Lars Rohwer

Lars Rohwer (born 1 February 1972 in Dresden) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag. He has sat in the Bundestag since 2021, for Saxony, and was a member of the Landtag of Saxony from 1991 to 1994 and again from 1998 to 2022. The Bundestag lists his occupation as a bank clerk (Bankkaufmann).

On a profile he wrote himself, Rohwer says he was born in Dresden, took his Abitur at the Kreuzschule, and became politically active as a student representative during the peaceful revolution of 1989, coming to party politics through the New Forum before joining the CDU. The Bundestag biography records the Abitur in Dresden in 1990, membership of the New Forum in Dresden in 1989, training as a bank clerk from 1991 to 1993, and Lutheran affiliation; he is married and has two children. The same self-profile describes work as a financial adviser at Dresdner Bank from 1994 to 1998 and civilian service at a youth house in Meißen. In the Saxon Landtag he was, in successive periods, the CDU group’s spokesperson on youth policy, on the budget and finance, and on energy and the environment, and he chaired the committee on schools and sport from 2004 to 2009.

At the 2021 federal election he won the direct mandate in constituency 160, Dresden II – Bautzen II. The final count gave the CDU 35,014 first votes (18.6 percent) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) 34,979 (18.6 percent), a margin of 35 votes, while the AfD led the second vote in the constituency with 19.2 percent to the CDU’s 13.8 percent; turnout was 80.8 percent. The Dresden constituency electoral committee confirmed the result after reviewing disputed ballots, and the lead over AfD candidate Andreas Harlaß fell from a preliminary 39 votes to 35.

In the 2025 federal election he was the runner-up in the renumbered constituency 159, Dresden II – Bautzen II: AfD candidate Matthias Rentzsch won with 29.9 percent of the first vote, and Rohwer received 24.2 percent (47,107 votes). He returned for the 21st electoral term on the CDU state list of Saxony. The 21st Bundestag convened on 25 March 2025. In that term he is a full member of the committees on economic affairs and energy and on housing, urban development, building and local government, and the parliamentary group’s spokesperson (Obmann) on the housing committee, with deputy seats on the finance, education and research committees and a place on the Corona study commission. Since 2022 he has chaired the CDU/CSU group’s Elbe working party.

Early life and education

Lars Rohwer was born on 1 February 1972. The Christian Democratic Union/CSU group in the Bundestag, and the Volkshandbuch of the Landtag of Saxony for the seventh electoral term (2019–2024), both place that birth in Dresden. The Bundestag biography, compiled from members' own statements, describes him as Evangelical Lutheran, married, and the father of two children; the Landtag handbook records the same family circumstances and gives his confession as evangelisch. In a self-description published by Abgeordnetenwatch he names his wife as Katrin Rohwer. He has written that he grew up in the Dresden borough of Blasewitz. A Domradio profile attributed to him states that he lives with his family in Gompitz, in the west of the city.

Schooling in Dresden

From 1978 to 1988 he attended a ten-class polytechnic secondary school (Polytechnische Oberschule) in Dresden, the general school of the German Democratic Republic. From 1988 to 1990 he was a pupil of the extended secondary school (Erweiterte Oberschule) Kreuzschule in Dresden and took the Abitur there in 1990. The Bundestag biography gives the same year and city for the Abitur but does not name the school.

His account of 1989, as published by Abgeordnetenwatch, is that during the Peaceful Revolution he was politically active as a pupil spokesperson (Schülersprecher) and that his way into politics ran through the Neues Forum, with CDU membership following soon afterwards. The Bundestag biography states that he was a member of the Neues Forum in Dresden in 1989. For the same year the Landtag handbook lists him as a founding member of the Christian Democratic Youth (Christlich-Demokratische Jugend), later of the Young Union, and as the Christian Democratic Youth's representative at the youth round table in Dresden; it dates his entry into the CDU to 1990.

Banking apprenticeship

From 1991 to 1993 Rohwer trained as a bank clerk (Bankkaufmann) at Dresdner Bank AG. The Bundestag biography records the same years of training but does not name the employer. The apprenticeship overlapped his first period in the Saxon Landtag, which the handbook gives as 1991–1994. From 1993 to 1998 the handbook lists him as a financial adviser at Dresdner Bank AG. His own curriculum vitae adds that this work was based in Dresden, Görlitz and Freiberg; the Abgeordnetenwatch self-description instead dates the adviser post from 1994 to 1998.

The same handbook records Zivildienst in 1995 and 1996 at the Jugendhaus in Meissen, years that fall inside the span it gives for the adviser post. It dates his return to the Landtag to November 1998, after that banking appointment had ended. In the Bundestag's register of members' interests, the occupation declared for the time before he entered parliament is bank clerk at Dresdner Bank AG, Frankfurt am Main, together with a right of return and protection against dismissal.

The Saxon Landtag

Entry as a successor deputy

Lars Rohwer sat in the Saxon Landtag in two stretches, January 1991 to October 1994 and November 1998 to July 2022. The Landtag handbook for the seventh electoral period records the second spell as membership “since November 1998” and lists him, for that parliament, as the directly elected member of the CDU for constituency 46 (Dresden 6).

He did not take a seat at the constitutive sitting of October 1990. The Landtag’s historical roll lists the CDU member Joachim Dirschka through 23 November 1990 and Rohwer from 16 January 1991. Between those snapshots Dirschka is the only departure and Rohwer the only arrival: the roll has 160 members on 23 November, 159 on 15 January 1991, and 160 again once Rohwer appears. He was 18. The Bundestag biography gives his date of birth as 1 February 1972, and both that biography and the Landtag handbook record a bank-clerk apprenticeship at Dresdner Bank from 1991 to 1993, so the first mandate ran alongside the training. The mandate ended with the electoral period in October 1994.

He returned during the second electoral period by the same route. Arnold Vaatz (CDU) is on the roll through 27 October 1998 and absent on 28 October; Rohwer is absent on 3 November and listed from 4 November 1998. From 1 October to 4 November the only CDU names to change are Vaatz, who leaves, and Rohwer, who enters; the only other change is that Christine Ostrowski of the Party of Democratic Socialism leaves and Cornelia Ernst enters.

The Landtag then records uninterrupted terms from October 1999 until July 2022, matching the third through seventh electoral periods. In 1999, 2004 and 2009 Dresden was divided into six Landtag constituencies, numbered 43 (Dresden 1) to 48 (Dresden 6). In 2004 and 2009 Rohwer’s seat was number 46, Dresden 4. By 2014 the same number 46 was styled Dresden 6, and in 2019 the city counted seven Dresden constituencies, numbered 41 to 47.

At the election of 19 September 2004 the Dresden statistics office’s official final result gave Rohwer 14,153 first votes in constituency 46, 39.29 percent of 36,025 valid first votes, on a turnout of 60.13 percent of 61,356 eligible voters. Cornelia Ernst of the PDS was second with 8,963 votes (24.88 percent); Holger Apfel of the NPD took 8.50 percent. The same office’s election-night count for 30 August 2009 again placed Rohwer first in constituency 46, with 11,718 first votes (35.88 percent) in what it published as the preliminary end result. For the 2014 election the state election office’s final constituency table gives him 10,259 of 29,962 valid first votes (34.2 percent); 30,341 of 58,404 people eligible to vote cast a ballot. On 1 September 2019 the state statistical office’s final list of directly elected members records 12,088 votes (31.0 percent) for Rohwer in Dresden 6. In the city’s final constituency table Andreas Harlaß of the AfD was second with 10,492 votes (26.9 percent), ahead of Lucie Hammecke of the Greens (5,523; 14.2 percent), and turnout was 68.3 percent of 57,807 eligible voters.

Committees and spokesperson posts

The Landtag handbook, using the member’s biographical return, assigns his group briefs by electoral period: youth policy in the third, the chair of the committee for schools and sport in the fourth (2004–2009), budget and finance in the fifth, and energy policy and digital development in the sixth. His Bundestag biography, which rests on members’ own disclosures, dates the youth-policy brief from 1998 to 2004, narrows the budget-and-finance brief to 2009–2011, and dates the energy and digital-development portfolio to 2015–2019. The same handbook lists him as a member of Saxony’s state youth-welfare committee from 1999 and as its chairman from 2005 to 2010; the Bundestag biography gives the chairmanship as 2005 to 2009. From 2015 to 2019 he chaired the Landtag inquiry into neo-Nazi terrorist networks in Saxony.

In the seventh period the CDU group’s list of spokespersons, dated 24 June 2020, names him spokesperson for energy and the environment, a brief the Bundestag biography carries through 2022. The handbook of that period records him as a member of the budget and finance committee, the committee for energy, climate protection, the environment and agriculture, and the committee for the economy, labour and transport. It also lists him as chair of the first committee of inquiry, whose title concerned the state government’s part in what it called the “qualifiedly unlawful” cutting of the AfD state list.

Resignation in 2022

On 1 July 2022 the Freie Presse reported that Rohwer had resigned the Landtag mandate, nine months after entering the Bundestag. The paper noted that on 26 September 2021 he had taken his Bundestag constituency by 35 votes over the AfD candidate Andreas Harlaß, who had then opened an election-scrutiny procedure. The Landtag roll still includes Rohwer on 1 July 2022 and does not include him on 2 July; the member register closes the last term in July 2022. The Landtag press office announced on 6 July that Sandra Gockel (CDU), of Heidenau, had succeeded him with effect from 5 July 2022, and that Landtag president Matthias Rößler was expected to receive her formal obligation at the opening of the sitting on 13 July. Gockel’s profile lists a CDU list mandate and residence in Heidenau; she had been head teacher of the Ehrenfried-Walther-von-Tschirnhaus-Gymnasium in Dresden from 2014 until 2022.

Party offices

Junge Union and CDU Dresden

Rohwer's recorded party activity began in Dresden in 1989. The handbook of the Landtag of Saxony, second updated edition for the seventh electoral term (editorial deadline 15 December 2020), lists him as a founding member that year of the Christlich-Demokratische Jugend (CDJ), later the Junge Union, and as a CDJ representative at the youth round table in Dresden. The same entry states that he joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990. His Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, adds that he held various political offices in the Junge Union from 1990 to 1995, without naming them. The Junge Union describes itself as an independent youth organization of the CDU and the Christian Social Union, not bound to either party in programme, organization or finance. The CDU lists it among the party's associations.

The Landtag handbook records him as chairman of the CDU Dresden from 2005 to 2011. The Bundestag biography additionally states that he was deputy chairman of the CDU Dresden from 2001 to 2005; that deputy post is not in the Landtag handbook. On 22 May 2011, six weeks before a district party congress set for 2 July, he announced that he would not stand again. Bild reported that he presented the step as a chance for the Dresden association to reorganize, and that on 15 May he had asked Bundestag member Andreas Lämmel to run; Lämmel, the paper wrote, intended to stand on 2 July. The same report noted that early in May Rohwer had been voted out as head of the CDU Landtag group's working group on budget and finance, and that confirmation of that vote in July could also cost him the group's finance-policy spokesmanship. Flurfunk Dresden reported that the decision was given to journalists that Sunday in a background conversation at which Lämmel was present, and was posted on Facebook under the heading "Mehr Zeit für den Dresdner Westen".

Protestant working group

Since 2021 Rohwer has been state chairman of the Evangelischer Arbeitskreis (EAK) of the CDU in Saxony. The EAK Saxony website carries a welcome signed by him in that office; neither source publishes a record of the meeting at which he was chosen. The Saxon EAK calls itself a Sonderorganisation of the CDU, an association of Protestant Christians in the party whose aims are to remind the CDU to make policy from a Christian understanding of the human person, to encourage Christians to stand for their faith in politics, to win Christians of all denominations to the CDU's goals, and to mediate between the Protestant churches and Saxon state politics.

The federal CDU classifies the body differently. Its account of the party statute lists eight Vereinigungen, including one for members of Protestant denominations, and names two Sonderorganisationen separately: the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten and the association of lesbians and gays in the Union. The federal EAK says it was founded in Siegen in 1952 after Bundestag president Hermann Ehlers argued that the Protestant side of the Union needed strengthening. It describes itself as the grouping of Protestant CDU and CSU members who want to contribute to politics accountable before God and other people, open also to non-members and holding a right to submit motions inside the Union; Bundestag member Thomas Rachel has been its federal chairman since 2003.

Federal elections

Lars Rohwer has sat in the Bundestag for two successive terms, by different routes. At the election of 26 September 2021 he won the direct mandate in constituency 160, Dresden II – Bautzen II, and took his seat when the 20th Bundestag was constituted on 26 October 2021. At the election of 23 February 2025 the same territory, renumbered constituency 159, elected an Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate; Rohwer returned when the 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March 2025, this time from the Saxony state list of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The 2021 direct mandate

Constituency 160 joined part of Dresden to five municipalities in the district of Bautzen. From Dresden it included the local-office areas of Cotta, Klotzsche, Loschwitz, Neustadt and Pieschen, plus the localities Altfranken, Cossebaude, Gompitz, Langebrück, Mobschatz, Oberwartha, Schönborn, Schönfeld-Weißig and Weixdorf; the rest of the city formed constituency 159, Dresden I. From the Bautzen district it included Arnsdorf, Großröhrsdorf, Ottendorf-Okrilla, Radeberg and Wachau, with the remaining municipalities in Bautzen I.

Of 234,432 eligible voters, 189,409 cast ballots, a turnout of 80.8 percent. The first-vote field was fragmented. Rohwer received 35,014 votes (18.6 percent). Andreas Harlaß, the AfD candidate and then the party’s press spokesman in Saxony, received 34,979 (also 18.6 percent). The official margin was 35 votes. Next were the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with 28,700 (15.3 percent), Alliance 90/The Greens with 25,527 (13.6 percent), Die Linke with 22,160 (11.8 percent) and the Free Democratic Party with 20,711 (11.0 percent). On second votes the AfD led with 36,003 (19.2 percent), ahead of the Greens (16.6 percent), the SPD (16.3 percent) and the CDU (13.8 percent, 26,037 votes), so the CDU’s constituency list vote was well below Rohwer’s first-vote total.

The provisional count on election night had put Rohwer 39 votes ahead. On 30 September 2021 the constituency electoral committee, after a report by returning officer Markus Blocher, met in Dresden town hall, corrected arithmetical errors in polling-station records and declared the result. It did not grant a motion to recount every ballot. TAG24 reported that the review added four votes to Harlaß’s provisional total, leaving the official 34,979 to 35,014. The AfD said a sample recheck of eight Dresden polling districts, out of 365 in the city, had already moved four votes toward Harlaß, and that neither returning officer saw cause for a full recount. State chairman Jörg Urban called that refusal a disadvantage to the party; the state executive said it assumed no deliberate manipulation and wanted certainty because counting errors were possible. Harlaß said he alleged no fraud and would object in order to obtain a recount.

On 22 November 2021 the runner-up—identified in reporting as Harlaß, represented by the lawyer Joachim Keiler—objected to the Bundestag. He asked that the constituency election be invalidated and repeated, arguing that mistakes in eight polling records required a full recount and that preparatory use of checking software had breached the public character of the count. On 23 June 2022 the election-review committee recommended rejection. It held that the constituency committee had determined the result lawfully, that the returning officer’s preparatory checks need not themselves be public, and that a close margin alone does not compel a recount of every vote, absent sufficiently concrete signs of an error that could change the allocation of seats. The Bundestag adopted that recommendation, in Drucksache 20/2300, on 7 July 2022 under Article 41 of the Basic Law. Rohwer served the 20th term as the directly elected member for constituency 160.

The 2025 state-list seat

For 2025 the same Dresden boroughs and localities, and the same five Bautzen-district municipalities, were renumbered constituency 159. The rest of Dresden moved to constituency 158 and the rest of the Bautzen district to constituency 155.

Turnout was 84.1 percent, 196,333 voters out of 233,483. Matthias Rentzsch of the AfD won the direct mandate with 58,238 first votes (29.9 percent), 11.3 percentage points above the AfD’s 2021 share in the constituency. Rohwer, again the CDU candidate, finished second with 47,107 votes (24.2 percent), up 5.5 points. Die Linke received 16.4 percent, the Greens 11.4 percent, the SPD 9.4 percent and the FDP 2.6 percent. Second votes were led by the AfD on 28.6 percent, followed by the CDU on 18.1 percent (35,306 votes), Die Linke on 15.9 percent, the Greens on 13.1 percent, the SPD on 8.5 percent and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht on 7.8 percent.

In Saxony as a whole the AfD took 37.3 percent of second votes and the CDU 19.7 percent. The state returning officer listed directly elected members in 15 of the 16 constituencies: 14 from the AfD, including Rentzsch, and Sören Pellmann of Die Linke in Leipzig II. No CDU candidate was on that list. The CDU’s Saxon members were elected from the state list, and Rohwer was the list member in sixth place, one of seven CDU list members returned. The Saxon CDU had adopted the list on 14 December 2024, with Carsten Körber in first place. The Bundestag records his mandate in the 21st term as election from the Saxony state list, alongside a constituency candidacy in Wahlkreis 159.

Work in the Bundestag

Lars Rohwer has sat in the Bundestag since its 20th electoral term, which opened on 26 October 2021, and he remained a member when the 21st term was constituted on 25 March 2025. In the 20th Bundestag he held a direct mandate for constituency 160, Dresden II – Bautzen II, in Saxony. For the 21st term the Bundestag records his candidacy in constituency 159, again Dresden II – Bautzen II; he took the seat from the Saxon state list and sits with the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

Committees

In the 20th term the Bundestag listed him as a full member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment and of the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Local Government, and as a substitute on the Finance Committee. That record gives him neither an Obmann post nor a seat on an economy or energy committee.

In the 21st term he is a full member of the Committee on Economy and Energy and of the housing committee, and Obmann of the latter for the CDU/CSU. Each group names one Obmann or Obfrau per committee as its leadership’s main contact there; they help set the group’s line, shape agendas and report the committee’s detailed work. He is a substitute on the committees for education, family, seniors, women and youth; for research, technology, space and technology assessment; and for finance. His earlier full membership on education and research was not repeated: those subjects now sit on two committees where he is only a deputy.

Apart from any Bundestag committee, the register of members’ interests has listed him since March 2022 as an unpaid member of the board of trustees (Stiftungsrat) of the Federal Foundation Bauakademie (Bundesstiftung Bauakademie) in Berlin. The 21st-term biography files that post under voluntary functions in associations and foundations, not under parliamentary offices.

Parliamentary groups and inquiries

Inside the CDU/CSU group he chaired the Elbe working group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Elbe) from 2022, a role stated in the self-reported narrative of his Bundestag biography. On 16 October 2026 the Nordsee-Zeitung, citing a group announcement, reported that Christoph Frauenpreiß had been elected unanimously to succeed him, with Anna Aeikens as deputy chair, and that Rohwer had stepped down for lack of time but stayed a member. The report called the group the faction’s forum for the Länder along the Elbe, covering shipping, ports, flood protection, rural areas and the river’s development. The Bundestag biography was still listing him as chair in late October 2026.

Before the committees of the 21st Bundestag were filled, he was one of six CDU members of the climate-and-energy working group in the March 2025 coalition talks between the Union and the SPD. The trade journal ZfK named him with Andreas Jung, who led the Union side, Thomas Gebhart, Jan Heinisch, Mark Helfrich and Tilman Kuban; Olaf Lies led the SPD side.

In July 2025 group chair Jens Spahn appointed him chair of the Stephanuskreis at a meeting of the CDU/CSU group. Rohwer announced the appointment on social media, and both Die Tagespost and the Diocese of Dresden-Meißen reported it within days. The faction describes the circle, named for the first Christian martyr in Acts 7, as a loose forum open to every CDU/CSU member. It centres the protection of persecuted Christians and freedom of religion for every faith, hears people affected, aid groups and experts, and is meant to feed initiatives into the group’s parliamentary work. In a Domradio interview on 7 August 2025 he said he had only just begun, called Monika Grütters his predecessor, and traced the circle to former group chair Volker Kauder, whose emphasis had been the persecution of Christians, while Grütters had widened it to religious freedom in general.

The 21st-term biography lists him as deputy chair of the German-Baltic Parliamentary Group (Deutsch-Baltische Parlamentariergruppe); the archived 20th-term biography does not. A Bundestag press notice of 8 May 2026 said a delegation of the group would travel from 11 to 15 May to Tallinn and Riga, led by Bettina Hagedorn of the SPD and including Rohwer, for talks with parliamentary counterparts in Estonia and Latvia on internal and external security, resilience and the economy of the Baltic Sea region.

He is a full member of the study commission on the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, formally the Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung der Corona-Pandemie und Lehren für zukünftige pandemische Ereignisse”. On 10 July 2025 the Bundestag established it on a CDU/CSU–SPD motion, with the Greens and the Left also in favour; the votes against, and most abstentions, came from the AfD, which wanted a committee of inquiry instead. It has 14 members of parliament and 14 outside experts and is to report by the end of June 2027 on the pandemic’s causes, course and consequences, the state’s measures, and lessons for later health crises. It constituted itself on 8 September 2025 under Bundestag president Julia Klöckner. The CDU/CSU sent five members — Franziska Hoppermann, Michael Hose, Axel Müller, Rohwer and Mechthilde Wittmann — and the commission elected Hoppermann chair.

The Saxon inquiry into neo-Nazi networks

Proceedings

On 27 April 2015 the Landtag of Saxony in Dresden established by majority the first committee of inquiry of its sixth electoral term, “Neonazistische Terrornetzwerke in Sachsen.” The urgent motion, Drucksache 6/1241, came from Die Linke and Alliance 90/The Greens. The governing CDU and SPD abstained; the Alternative for Germany voted in favour. On 30 April it elected the 18 members—nine from the CDU, four from Die Linke, two each from the SPD and the AfD, and one Green—with the CDU deputy Lars Rohwer as chair and Kerstin Köditz of Die Linke as deputy. The first sitting was on 13 May 2015.

The mandate covered possible omissions and misconduct by the state government and the authorities under its supervision toward the neo-Nazi group that called itself the National Socialist Underground, its milieu and any support networks: how the group arose and acted in or from Saxony, how offences attributed to it were pursued, what Saxon bodies knew and shared, and what should follow. It centred on Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, who disappeared in 1998 and lived clandestinely in Saxony, first around Chemnitz and later in Zwickau. This second NSU inquiry in the Landtag took up questions the third committee of the fifth term had left open, using that committee’s files and the Bundestag inquiry.

From 13 May 2015 to 3 June 2019 the committee met 43 times and heard 70 witnesses, four of them more than once. Fifty-one motions for documents produced 1,572 binders, 394 of them classified. On 3 June 2019 it closed the inquiry, adopted the report and named Rohwer rapporteur; the factual part had been drafted by Ekkehard Becker-Eberhard of the Leipzig law faculty. The Landtag issued Drucksache 6/18000 on 21 June 2019 in four volumes, including the dissent, and debated it on 4 July, rejecting a resolution from Die Linke, Drucksache 6/18194.

Findings and dissent

The CDU and SPD statement adopted Becker-Eberhard’s account. They wrote that police work on the robberies, mostly committed in Saxony, had not identified the offenders before 4 November 2011, and that no police omissions were apparent. Saxony had no manhunt jurisdiction of its own—that lay with Thuringia—but a duty to arrest the three if found and to assist, which Saxon police had met. They found that the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution had neither worked with the trio nor supported its network, but that its willingness to share information “was at least not consistently given” and that, as the predecessor committee had said, the office and the police had not investigated “to an appropriate and obvious extent.” The governing factions treated later changes in cooperation and staffing as having met those defects. After the 3 June vote Rohwer said there was “no demonstrable guilt” of the Saxon authorities, while conceding an “incongruent evaluation” of NSU-related information at the office, which he said had been corrected. In July the CDU’s Steve Ittershagen said there had been no structural failure. Rohwer put the report at 203 pages.

Die Linke and the Greens did not claim that Saxon authorities had shielded or promoted the NSU. Köditz told the Landtag there were “simply no indications” of that, but that the complex was “by no means cleared up” and that nothing justified drawing a line under it. Their dissent, which nd put at 1,159 pages, argued that the office had failed. She said early and accurate leads had placed the three in Saxony and that a professional reading of them could probably have prevented the murder series. The office’s “Terzett” file, she said, had no plan, no situation picture and no single dossier and was given to an inexperienced officer; she compared that handling to an intern’s job. Valentin Lippmann, for the Greens, spoke of “organised irresponsibility, a lack of competence, inconsistency and lack of interest”: despite concrete warnings, he said, the office stayed in an intelligence-service parochialism and sat on knowledge to protect questionable sources, while police officers too often worked strictly to rule. Both factions said right-wing extremism in Saxony had for years been underestimated.

They found no proof that NSU files were destroyed on purpose after November 2011, but said routine deletion continued into mid-2012 and that it could no longer be shown whether NSU material was lost. Negligence and failures of leadership, they argued, had obstructed clarification. Among 46 recommendations were dissolving the Saxon office, preserving the files, further police inquiries, a compensation fund for relatives on the Thuringian model, a documentation site in Saxony, and teaching about the NSU in schools. The Landtag rejected the resolution that put those demands to a vote. Köditz said the two sides seemed to have sat in different committees.

Policy positions

Energy and climate

As energy-policy spokesperson of the Christian Democratic Union in the Saxony parliament, Rohwer told Tagesspiegel Background in 2020 that something more intelligent ought to be possible than digging up lignite and burning it. In the Bundestag he treated the 2038 coal phase-out as a settlement not to be reopened. On 30 March 2023, debating structural change in Lusatia, he said the compromise had to be kept and the old system valued until replacements were ready, and that Germany would not have got through the crisis winter after the Russian attack on Ukraine without coal-fired power. On 5 July 2024 he blamed uncertainty in the coal regions on the word "ideally" in the then coalition agreement. Coal power was needed until 2038 for security of supply, he said; an EU state-aid deal had confirmed that date, and renewed talk of 2030 left LEAG unable to answer its workers. As an IG BCE member he sat on the LEAG board as an employee representative.

In March 2025 ZfK named him one of six CDU members of the climate-and-energy working group in the CDU/CSU–SPD talks, chaired by Andreas Jung and Olaf Lies. He later wrote that the agreement, not a programme of his own, was the answer to calls for more climate policy: socially accepted protection aimed at neutrality in 2045, emissions trading with revenues returned, renewables and storage, a gradual carbon price, and lower electricity taxes and grid fees, without picking technologies. Deindustrialization, he added, would weaken climate innovation. He wanted openness on storage, including pumped storage in his constituency. The published text, "Verantwortung für Deutschland", states the joint version: the Paris Agreement and neutrality in 2045 while remaining an industrial country; carbon pricing and a shift into the EU's second trading system, with revenues returned; power costs cut by at least five cents per kilowatt-hour, starting with the electricity tax at the European minimum; and lignite paths to 2038, timed to construction of controllable gas plants.

In September 2025 he opposed wider subsidies for household solar. Undirected aid was not enough, he wrote: compulsory rooftop panels had overloaded grids, and the government of Katherina Reiche, with his group, was moving support to system-serving plants and storage. He cited the Solarspitzengesetz, passed with the Greens, which stops the feed-in tariff when prices are negative, and wrote that large plants were more efficient. In August 2026, as CDU rapporteur for the grid package and reform of the Renewable Energy Sources Act—ZfK also named him on the building-modernization and power-plant bills—he called the cabinet drafts helpful. The 80 percent renewable-electricity goal for 2030 continued only with storage, he said, and policy had to leave subsidies for the market. He ruled out restoring the feed-in tariff. A capped, system-serving connection, with incentives beyond it for storage, electrolysers and heat stores, should go further. In May 2026, amid objections to a southern preference for new gas plants, MDR Aktuell reported that he expected plants in eastern Germany as well.

Housing and the economy

The CDU/CSU group lists him as its Obmann on the Committee on Housing, Urban Development, Building and Municipalities and as deputy chair of the matching working group. On 10 February 2023 he backed "housing first" and the European Social Charter aim of ending homelessness by 2030, but rejected a Left call to seize vacant homes. Cooperation with housing companies, cooperatives and the community, as in Dresden, worked better, he said. New building was the best help against homelessness. A target of 400,000 homes a year was then, he said, a dream, and one federal scheme would not fit every local market.

In January 2025 he opposed ending the modernization levy for energy-saving heating that still used oil or gas. Section 559 of the Civil Code lets landlords pass on up to 8 percent of specified costs. About 71 percent of 42 million dwellings used oil or gas, he wrote; dropping the levy risked a backlog where renewables were unrealistic, while the percentage cap protected tenants. He would not rule out green gas or green heating oil, and called this his group's line too. The 2025 coalition agreement, which he did not draft alone, says the parties will abolish the heating law, make the Building Energy Act more technology-open with carbon avoidance as the control, secure "building type E", and use guarantees so that homes in tight markets can be built for under 15 euros a square metre. In July 2024 he said value lost with lignite had to be replaced, and faulted the then coalition for not prioritizing an ICE route via Cottbus to Görlitz, electrification of the Dresden–Görlitz line, or a wider A4. The later agreement, which he described as the negotiated course, ties climate policy to competitiveness by returning carbon revenues and cutting the electricity tax, an approach he said should avoid deindustrialization.

Outside offices and declared income

Members of the Bundestag file notices under the code of conduct, sections 45 onwards of the Members of the Bundestag Act, within three months of taking their seats and, during a term, within three months of any change. An entry is published once the administration has checked that publication is required. Side income above 1,000 euros in a month, or 3,000 euros in a year, must be shown to the cent; section 51 provides for sanctions. A biography on the same page rests on the member's own statements. Rohwer's published pre-mandate occupation is bank clerk at Dresdner Bank AG in Frankfurt am Main, with a right to return and protection against dismissal.

Civic, sporting and church roles

Several association offices are marked honorary. He is unpaid president of the Saxony branch of the German Youth Hostel Association, based in Chemnitz; the biography dates the presidency from 2022. On 8 February 2025 the members' assembly elected an honorary presidium with him as president, beside a full-time executive board. He is honorary first vice-president of Dresdner SC 1898 in Dresden, listed by the club beside president Birke Tröger. The biography dates the vice-presidency from 2013 and the athletics-section leadership from 2001 to 2005.

He chairs, unpaid, the support association of the Kreuzkirche, Dresden, dated in the biography from 2014, and sits on the council of the support foundation of the Dresdner Kreuzchor. The biography lists him as a founding board member of that foundation from 2005 to 2022. He is on the Kuratorium of the Saxony branch of the German Red Cross; the same account records the chair of the Dresden district branch from 2012 to 2022. From 14 August 2025 he has been honorary chair of the Saxony branch of the German Library Association, and from 12 October 2026 an honorary member of the national association's advisory board in Berlin. The Saxon branch describes itself as representing about 400 public and 43 academic libraries. He is an honorary trustee of the Federal Foundation Bauakademie in Berlin and, until 2 June 2025, was an assessor on the board of the German-Korean Forum, with no income figure published.

The biography also records the chair of the trustees of the Saxon state centre for political education (2002–2015), the trustees and advisory board of the Evangelische Hochschule Dresden (2006–2016), the administrative board of the Sächsische Aufbaubank (2011–2021), and the trustees of the school foundation of Saxony's Evangelical Lutheran regional church (2013–2021). It dates his presidency of the Sächsische Landesvereinigung für Gesundheitsförderung from 2013 to 2025. At the association's 2025 general meeting Alexander Dierks was elected to succeed him after more than twelve years in office.

Two 2026 items are published as benefits for political activity rather than as fees. The Taipei Representative Office in Germany, Taiwan's representation in Berlin, covered travel costs of 8,090 euros. The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation in Hanau is entered for 13,500 euros for placing a stipend holder. Its programme "Wissenschaft trifft Politik" puts recently qualified physicists in a member's office for generally three months and pays the stipend holder 4,500 euros a month. Abgeordnetenwatch notes that the 13,500 euros went directly to the stipend holder.

Corporate boards

Three posts are published with gross annual figures. He sits on the supervisory board of IPRO DRESDEN Planungs- und Ingenieuraktiengesellschaft in Dresden at 11,900 euros a year, and on that of Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG in Cottbus, a mining company in the LEAG group, at 11,900 euros a year plus irregular payments of 1,190 euros gross in 2025. The company lists him on that board. On 5 July 2024 he told the Bundestag that the LEAG seat was an employee-representative mandate he held as a member of IG BCE, together with the SPD deputy Maja Wallstein. Until 31 December 2025 he was on the eastern advisory board of Landesbank Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, filed under public-law corporations, at 3,689 euros gross a year. Abgeordnetenwatch republishes the same three paid entries.

Public debate

The narrow 2021 result

On election night of 26 September 2021 the provisional count in constituency 160, Dresden II – Bautzen II, put Lars Rohwer of the CDU 39 first votes ahead of Andreas Harlaß of the AfD. The AfD in Saxony said a sample recheck by the constituency returning officer, in eight of 365 polling stations in Dresden, had moved four further votes toward Harlaß. State chair Jörg Urban called that refusal a “stoic refusal” aimed, he said, at denying the AfD another direct Bundestag seat. The state executive alleged no deliberate manipulation and said counting errors could not be ruled out. Lawyer Joachim Keiler called a challenge justified; neither returning officer ordered a full recount.

On 30 September 2021 the Dresden constituency committee corrected arithmetical errors, established the result and refused a full recount. The Federal Returning Officer’s final figures are 35,014 first votes for Rohwer and 34,979 for Harlaß, a margin of 35, each at 18.6 percent.

Harlaß and another Dresden voter, through Keiler, objected on 22 November 2021 (WP 1744/21) and asked that the poll be repeated. They cited eight faulty records, an opaque computer check, implausible turnout on the city website, and one ballot issued without a postal-vote certificate being collected. On 23 June 2022 the election-scrutiny committee found the objection admissible but unfounded: the count was lawful, preparatory recounts need not be public, the software only flagged doubtful figures, the turnout anomaly was a website grouping, and one irregular ballot could not move a margin of 35. The Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten reported on 1 July 2022 that the rejection left Rohwer the winner. On 7 July the Bundestag adopted the recommendations, with no votes against and no abstentions, and left the constituency result in place. On 8 September the Freie Presse reported that Harlaß had gone to the Federal Constitutional Court over postal votes.

In February 2025 he told Abgeordnetenwatch there would be “no coalition, no joint motions, no cooperation of any kind” with the AfD, which he called in part right-wing extremist and hostile to the European Union.

Questions about outside roles

The Bundestag register lists Rohwer on the supervisory board of Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG in Cottbus, at 11,900 euros gross a year plus 1,190 euros gross in irregular payments in 2025, and as a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy. LEAG places him on the mining company’s board, not on that of Lausitz Energie Kraftwerke AG. On 5 July 2024 Rohwer interjected that compensation of about 1.7 billion euros was fixed in statute, and said that he and SPD deputy Maja Wallstein sat on the board as employee representatives for IG BCE, for regional jobs.

On 18 November 2025 the European Commission approved German aid of up to 1.75 billion euros for Lausitz Energie Kraftwerke AG, for extra fixed costs and forgone profits from closing lignite plants in Lusatia by 2038 under the coal phase-out law. LEAG said the Bundestag had passed the payment changes that review required. On Abgeordnetenwatch, Frank W. (26 February 2026), who said Rohwer had voted for the amending law, and Uwe L. (20 March) asked him to explain the committee seat and paid board role given that compensation. Both were still unanswered. National and Saxon reporting consulted here described no investigation, recusal or breach of the disclosure rules.