grouping to a September 1974 meeting and presents it as pragmatic, centre-oriented and intent on keeping the SPD able to govern. A version of that account archived in January 2016 listed Brunner in the Sprecherkreis as it then stood, a speakers’ circle of the parliamentary group after the 2013 election.

After Andrea Nahles left the party chair, the SPD filled the post by a ballot of the membership. Applicants, alone or in pairs, needed nomination by at least five sub-districts or by one district, and the party’s procedure encouraged mixed pairs to form before the campaign. On 20 August 2019, about two weeks before the deadline, Brunner told the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that he would stand so that “the whole diversity of the party” was reflected. Ahead of the regional conferences due to begin in September, he said he saw “a clear overhang of opponents of the grand coalition and of the left of the party spectrum.” He intended at first to run without a woman as co-candidate, and he called the preference for pairs arranged in advance “unfortunate.”

By 2 September he had the five nominations the rules required. He told the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that the mandates had come above all from Swabia: the sub-districts of Neu-Ulm, Günzburg, Memmingen-Unterallgäu, Ostallgäu and Allgäu-Bodensee. The same interview reported him as the only candidate still standing alone, which he said surprised him, and quoted him calling himself an “absolute realist” who did not believe he would be elected chair. He said he wanted to set a sign that anyone could have a chance, and he left open dropping out later to support a team whose positions fitted the party.

He withdrew on 16 September 2019. In a statement that day he wrote that he wanted “a clearer sharpening of the field of candidates and thus a clearer electoral decision,” because a large field made a decisive result harder and reconciling the wings needed a leadership with broad support. He had also stood, he said, to help that reconciliation: it was sad if “Juso,” shorthand for the Young Socialists in the SPD, was an insult in some circles and “Seeheimer” in others, since opponents were other parties, not one’s own members. External, internal and social security, the themes he said mattered most to him, he considered in good hands with the tickets of [Klara Geywitz](/people/klara-geywitz) and [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz) and of Petra Köpping and [Boris Pistorius](/people/boris-pistorius), and he asked members to back whichever pair won. Seven male–female duos remained; the membership vote was set for October, with the result due on 26 October.

### Memberships in the SPÖ and ČSSD

The archived Bundestag biography, which the parliament states rests on members’ own information, lists Brunner as a member of the [Social Democratic Party of Austria](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-austria) (SPÖ) in Vienna-Ottakring and of the [Czech Social Democratic Party](/organizations/social-democracy) (ČSSD). The SPD Bundestag group’s biography records the same two memberships, without naming the Ottakring branch, and neither text attributes him an office or candidacy in Austria or the Czech Republic. The entries are additional affiliations with two social-democratic parties, not a parallel set of party offices.

## Bundestag elections

From 2009 through 2021 Karl-Heinz Brunner was the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in Bundestag constituency 255, Neu-Ulm, in Bavaria. Under the personalized proportional system then in force, each voter had two votes: the first elected a constituency member by direct vote, and the second chose a party's closed state list, whose order the party itself had fixed. The constituency seat went to the candidate with the most first votes; further members were taken from the state lists, so a candidate who lost the direct contest could still enter parliament if the list place was high enough. The territory of constituency 255 was the same at all four of Brunner's candidacies. The Eighteenth Act Amending the Federal Elections Act of 17 March 2008, in force for the 2009 election, defined it as the districts of Günzburg and Neu-Ulm in full and, from Unterallgäu, the administrative communities of Babenhausen, Boos, Erkheim and Pfaffenhausen, with the remaining Unterallgäu municipalities in constituency 257. The Federal Returning Officer published the same delimitation for 2013, 2017 and 2021.

### The 2009 candidacy

At the election of 27 September 2009 Brunner stood for the SPD in Neu-Ulm and was 41st on the Bavarian SPD state list. Wen-wählen lists Georg Nüßlein of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) among the other constituency candidates, and Tagesschau's archive of the count records Nüßlein with 50.7 percent of the first votes. Abgeordnetenwatch records Brunner's constituency result as 15.40 percent and lists him for 2009 as a candidate, not a member. The Bavarian returning officer's final report on the 2013 election reprints the 2009 party totals for the same constituency: the SPD took 15.4 percent of the first votes and the CSU 50.7 percent, and turnout was 69.8 percent. Place 41 did not bring him into the 17th Bundestag; a later directory of Bavarian members dates his service from 2013.

### List seats in 2013 and 2017

On 22 September 2013 he again failed to win the direct seat. The final Bavarian report names him as the SPD constituency candidate and Dr. Georg Nüßlein (CSU) as the member elected in the constituency, with 91,961 first votes (57.5 percent) against 29,420 (18.4 percent) for the SPD. Turnout was 68.0 percent. Brunner stood 21st on the SPD state list and was marked in that report as elected via the list. The Bundestag biography for the 18th electoral term (2013–2017) likewise states that he was elected via the state list and names constituency 255, Neu-Ulm.

The election of 24 September 2017 followed the same route. In the final result the CSU received 80,503 first votes (44.6 percent) and the SPD 26,419 (14.6 percent), and turnout was 76.0 percent. The Bavarian returning officer's provisional report names Nüßlein as the constituency winner and Brunner as the SPD candidate, and records Brunner as elected from place 15 on the SPD state list. The biography for the 19th term (2017–2021) again says that he was elected via the state list for constituency 255. In both terms the mandate was a list seat.

### The 2021 result and exit from parliament

Before the election of 26 September 2021 Brunner dropped out of the contest for the Bavarian SPD list. As the state executive and the regional organizations settled the order in March, he judged that he would be placed far down—he estimated between 25th and 35th, because even the leading Swabian candidate, Ulrike Bahr, had received only place 16—and he withdrew rather than accept that position. The *Schwäbische Zeitung* reported his formulation that he was "kein Lückenbüßer" and would not go on the list "nur als Placebo." He stayed on as the direct candidate. The same paper reported that a constituency conference at the beginning of February had nominated him with 93 percent of the votes.

He did not win the constituency, and without a list place he did not return to parliament. *Der Spiegel* reported that Alexander Engelhard of the CSU took the direct mandate with 37.2 percent of the first votes and that Brunner came second with 16.0 percent. Those shares match the final official figures, 69,676 votes (37.2 percent) for the CSU and 29,960 (16.0 percent) for the SPD, which the constituency page labels the runner-up party (*Erstunterlegen*), on a turnout of 78.0 percent. The Bavarian statistical office's list of members of the 20th Bundestag from Bavaria names Engelhard, of Weißenhorn, as elected in constituency 255 and does not include Brunner; its historical index gives Brunner's service as 2013–2021 and as having come through the state list rather than a constituency. The archived biography of the 19th Bundestag records the end of his membership as 26 October 2021. On 22 February 2022 the *Augsburger Allgemeine* already described him as a former member of the Bundestag, writing that in September 2021 he had fought the direct mandate, had declined the unpromising list place the state party had envisaged for him, and had lost the constituency to Engelhard.

## Defence and security policy in parliament

### The Defence Committee and the Air Force

Karl-Heinz Brunner was a full member of the Bundestag Defence Committee from 13 January 2014 and again from 29 January 2018. The SPD group’s list of his offices does not record a separate rapporteurship for the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe deployment he is documented as having inspected was the contingent at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. In October 2016 he went there with a seven-member Defence Committee delegation. German Panavia Tornado jets at [the base](/organizations/the-base) were flying reconnaissance over Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State.

Ankara had barred German parliamentarians after the Bundestag’s June 2016 Armenian-genocide resolution. The Reservists’ Association, which reported the visit, called Brunner deputy to its president and a Jäger der Reserve. He said he had been sceptical after the coup attempt and over human rights, then called the ban “untenable” for a parliamentary army and said the ice between the parliamentarians appeared broken. When Turkey again refused entry in May 2017, he told *Vorwärts* the contingent should leave “as quickly and promptly as possible.” His 19th-term disclosure also lists a seat on the presidium of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wehrtechnik.

### Disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation

From 11 March 2014 Brunner was a full member of the Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and from 16 June 2015 its SPD spokesperson. In the 19th term the Bundestag biography lists him as a full member and as Obmann; the SPD group dates that term’s spokesperson role from 14 May 2018. A November 2015 Bundestag notice named him as SPD Obmann when the subcommittee’s whips welcomed procurement of a German observation aircraft under the [Treaty on Open Skies](/facts/treaty-on-open-skies). Germany, one of the most active parties, had had no aircraft of its own since 1997; the whips called the purchase a signal for cooperative arms control before the German chairmanship of the [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe](/organizations/organization-for-security-and-co-operation-in-europe).

On 31 March 2021 the SPD group issued a statement in his name as rapporteur on the 30th anniversary of the Bundeswehr Verification Centre at Geilenkirchen, which implements arms-control agreements, flies Open Skies missions and, the statement said, had carried out more than 3,000 missions.

### Troop visits and the Afghanistan mandate

On 11 August 2021 the Allgäu barracks in Füssen received Brunner and other SPD politicians. Mountain reconnaissance and support troops briefed them on vehicles and tasks. The office call covered the return of the last German soldiers from Afghanistan, and both units were due to send soldiers the next year to the [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) mission MINUSMA in Mali.

In late March 2018 he accompanied Defence Minister [Ursula von der Leyen](/people/energy-ursula-von-der-leyen) to Mazar-i-Sharif. The *Augsburger Allgemeine* reported that he spoke with Bundeswehr personnel and with German development agencies and non-governmental organisations. He told the paper one had to “think in decades, not in years,” and that after more than 40 years of war Afghanistan was still far from stable. Referring also to earlier visits, he credited the NATO Resolute Support Mission, running since January 2015, with training Afghan forces and police and protecting aid work, in small steps.

On 22 March 2018, on the request to continue the mission, he said everyday life in Afghanistan was “everyday life in violence and terror,” usually reduced in German reporting to spectacular attacks. He called the “quasi-withdrawal” signalled for 2014 “simply silly,” and a fixed exit date a gift of space to terrorist groups. Raising the personnel ceiling, he said, was to offer prospects against drugs, corruption and clientelism; leaving, he argued, would neither finance aid nor protect civilian helpers. What was required was “stance and strategic patience.”

### The consultants inquiry

On 30 January 2019 the Defence Committee constituted itself, under Article 45a(2) of the Basic Law, as an investigative committee on external consulting in the Federal [Ministry of Defence](/organizations/ministry-of-defence). The FDP, [The Left](/organizations/the-left-slovenia) and [the Greens](/organizations/the-greens) had tabled the motion. Coalition members abstained, the later report said, over doubts that an inquiry was required. The trigger was Bundesrechnungshof findings of legal and regulatory breaches; the mandate included the personal and political responsibility of the ministry leadership.

Every full and substitute member of the Defence Committee was automatically a member of that body, which is the status in Brunner’s Bundestag biography. Evidence was taken by a subcommittee of nine. The SPD’s ordinary members were chair Wolfgang Hellmich and [Dennis Rohde](/people/dennis-rohde), with [Siemtje Möller](/people/siemtje-moller) and [Marja-Liisa Völlers](/people/marja-liisa-vollers) as substitutes. Brunner was not named to it. The subcommittee drew more than 4,700 files and, in 17 public sessions between 21 March 2019 and 13 February 2020, heard one expert and 41 witnesses, the last von der Leyen. It adopted its report on 10 September 2020; the full committee adopted it on 16 September as printed paper 19/22400.

The assessment said the hearings confirmed the audit findings, including awards without a proper test of necessity or economy and misuse of framework contract 20237. Stopping further call-offs under that contract from 24 August 2018 was judged correct but late. The FDP, The Left and the Greens filed a joint dissent, and the AfD a separate one. Brunner did not speak on 4 November 2020. For the SPD, Möller said some consultants had unrestricted access to security-relevant information, that the ministry had lost count of its external staff, and that some projects had brought the Bundeswehr nothing. The House was asked only to take note of the report.

## Legal affairs and other parliamentary work

### Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection

Karl-Heinz Brunner was a full member of the Bundestag Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection in both terms. The committee’s list included him for the SPD in February 2014, and his 19th-period biography again records him as a full member. He was a substitute on the Committee on Election Scrutiny, Immunity and the Rules of Procedure and, in the 19th period, on the Subcommittee on European Law.

Committee reports name him as rapporteur for the February 2017 bill on insolvency avoidance and the June 2017 bill rehabilitating people convicted after 8 May 1945 for consensual homosexual acts, including under Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code. In June 2021 he was a rapporteur on the report recommending a travel-security fund after the insolvency of the German subsidiary of [Thomas Cook Group](/organizations/thomas-cook-group). The government told the committee that insurers’ €110 million liability cap had left package-travel customers exposed to incomplete refunds.

### Insolvency law and Franco-German cooperation

The 2017 avoidance bill sought to make intentional clawback more predictable for businesses and employees: granting easier payment terms would not by itself justify a challenge, the treatment of wages was to be clarified, and parallel changes were to be made in the individual-creditor Avoidance Act.

In the next term Brunner was again rapporteur, with Heribert Hirte, for the bill to develop restructuring and insolvency law (SanInsFoG). The committee report of 16 December 2020 recorded the SPD view that the new Corporate Stabilisation and Restructuring Act (StaRUG) shifted the law toward pre-insolvency restructuring, including amid the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic), in line with European rules on preventive restructuring.

His Bundestag biography, based on members’ own statements, lists him as a consultative member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly working group on harmonising German and French commercial and insolvency law. Set up on 6 February 2020 and coordinated by Hirte and Liliana Tanguy, the group drew members from the Bundestag and the [French National Assembly](/organizations/french-national-assembly). In four meetings it reviewed Association Henri Capitant drafts on company, financial-market, insolvency and market law, the basis for an assembly resolution of 28 June 2021.

### Colonia Dignidad

Colonia Dignidad, later Villa Baviera, was founded in 1961 in Chile by Paul Schäfer, who had left Germany ahead of prosecution. The joint commission’s 2019 aid paper, after the Bundestag’s unanimous resolution of 29 June 2017, described decades of sexual violence, forced labour and family separation, and cooperation with the security apparatus of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It recorded [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier)’s statement, as foreign minister in April 2016, that German diplomats had for years looked away. The government treated later aid as moral, not legal, responsibility.

On 5 July 2018 the Bundestag elected eight members, Brunner and Matthias Bartke among them for the SPD, to the Joint Commission of the Bundestag and the Federal Government on an aid concept for the victims. It first met on 10 October 2018. On 17 May 2019 it adopted payments of up to €10,000 a person—up to €7,000 on a credible account without formal proof and up to €3,000 more against receipts—plus a “care and old age” fund for people outside the German social-security system. Help was voluntary and closed to those convicted of colony crimes or who had held leading responsibility. The [International Organization for Migration](/organizations/international-organization-for-migration) was to run advice centres in Germany and Chile; the commission estimated about €3.5 million from 2019 to around 2024.

A balance report of September 2021 said the IOM contract was signed in November 2019, interviews began in January 2020 and the first payments followed from March 2020. By 1 September 2021 the Foreign Office had issued 110 decisions under the first pillar and 70 under the second, and the IOM had paid 95 and 42 cases. The commission said it would keep accompanying the scheme beyond the 19th electoral period.

### NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Foreign Affairs Committee

The SPD group listed Brunner as a substitute member of the Bundestag delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, an inter-parliamentary body institutionally separate from NATO, from 28 January 2014 and again from 27 February 2018. In May 2014 the *Südwest Presse* reported that he would observe Ukraine’s early presidential election on 25 May with the NATO parliamentary delegation, beside OSCE and [Council of Europe](/organizations/council-of-europe) observers, after a briefing led by Doris Barnett, a vice-president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and that he expected to be paired with CDU member Robert Hochbaum about 60 kilometres from Kyiv. The published lists of his Bundestag offices do not give him a seat in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

The Bundestag data handbook lists him as special rapporteur of the assembly’s Science and Technology Committee in 2020–2021. His preliminary draft of 2 March 2021, “Space and Security – NATO’s Role”, noted a NATO space policy and the late-2019 decision to treat space as the alliance’s fifth operational domain, and stated that until the committee adopted it the text was only the rapporteur’s view.

From 29 January 2018 he was a substitute on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The SPD group also listed him, from April 2014 and again from May 2018, as deputy chair of the German–Austrian parliamentary friendship group.

## Political positions

### Defence, NATO and European security

The *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*, reporting in August 2019 that Brunner intended to run for the chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, described him as a conservative Social Democrat in the Seeheimer Kreis. On 8 November 2018, debating a motion by [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) that the Bundestag reject NATO's goal of spending 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence, he called the 2 per cent debate "vollkommen absurd": GDP moved, he said, and the defence share had peaked in 2008 only because the economy was then weakest. Germany was near 1.5 per cent and could equip its soldiers, but percentages were pointless until it defined its security interests; only then would he discuss 1.5, 1.7 or 2 per cent.

In May 2020, after SPD parliamentary leader [Rolf Mützenich](/people/rolf-mutzenich) called for US nuclear weapons to leave Germany, *Telepolis* quoted Brunner: he was "kein glühender Verfechter der nuklearen Teilhabe", but sharing was "deutlich besser als keine Teilhabe" because it gave Germany "echte Mitsprache", and the chancellor always had the last word on using American warheads from German soil. On exports, on 28 February 2018, he called arms for the Peshmerga in Iraq "durch und durch richtig, verantwortungsbewusst und notwendig" against the Islamic State, and rejected a German opt-out that left the trade to others. He argued for a restrictive regime with the European Union and NATO, for stopping supplies to states in the Yemen war and tightening rules on dual-use goods and small arms, and said that although Turkey was a NATO ally, weapons should not be sent given abuses against Kurds.

On 22 March 2018 he supported extending Resolute Support in Afghanistan. Daily life there was terror, he said, and people fairly asked why soldiers faced it, but parliament could not look away: a quasi-withdrawal fixed for 2014 had been "einfach nur albern", and a set end date would open a vacuum for terrorists. He backed a higher troop ceiling and asked for "strategische Geduld" and a properly equipped Bundeswehr. In the IPS Journal in February 2019 he argued that lethal autonomous weapons must not leave killing to an algorithm: a soldier had to control target selection, prioritisation and tracking, and a ban or full regulation was urgent while talks at the United Nations in Geneva, running since 2013, risked failure.

### LGBT equality and constitutional reform

On 12 March 2019 Brunner succeeded Johannes Kahrs as the SPD Bundestag group's spokesperson for the concerns of lesbians and gay men, reported as a "queerer Stabwechsel". He thanked Kahrs for making LGBTI issues visible. On 30 June 2017, closing debate on the Bundesrat bill opening marriage to same-sex couples, he said [same-sex marriage](/facts/same-sex-marriage-in-germany) was arriving without a court ruling and, on his figure, with support from well over 80 per cent of the population, and told the house: "Wir werden heute Geschichte geschrieben haben." The roll-call was 393 in favour, 226 against and four abstentions; Brunner voted yes.

He wanted a stricter ban on conversion practices than the government offered. In the first reading on 6 March 2020 he cited human dignity in the Basic Law and said the state had to protect young homosexual people from therapists, charlatans or clergy. He thanked Health Minister Jens Spahn for the bill but opposed the age limit of 18, impunity for parents and guardians, and a maximum sentence of one year. On 7 May 2020 he called the practices "Unfug und Unheil", welcomed protection to 18 and a limited step toward those up to 26, and said his side had wanted more, while urging members to treat the bill as an "epochaler Schritt". It passed with the governing parties and the Free Democratic Party; the other groups abstained, with one AfD vote against.

On 21 May 2021, on an opposition bill to add "sexuelle Identität" to Article 3(3), he recalled being 16 in 1969, when section 175 of the criminal code, as tightened by the Nazis, still punished sex between adult men. He said he had moved nearly 30 times in the previous term to delay the marriage bill in committee so as to keep a Bundesrat draft alive until a majority existed, and that he still wanted the change, which also needed two thirds in the Bundesrat. Forcing a vote certain to fail was "perfide", he said, because opponents could claim the Bundestag had already refused; he planned to seek the numbers with [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) deputy [Jan-Marco Luczak](/people/jan-marco-luczak). The Free Democrats, Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens then moved to take the bill to second reading. The coalition and the AfD defeated that motion, and the amendment was not made in the term.

### Social and domestic policy

In the 2019 contest for the SPD leadership he set himself against the party left and against opponents of the CDU/CSU grand coalition. He told the *Augsburger Allgemeine*, as the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* reported on 20 August, that the race should show "die ganze Vielfalt der Partei", and that he saw "einen deutlichen Überhang der Groko-Gegner und des linken Parteispektrums". On 4 September the *Schwäbische Zeitung* reported that, the only solo candidate beside eight pairs, he would centre the 23 regional conferences on "drei Mal Sicherheit": external, internal and social security.

## Personal life and later years

### Family, faith and the 2020 coming-out

The archived biography for the 19th Bundestag, from Brunner's own statements, listed him as Old Catholic, married, and the father of two children. In an *Augsburger Allgemeine* interview at the start of September 2020, aged 67, he said he is gay and had lived with a partner in Berlin for about 20 months, a change he could not have imagined. Admitting that a man had entered his life was hard at first, then sudden: someone crosses your path, "it goes 'ding' — and then that is simply how it is." Love, he said, falls where it falls, "and I have to say, looking back: it is beautiful."

The interview recorded that he was still a married Old Catholic with two children, and that his family needed longer to accept the change. At the end of July 2020 he told the SPD in the Neu-Ulm district. Colleagues treated it as no great matter; what mattered was that he would stand for the Bundestag again. He said some people still found his situation dreadful, and that he would probably not walk hand in hand with his partner through the town of Neu-Ulm. *BILD* reported on 4 September 2020 that he had tied the statement to a third candidacy, this time as an openly gay candidate. During a short 2019 bid for the SPD leadership he had already told selected Berlin journalists "Ich bin schwul," to stop rumours, then withdrawn. The partner was not named. A further term, he said, was not necessarily connected with the relationship, though his partner would not mind it. He had been the SPD group's queer-policy spokesperson since March 2019.

The same Bundestag record listed, briefly, voluntary roles: the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, including as district auditor of its Swabian association; the Bavarian Red Cross, part of the German Red Cross, including 14 years as a *Bereitschaftsleiter*; the board of trustees of the federal Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation; the foundation council of the Deutsche Härtefallstiftung; and the advisory board of the Verband der Soldaten der Bundeswehr.

### Resignation from the county council and later activity

After the 2021 election he said he was leaving active politics for corporate consulting. In October 2021 he gave up the Neu-Ulm SPD chair to Maren Bachmann of Senden and Daniel Fürst of Neu-Ulm, and said his life would centre on Berlin, with visits back to the constituency.

On 22 February 2022 the *Augsburger Allgemeine* reported his resignation from the Neu-Ulm county council, his last political office in the district, after 25 years covering the Illertissen mayoralty and the Bundestag. A Facebook post at the end of 2021 had called the 17 December sitting his last. He thanked the *Landräte* Franz-Josef Schick, Erich-Josef Geßner and Thorsten Freudenberger and said it had been an honour to share in decisions he associated with human dignity, decency and responsibility. The step was to be made official that week in the district committee. Fürst, next on the SPD list, had accepted the seat the day before Christmas. No statement of reasons was required, and the council did not vote on the resignation.

On 11 March 2022 the paper described that Friday's sitting, in the Fuggerhalle in Weißenhorn, as his very last. He called the offices a privilege and the Bundestag farewell one "without melancholy, with a joyful heart." He would keep a residence in the district but move to Berlin rather than withdraw and grow carrots. A plan to represent an American law firm with clients in Belarus and Russia had, he said, been overturned by the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](/facts/2022-russian-invasion-of-ukraine). What remained, he told the paper, was teaching at the Biberach University of Applied Sciences and at Syracuse University, where he was to speak on foreign policy and disarmament, and Berlin work with Laib und Seele, which supports the Berliner Tafel, including hauling food crates and collecting donations. Life with his partner was, he said, as ordinary and conventional as anyone else's: "It is a normal, average life. I am simply content."

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/karl-heinz-brunner