Matthias Hauer

Matthias Hauer (born 18 December 1977 in Hattingen) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). He has represented the Essen III constituency, covering the south and west of Essen in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the Bundestag since 2013. In May 2025 he became Parliamentary State Secretary to Federal Minister Dorothee Bär at the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space, in the cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

After his Abitur in Essen in 1997 and basic military service in the city, Hauer studied law at Ruhr University Bochum from 1998 to 2003 and passed the first state examination in law that year. He completed his legal traineeship at Essen Regional Court, passed the second state examination in 2005 and was admitted as a Rechtsanwalt. He has held the specialist lawyer’s title for banking and capital-markets law since 2010 and was a partner in the Wuppertal firm Esch & Kramer from 2009 to 2023. Paid work for Dr. Esch & Partner Rechtsanwälte ended on 5 May 2025.

Hauer joined the Junge Union in 1993 and the CDU in 1994. He sat on Essen’s district council IX, for Werden, Kettwig and Bredeney, from 1999 to 2004, and on the Essen city council from 2004 to 2013. He has chaired the CDU in Essen since 2015 and has been a member of the CDU state executive in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2018. On 30 August 2025 a state party congress in Bonn created an additional deputy chair for the Ruhr CDU and elected Hauer to it, at the same congress that re-elected state chair Hendrik Wüst.

In the 2013 federal election the Essen III seat, then numbered 120, produced the closest constituency result in the country. A full recount gave Hauer 59,101 first votes to 59,008 for Social Democratic Party of Germany candidate Petra Hinz, a margin of 93. He again won the direct mandate in 2017, 2021 and 2025. At the election of 23 February 2025, in constituency 119, he received 35.7 percent of valid first votes (55,807), ahead of Albert Ritter of the SPD on 24.7 percent. Turnout was 84.5 percent of 186,492 eligible voters, and the CDU first-vote share stood 5.0 percentage points above the 2021 result.

In parliament he was the CDU/CSU group’s Obmann on the 19th Bundestag’s third committee of inquiry into the Wirecard scandal, and in the 20th term the group’s Obmann on the Finance Committee. Since April 2021 he has chaired the CDU/CSU working group on the Ruhr and has been deputy chair of the group’s North Rhine-Westphalia Landesgruppe. He is deputy chair of the German–Central American parliamentary friendship group. Disclosed roles at Sparkasse Essen, Stadtwerke Essen and the Rheinischer Sparkassen- und Giroverband, together with his paid legal practice, ended on 5 May 2025. His unpaid membership of the administrative council and of the budget-control and audit committee of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority lasted until 18 December 2025.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Matthias Hauer was born on 18 December 1977 in Hattingen, in the Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis of North Rhine-Westphalia. Hattingen lies on the southern edge of the Ruhr metropolitan region and has about 56,000 inhabitants. The town's own account ties its modern history to the region's industry, above all the Henrichshütte iron- and steelworks, which began production in 1854 and closed after the last tap in December 1987.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on information supplied by members themselves, does not name his school. It records that he passed the Abitur—the school-leaving certificate that confers a general university entrance qualification—in Essen in 1997. The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space states that he has been active in local politics in Essen since 1993. That was the year he joined the Young Union (Junge Union Deutschlands), the Christian-democratic youth association aligned with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union, though it is organizationally independent of both parties. He joined the CDU itself in 1994, three years before the Abitur.

Military service and legal training

After the Abitur he performed basic military service (Grundwehrdienst) in Essen from 1997 to 1998, while conscription for men was still in force. The Bundestag suspended compulsory service in peacetime on 24 March 2011, with effect from 1 July 2011, about 55 years after it had been introduced. He then read law from 1998 to 2003 at Ruhr University Bochum, in the Ruhr city of Bochum.

In 2003 he passed the first state examination in law (Erstes Juristisches Staatsexamen). Under the German Judiciary Act (Deutsches Richtergesetz), the qualification for judicial office is acquired by completing a university course in law with a first examination and then a preparatory service closed by a second state examination. The Federal Lawyers' Act (Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung) makes that qualification the ordinary requirement for admission as a lawyer. The preparatory service lasts two years. It includes compulsory stages in civil matters at an ordinary court, with a public prosecutor's office or a criminal court, in an administrative authority and with a lawyer, together with one or more elective stages.

From 2003 to 2005 Hauer was a trainee (Rechtsreferendar) at the Essen regional court (Landgericht Essen). That span matches the two-year preparatory service set by the Judiciary Act. The Bundestag biography adds that he also did legal work alongside the traineeship; it does not name the employer. In 2005 he passed the second state examination in law and was admitted as a Rechtsanwalt. The ministry biography gives the same sequence: military service, the Bochum degree and first examination in 2003, the traineeship at the Essen regional court, and the second examination and bar admission in 2005.

Legal career

Admission and specialist qualification

Matthias Hauer was admitted as a Rechtsanwalt in 2005, the year he passed the second state examination in law. His biography on the website of the Bundestag still gives that profession and records that he has been a Fachanwalt für Bank- und Kapitalmarktrecht since 2010.

The title is not a further academic degree. Section 43c of the Federal Lawyers' Act (Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung) allows a lawyer with special knowledge and experience in a field to use a Fachanwalt designation, for at most three fields. The board of the competent regional bar decides after a committee has examined the evidence, and it may later revoke the permission if prescribed continuing education is omitted. The conditions are set by the Fachanwaltsordnung of the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer. In the 2026 text, an applicant must have been admitted and practising for three years within the six years before the application, and normally shows theoretical knowledge by a course of at least 120 hours plus written examinations. For banking and capital-markets law, 60 cases must have been handled personally and independently in the five years before the application, at least 30 of them formal proceedings, across at least three parts of a syllabus covering the bank-customer relationship, credit, payments, capital markets, banking supervision and procedure. Holders must publish or train in the field for at least 15 hours each calendar year. Hauer received the title in 2010; this is the Federal Bar's later text, not the file on which his application was decided.

Partnership and practice alongside the mandate

From 2009 to 2023 Hauer was a partner in the Wuppertal practice which the Bundestag biography calls the Sozietät Esch & Kramer Rechtsanwälte. The mandatory disclosures enter the same work as that of a lawyer at Dr. Esch & Partner Rechtsanwälte mbB in Wuppertal, also given as his occupation before he entered the Bundestag. The firm's imprint uses the legal name Dr. Esch & Partner Rechtsanwälte mit beschränkter Berufshaftung, records the partnership at the local court in Essen as PR 482, and lists offices in Wuppertal and Düsseldorf. The partnership belongs to the Düsseldorf bar, and Hauer is not among the partners named there. A participation in the firm was disclosed until 26 March 2023.

The work was also disclosed as remunerated activity alongside the mandate. In the 18th electoral period, outside income was published in ten steps, from step 1 (1,000 to 3,500 euros) to step 10 (more than 250,000 euros). His lawyer's earnings were recorded as monthly step 1 until 31 March 2014, step 4 from April 2014, step 5 for 2015 and step 4 for 2016. On 6 September 2021 he told Parliamentwatch that he was still admitted as a lawyer but was no longer practising and then had no income from the work. The Bundestag listing of the remunerated activity nevertheless continued, without a separate euro amount in the later entry, until 5 May 2025. Since May 2025 he has been Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. Parliamentary state secretaries are covered by the rule for federal ministers that the office-holder may not, alongside the office, hold another salaried post or carry on a trade or a profession.

Local politics in Essen

District council

Hauer's first elected office was a seat on Essen's Bezirksvertretung IX from 1999 to 2004, begun when he was 21. The city's Hauptsatzung designates Stadtbezirk IX as Werden / Kettwig / Bredeney and assigns it the Stadtteile Bredeney, Schuir, Werden, Heidhausen, Fischlaken and Kettwig, along the Ruhr on the southern edge of Essen. Under the Gemeindeordnung of North Rhine-Westphalia, a kreisfreie Stadt must divide its territory into districts, and each district elects a Bezirksvertretung for five years. Essen elects 19 members in each of nine districts. Those bodies decide matters whose importance does not extend substantially beyond the district—upkeep of local schools and public facilities, monuments and green space, the sequencing of work on local streets, and support for local associations—within guidelines and funds set by the city council, and they are heard before the council acts on important plans affecting the district.

In the municipal election of 12 September 1999, the election that seated that term, the Christian Democratic Union took 63.8 percent of the vote and 12 of 19 seats in Bezirksvertretung IX. The Social Democratic Party received 21.7 percent and four seats, Alliance 90/The Greens 9.9 percent and two, and the FDP 3.8 percent and one. The same day, citywide, the CDU won 49.4 percent and 40 of 82 seats on the council, ahead of the SPD on 35.0 percent and 29 seats, and Wolfgang Reiniger of the CDU was elected Oberbürgermeister with 51.7 percent of the valid vote. The southern district was thus a stronger CDU area than the city as a whole. By the next district election, on 26 September 2004, the CDU share there had fallen 11.5 points to 52.3 percent, still enough for 10 of 19 seats, with turnout at 63.1 percent against 49.5 percent citywide. Public minutes and press accounts do not document particular motions Hauer introduced in the district body; the membership is recorded in the Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is compiled from members' own information.

Essen city council

The same biography records him as a member of the Rat der Stadt Essen from 2004 to 2013. An archived text of that biography from December 2013, when he had just entered the Bundestag, adds that he was latterly the CDU group's spokesperson on public-order and personnel policy (ordnungs- und personalpolitischer Sprecher) and a member of the group executive. A Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung profile of 17 September 2013, written during his Bundestag campaign, independently described the lawyer, who had grown up in Steele and Bredeney, as a city councillor since 2005 and as the group's ordnungspolitischer Sprecher. The published record does not reconcile "2004" with "since 2005", and it does not identify the ward or list place through which he was elected. The dates in the biography span the councils chosen on 26 September 2004 and 30 August 2009.

The council has 82 members, half elected in Wahlbezirke and half from reserve lists. In 2004 the CDU remained the largest group but dropped to 39.4 percent and 32 seats, of which 20 were direct mandates; the SPD took 34.2 percent and 28 seats. Turnout was 49.5 percent. In 2009 the balance changed. The SPD led with 37.2 percent and 31 seats, all of them direct mandates, and the CDU fell to 31.9 percent and 26 seats, only 10 of them won in wards. Reinhard Paß of the SPD was elected Oberbürgermeister with 46.1 percent of the valid vote. Hauer's later council years therefore ran under an SPD mayor and an SPD plurality, while Bezirksvertretung IX stayed under CDU leadership. The biography places the end of the council membership in 2013, the year he took his Bundestag seat, without giving a resignation date. Beyond the spokesperson role in the 2013 biography and the WAZ profile, contemporary reporting does not set out a separate record of individual council initiatives.

Party offices

Junge Union

Hauer joined the Junge Union in 1993 and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1994. From 2000 to 2007 he sat on the state executive of the Junge Union in North Rhine-Westphalia, latterly as its legal adviser (Landesjustitiar). He chaired the Junge Union in Essen from 2003 to 2007 and, from 2007 to 2010, its regional association for the Ruhr. The Bundestag biography that records these posts states that the biographical details come from the members themselves.

CDU Essen

On the Essen CDU he has been a member of the district executive since 2007. From 2009 to 2015 he chaired a city-district branch (Stadtbezirksverband), and from 2011 to 2015 he was deputy district chairman.

In June 2015 Franz-Josef Britz left the district chair after twelve years. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that, at a district congress, he handed the office to Hauer and treated the handover as a generational change in the local leadership. Hauer has been district chairman (Kreisvorsitzender) since 2015.

Delegates have renewed that mandate more than once. Radio Essen reported that a congress in the Grugahalle at the beginning of July 2021 returned him with about 82 percent of the vote, six years after he had taken the chair, and that a further congress in the Essen trade-fair halls on 16 September 2023 did so with more than 93 percent.

The latest election was on 5 July 2025, again at the trade fair, in the Congress Center Süd. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Hauer was re-elected as the district association turned to its municipal campaign, and described a 50 percent quota for women as a novelty at that congress. The Essen CDU put his share of the vote at 96.84 percent. Under the state statute, the quota for board offices from district level upward had risen to 50 percent from 1 July 2025.

CDU North Rhine-Westphalia

He first joined the state executive at the 41st state congress, held in Bielefeld on 9 June 2018. The Rheinische Post reported that Armin Laschet was re-elected state chairman there with 96.3 percent. The state association's results list Hauer among the ordinary members (Beisitzer) with 54.2 percent, and the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung noted a few days later that he had just been elected to the state executive. The Bundestag biography dates that membership from 2018.

On 30 August 2025 the 47th state congress met in Bonn, with about 680 delegates. Minister-President Hendrik Wüst was re-elected state chairman with 98 percent, and general secretary Paul Ziemiak received 91 percent. Hauer was not elected state chairman; that office remained Wüst's.

The congress amended the state statute. WDR reported that the change created an additional deputy state chair for the Ruhr CDU, and that Hauer, the member of the Bundestag from Essen, was newly elected to the state executive, while the other deputy posts stayed with Jan Heinisch, Ina Scharrenbach, Sabine Verheyen, Daniel Sieveke and Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker. The party's own result names the same six, Hauer included, as deputy state chairs and does not publish separate percentages. The statute as later issued provides for six deputy chairs, chosen together in a group ballot, without reserving a seat by name for the Ruhr. Because he had already been an ordinary member of the executive since 2018, the 2025 vote moved him into a deputy chair rather than placing him on the board for the first time.

Bundestag elections

The 2009 candidacy and the 2013 recount

Hauer was the Christian Democratic Union of Germany candidate in Essen III at the 2009 Bundestag election and lost to the sitting Social Democratic Party of Germany member Petra Hinz. The constituency was then numbered 121. Hinz took 57,055 first votes (38.6 percent) and the CDU 53,269 (36.1 percent), a margin of 3,786, on a turnout of 75.5 percent among 197,729 eligible voters. In 2005 the SPD’s first-vote share in the same seat had been 48.1 percent, against 37.4 percent for the CDU; in 2009 the SPD also led the second vote, 31.0 percent to 30.0 percent.

Numbered 120 in 2013, the seat produced the narrowest constituency result in the country. The preliminary count on 22 September gave Hauer 59,043 first votes and Hinz 59,040, both 39.5 percent. Der Spiegel reported that Hauer was the only CDU candidate to win a constituency in the Ruhr. Hinz, who had won the seat four years earlier by nearly 4,000 votes, asked for the ballots to be checked.

A review of the polling-station minutes found inconsistencies, and a partial recount — 23 of 190 districts, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung told Der Spiegel — put Hinz ahead by 31 votes. The constituency returning officer, Essen’s mayor Reinhard Paß (SPD), proposed a full recount, and the election committee ordered all 149,407 ballot papers counted again. About 800 helpers counted on the Saturday and checked the totals on the Sunday; only figures that agreed were kept. The result announced on 30 September was 59,101 for Hauer and 59,008 for Hinz, a margin of 93. The federal and North Rhine-Westphalia returning officers published the same CDU and SPD shares, 39.5 percent each, named Hauer as elected, and recorded turnout of 77.2 percent among 195,692 eligible voters. Paß said the shift from election night was within the usual tolerance for counting error and had mattered only because the result was so close. Both candidates were high enough on the state lists that either would have entered parliament without the direct mandate, and the recount was not expected to change the allocation of seats.

The 2017 and 2021 elections

Essen III was still Wahlkreis 120 in 2017, and Hauer held it. The CDU received 56,393 first votes (37.1 percent) and the SPD 46,829 (30.8 percent), a margin of 9,564. The Free Democratic Party (Germany) took 12,639 (8.3 percent), Alliance 90/The Greens 12,511 (8.2 percent), the Alternative for Germany 12,306 (8.1 percent) and Die Linke 9,846 (6.5 percent). Turnout was 79.5 percent of 192,918 eligible voters; second votes were led by the CDU on 30.1 percent, the SPD on 24.7 percent and the FDP on 15.1 percent. The SPD’s candidate, nominated in December 2016 by 83 votes to 52, was Gereon Wolters.

In 2021 the first-vote margin fell to 1,023. Hauer took 46,635 votes (30.7 percent) and the SPD, with Wolters as its candidate, 45,612 (30.0 percent); the Greens rose to 28,745 (18.9 percent), with the FDP on 10,871 (7.2 percent), the AfD on 8,225 (5.4 percent) and Die Linke on 5,030 (3.3 percent). Turnout was 80.3 percent of 190,335 eligible voters. Second votes went the other way: the SPD led on 28.0 percent, the CDU had 24.4 percent and the Greens 20.2 percent.

The 2025 election and the Essen III constituency

For the election of 23 February 2025 the seat was renumbered 119. Population change had moved one constituency from Saxony-Anhalt to Bavaria, so the numbers of former constituencies 72 to 255 changed; North Rhine-Westphalia kept 64 constituencies, now numbered 86 to 149, and Essen III was not among the 16 whose boundaries were redrawn. It still comprises Stadtbezirke II, III, VIII and IX of Essen, the same four boroughs listed for Wahlkreis 120 in 2017; the city’s other boroughs lie in Mülheim – Essen I and Essen II.

Hauer won 55,807 first votes (35.7 percent, up 5.0 points on 2021). Albert Ritter of the SPD was second with 38,546 (24.7 percent, down 5.4). The Greens received 24,617 (15.8 percent), the AfD 18,563 (11.9 percent), Die Linke 11,667 (7.5 percent), the FDP 4,835 (3.1 percent), the Free Voters 1,751 (1.1 percent) and the MLPD 380 (0.2 percent). Of 186,492 eligible voters, 157,566 voted, a turnout of 84.5 percent (up 4.2 points). Second votes were CDU 29.6 percent, SPD 21.2 percent, Greens 16.1 percent, AfD 12.1 percent and Die Linke 9.0 percent.

The direct mandate is the first-vote plurality. Where the SPD had led heavily in 2005 and held the seat in 2009, Hauer’s wins from 2013 made Essen III a CDU constituency in the Ruhr, including in 2021, when the SPD still led the second vote. In 2025 a constituency win no longer by itself guaranteed a Bundestag seat; Hauer nevertheless took it, and the Bundestag lists him, a member since 2013, for Wahlkreis 119.

Finance committee and the Wirecard inquiry

The Finance Committee

Hauer was an ordinary member of the Bundestag Finance Committee in the 18th, 19th and 20th legislative periods. The 20th-term biography, which the Bundestag notes rests on members' own statements, records that from January 2022 he was also CDU/CSU Obmann, the group's lead member in the committee. In the 19th term the committee led on the bill to strengthen financial-market integrity after the Wirecard collapse. Hauer was a rapporteur, with Cansel Kiziltepe of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Florian Toncar of the Free Democratic Party (Germany) (FDP) and Lisa Paus of Alliance 90/The Greens, for the recommendation of 19 May 2021 (Drucksache 19/29879).

The Wirecard investigative committee

On 1 October 2020 the Bundestag, on a motion from the FDP, Die Linke and the Greens and with the governing coalition abstaining, set up the third committee of inquiry of the 19th term. Chaired by Kay Gottschalk of the Alternative for Germany, the nine-member body was to establish what the federal government, its authorities and the auditors knew of suspected balance-sheet fraud, market manipulation and money laundering at the payments company, insolvent since June 2020, and whether supervision had been exercised. Hauer was the CDU/CSU Obmann.

Public sitting of the Bundestag Wirecard committee of inquiry on 11 February 2021.

From 19 November 2020 to 8 June 2021 the committee heard 105 witnesses in 32 sittings, most of them public, and by 9 June had questioned 110 people orally or in writing, among them former Wirecard directors, auditors, supervisors, Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum and short sellers. Hauer told the plenary that the work had taken 52 sittings in under nine months. From 4 March 2021 four auditors, as special investigators, reviewed files from Ernst & Young (EY), Wirecard's long-time auditor. At the sitting of 11 February 2021, which heard DPR president Edgar Ernst and Hesse economy minister Tarek Al-Wazir, Hauer asked why BaFin had referred an examination to the private German Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel when it knew that body could not uncover fraud, and said the arrangement had been doomed from the start.

Kay Gottschalk gave the report, Drucksache 19/30900, more than 2,000 pages, to Bundestag president Wolfgang Schäuble on 22 June 2021. With no single assessment, it contains a CDU/CSU–SPD valuation and dissents from the FDP, Die Linke and the Greens, and from the AfD. The coalition text finds a collectively executed balance-sheet fraud, internal controls kept deliberately ineffective, and EY's unqualified opinions repeatedly dispersing suspicions, including after Financial Times reporting from October 2019. It finds no sign that the Chancellery gave Wirecard special treatment, or that Angela Merkel's mention of the firm on a September 2019 trip to China had a concrete effect.

On 25 June 2021 the Bundestag took note of the report unanimously. Hauer described a criminal case, serious errors by the auditors and "a multiple failure of German financial supervision reaching into the Federal Ministry of Finance." BaFin had, he said, sided with Wirecard through a short-selling ban he called unlawful and through criminal complaints against journalists, and neither Finance Minister Olaf Scholz nor state secretary Jörg Kukies had "pulled the ripcord."

Financial-supervision debate

That charge went beyond the joint text, which did not assign responsibility to the minister. At the handover Hauer said: "The political responsibility lies with Olaf Scholz. Full stop." The ministry, he said, had looked away, failed to act and hindered the inquiry; Scholz had appeared as a "silent minister," with thin excuses and late files; and BaFin and the ministry had spent years in a "supervisory deep sleep." The shared report was, in his words, no blank cheque, and stopped short of the contrary finding because the SPD had wanted to protect its candidate for chancellor. The Union did not, unlike the AfD, demand Scholz's resignation. The AfD dissent said both the SPD and the CDU/CSU had softened the responsibility of their own decision-makers; the other dissent called the case the largest post-war stock-market and financial scandal, enabled by collective supervisory failure and the wish for a national digital champion. Hauer also called the scandal "a testament to the failure of auditors."

On 22 April 2021 Hauer asked Scholz whether he personally bore responsibility for the scandal not having surfaced earlier. Scholz answered "No," and declined to place that responsibility on his state secretaries or the ministry. He called protection of Wirecard by BaFin or the ministry an "absurd fairy tale," pointed to criminal conduct and to EY, and said the ministry was not to override individual BaFin decisions without signs of a mistake. Hauer put to him three emails sent from a private account, including one to Chancellery chief Helge Braun about ending the contract with the DPR, and said that correspondence should already have been produced under the evidence order. Scholz said he could not readily remember and that he deleted private mail out of concern about hacking; Hauer described "a minister between looking away and the delete key."

In the 25 June debate, SPD member Jens Zimmermann treated that line as political noise and placed EY's auditors at the centre of the scandal. The main statute was already law. On 20 May 2021 the Bundestag adopted the Financial Market Integrity Strengthening Act in the Finance Committee's amended form: the coalition in favour, the FDP against, and the AfD, Die Linke and the Greens abstaining. The committee version concentrated balance-sheet enforcement at BaFin rather than keeping a revised dual system with the DPR, and the act also restricted trading by BaFin staff and tightened auditor rotation, the separation of audit and consulting, and auditors' liability. In the June debate Hauer listed balance-sheet control "from a single source" among results he said bore the Union's mark. Scholz remained finance minister. Hauer's later honorary seat on BaFin's administrative council, recorded in the Bundestag biography as ending on 18 December 2025, is a separate office.

Parliamentary State Secretary

Appointment

In May 2025 Matthias Hauer became Parliamentary State Secretary to Dorothee Bär, Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space, in the cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. On 28 April the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union had published their proposed list. Radio Essen reported that Merz had nominated the Essen deputy, still subject to Social Democratic agreement, and that Hauer would remain a member of the Bundestag and represent the ministry there. The Bundestag lists that function for the 21st legislative period.

Parliamentary state secretaries are not members of the federal government. They support an assigned minister, must themselves be Bundestag members, and hold a public-law office of the Federation; the President of Germany appoints them on the Chancellor’s proposal, made with the minister’s agreement. Bär is assisted by Hauer and by Dr Silke Launert of the Christian Social Union, and by the civil-servant state secretaries Dr Rolf-Dieter Jungk and Dr Marcus Pleyer. No division of subjects between the two parliamentary state secretaries has been published.

Portfolio

The Chancellor’s organisational decree of 6 May 2025 renamed the Federal Ministry of Education and Research the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space. General, school and vocational education, lifelong learning, and the related education research and financing moved to the ministry then renamed for education, family, senior citizens, women and youth. From the economics ministry the research ministry received space, including the German Aerospace Center, the principles of innovation and technology policy, development of digital technologies, the High-Tech Agenda, gigafactories, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND) and games. From the transport ministry it received promotion of U-spaces and advanced air mobility, Earth observation, satellite navigation and communication, and the German Galileo PRS authority; quantum technologies and nuclear fusion remained.

The ministry describes a leadership staff and eight departments, from strategy and international affairs through space and security, the science system, technological sovereignty, health and the life sciences, and basic research for sustainable development. Space policy, on its account, covers industry, programmes and international cooperation, together with civil security and the security of space activities; technology policy covers artificial intelligence, microelectronics, supercomputing, robotics, batteries and transfer, including through SPRIND. A notice published on 10 July 2025 reported that Hauer had presented that year’s VIP+ validation prizes, for moving research into use, to BioCORE (Reverion, a Technical University of Munich spin-off), Next-Gen-Chlor (Nano Cats, from the Technical University of Berlin) and Robust3D at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research.

Health-research strategy roles

Health funding is described as aimed at new active substances, medicines, vaccines and therapies, with priorities that include cancer, dementia, and post-infectious conditions such as post- and Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Hauer chairs the strategy circle of the National Decade against Cancer, whose initiator is the research ministry. The circle sets the decade’s goals and fields of action and established working groups on unsolved questions in cancer research, prevention, and linking research with care. A membership sheet issued under the ministry’s previous name listed Mario Brandenburg, then parliamentary state secretary, as chair and Professor Michael Baumann, chair of the German Cancer Research Center, as co-chair. The programme’s later page lists Hauer as chair and Baumann as co-chair, with the health ministry, patient organisations, professional societies and research institutions also represented. In a 3 July 2025 interview he stressed patient-oriented research, cancer in older age, European cooperation and early-career researchers.

On World Cancer Day, 4 February 2026, he visited the National Center for Tumor Diseases West in Essen, including the West German Proton Therapy Centre, and handed over funding decisions for I-CHECK-HEART and BALANCE-ET, two projects under the decade. University Medicine Essen and the centre reported about €3.6 million in all, of which about €1.6 million was for Essen teams led by Tienush Rassaf and Kathrin Thedieck.

A separate steering body covers post-infectious disease. After the budget committee’s adjustment session in November 2025, the ministry said a National Decade against Post-Infectious Diseases, running from 2026 to 2035, would be equipped with €500 million. Bär launched it in Berlin on 30 January 2026. Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported that she expected the steering circle to meet within days and that Hauer would chair it, on the model of the cancer decade. The ministry’s account of the first meeting, on 27 February 2026, does not name an individual chair. Experts from twelve institutions took part, spanning federal and Land ministries, patient representation, cohort studies and university medicine, the German Centres for Health Research, Helmholtz, Leibniz, the Berlin Institute of Health and the research-based pharmaceutical industry. They agreed genome sequencing of existing cohorts to look for biomarkers and risk factors, more support for clinical studies, and working groups on translation, research infrastructures and biosamples, and research close to care.

The ministry later quoted Hauer that, for post- and Long COVID and ME/CFS, practical therapy and diagnostics had to stand beside basic research. It published two funding guidelines, one for clinical studies of post-acute infection syndromes and one for investigator-initiated studies across diseases, and put the decade at about €50 million a year within the €500 million; since 2014, it said, about €200 million had gone into roughly 100 clinical studies.

Other offices and side activities

Savings bank and municipal companies

Until 5 May 2025 the Bundestag register of disclosable activities listed Matthias Hauer as deputy chairman of the administrative board of Sparkasse Essen and as a member of its main committee (Hauptausschuss) and risk committee. The bank's 2024 annual report names him first deputy to the chair, Essen mayor Thomas Kufen, and records remuneration of €12,500 for him that year. Ordinary board members received a flat €2,650 a year, plus €2,000 for the risk committee and €550 per meeting of the board or its committees. The Bundestag published one combined gross figure for the Sparkasse Essen posts: €18,400 in 2022, €16,200 in 2023, €12,500 in 2024 and €3,975 in 2025, amounts that under the rules of conduct are not taxable income.

The same register records two unpaid roles that also ended on 5 May 2025: membership of the assembly of the Rheinischer Sparkassen- und Giroverband in Düsseldorf, and a seat on the board of trustees of the Sparkasse Essen foundation for older people, people with disabilities and young people. He was a member of the supervisory board of Stadtwerke Essen AG, which supplies Essen with electricity, gas and water, until the same date. Published gross pay for that seat was €1,400 in 2021, €2,900 in 2022, €3,000 in 2023 and €2,500 in 2024.

BaFin administrative council

Section 7 of the Finanzdienstleistungsaufsichtsgesetz establishes an administrative council at the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) to monitor the agency's management and support its work. Of its 17 voting members, five are Bundestag members, proposed by parliament for one electoral term and remaining until successors are appointed; the Federal Ministry of Finance makes the appointments. BaFin states that the council also adopts the agency's budget, which is paid for by supervised firms and is not part of the federal budget.

On 19 April 2018 the Bundestag adopted Drucksache 19/1318 by a large majority, with Die Linke abstaining. The motion of the CDU/CSU, SPD, AfD and FDP named Hauer as a CDU/CSU member of the council, with Carsten Brodesser as deputy. For the 20th electoral term the groups again proposed him, in Drucksache 20/1049 of 16 March 2022, with Florian Oßner as deputy. His biography records the council seat and membership of BaFin's budget-control and audit committee (Haushaltskontroll- und Prüfungsausschuss) as honorary, with no published remuneration, and as ending on 18 December 2025. BaFin's list of council members as of April 2026 does not include him.

Parliamentary friendship group and honorary posts

The current biography lists Hauer as deputy chair of the Deutsch-Mittelamerikanische Parlamentariergruppe. The Bundestag's list of group boards for the 20th electoral term names him a CDU/CSU deputy chair, with Axel Echeverria (SPD) as chair. That list gives the group's partner parliaments as those of Belize, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. A Bundestag press release of 29 January 2024 said he would travel with the group, led by Echeverria, to Guatemala, Belize and Jamaica from 4 to 13 February, for talks on bilateral relations, the rule of law, corruption and human rights.

The current register lists, as honorary, a seat on the board of trustees of the Essen branch of the Deutscher Kinderschutzbund, and, until 5 May 2025, the administrative board of Diakoniewerk Essen and the presidium of the friends' association of the University of Duisburg-Essen. The biography for the 20th electoral term dates the Kinderschutzbund seat from 21 November 2023. From 23 July 2025 the biography lists him as a member of the senate of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft; no remuneration is published for that seat.

Political positions

Fiscal and financial-market policy

From January 2022, in the 20th term, Hauer was the CDU/CSU spokesperson on the Bundestag Finance Committee and a deputy member of the Budget Committee. In the 19th term he had been the group's spokesperson on the inquiry into Wirecard.

At the 20 May 2021 final reading of the Act to Strengthen Financial Market Integrity, he called the collapse balance-sheet fraud plus "multiple supervisory failure." The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, he said, had looked away too long, and its short-selling ban, known to the leadership of the Federal Ministry of Finance, had been a fatal decision. He said the law would bring a "culture of looking," accounting control "from one hand," higher auditor liability and shorter rotation, but called it insufficient and criticised finance minister Olaf Scholz for stressing reform over the ministry's own supervision.

In the 2025 coalition talks with the SPD, the CDU roster placed him in working group 16, "Budget, finances and taxes," under Mathias Middelberg; it does not record what he argued in the closed talks.

The Ruhr area

Since April 2021 he has chaired the CDU/CSU Ruhr working group and been deputy chair of its North Rhine-Westphalia state group.

After the March 2025 exploratory talks he called legacy debt in Ruhr municipalities "an ongoing brake on growth" for a region of more than five million people, blocking investment and local action. Announced investment would work, he said, only if weak cities were freed of that constraint; the previous coalition had broken its promise, Hendrik Wüst's state government had done its part, and the federation now had to act, above all for cities with high social spending, integration pressures and long-built debt.

In November 2025, at the Gas and Heat Institute in Essen, he called the Ruhr "an industrial heart of Germany," described hydrogen as important to the site's future and to jobs, and said research and innovation had to be strengthened if the energy transition was to succeed.

Digital policy, research and space

He was an ordinary member of the Digital Agenda Committee in the 19th electoral period, listed for the CDU/CSU as of 30 June 2021, and only a deputy member of the successor Committee on Digital Affairs in the 20th, not a full member across 2018–2025.

On 8 November 2023 he asked the Bundestag to reaffirm cash, to debate a digital euro in public, and to bind the government, in the Council of the European Union, to that vote. The project must not be an end in itself, he said; the European Central Bank should prepare it, not decide it, and the legal-tender status of cash was "non-negotiable." On 4 July 2024 the Bundestag rejected the motion, with the governing SPD, Greens and FDP against and the CDU/CSU and the AfD in favour.

In May 2025 he became Parliamentary State Secretary to research minister Dorothee Bär. Opening the 11 June 2026 debate on the Federal Report on Research and Innovation, he warned against complacency and cited about 137 billion euro of R&D spending in 2024, or 3.17 percent of GDP, slightly above the EU's 3 percent mark. He stated a target of at least 3.5 percent by 2030 and described the High-Tech Agenda Germany — six key technologies and five strategic fields — as the means, calling the report a mandate to implement it and to strengthen transfer. In a 16 January 2026 interview he connected the post to his legal, business and digital-policy experience, and cited International Space Station work on muscle and bone loss, cardiovascular disease and the immune system, plus satellite data for transport, farming and health, as the case for space spending.

Personal life

Family and residence

Matthias Hauer was born on 18 December 1977 in Hattingen, North Rhine-Westphalia. The English staff biography of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space describes him as a lawyer who lives with his family—his wife and two children—in the south of Essen. The North Rhine-Westphalia page of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag lists him as married and Roman Catholic and does not name his wife or children.

His constituency office is given as Blücherstraße 1, 45141 Essen. The Bundestag biography also lists a Berlin office at Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin.

Public record

On 7 November 2019, during the 124th sitting of the 19th Bundestag, Hauer was speaking for the CDU/CSU on the use of cash when the stenographic report records that he broke off his speech. President Wolfgang Schäuble interrupted the sitting from 10:22 until 11:30. Reopening it, Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democratic Party told the House that Hauer was fully stabilized, fully responsive and in the care of doctors, and wished him well. Kubicki also asked people, out of respect for the member’s person and dignity, not to post the collapse or the treatment. The Berliner Morgenpost, citing the live broadcast and a dpa photographer, reported that the then 41-year-old faltered near the end of the speech, that his hands shook strongly, that he seemed absent, turned pale and began to sway, and that staff and other members urged him to lie down while a cloth was held up as a screen.

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported on 14 November 2019 that Hauer was back in the plenary and was warning against false accusations connected with the episode. In a profile published on 16 September 2021, the same paper wrote that the collapse followed an official trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and was his first stay in hospital, at Berlin’s Charité.