# Max Lucks

# Max Lucks

Max Lucks (born 19 April 1997 in Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf) is a German politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) and a member of the Bundestag since 2021. The Green parliamentary group lists him as its spokesperson for human rights and humanitarian aid, as a full member of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, the Finance Committee and the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilization and Peace Promotion, and as a deputy member of the Committee on [Foreign Affairs](/organizations/foreign-affairs) and the Petitions Committee. He sits for North Rhine-Westphalia and is associated with the constituency of Bochum I.

He grew up in Wattenscheid, a district of Bochum, and took the Abitur at the Märkische Schule Wattenscheid in 2015. From 2016 to 2022 he studied social science at Ruhr University Bochum and graduated with a bachelor's degree, working in student jobs alongside the course. He was then employed as a campaign coordinator for the Greens in the Ruhr in 2019–2020 and as a public-relations officer for the Green group in the Ruhr parliament in 2020–2021.

Lucks joined the Green Youth in 2011, at the age of 14, and the party in 2013. He has traced that start to local campaigning in Wattenscheid, including work against neo-Nazis and, with the local Green Youth, against the closure of Wattenscheid station. He was a member of the Green Youth federal board and of the Bochum Greens' district executive in 2014–2015, state spokesperson of the Green Youth in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2015 to 2017, and federal co-spokesperson from 2017 to 2019 together with [Ricarda Lang](/people/ricarda-lang). During the federal term he was an advisory member of the Green party council and a permanent guest of the Bundestag group.

In the 2021 federal election the Greens received 18.6 percent of first votes (28,288) and 20.1 percent of second votes in Bochum I, then constituency 140, while the direct mandate went to the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) with 38.3 percent. In the election of 23 February 2025, in the renumbered constituency 139, [Serdar Yüksel](/people/serdar-yuksel) of the SPD won the seat with 32.7 percent of first votes; the Greens received 13.7 percent (22,181 first votes) and 14.9 percent of second votes.

On 19 January 2023 Lucks opened the Bundestag debate in which the house recognized crimes by the Islamic State against the Yazidis as genocide. He told a Yazidi delegation in the gallery that more than 5,000 people had been killed, about 7,000 abducted and hundreds of thousands displaced, and that Germany had to admit it had not acted when it mattered most. The Bundestag biography records him as a German delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the [Council of Europe](/organizations/council-of-europe) since 2022. In his first Bundestag speech, during a December 2021 debate on religious freedom, he described himself as a gay Catholic; members of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany then attacked him verbally. On 7 April 2022 he spoke against a general COVID-19 vaccination mandate from the age of 60, calling normative pressure the wrong instrument, and supported the motion of the group around [Wolfgang Kubicki](/people/wolfgang-kubicki).

## Early life and education

### Upbringing in the Ruhr

Max Lucks was born on 19 April 1997 in Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf, in the Ruhr area of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He grew up in neighboring Wattenscheid. On 1 January 1975 a municipal reform united the previously independent cities of Bochum and Wattenscheid, and Wattenscheid has since been a borough of Bochum.

He has called Wattenscheid his hometown and has described a childhood spent at the Wellenfreibad in the Südfeldmark, where he said he passed what felt like half his youth; at local carnival; in the Kruppwald, which he called a large, dirty former colliery site where children played; and on the forecourt of the Herz Mariä church in Günnigfeld, which he said those children turned into a football pitch. In a September 2022 interview with the *Wattenscheider Stadtspiegel* he said that a large part of his friends and family still lived in Wattenscheid and that he was glad to see his nieces growing up there. His Bundestag biography does not name his parents or give their occupations.

In a January 2025 interview with the Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur he said he had followed a “typically Catholic path”: after First Communion he became an altar server and felt at home in his parish. He said a break came when he realized he was gay, and that as a student he found his way back to faith and to the Catholic Church, whose services and rituals he still valued.

### School and university

Lucks passed the Abitur in 2015 at the Märkische Schule Wattenscheid. The school, run by the city of Bochum, presents itself as the Märkisches Gymnasium Wattenscheid. From 2016 to 2022 he studied social science at Ruhr University Bochum and graduated as a Sozialwissenschaftler, Bachelor of Arts. The same biography lists varied student jobs beside the course from 2015, the year of his Abitur, until 2019, then paid work from 2019 to 2020 as campaign coordinator for Alliance 90/The Greens in the Ruhr and from 2020 to 2021 as public-relations officer for the Green group in the Ruhr Parliament, the assembly of the Regionalverband Ruhr. The Bundestag’s register of interests records that press post with the party at the Regionalverband in Essen. He has said he earned his own living in those years and that the student jobs included fundraising and a post as a student assistant.

He has said that ethnology was the part of the degree he cared about most, because it broke with conventions, and that he wrote his bachelor’s thesis in that discipline on ethnic fragmentation in the northern Italian province of South Tyrol. A 2023 interview published by the university confirms the subject: he wanted to examine problems of that fragmentation, in a border region where, as he put it, the party systems of several countries meet and most people speak German. He told the university paper that he submitted the thesis on the Tuesday before the federal election of 26 September 2021, and the paper reports that he remained a bachelor’s student of social science until autumn 2022, after he had already taken his seat in the Bundestag. In the same conversation he pointed to a term paper he had enjoyed most, on what he argued were similarities between Islamism and right-wing extremism, using hostility toward gay people as the case.

## Youth politics

### Local activism and party entry

Lucks joined the Grüne Jugend, the youth organization of Alliance 90/The Greens, in 2011 and the party in 2013. He told the *Westdeutsche Zeitung* in October 2017 that he had been active in the Bochum local group from the age of 13, and that at a state members' assembly in the year he turned 14 he founded a working group on transport because of the dispute over a Rhein-Ruhr-Express stop in Wattenscheid. The paper said he joined the state executive the next year—the Green Youth in North Rhine-Westphalia later dated that term to 2012–2013—and entered the party at 16.

The same interview quoted him as saying that work against the far right had brought him into politics. On his own website he has written that classmates organized against Nazis because the state headquarters of the [National Democratic Party](/organizations/national-democratic-party) of Germany was in Wattenscheid, and that a plan to close Wattenscheid station sent him to the Green Youth. The *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* reported in 2012 that the NPD state association had been based there for more than twenty years before a new landlord forced a move to Essen-Kray. A November 2018 *WAZ* interview, while he was federal spokesperson, instead headlined the rail dispute "Der RRX-Halt hat mich politisiert" ("The RRX stop politicized me").

From October 2014 to October 2015 he was on the Green Youth federal executive, where the state association said his briefs were drug policy, anti-racism, queer feminism and a half-year focus on education, and from June 2014 to September 2015 on the Bochum district executive of the Greens. The Bundestag biography dates both posts to 2014–2015 and does not use the title of assessor.

### Green Youth in North Rhine-Westphalia

On 7–8 November 2015 a members' assembly in Dortmund elected Julia Wenzel of Duisburg and Lucks, then 18, spokespersons of the Green Youth in North Rhine-Westphalia, with René Hessen as treasurer and Nyke Slawik, Nils Kriegeskorte and Liliane Pollmann as assessors. Wenzel, then 24, criticized federal asylum policy as deterrence and exclusion. Lucks said the youth wing would press, before the 2017 elections, for a queer, ecological and solidary state, a comprehensive school, and younger candidates on winnable list places.

He served the two-year term. Leaving it in October 2017, he told the *Westdeutsche Zeitung* that the state's red-green government had disappointed him over a residence rule for refugees, a late position on deportations to Afghanistan, and what he called a "Kuschelkurs" toward Social Democratic interior minister Ralf Jäger. A public shift to the right, he said, required a stronger Green Youth.

On 8 July 2017, still state spokesperson, he was among 44 young people from the Ruhr whose registered bus was stopped by Hamburg police on the way to a protest against the [2017 G20 summit](/facts/2017-g20-hamburg-summit) and held for up to four and a half hours. A protocol he gave the *taz* described an intimate search. The interior senator later conceded errors; the administrative court found the detention unlawful in two test cases, and Lucks said he would seek a separate finding for his own.

### Federal spokesperson

At the 49th federal congress in Dortmund in October 2017, the Green Youth elected Ricarda Lang, then 23 and from Berlin, and Lucks, then 20 and from Bochum, as spokespersons, succeeding [Moritz Heuberger](/people/moritz-heuberger). The Bundestag biography dates that office to 2017–2019, not 2019–2021, and says that while he held it he was an advisory member of the party council and a permanent guest of the Green group in the Bundestag.

In August 2018, while studying social science at Ruhr University Bochum, he told *Nordbayern* that people displaced from island states by climate change should receive European citizenship as well as asylum, and he dismissed caps on reception as a distraction from deaths in the Mediterranean. He traced the rightward turn in debate to low wages and poverty rather than to border crossings, and contrasted the abuse he received with misogynistic threats against women in the party such as [Claudia Roth](/people/claudia-roth). On 2 May 2018 the Greens in Hattingen hosted him on the Turkish offensive in Afrin.

Lang and Lucks did not stand again. At the 53rd federal congress in Dortmund they were succeeded by Anna Peters, then 23, and Georg Kurz, then 25, both living in Berlin. The Bundestag biography next lists him as campaign coordinator for the Greens in the Ruhr in 2019–2020 and as public-relations officer for the Green group in the Ruhr parliament in 2020–2021, posts he has also given on his own site.

## Bundestag elections

Max Lucks was the direct candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens in Bochum I, North Rhine-Westphalia, at both the 2021 and 2025 federal elections, and entered the Bundestag each time on the party's state list rather than by winning the constituency.

### 2021 federal election

At the [2021 German federal election](/facts/2021-german-federal-election) on 26 September, constituency 140 (Bochum I) comprised the Bochum districts of Mitte, Wattenscheid, Süd and Südwest; the rest of the city lay in Herne–Bochum II. Lucks, recorded on the nomination as an employee born in 1997, stood for the Greens and was 14th on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list. In March 2021 Radio Bochum presented the 23-year-old from Wattenscheid, then a social-science student and a former federal spokesperson of the Green Youth, as the challenger to Axel Helmut Schäfer of the Social Democratic Party, and described the seat as an SPD stronghold the party had won directly for 60 years.

Turnout was 76.4 percent: 154,691 people voted out of 202,393 eligible, 0.4 percentage points more than in 2017. Schäfer took the direct mandate with 58,235 first votes (38.3 percent, up 1.1 points). Fabian Richard Schütz of the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) was second with 32,962 votes (21.7 percent, down 6.6 points), and Lucks third with 28,288 (18.6 percent, up 10.9 points). Olaf in der Beek of the Free Democratic Party received 13,657 votes (9.0 percent) and [Sevim Dağdelen](/people/sevim-dagdelen) of [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) 9,361 (6.2 percent). The Alternative for Germany had no constituency candidate, so it recorded no first votes.

Second votes in the constituency put the SPD first on 32.7 percent (50,162). The Greens followed on 20.1 percent (30,795), a rise of 11.1 points, ahead of the CDU on 19.4 percent, the FDP on 9.5 percent, the AfD on 6.7 percent and Die Linke on 5.4 percent. Because Lucks did not win the seat, his place in parliament came from the state list: the Federal Returning Officer listed him among those elected for North Rhine-Westphalia on place 14, with a candidacy in constituency 140.

### 2025 federal election

For the 2025 German federal election on 23 February the same four districts formed constituency 139, still called Bochum I; the rest of Bochum remained in Herne–Bochum II, now numbered 140. On 24 January the constituency committee admitted nine direct candidacies, among them Fee Roth (CDU), Serdar Yüksel (SPD), [Knuth Meyer-Soltau](/people/knuth-meyer-soltau) (AfD) and Lucks for the Greens.

Turnout was 81.7 percent, with 163,505 voters out of 200,128 eligible, 5.3 points above 2021. Yüksel won the direct mandate with 53,007 first votes (32.7 percent, down 5.6 points). The official runner-up was Vivienne Chantal Fee Roth of the CDU, with 39,925 votes (24.6 percent, up 2.9 points). Meyer-Soltau received 22,797 votes (14.1 percent) and Lucks 22,181 (13.7 percent, down 4.9 points), leaving the Green candidate fourth, 616 votes behind the AfD. Cansin Köktürk of Die Linke took 15,273 votes (9.4 percent) and Léon Beck of the FDP 4,680 (2.9 percent). The city's election committee fixed those first-vote totals on 26 February; they match the Federal Returning Officer's final result.

On second votes the SPD led on 24.2 percent (39,364, down 8.5 points), followed by the CDU on 23.5 percent (38,257), the Greens on 14.9 percent (24,221, down 5.2 points), the AfD on 13.8 percent, Die Linke on 12.1 percent, the BSW on 3.9 percent and the FDP on 3.7 percent. Lucks was again not the constituency member. The list of those elected in 2025 records him for the Greens as returned from North Rhine-Westphalia on place 12, with a candidacy in constituency 139, and the Bundestag biography describes the mandate as a state-list seat for Bochum I.

In a Radio Bochum interview published on 18 February he called for a minimum wage of 15 euros, opposed widening the A40 and A43 through Bochum, and supported a ban on the AfD. The *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* reported on 12 February that he intended to file a criminal complaint after Meyer-Soltau threatened to slap him during a panel discussion in Wattenscheid.

### Constituency work

The Bundestag biography gives two constituency offices: Wahlkreisbüro Bochum at Diekampstraße 37, 44787 Bochum, and Wahlkreisbüro Wattenscheid at Freiheitstraße 6, 44866 Wattenscheid. He is listed there as the candidate for constituency 139, Bochum I, while holding the North Rhine-Westphalia list mandate, so the offices cover the four urban districts in that seat rather than a district he won outright.

## Parliamentary roles

### Committees in the Bundestag

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025), Max Lucks was a full member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and of its Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and Obmann for Alliance 90/The Greens on the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid. An Obmann or Obfrau is the parliamentary group's coordinator on a committee. The Bundestag's English member lists call that role "group coordinator" and distinguish it from the committee chair and from a "policy spokesperson".

Article 45a(1) of the Basic Law requires a committee for foreign affairs. Its members follow government foreign and security policy ahead of major decisions and lead deliberation on whether the government may deploy German soldiers abroad. The disarmament subcommittee, continued in the next term as the Subcommittee on Arms and Proliferation Control, Non-Proliferation and International Disarmament, works on current disarmament questions and longer-term aims such as a world without nuclear weapons, including the ban on cluster munitions and conventional arms control in Europe. The Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid has 14 members; the Bundestag describes their task as upholding the standing of human rights worldwide.

In the 21st Bundestag the offices shifted. Lucks stayed a full member of the human-rights committee, but as the Greens' policy spokesperson (*Sprecher*) for human rights and humanitarian aid; Boris Mijatović was the group's Obmann there. Lucks became a full member of the Finance Committee and of the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilization and Peacebuilding, where he is deputy chair and the Greens' Obmann. He is a substitute on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and on the Petitions Committee, and not a member of the disarmament subcommittee.

The Finance Committee follows the responsibilities of the Federal [Ministry of Finance](/organizations/ministry-of-finance) except for the budget. Its 42 members consider items referred by the plenary and usually lead on financial-market regulation, customs and tax policy. The crisis-prevention subcommittee partly continues an earlier body on civil crisis prevention and conflict management. It concentrates on strategic foresight in foreign and security policy, following a recommendation of the previous term's inquiry into lessons from Afghanistan, and it accompanies the National Security Council in the Federal Chancellery. The Petitions Committee, with 26 members, examines requests and complaints that fall within federal competence.

### Parliamentary friendship groups

Parliamentary friendship groups (*Parlamentariergruppen*) are cross-party associations of members, without statutes of their own, for a continuing dialogue with parliaments of partner countries or regions and for contacts with governments, oppositions and civil society. At the start of each term the Council of Elders sets their number and structure. Chairs are shared with regard to the strength of the parliamentary groups, each group that does not hold a chair may name a deputy, and a member may join at most three groups. The 21st term has 47 bilateral and multilateral groups, including the Berlin–Taipei circle; the Council of Elders announced their establishment in June 2025.

In the 20th term Lucks chaired, from 2022, the German–Turkish group, for relations with the parliament of Turkey, and he was a deputy chair of the German–Mexican group, for Mexico. The board list for that term names him as Turkish chair, with deputies from the other groups then in the Bundestag, and names [Dunja Kreiser](/people/dunja-kreiser) as Mexican chair, with Lucks among the deputies. The Bundestag's youth site already presented him as the Turkish chair on 9 August 2022. The same directory's German–Central Asian board, covering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, did not include him.

In the 21st Bundestag he is instead deputy chair of the parliamentary group for Central Asia. He is not on the published boards of the Turkish or Mexican groups. The Turkish chair has been Serdar Yüksel of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. A press release of 28 September 2026 described a delegation to Istanbul and Ankara led by Yüksel, with deputy chairs from the AfD, the Greens and the Left, and did not include Lucks.

### Council of Europe and ECRI

On 13 January 2022 the Bundestag elected, without debate, its delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Lucks was one of three full Green members, with Julian Pahlke and [Filiz Polat](/people/filiz-polat). The Bundestag described the Assembly as the first parliamentary body at European level after the Second World War and as Europe's largest political forum, then with 324 parliamentarians from the member states and as many substitutes. It accompanies the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe and initiates European agreements and conventions. The Bundestag's current list of offices still records Lucks as a full member of the delegation.

On 11 December 2024 the Assembly's Committee on Political Affairs and Democracy, meeting in Paris, appointed him Youth Rapporteur by acclamation, subject to a declaration of interests. The synopsis records him as a representative of Germany in the Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group.

The [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission) against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) is a Council of Europe monitoring body, created by the Vienna Declaration of 9 October 1993 and given its own statute by the Committee of Ministers on 13 June 2002, to combat racism, intolerance and related discrimination. Article 5 of the statute, as amended in 2013 and 2014, invites the Parliamentary Assembly to be represented in ECRI without the right to vote. ECRI's report for 2024, published on 28 May 2025, lists Lucks among the Assembly's observers for that year, with Petra Bayr and Mia Karalegić Abazović, and not among ECRI's members.

## Human rights advocacy

### Recognition of the Yazidi genocide

On 19 January 2023 the Bundestag adopted Drucksache 20/5228, a motion from the [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats), the CDU/CSU, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democrats recognizing crimes by the Islamic State against Yazidis as genocide. Following the [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) investigative team UNITAD, the text says the group sought the community's complete destruction and that more than 5,000 Yazidis were tortured and murdered, especially in 2014, including in a planned attack on the Sinjar area of northern Iraq on the night of 2–3 August. [Deutsche Welle](/organizations/deutsche-welle) reported that the vote was unanimous.

Max Lucks spoke before Foreign Minister [Annalena Baerbock](/people/annalena-baerbock). To a Yazidi delegation in the gallery he said more than 5,000 people had been killed, about 7,000 abducted and hundreds of thousands displaced, and that the Islamic State had tried "to seize power over your stories, your identities and your bodies." Germany, he said, had not acted when it mattered most; recognition had to be "an act of action," and the motion made pacification of Sinjar a priority of German policy on Iraq. Baerbock said Germany was recognizing the Yazidi genocide as a society, in order to obtain justice for the victims. [Michael Brand](/people/michael-brand) of the CDU/CSU called the decision a new chapter; the AfD's Martin Sichert said it had to be followed by prosecution of perpetrators and accused the other parties of ignoring radical Islam.

Lucks later treated removals to Iraq as a breach of that vote. In October 2023, during a Yazidi hunger strike outside the Bundestag in which seven people were hospitalized, he told *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* that Interior Minister Nancy Faeser should stop the deportations at once. More than a hundred Yazidis had recently lost protection, he said, and Germany, with about 200,000 Yazidis, had the world's largest diaspora. A year after the resolution he said the SPD-led ministry offered only excuses: Faeser, as he reported her position, saw no need to act because a protection rate of 48.6 per cent was adequate and her hands were tied. He called that morally questionable and linked it to a drive to raise deportation numbers. Return was still unsafe for men as well as women and children, he argued, because of Islamic State remnants, Iranian strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan, street attacks and camp conditions. North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia had by then halted removals only of Yazidi women and children; he called that a compromise, said a nationwide ban was legally difficult, and proposed a Yazidi clause in the Residence Act.

### LGBT rights

On 26 June 2016, when Lucks was a Green Youth spokesperson in North Rhine-Westphalia and not yet an MP, Turkish police detained him at a banned Istanbul Pride gathering.

The governor of Istanbul had banned the march on security grounds, and police used tear gas and rubber bullets against groups that still tried to read statements. Deutsche Welle, citing dpa, Reuters and AP, reported that Green MP Volker Beck was shoved and briefly held after trying to stop the arrest of a Turkish activist, and that MEP [Terry Reintke](/people/terry-reintke) was also detained briefly. The two said Lucks and [Felix Banaszak](/people/felix-banaszak), then a Green speaker in Duisburg, had been arrested and were still in custody; organizers put the detentions at least 19. The dispersal continued a crackdown on Pride events in Turkey under way since 2015.

In a 2021 written answer on LGBT rights in Germany, Lucks called the 1980 Transsexuals Act—which required psychological reports and a court order before a change of legal sex or forename—a "human-rights-policy disaster," and said he wanted a self-determination law instead. He described himself as a gay man for whom the subject was personal. On 12 April 2024 the Bundestag passed that reform by 374 votes to 251, with 11 abstentions: from 1 November adults could change their gender entry and forenames at a registry office by declaration, without reports or a judge. Minors were covered only with parental consent and, in specified cases, prior counselling. CDU deputy Mareike Lotte Wulf said the state was neglecting children and inviting abuse; the AfD called the law ideological nonsense; [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht) said sex was being reduced to a mood. The government's queer commissioner, Sven Lehmann of the Greens, said the old Act had caused more than forty years of harm, including sterilizations, forced divorces and psychiatric assessments.

### Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan

On 26 April 2023 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe named Lucks rapporteur on Iran. He told *taz* he was the first such rapporteur since 1979 to question the regime, that the Council of Europe had looked away too long, and that policy needed a turning point because diplomacy had returned to the nuclear file and to Iran's support for Russia. The appointment followed confirmation of a death sentence against the German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd; *taz* noted that a G7 statement of 18 April had done little more than condemn abuses, and that the Assembly has no direct leverage over a non-member. On 1 October 2024 the Assembly adopted, from his report Doc. 16035, a resolution on Iran and on Iranian human-rights defenders in member states. After the death of [Mahsa Amini](/people/mahsa-amini) in morality-police custody in September 2022 and the protests that followed, it treated human rights as part of any diplomacy with Tehran and called for protection of exiles against intimidation and abduction by Iranian structures in Europe, plus targeted sanctions and international prosecution.

As chair of the Bundestag's German-Turkish parliamentary group, Lucks said a trip planned for October 2023 would include Left MP [Gökay Akbulut](/people/gokay-akbulut) or would not happen, after Turkish authorities briefly held her over alleged "terror propaganda." "We will certainly not let autocrats and a politically instrumentalized judiciary dictate a Bundestag delegation," he told the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*. CDU/CSU deputy [Johann Wadephul](/people/johann-wadephul) likewise called a detention for public statements unacceptable. In March 2025, after the imprisonment of Istanbul mayor [Ekrem İmamoğlu](/people/ekrem-imamoglu), Lucks told NDR Info that using the courts to remove opponents of President [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan](/people/recep-tayyip-erdogan) was a familiar method, and called the case a "civilian coup."

In January 2024 Lucks voted for a resolution aimed at refusing to accredit Azerbaijan's delegation over human-rights violations and a growing number of political prisoners. On 25 August the Azerbaijani foreign ministry declared the 76 members who had backed that step persona non grata, among them [Frank Schwabe](/people/frank-schwabe) and Heike Engelhardt of the SPD, Andrej Hunko, then of the BSW, and Lucks. A confidential foreign-ministry note, reported by the Funke newspapers, called the bans a "gross disregard" of the Assembly and of members' right to exercise their mandate; a German official said so to Azerbaijan's ambassador on 26 August. Lucks called President [Ilham Aliyev](/people/ilham-aliyev)'s move bluster and said that, with COP29 opening in Baku on 11 November, he would look harder at Azerbaijan's foreign policy and at imprisoned journalists. The bans remained in force during the summit. United Nations circles, *Der Spiegel* reported, saw that refusal as a breach of COP rules.

## Foreign policy, security and migration

### Ukraine and disarmament

Lucks has treated military support for Ukraine and arms control as joint obligations. On 12 February 2024 he wrote on abgeordnetenwatch that, since Russia's invasion of 24 February 2022, Germany had a duty to support Ukraine's self-defence, and that humanitarian aid was his priority as a human-rights politician. He said he had nevertheless voted with the governing groups against a CDU/CSU motion on the Taurus KEPD 350, because the motion was attached to debate on the report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, which concerned the Bundeswehr rather than arms for Ukraine, and because he thought a decision on that missile needed its own discussion and a wider strategy for Ukraine's territorial integrity, not a debate narrowed to one weapon. On 10 March 2025 he wrote that people in Ukraine needed protection from [Vladimir Putin](/people/vladimir-putin)'s bombing and that withholding support would be irresponsible for anyone serious about peace in Europe.

On 8 April 2024 the International Society for Human Rights said Lucks had taken its form of political sponsorship of two Ukrainian civilians the organization described as arbitrarily detained by Russian forces, Hennadij Sherban and Roman Levitsky, and was pressing for their release.

The Bundestag biography records him, from 2021, as a member of the Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. On 14 June 2023 he opened debate on the government's 2022 annual disarmament report. He said Russia's war, its ending of [New START](/facts/new-start), nuclear weapons in Belarus and nuclear threats made implementation of disarmament more urgent, not less, and that defending Ukrainians and pursuing fewer weapons were both part of responsible security policy. He asked for more pressure, under Germany's presidency of the [Ottawa Treaty](/facts/ottawa-treaty), on NATO members slow to act against anti-personnel mines; for new forums if talks on autonomous weapons stalled, so that algorithms would not decide over life and death; and for follow-up to Germany's observer role at the conference of the [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons](/facts/treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons), including care for survivors after what he called a disappointing G7 statement in Hiroshima. He closed with the line "Now is the time for disarmament — more than ever."

On 18 December 2025, in a current-affairs hour on the Berlin Ukraine summit, he said that in January 2022, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, he had voted against accrediting Russian delegates without conditions while about 100,000 Russian soldiers stood on Ukraine's border, and that the majority which accredited them illustrated a failed habit of concessions in advance. He said he respected Chancellor [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) for breaking with that habit, pointed to a Council of Europe special tribunal and register of damage, and argued that frozen Russian state assets should pay for reconstruction rather than young Ukrainians. He also said Russian men refusing military service should be allowed into Europe.

### Asylum and European migration policy

After EU interior and justice ministers adopted a position on reform of the Common European Asylum System, Lucks and 27 other members of Alliance 90/The Greens filed a written explanation, printed with the record of 15 June 2023, of their vote on a motion from the Left to defend the Geneva Refugee Convention and secure asylum in the European Union. They called the Council result "absolutely not satisfactory": it did not sufficiently protect an individual lawful procedure or children, worsened conditions at the external borders through detention-like compulsory border procedures, and left relocation voluntary. A text acceptable after trilogue talks, they wrote, would have to meet minimum standards of human rights and international law; rejecting the Left's motion and following the Interior Committee was "expressly not" a rejection of a human-rights-oriented refugee policy. Five days later he told abgeordnetenwatch that he considered the interior ministers' agreement wrong and that the reform neither safeguarded human rights nor improved the humanitarian situation at the external borders.

On 18 October 2024 the Bundestag passed, by 357 votes to 289 with eight abstentions, the coalition bill "to improve internal security and the asylum system," covering intelligence law, asylum and residence law and weapons law; a companion counter-terrorism bill passed by 367 to 280. Votes against also came from the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the FDP. Asked why he had agreed to the package, Lucks wrote on 10 January 2025 that it cut rights of some people seeking protection but had blocked further-reaching measures. He welcomed the weapons-law parts and called benefit cuts for people required to leave under the Dublin rules, if they refused an organized departure, neither a gain for security nor for [social cohesion](/drivers/social-cohesion), yet "the lesser evil" after Green bargaining with the SPD and the FDP. In the same reply he criticised Interior Minister Nancy Faeser's deportation practice and the fear of removal among Yazidis despite the Bundestag's recognition of genocide against them. *Der Spiegel* had reported on 18 October 2023 that, during a hunger strike outside the Bundestag, he demanded an immediate stop to deportations of Yazidis to Iraq.

### The 2022 vaccination-mandate vote

On 7 April 2022 the Bundestag held recorded votes on several proposals for a COVID-19 vaccination mandate, with the coalition groups split. Lucks spoke for the cross-party group around vice-president Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democratic Party. He called it a decision of conscience: closing the vaccination gap was necessary, but he was against a mandate because a duty built "normative pressure," promised "a pandemic end by statute" which he feared would not hold, and raised legal risks, including whether excluding coercive detention would survive a constitutional complaint. An unenforceable law, he said, would not help, and he asked the House to "file the vaccination mandate away."

He was one of six Green members to vote against the combined Baehrens–Janecek bill for [pandemic preparedness](/drivers/pandemic-preparedness), mandatory vaccination advice and immunization, centred on a requirement from the age of 60. That bill fell by 296 votes to 378, with nine abstentions. He was one of three Green members, with Tessa Ganserer and Tabea Rößner, to vote for the Kubicki group's motion "Increase willingness to vaccinate without a general vaccination mandate against SARS-CoV-2" (Drucksache 20/680), which fell by 85 votes to 590, with 12 abstentions.

## Religion and civil society

### Catholic identity and the Central Committee

In his first Bundestag speech, on 16 December 2021, on a CDU/CSU motion on freedom of religion, Lucks, for Alliance 90/The Greens, said that he called himself a Christian and that, as a gay Catholic, he might not fit some members' worldview, but that his religion had taught him the inviolability of human dignity. He later told the Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur that the phrase was spontaneous: Jürgen Braun of the Alternative for Germany had just claimed that only the AfD denounced the persecution of Christians, and Lucks had looked toward that group's benches.

He treated human rights as indivisible. Citing Christians and Hazaras in Afghanistan, he said that limiting freedom of belief touches human dignity whether or not one believes, and he asked deputies of every conviction to defend that freedom abroad and in Germany—for Jews wearing a kippah and for Muslim women in a headscarf—as well as for Alevis in his Bochum constituency who had described discrimination. He called the Union motion a reduction of thirty human rights to one right and one commissioner, and said it underplayed the freedom not to believe.

A KNA interview carried by the Evangelische Zeitung on 28 January 2025 reported a "typically Catholic path": he had been an altar server after First Communion and felt at home in his parish, then experienced something like a break on realizing he was gay, and returned to faith and the church as a student. He said he likes services and fixed rituals, that faith means freedom, confidence and humanity to him, and that "faith gives me strength." He could not understand why the church found it so difficult to marry him and his partner.

On 24 May 2025 the plenary of the Central Committee of German Catholics (Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken) in Paderborn elected 45 individual members for four years, 21 of them new to that role; Lucks was among those chosen. Individual members are one of the committee's three pillars, with diocesan councils and Catholic organizations. The next month he told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that, for him, church was above all a feeling of community. After a vehicle was driven into the crowd at Berlin's Christopher Street Day in 2026, he told KNA that the moment was right for a further opening toward queer believers, and that a statement by Hamburg's Archbishop Stefan Heße had moved him.

### Foundations, unions and local groups

On 2 June 2022 the Bundestag elected Lucks a full member of the Kuratorium of the Federal Foundation Magnus Hirschfeld (Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld), with Tessa Ganserer as deputy. The foundation's statutory tasks, as parliament restated them, are education and research on the Nazi persecution of homosexual people, on Hirschfeld and on homosexual life in Germany, and countering discrimination. On 25 September 2025, without debate, it elected Nyke Slawik as the Greens' full member and Lucks as deputy; the AfD voted against, and its own nominees were not elected. The foundation's list of 4 May 2026 still names him as deputy. His disclosure records that post as unpaid and, from 9 September 2025, a seat on the Kuratorium of Freiheit für die Westsahara e.V.

The same biography, which the Bundestag says rests on members' own information, lists ver.di and the Socialist Youth of Germany – The Falcons (Sozialistische Jugend Deutschlands – Die Falken). On Abgeordnetenwatch that self-description also names ver.di's Middle Ruhr district, the Workers' Welfare Association (Arbeiterwohlfahrt) in Ruhr-Mitte, and the festival committee of Wattenscheider Karneval. In February 2023 he joined the founding board of the informal cross-party circle "Karneval, Fastnacht, Fasching." From 13 March 2026 the disclosure lists seats on the supervisory boards of Bochum-Gelsenkirchen Straßenbahnen AG (BOGESTRA) and Bochum-Gelsenkirchener Bahngesellschaft mbH (BOGEBA); BOGESTRA's own list of board members includes him.

## Reception and disputes

### Place in the party

Press profiles have placed Lucks on the left of Alliance 90/The Greens. In July 2025 the *Berliner Zeitung* called the human-rights spokesperson of the Green parliamentary group, then 28, a representative of the party's left wing who was also examining that camp. A note in *der Freitag* in August 2026 likewise counted him on the party's left wing.

He has not always voted with the group. On 7 April 2022, in the Bundestag debate on a COVID-19 vaccination requirement from age 60, the Protestant news agency epd reported that Lucks called a mandate the wrong "normative pressure," a promise of "an end to the pandemic by statute," and legally and practically uncertain. He backed the motion around Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democratic Party against extending compulsion beyond health and care settings. On Abgeordnetenwatch he called the ballot a decision of conscience: he doubted a mandate would close the vaccination gap, while still treating vaccination, where medically safe, as a moral duty. The *Evangelische Zeitung* later reported that he had been one of very few in his group to vote that way, and that he kept positions even when they drew criticism in his own ranks.

### Threats and public disagreements

In his first Bundestag speech, on 16 December 2021, on freedom of religion, Lucks addressed "colleagues of the democratic groups" and said he was a Christian who, "as a gay Catholic, perhaps does not fit the worldview of some here," though his religion had taught him that human dignity is inviolable. The line followed a speech by Jürgen Braun of the Alternative for Germany. President [Bärbel Bas](/people/barbel-bas) later called the AfD member Thomas Seitz to order for posting, during the sitting, a photograph of Lucks on Facebook with words she would not repeat. Lucks told the *Evangelische Zeitung* the phrase had been spontaneous, after an AfD claim that only that group denounced the persecution of Christians, and that later verbal attacks from the right had not stopped him standing again.

On 4 February 2025, at a church-hosted candidates' debate in the Friedenskirche in Bochum-Wattenscheid, Radio Bochum reported that AfD candidate Knuth Meyer-Soltau threatened Lucks with a slap, then with blows if called a Nazi again, after Lucks said the CDU had formed majorities "with Nazis." Other candidates ruled out cooperation with the AfD. On 12 February the *Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung* reported that Lucks intended to file a criminal complaint. A *Welt* commentary of 27 June 2025 reported that accounts close to the AfD had recirculated a years-old video of Lucks, then 17, chanting "Nie wieder Deutschland" at a protest against right-wing extremists. The column said the clip drew insults and threats rather than questions, and treated threats of violence as unjustified even if the slogan invited criticism.

After an attack on Berlin's Christopher Street Day in late July 2026, which *der Freitag* and the *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* described as motivated by Islamism and in which one person was killed, Lucks criticized parts of the wider left for not naming that motive. He told *der Freitag* that the German left too often relativized Islamism, while his own party refused cooperation with Islamists. Not naming the motive, he said, was "gefundenes Fressen für die AfD," a gift to a party that ordinarily mocked queer people. In the *NZZ* he called the Islamist danger real for gay men, said homophobia should not be viewed from only one direction, and noted that an Instagram post by the Neukölln branch of Die Linke had at first spoken only vaguely of "right-wing and conservative actors." Elif Eralp of Die Linke told *der Freitag* she had called the attack Islamist from the start and that also naming far-right dangers was not relativization; she called that charge dishonest.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/max-lucks