Nicolas Zippelius

Official portrait of Nicolas Zippelius, member of the German Bundestag.

Nicolas Benjamin Zippelius (born 1 August 1987 in Karlsruhe) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag for Karlsruhe-Land (constituency 272) in Baden-Württemberg. The CDU/CSU parliamentary group lists him as a directly elected member since 26 October 2021, the opening of the 20th Bundestag. He retained the seat at the 2025 German federal election.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own statements, records that he is Catholic, married and the father of one child, that he passed the Abitur in Karlsruhe, and that he holds a bachelor's degree in political science with a minor in law and a master's degree in management. In the archived biography for the 20th electoral term he was also listed as a municipal councillor of Weingarten (Baden) and as a member of the district council of Landkreis Karlsruhe. Before entering parliament he was an employee of Roland Stärk Landschaftsbau GmbH in Weingarten; alongside the mandate he is a self-employed lecturer in Ettlingen. During the 2021 campaign, Südwestrundfunk described him as the CDU candidate from Weingarten who had prevailed over the sitting member Axel E. Fischer in the party's internal selection.

At the 2021 German federal election he won the direct mandate with 30.4 percent of first votes (50,581), ahead of Patrick Michael Diebold of the Social Democratic Party on 22.8 percent. Turnout in the constituency was 80.3 percent, and the CDU first-vote share was 10.0 percentage points lower than in 2017. In 2025 the Federal Returning Officer recorded a renewed win for Zippelius with 39.2 percent of first votes (68,439), 8.7 points above 2021; Thomas Möckel of the Alternative for Germany placed second with 18.5 percent, and turnout rose to 85.0 percent.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and deputy chair of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group. The CDU/CSU group lists him as spokesperson and chair of its working group on economic cooperation and development. The CDU in Baden-Württemberg lists him among its deputy state chairs. His parliamentary disclosures also record membership of the board of trustees of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit from 1 October 2025, membership of the advisory board of the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) from 7 October 2025, and continued membership of the Karlsruhe district council.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing

Nicolas Benjamin Zippelius was born on 1 August 1987 in Karlsruhe, according to the Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own statements; that entry also records his denomination as Catholic and states that he passed the Abitur in Karlsruhe. The Federal Returning Officer's list of members elected in 2025 uses the full name Nicolas Benjamin Zippelius and the same birth year. The German National Library authority file likewise gives 1987 and Karlsruhe, under the preferred name Nicolas Zippelius.

In a first-person note carried by a local CDU association, he writes that he grew up in Weingarten (Baden), in the Karlsruhe district of Baden-Württemberg. Abgeordnetenwatch lists Weingarten as his place of residence, and the regional broadcaster SWR, in its preview of the 2021 federal election, identified the CDU candidate as Nicolas Zippelius from Weingarten. The parliamentary biography and that local note do not name his parents or any siblings, and they do not identify the Karlsruhe school at which he took the Abitur. In a March 2025 interview he said that a language course in England at the age of 15, where he met classmates from Hong Kong, and a later first visit there with his father had stirred his interest in Asia and in China. On his own website he writes that he played football and tennis in his youth and later both played and coached goalkeepers; the interview described him as a goalkeeper for FVgg Weingarten, the club in his home town. Replying to a constituent on Abgeordnetenwatch, he said that work in his parents' firm and as a youth leader had taught him the places and outlook of the district.

University studies and Taiwan

The same CDU note states that after the Abitur he studied political science first in Hanover and then in Frankfurt am Main, taking law as a minor there, and that he completed the course, without naming the universities. The current Bundestag biography lists a Bachelor of Arts in political science with a minor in law and a Master of Arts in Management, again without an institution. The biography archived for the 20th Bundestag recorded the Abitur and the bachelor's degree but not the master's.

He told journalist Wolfgang Hirn that in 2015/16, during his political-science studies, a Taiwanese scholarship supported seven months in Taiwan, six of them an intensive Mandarin course that ended with an examination. He said he then continued with several hours of Chinese each Saturday at the Confucius Institute in Frankfurt and that, as a member of parliament, he still took lessons online. His website places that scholarship stay in Taipei and describes it as the point at which Chinese language and culture caught his interest. Neither the interview nor the parliamentary biographies name the scholarship's sponsor. A short profile by the briefing publisher Table.Media likewise notes that he learned Chinese in part through a scholarship in Taiwan.

Career before the Bundestag

City marketing and the family firm

The occupation the Bundestag publishes for Nicolas Zippelius before he took his seat is one employee post at a landscaping firm in Weingarten (Baden). Section 45 of the Members of the Bundestag Act requires notification of the last professional activity before membership. Both the biography page with his 20th-term disclosures and the biography for the 21st Bundestag list "Roland Stärk Landschaftsbau GmbH, Weingarten" and the function Angestellter (employee). Abgeordnetenwatch reproduces that pre-membership record for the 2021–2025 and 2025–2029 mandates, with the site's dates 18 July 2024 and a last change on 9 September 2026, under spatial planning, construction and housing. The notices give no narrower job title, dates of employment, or pay.

An earlier station is documented only in his own text. On a campaign page archived in August 2021 he wrote that, before returning to what he called the family firm (Familienbetrieb), he had most recently been employed as a Referent for Stadtmarketing—a city-marketing officer—at an advertising company listed in the MDAX. The firm is not named. A later biography on his site drops the index and the title, and refers to work at an advertising company, which he calls market-leading, and in his parents' medium-sized business. Because the statute asks for the last occupation, the landscaping post is the one disclosure treats as immediately before the mandate; the 2021 wording is what places the advertising job before the return to the firm. No independent notice names the advertiser, so the MDAX description and the later "market-leading" claim remain his own.

Roland Stärk Landschaftsbau GmbH presents itself as a garden- and landscape-construction business designing outdoor grounds since 1988, with offices and workshops at Neue Bahnhofstraße 17 in Weingarten and a show garden, store and fleet at Neue Bahnhofstraße 31. The imprint names Stefan Geisser and Ralf Holzmann as managing directors, the seat as Weingarten, and the register entry HRB 106815 at the Amtsgericht Mannheim. The public record does not set out Zippelius's kinship to the Stärk family beyond that description of a parental business and the listing of him as an employee.

Lecturing and declared outside work

The paid activity published beside the mandate, rather than among the pre-membership entries, is "Selbstständiger Dozent, Ettlingen": self-employed lecturer in Ettlingen. Abgeordnetenwatch records it as freelance work under education, captured on 22 December 2025 for the 2025–2029 mandate, with no interval and no income. The page that still shows the 20th-term disclosures does not contain this line.

Paid work alongside the mandate must be notified, and the amount stated when it exceeds 1,000 euros in a month or, if not, 3,000 euros in a calendar year. For expert opinions, journalism and lecture-type work, notification itself is not required below those levels. Notifiable sums are published to the cent. The Ettlingen entry names no client, subject, institution or sum, and does not say whether the lecturing began before parliament or only in the 21st term. Filings are due within three months of taking a seat and of any later change; publication follows a check of whether a duty to publish exists.

Party and local offices

Entry into the CDU and municipal politics

Zippelius’s documented local offices are in Weingarten (Baden) and on the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Karlsruhe, held as a candidate and member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Official notices record those mandates from the communal elections of 26 May 2019. The Bundestag biographies do not give a date for his joining the party.

At the municipal election that day, the election committee of Weingarten (Baden) declared him elected to the Gemeinderat. He was third on the CDU list and received 2,783 votes. The CDU list won 20,316 votes, 23.19 percent, and four seats.

In the archived biography for the 20th electoral period, compiled from members’ own statements, the Bundestag listed him as a councillor of Weingarten (Baden) and as a member of the Kreistag. The mandatory disclosure for that period records the council mandate as ending on 22 May 2023 and lists seats on the committee for the environment and technology and on the administrative committee. The biography for the 21st electoral period no longer mentions the municipal council. It still lists membership of the Kreistag of Landkreis Karlsruhe among functions in public-law bodies.

On the same polling day he stood for the Kreistag on the Junge Liste, a list separate from the CDU. The district election committee’s official result, dated 6 June 2019, gave the Junge Liste 31,685 votes and two seats in the district as a whole. Zippelius was credited with 251.8 votes, the equalized figure used in that notice, and with the status of a compensatory seat (Ausgleichssitz). A preliminary count published by Weingarten for Wahlkreis V, covering Weingarten and Stutensee, had recorded 1,511 personal votes for him in that constituency, ahead of the other Junge Liste candidates there, and noted that the Landratsamt would publish the official result.

He was returned at the Kreistag election of 9 June 2024, this time on the CDU list in Wahlkreis Stutensee. The official results presentation records 7,433 votes and the mandate “Gewählt”. The CDU list received 410,740 votes, 31.98 percent of valid votes, and turnout in the district was 63.19 percent. The district’s address directory lists him in the CDU/Junge Liste group.

District chair and the state party

On 20 January 2024 the Badische Neueste Nachrichten reported that two candidates had stood for the chair of the CDU district association Karlsruhe-Land, the first such contest, and that more than 440 of about 3,000 members voted in Weingarten. The paper described the outcome as closer than had been expected. The association’s own account, dated 24 January 2024, said that more than 450 members met in the Walzbachhalle in Weingarten and gave Zippelius, the Bundestag member for the constituency, a majority over deputy chair Nicole LaCroix. Daniel Caspary, a member of the European Parliament, did not stand again after 13 years as chair. LaCroix was then elected a deputy chair, with Frank Burkard, Maria Dik and Ansgar Mayr. Manuel Hagel, the new CDU state chair in Baden-Württemberg, was the main speaker.

In January 2026 the CDU association in Waldbronn reported that more than 250 members, meeting in the Kurhaus, had re-elected Zippelius as district chair with 91 percent of the vote. The notice, published in the local official gazette on 21 January 2026, again named LaCroix among the deputy chairs.

On the state executive, a version of the CDU Baden-Württemberg website archived on 16 December 2023 lists him as a Beisitzer, an ordinary member of the Landesvorstand rather than a deputy chair. The page states that this executive was elected at the 79th state party conference on 18 November 2023 in Reutlingen. The party’s current executive page says the Landesvorstand was elected at the 82nd state conference on 5 and 6 December 2025 in Heidelberg. It lists Zippelius as a deputy state chair, with Thorsten Frei, Ronja Kemmer and Nicole Razavi, under state chair Manuel Hagel. That page does not give a separate vote total for his election.

Bundestag elections

The 2020 nomination contest

On 15 October 2020 the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) association for the Karlsruhe-Land constituency met in Ettlingen to choose its candidate for the following year's federal election. Nicolas Zippelius, then 33 and from Weingarten (Baden), had said in September that he would challenge the incumbent. He won an absolute majority on the first ballot, 152 votes to 116. The defeated candidate was Axel E. Fischer, then 54, who had represented the constituency in the Bundestag since 1998. Contemporary local reporting treated the result as unexpected. Ansgar Mayr, the association's press spokesman, said he had not expected it a week or two earlier and that many members had been torn between the two; he called the outcome personally regrettable for Fischer. Zippelius thanked Fischer for what he called a fair contest. Fischer described the ballot as a decision on direction, saying that a closer approach to the Greens sent a signal for the federal election, and said he accepted the result.

The 2021 federal election

The 2021 German federal election was held on 26 September 2021. Constituency 272, Karlsruhe-Land, in Baden-Württemberg, covers the southern municipalities of the Karlsruhe district, including Ettlingen, Bretten, Rheinstetten, Stutensee and Weingarten; the rest of the district lies in constituency 278. Of 209,147 eligible voters, 167,946 cast ballots, a turnout of 80.3 percent, 0.2 percentage points below 2017. SWR reported before the vote that the CDU had held the direct mandate there at every federal election since the founding of the Federal Republic, including in 2017 with Fischer as its candidate, and that he had lost the 2020 selection "surprisingly clearly."

Of 166,259 valid first votes, Zippelius received 50,581 (30.4 percent), 10.0 points below the CDU's 2017 share. The district returning officer had admitted twelve constituency candidates. Patrick Michael Diebold of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was second with 37,948 votes (22.8 percent, up 3.1 points). Sebastian Andrè Grässer of Alliance 90/The Greens received 27,755 (16.7 percent, up 5.3), Hans-Günther Lohr of the Free Democratic Party 19,066 (11.5 percent, up 2.4), and René Rotzinger of Alternative for Germany 14,963 (9.0 percent, down 2.7). Steffen Schmid of the Free Voters took 4,358 (2.6 percent), Jörg Alfred Rupp of Die Linke 4,040 (2.4 percent), Ralf Hubert Baßler of dieBasis 3,505 (2.1 percent), David Johannes Braitmaier of Die PARTEI 2,437 (1.5 percent), Georg Hans-Ludwig Maria Austermann of the ÖDP 562, the independent Heidemarie Ingeborg Mund 548 and Niklas Goerke of Die Humanisten 496.

On second votes the CDU led with 42,831 of 166,633 valid votes (25.7 percent, down 9.7 points), ahead of the SPD on 38,474 (23.1 percent, up 6.0), the Greens on 26,969 (16.2 percent, up 3.9), the FDP on 24,660 (14.8 percent, up 2.0) and the AfD on 15,869 (9.5 percent, down 3.0). Zippelius won the direct mandate. The CDU/CSU group dates his Bundestag membership from 26 October 2021, when the 20th Bundestag held its constituting session.

Renomination and the 2025 federal election

A notice on Zippelius's website stated that CDU members in Karlsruhe-Land nominated him on 18 September 2024 for the next federal election with 96.8 percent of the vote. The 2025 German federal election had been set for 28 September 2025. On 27 December 2024, at the chancellor's request, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier dissolved the 20th Bundestag and fixed polling day as 23 February 2025.

That election was the first under the 2023 electoral reform. Voters still had a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party list, and there were still 299 constituencies, but the Bundestag was capped at 630 seats and overhang and leveling seats ended. Second votes alone set each party's seat total. In a Land, the party's constituency winners were seated in descending order of their first-vote share only up to the seats its list had won there. A plurality of first votes no longer guaranteed a seat; further winners went without one. The final result lists Zippelius as elected in the constituency, so his plurality was covered by the CDU list's seats in Baden-Württemberg.

Of 207,276 eligible voters, 176,259 voted (85.0 percent, up 4.7 points). Zippelius received 68,439 of 174,777 valid first votes (39.2 percent, up 8.7). Thomas Möckel of the AfD was second with 32,293 (18.5 percent, up 9.5), 20.7 points behind. Assad Hussain (SPD) received 26,153 (15.0 percent, down 7.9), Sebastian Grässer (Greens) 22,739 (13.0 percent, down 3.7), Jürgen Creutzmann (Die Linke) 8,839 (5.1 percent, up 2.6) and Sebastian Weber (FDP) 7,330 (4.2 percent, down 7.3). Ulrich Stoll (Free Voters) received 4,589 (2.6 percent, unchanged), Tobias Mexner (Volt) 2,311 (1.3 percent) and Vanessa Schulz (Die PARTEI) 2,084 (1.2 percent, down 0.3). The constituency committee admitted these nine nominations on 24 January 2025.

Of 175,405 valid second votes, the CDU took 58,133 (33.1 percent, up 7.4 points), then the AfD 33,394 (19.0 percent, up 9.5), the SPD 26,361 (15.0 percent, down 8.1), the Greens 23,377 (13.3 percent, down 2.9), Die Linke 9,790 (5.6 percent, up 2.9), the FDP 9,723 (5.5 percent, down 9.3) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance 6,761 (3.9 percent).

Parliamentary work

Committees in the 20th Bundestag

In the 20th Bundestag, from 26 October 2021 to 25 March 2025, Nicolas Zippelius sat for the CDU/CSU as an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Committee on Digital Affairs, and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The archived biography does not list a chair or a rapporteurship on those standing committees. From 8 July 2022 he was also an ordinary member of the term’s first committee of inquiry, on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan inquiry

The Bundestag established the inquiry that day on a motion of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the CDU/CSU, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The Alternative for Germany voted against and Die Linke abstained. The committee constituted itself the same day. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas confirmed that the members named by the groups were present, and Ralf Stegner (SPD) was elected chair with 11 votes in favour and one abstention.

The mandate covered 29 February 2020, the date of the Doha Agreement between the United States and Taliban representatives, through 30 September 2021, four weeks after the last US soldiers left Kabul airport. The committee was to form an overall picture of how the federal government, its authorities and the intelligence services had assessed and handled the Bundeswehr withdrawal, the evacuation of embassy staff and German citizens, and the protection and admission of local employees (Ortskräfte). The decision recorded that many Afghan local staff of German offices had not been brought out in time.

Twelve ordinary members sat in proportion to group strength. The CDU/CSU’s were Thomas Erndl as deputy chair, Thomas Röwekamp as the group’s Obmann (coordinator), and Zippelius; Michael Brand, Kerstin Vieregge and Mechthild Wittmann were the substitutes. Die Linke, which began with a seat, later had to leave after losing parliamentary-group status in the split that produced the BSW.

At the 87th public sitting, on 10 October 2024, Stegner turned the questioning to Zippelius for Martin Jäger, a former state secretary in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Zippelius asked how decisions had been shared with Minister Müller in August 2021, whether Jäger had attended the crisis-staff meetings, and whether the ministry had meant to continue cooperation in Afghanistan in any event. Asked whether development cooperation had been used to strengthen the Afghan government’s support at home, Jäger said the ministry had never politicised it and did not treat it as an instrument of foreign policy.

In the plenary debate of 30 January 2025 on the close of evidence-taking, Zippelius thanked service members who had carried out the mandate for 20 years, people who had supported the evacuation at risk to their lives, staff of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, and those who continued the work after 27 August 2021, in what he called phase II. He said the situation had been misjudged: until mid-August the development ministry and the Foreign Office had still intended to remain. Germany, he argued, had to seek the best outcome and also prepare for the worst case, the rapid Taliban advance and the collapse of state structures. He cited projects he attributed to development cooperation, including 29 hospitals built or renovated and schools, and closed with thanks. Applause came from the CDU/CSU and from members of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP.

On 18 February 2025 the committee handed Vice President Aydan Özoğuz its final report, printed paper 20/14700, more than 1,400 pages, submitted under Article 44 of the Basic Law. In the Bundestag’s account of the faction chapters, the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP drew similar conclusions and differed only in detail, while the AfD criticised the inquiry itself. The four groups concentrated on the US role and the German response, weak coordination among ministries, and failures in the local-staff procedure. The CDU/CSU assessment, as that account summarised it, said the right moment to prepare for a crisis must not be missed; the AfD called the local-staff procedure a migration measure.

The 21st Bundestag and interparliamentary groups

Since the 21st Bundestag convened on 25 March 2025, Zippelius has been an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and a deputy member of the Subcommittee on Armaments and Proliferation Control, Non-Proliferation and International Disarmament. The same biography lists him as a deputy member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly and of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and as deputy chair of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group (Deutsch-Chinesische Parlamentariergruppe), the Bundestag’s group for contacts with China.

On 13 May 2025 the CDU/CSU group elected him chair of its working group on economic cooperation and development. Its member page describes him as spokesperson and chair of that working group. The 20th-term archive does not list the Franco-German, Inter-Parliamentary Union or German-Chinese posts.

China and foreign policy

De-risking and the Union position

Zippelius sits on the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee and the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Bundestag lists him as deputy chair of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group. Deutschlandfunk in May 2026 called him the CDU/CSU group's China rapporteur (China-Berichterstatter); the Börsen-Zeitung has described him as the CDU's China expert. The group's written line came first. On 18 April 2023 the CDU/CSU Bundestag faction adopted Souveränität aus eigener Stärke – Eckpfeiler einer neuen China-Politik. The text names no authors. Zippelius later treated it as the faction's paper and, in August 2024, summarised the aim as "ein gutes, aber kein naives Verhältnis zu China"—a good relationship with China, but not a naive one.

It says "peace through trade" has failed toward Russia and China, notes that some supply-chain dependencies had grown, and argues for "de-risking" and technological sovereignty in key technologies rather than a break in economic relations. Sovereignty, it states, "beginnt mit der eigenen Stärke zuhause": there should be no China strategy without a Germany strategy. Proposals include a recurring dependency report—covering high technology, rare earths and renewable-energy technologies—with options, as a rule of thumb, where sensitive imports are more than one-third dependent, and a Chancellery "Kompetenzzentrum China" under a federal China commissioner, plus an EU-level centre.

In the August 2024 interview Zippelius listed analysis of critical dependencies, designation of security-relevant technologies, a stronger European business location, ratification of EU investment-protection agreements with Vietnam and Singapore, raw-material partnerships and selective re-regionalisation. For some German firms, he said, de-risking could mean more investment in China so that sites could run separately in a crisis; China itself, he added, was already de-risking through dual circulation. To Deutsche Welle in April 2024 he called heavier China investment only a partial cut in dependence—"Darin sehe ich ein Problem"—and said Germany and Europe had to become more attractive for investment. The same article reported the business counter-view: about half the members of the German Chamber of Commerce in China planned to raise investment there, and the chamber's chief executive said many executives saw absence from China as the greater competitive risk.

In June 2026 he told the Börsen-Zeitung that dependencies were "ein ernstzunehmendes Risiko," naming rare earths, batteries, pharmaceutical precursors, critical components, digital systems in infrastructure and processing methods that could lock in technological dependence. He tied de-risking to better conditions, European processing and recycling, partnerships and further trade agreements, and again urged a central China competence centre, alongside a Bundestag commission on critical economic ties.

Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific

The 2023 paper treats peace in the Taiwan Strait as a strategic interest and a one-China policy, as understood in the EU, NATO and the G7, as the reference point. It also asks that the 2020 Indo-Pacific guidelines be carried out through cooperation and a contribution to secure sea lanes, because European trade with Asia depends on freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific.

On 13 September 2024 the frigate Baden-Württemberg and the replenishment ship Frankfurt am Main entered the strait, the first German naval passage since 2002, on a deployment whose next port was Manila in the Philippines. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius called it the shortest and, given the weather, the safest route through international waters. Beijing called the passage a provocation; foreign-ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, quoted by Deutsche Welle, spoke of threats to China's sovereignty "under the cloak of freedom of navigation." In a March 2025 Table.Briefings interview headlined on normalising a German transit, Zippelius argued that such passages should become routine and that military cooperation with the Philippines could be expanded.

After talks in May 2026 between Donald Trump and Xi, Zippelius told Deutschlandfunk that the two had met as equals and were seeking a constructive relationship, and that he rejected the view that every advantage lay with China. Xi's warning on Taiwan was unsurprising even if the language had sharpened, he said; Taiwan was China's most important question, and Germany's line was unchanged—a one-China policy, with economic and scientific ties kept at a lower level.

Debate over the federal China strategy

Chancellor Olaf Scholz's cabinet adopted Germany's first cross-government China strategy on 13 July 2023, describing China as partner, competitor and systemic rival and aligning the text with EU policy. The government summary separates de-risking from decoupling: trade was to continue, but resilience was to rise and dependencies to fall in critical fields, with broader partnerships in Asia. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock presented the strategy that day at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, saying Germany would not decouple but would reduce risks, and that firms could not trust the market in good times and the state in a crisis.

A statement by Zippelius published the next day called the process chaotic and lengthy, and said parliament had been excluded because the text appeared at a think-tank event in the summer recess. The analysis, he said, overlapped in part with the Union's "Eckpfeiler," but the strategy still needed structures, including a national China competence centre. He criticised "unkoordinierte Alleingänge" by the chancellor, naming the Chinese stake in Hamburg's Tollerort terminal—the COSCO holding from which the Union paper said the government must draw lessons for investment screening—and a Chancellery press conference that took no questions.

Norbert Röttgen told Das Parlament in September 2023 that the strategy mostly described the status quo and lacked consequences, and that its core had to be a German growth strategy reducing industrial and raw-material dependence. In the same August 2024 exchange, SPD politician Nils Schmid warned that firms must weigh geopolitical risk and should not expect a state rescue in a crisis.

In June 2026, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Zippelius told the Börsen-Zeitung that the task was implementation, not another paper: dependencies cut faster, sources diversified, and China expertise built up. Asked about cabinet differences—Economy Minister Katherina Reiche stressing dialogue, others a harder line—he said policy was coordinated, that reciprocity and action against unfair competition had to be pursued with the EU, and that China remained a necessary partner on global issues.

Development cooperation

Spokesperson and working-group chair

Since the 21st Bundestag met on 25 March 2025, Nicolas Zippelius has been an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development. The CDU/CSU group lists him as spokesperson and chair of its working group on that subject; the chair is the faction's lead speaker. A report of 15 May 2025 said the faction had elected him at its sitting the previous Tuesday, 13 May. He spoke of efficiency, a link to foreign policy, and priorities of economic cooperation, external economic policy and crisis prevention. In the first reading of the 2026 budget of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) on 24 September 2025 he asked for critical committee scrutiny of Einzelplan 23, and rejected an Alternative for Germany claim that development and humanitarian spending was stuck at a historic high, setting about 10.27 billion euros against a draft of 9.94 billion.

Priorities for economic cooperation

The coalition agreement Verantwortung für Deutschland, between the CDU, the CSU and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, calls development policy both value-led and interest-led. Priorities include economic cooperation and raw materials, the causes of displacement, and energy, and financial-cooperation contracts are to go mainly to German and EU firms. The BMZ is assigned to the SPD.

On 24 September he told the Bundestag that scarcer money required concentration and coordination across ministries. Citing the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, he said infrastructure and governance spending could mobilise private investment, and he named economic cooperation and the causes of flight as Union priorities. Jamila Schäfer of Alliance 90/The Greens called the draft a planned cut, with the chapter down to 9.269 billion euros by 2029. On 26 November he defended a 2026 chapter of about 10.06 billion euros as a smaller annual cut than in 2022–23. Schäfer said that comparison understated the medium-term reduction, and that room from the debt-brake reform was not going into development cooperation.

On 6 October 2025 he said more private capital had to be mobilised, because public projects alone would not end poverty and hunger. After talks in Jakarta on 18 November with ASEAN secretary-general Kao Kim Hourn and Indonesian ministers, he urged economic cooperation with Southeast Asia to diversify supply chains. Governments there, he said, were open to partners other than China or the United States, and Germany should concentrate on the circular economy, infrastructure, governance and standards. On 15 January 2026 he said a BMZ reform should make economic cooperation a main pillar, with competition among implementers and hunger and poverty back at the centre. VENRO, the NGO umbrella, welcomed attention to civil society and the poorest countries, but warned that the economic turn put national commercial interests first.

GIZ, DEval and oversight

The Bundestag register of interests lists him, from 1 October 2025, on the board of trustees (Kuratorium) of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in Bonn and, from 7 October 2025, on the advisory board (Beirat) of the Deutsches Evaluierungsinstitut der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (DEval) gGmbH in Bonn. Under section 24 of GIZ's articles, the Kuratorium advises the federally owned implementing company on questions essential to its development and normally meets once a year. Members are unpaid, appointed for five years; five of up to 40 seats are for the Bundestag, one per faction, including Zippelius for the CDU/CSU and Claudia Roth for the Greens. That seat is not the supervisory board, which oversees the company.

DEval, owned by the Federal Republic through the BMZ, evaluates German development cooperation and publishes its reports. Its Beirat advises on the evaluation programme, methods and findings; Zippelius is the CDU/CSU member from the development committee. A BMZ grant fixed in the budget pays for the institute, which may not evaluate on commission from GIZ or KfW. Neither post directs the organisation; control of the money stays with the committee and the budget.

On the irregularities in GIZ's Yemen work he spoke as spokesperson, not as a trustee. On 20 June 2026 he told dpa, for Welt am Sonntag, that he took signs of possible misappropriation of development funds "very seriously" and that the allegations "must be fully and completely investigated." GIZ said 24 Yemeni national employees no longer worked for it, and that the BMZ and the supervisory board—not the Kuratorium—had been told in spring 2023. Roth asked that parliament be informed; the AfD again demanded that the ministry be abolished. On 18 September 2026 GIZ said it would repay the BMZ and the Federal Foreign Office about 15 million euros for 2014–2024, about 1 million for fraud and the rest for weak controls during years of remote management.

Constituency and domestic positions

The Karlsruhe-Land constituency

Zippelius is the directly elected member for Karlsruhe-Land (Wahlkreis 272) in the Bundestag, in northwestern Baden-Württemberg. The seat does not include the independent city of Karlsruhe (constituency 271). For the 2025 election the Federal Returning Officer assigned it 21 municipalities in the south and centre of Landkreis Karlsruhe: Bretten, Dettenheim, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Ettlingen, Gondelsheim, Graben-Neudorf, Karlsbad, Kraichtal, Kürnbach, Linkenheim-Hochstetten, Malsch, Marxzell, Oberderdingen, Pfinztal, Rheinstetten, Stutensee, Sulzfeld, Waldbronn, Walzbachtal, Weingarten (Baden) and Zaisenhausen. The district’s other municipalities, including Bruchsal, form constituency 278, Bruchsal–Schwetzingen.

On 31 December 2023 it covered 718.4 square kilometres and 291,700 people. The Bundestag lists constituency offices at Kaiserstraße 19 in Bruchsal, outside the constituency, and at Entengasse 12 in Ettlingen.

The main local infrastructure dispute has been Deutsche Bahn’s plan for extra tracks between Mannheim and Karlsruhe. In November 2025 the railway named a preferred route joining the A5 near Forst and running south beside the motorway, instead of crossing Stutensee. Zippelius and Olav Gutting, the CDU member for the neighbouring seat, said this met their demands—no cutting through municipalities, and bundling with existing infrastructure—and that noise effects on affected towns had to be resolved. Stutensee mayor Petra Becker welcomed the dropped landscape cut but said the eastern edge would still face freight noise; mayors in Waghäusel and Hambrücken, outside the constituency, reserved legal action and asked for stronger sound protection.

Digital policy and domestic debates

In the 20th electoral term (2021–2025) Zippelius was an ordinary member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, and a substitute on the Foreign Affairs Committee. On 21 September 2023, in the final readings of the Energy Efficiency Act, he said the bill’s data-centre rules ignored site limits and seasonal waste heat, cut across cooling equipment lasting more than ten years, and could be met on paper while total energy use rose; he also claimed extra municipal costs above one billion euros.

Asked in July 2022 whether the Network Enforcement Act should be tightened, he said reform should be discussed and relayed the government’s answer that the EU Digital Services Act would largely replace the NetzDG, using a notice procedure and a 24-hour benchmark rather than fixed deletion deadlines.

On 20 June 2023 he criticised a draft Building Energy Act from Economy Minister Robert Habeck, which he said would allow only heating with a 65 percent renewable share where a heat plan already existed—from 2024 in parts of Baden-Württemberg, and elsewhere only after heat planning, by 2028 at the latest. He called that a “Heizungs-Flickenteppich” punishing ambitious towns and asked that the draft be withdrawn. The act as later described by the federal government still tied the 65 percent rule to heat planning, applying it from 1 January 2024 in new development areas and, at the latest, to other new heating by mid-2028.

In 2023 the Badische Neueste Nachrichten reported that he had written to Interior Minister Nancy Faeser accusing the federation of leaving Länder and municipalities alone with refugee housing. In a notice he posted himself, he said the ministry had pointed to federal properties, while the Karlsruhe district authority told him on 27 June 2023 that the only built site offered, in Kraichtal-Oberacker, was unsuitable for short- or medium-term accommodation, and that by late September the authority was still searching alone.

In 2025 a constituent, citing the BNN, asked why he was “polemicising” against the SPD nomination of Potsdam public-law professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf to the Federal Constitutional Court, given a coalition agreement that sought insurer reimbursement of abortion costs; the questioner suggested he had not read that agreement or had followed propaganda. Zippelius answered on 28 October 2025 that he had objected internally early and spoken publicly only when asked. His decision, he wrote, rested on the view that the underlying fundamental-rights doctrine “enables a far-reaching unleashing of the state’s power to intervene,” formed in talks with experienced lawyers; rejecting such nominees was, he added, common practice, citing the earlier candidate Seegmüller.

Public profile

Interviews and commentary

Outside parliament, Zippelius is heard mainly in specialist China and business outlets, short public-radio interviews, and the regional press around Karlsruhe. In 2025 the subscriber briefing China.Table published two interviews by Angela Köckritz. In March he argued that a transit of the Taiwan Strait by German warships should be treated as routine and that cooperation with the Philippines could be widened. In October, under the line “Wir müssen politisch schneller werden, denn es brennt,” he was asked about rare earths and the pace of reducing industrial dependence on China. In a March 2025 CHINAHIRN profile, Wolfgang Hirn noted a pre-election China.Table article calling for a central China competence centre, and wrote that colleagues and outlets had begun calling him the CDU/CSU group’s China expert.

On 8 June 2026 the Börsen-Zeitung ran a question-and-answer interview by Andreas Heitker, “Die Abhängigkeiten von China stellen ein ernstzunehmendes Risiko dar.” Introducing the CDU member, in the Bundestag since 2021, as a member of the Foreign Affairs and Economic Cooperation and Development committees, it summarised his case for a common European Union line and for cutting dependencies through location policy rather than another strategy paper. Public radio covered the same ground more briefly. On 15 May 2026 Deutschlandfunk broadcast an approximately twelve-minute interview, reported by Barbara Schmidt-Mattern, on U.S.–Chinese talks and Europe’s economic independence from China. On 21 May, WDR 5’s Morgenecho aired a five-minute interview after visits to Beijing by the U.S. and Russian presidents, identifying him as the CDU/CSU China rapporteur.

The Badische Neueste Nachrichten has treated him as the Karlsruhe-Land member as well as a China voice: a September 2021 candidate profile, an October 2022 interview on commuting between Weingarten and Berlin, a February 2025 pre-election questionnaire, and October 2026 quotes on pressure on German industry. In 2024 the regional station KraichgauTV recorded a studio conversation titled with his self-description as a “classically liberal conservative.”

Podcast and public reception

With fellow CDU Bundestag member Yannick Bury—an economist for the Emmendingen–Lahr seat in Baden-Württemberg and a member of the Budget Committee—Zippelius has co-hosted Nachts im Bundestag since 3 June 2022. The Podigee show says the two explain a typical day in the Bundestag and what happens behind the scenes, “honestly, directly, and sometimes with a wink.” The first episode compared their arrival in parliament to a student’s first days at university. Season 1 reached 36 episodes, the last dated 12 November 2024; season 2 resumed on 16 May 2025. By 27 March 2026 it listed 44 episodes of roughly 30 to 45 minutes, on plenary routine, the budget, energy prices, the state election, and personal asides.

The podcast is a self-distributed parliamentary diary and has not drawn noticeable national reviews. The same limit marks his wider reception. He is asked to comment when China policy or supply-chain risk is in the news, and constituency papers in northern Baden cover him regularly, but he is not a fixture of national talk shows or magazine profiles. The coverage that exists is largely explanatory, not a sustained critical portrait.

Personal life

Family

The Bundestag biography of Nicolas Benjamin Zippelius, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, records that he was born on 1 August 1987 in Karlsruhe. The text kept for the 20th electoral period describes him as Catholic and married. The biography for the 21st Bundestag repeats that wording and adds that he has one child. Neither entry names a spouse or child, and the parliamentary biographies do not name his parents or any siblings.

In a first-person note carried by the CDU association in Linkenheim-Hochstetten, he writes that he grew up in Weingarten (Baden), in the Karlsruhe district of Baden-Württemberg, and he calls Weingarten his home municipality. Abgeordnetenwatch lists Weingarten as his place of residence. The same note says that his last job before the Bundestag was in the family firm in Weingarten. On his own website he describes that business as his parents' medium-sized firm; the Bundestag disclosure names the employer as Roland Stärk Landschaftsbau GmbH in Weingarten and does not set out a kinship. In a March 2025 interview he mentioned a visit to Hong Kong with his father, without giving his father's name.

Other activities

Zippelius was a goalkeeper for FVgg Weingarten, the football club in his home town. Wolfgang Hirn recorded that detail in 2025 when Zippelius used a player's saying about performing on the pitch. On his website he writes that, away from politics, he played football and tennis in his youth and later stayed active both as a player and as a goalkeeper coach. Replying on Abgeordnetenwatch, he said that sport and work as a youth leader, together with the family firm, had taught him the places and outlook of the district. Those accounts do not name a club season, a coaching licence, or the youth group.

A separate local activity is a food collection run with party volunteers. In December 2024 the Badische Neueste Nachrichten reported that the CDU Bundestag member was supporting the Tafel in Bretten, a food bank, through a "reverse Advent calendar," and that the drive was then being carried out for the fifth time. The article's image description says the CDU and Zippelius filled shopping carts with groceries for the collection.