Patricia Lips

Patricia Ingrid Lips (born 21 December 1963 in Milan, Italy) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag from Hesse. The federal returning officer records her full name as Patricia Ingrid Lips. The Bundestag biography, which publishes the member's own statements, lists her occupation as Handelsfachwirtin, a German qualification in commercial management, and describes her as Roman Catholic and unmarried. She is from Urberach, a district of Rödermark in the Offenbach area, south-east of Frankfurt.

She took the Abitur in Darmstadt in 1983 and then trained as a Handelsfachwirtin. From 1984 to 2000 she was employed by a wholesale company, working in central purchasing as a wholesale and foreign-trade clerk, and from 2000 to 2002 she was a member of the management of a medium-sized trading firm. She joined the CDU in 1993, at about the age of 30, and held municipal party and council offices in Rödermark before her move into federal politics.

Lips has been a member of the Bundestag since 2002. In the parliament elected that year she was the tenth CDU member returned from Hesse. She later won the direct mandate in the Odenwald constituency in several successive elections. At the 2021 federal election the Social Democratic Party took the seat: Jens Zimmermann received 32.3 percent of the first votes and Lips 27.9 percent, and she returned through the state list. In the snap 2025 German federal election, held on 23 February, she regained Wahlkreis 186 (Odenwald) with 34.0 percent of the first votes (65,470) against Zimmermann's 24.8 percent, at a turnout of 84.5 percent. On 14 January 2025 delegates of the Hesse CDU, meeting in Alsfeld, had elected her to first place on the state list with 94.1 percent of the vote; it was the first time the state party entered a Bundestag election with a woman at the head of its list.

On 13 December 2021 the CDU/CSU parliamentary group elected her one of its deputy chairs, responsible for European policy, coordination of parliamentary cooperation in Europe, the Bundestag liaison office in Brussels, relations with the European People's Party group in the European Parliament, and human rights. The same Bundestag biography records that she has been a deputy state chair of the CDU in Hesse since 2024. In the 21st Bundestag she is a substitute member of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, a full member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, and a full member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Before that leadership role, her parliamentary work ran through the finance committee and the budget, including a period as chair of the body that oversees federal borrowing. For several years she was a deputy federal chair of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion, the CDU/CSU small- and medium-business association, serving under Carsten Linnemann. When Friedrich Merz became CDU chairman only after an earlier defeat, Hessischer Rundfunk described Lips as one of the leading organizers of his campaign team.

Early life and education

Childhood in Italy and Hesse

Patricia Lips was born on 21 December 1963 in Milan, Italy. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on the member's own information, also describes her as Roman Catholic. Her parents lived in Italy for several years, and the family moved to Urberach when she was one and a half. A community report on der Freitag of a discussion in Berlin in April 2023 adds that those first years were spent there with her parents and brothers, in the capital of Lombardy, because her father worked in the city.

Urberach was then a municipality of its own in the district of Dieburg, in Hesse. On 1 January 1977 it was merged with neighbouring Ober-Roden to form Rödermark, which was placed in the Offenbach district; the new municipality received town rights on 23 August 1980. She grew up in Urberach and has remained based there. In February 2025 hessenschau described the 61-year-old parliamentarian as coming from that district of Rödermark, and she told the Offenbach-Post that, outside sitting weeks in Berlin, she worked from home at the Gänseeck overlooking the Gallusplatz and gardened at her parents' house.

The same interview records only short returns to Italy. Lips said she was not drawn to long holidays, but that in summer she liked to spend a few days in northern Italy, preferably at Lake Como. The 2023 account quotes her as valuing both the calm and approachability she associated with people in Italy and, in Germany, reliability together with a degree of distance.

School and vocational qualification

In 1983 Lips passed the Abitur in Darmstadt. Her website names the school as the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium and connects a long-standing interest in history with her parents and with her years at a classical Gymnasium.

The school describes itself as a small classical humanist Gymnasium in the centre of the city, with Latin among its subjects. Since 1955 it has used a postwar building on Nieder-Ramstädter Straße designed by Max Taut, one of the five Darmstadt Meisterbauten that were built: classroom and administration wings arranged in a U, with an assembly hall to the south-west.

The Bundestag biography summarises the next stage as training as a Handelsfachwirtin and employment in a wholesale company from 1984 to 2000. Lips dates the Handelsfachwirtin qualification to 1989, after an apprenticeship as a Groß- und Außenhandelskauffrau (a clerk in wholesale and foreign trade), and describes the job as central purchasing in a wholesale firm. A hessenschau profile published on 15 February 2025 used the same occupational title for the work she was doing when, in 1993 and aged 30, she joined the Christian Democratic Union: clerk in the central purchasing department of a wholesale chain. That commercial training preceded her municipal offices in Rödermark and her entry into the Bundestag in 2002.

Business career

Wholesale employment

The occupation recorded for Patricia Lips before she entered the Bundestag is Handelsfachwirtin. The biography published there, which the parliament notes is drawn from members' own statements, says that she took the Abitur in Darmstadt in 1983, trained as a Handelsfachwirtin, and from 1984 to 2000 was an employee of a wholesale company. That account does not name the firm.

Her own website gives a fuller version of the same years: an apprenticeship as a Groß- und Außenhandelskauffrau (a wholesale and foreign-trade clerk), the Handelsfachwirtin qualification from 1989, and work in the central purchasing department of a wholesale company. A February 2025 portrait on hessenschau.de, a news site of Hessischer Rundfunk, described her, when she joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in 1993, as a Groß- und Außenhandelskauffrau in the central purchasing of a wholesale chain (Großmarktkette). The parliamentary biography places the CDU entry in 1993 and the wholesale employment through 2000, so the two overlap.

Management role before parliament

From 2000 to 2002 the same biography lists her as a member of the management of a medium-sized trading business, in the German wording a Mittelstand Handelsbetrieb. It does not call the business a textile firm. A report published on 14 February 2025 by op-online.de, on her selection as lead candidate of the CDU in Hesse, wrote that the Handelsfachwirtin moved into federal politics in 2002 while she belonged to the management of a medium-sized textile trading company.

Under sections 45 and following of the Abgeordnetengesetz, members must file notifiable information within three months of taking their seats; it is published on the Bundestag site after the data are processed and checked for a duty to disclose. In that register, Lips's professional activity before membership is entered as Handelsfachwirtin at Discount-Tex GmbH, Stadtroda. The transparency site Abgeordnetenwatch reproduces the same pre-membership item, with Discount-Tex GmbH in Stadtroda as the organisation and Handelsfachwirtin as the activity. The published line does not itself state a management post, a company size, or a product line.

The 15th Bundestag held its first sitting in Berlin on 17 October 2002. An annex to the protocol lists Patricia Lips among the members who took part that day in the election of the Bundestag president. The biography records her as a member of the Bundestag from 2002 and limits the management role to that year.

Local and party politics in Hesse

Municipal offices in Rödermark

Patricia Lips joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1993 and, the same year, began municipal politics in Rödermark, in the Offenbach district of Hesse. She sat in the Stadtverordnetenversammlung, the city council, from 1993, with a break from 2002 to 2005 after she entered the Bundestag, and gave up the seat in November 2013. She said Berlin sittings had made regular attendance in Rödermark too difficult, and that she would remain linked to local politics as city-association chair and deputy district chair.

On her own account she chaired the CDU group on the city council from 1997 to 2001 and was Stadtverordnetenvorsteherin, the council's presiding officer, from 2001 to 2002. A 2025 Offenbach-Post profile recorded both offices, without the years, as the local posts she held before the move into federal politics in 2002. From 2005 she chaired the CDU city association in Rödermark.

She resigned that chairmanship with effect from 20 May 2017. She described the step, after almost 13 years, as a hard one; the Frankfurter Rundschau summarised the tenure as 13 years. The dispute followed the February 2017 mayoral election, in which CDU candidate Carsten Helfmann lost narrowly to incumbent Roland Kern of the local list Andere Liste/Die Grünen. Lips said the campaign had badly damaged relations with the coalition partner and that the party should reconsider its course, including for the election due when Kern's term ended in 2019, before committing itself again. The CDU council group had already agreed a joint "Aktionsprogramm Stadtentwicklung", an urban-development programme, with AL/Die Grünen, which she treated as a continuation of the coalition agreement made before the competent party bodies had decided whether the pact should go on. She said she would not force a split over her own differing view, that the task mattered more than the person, and that she would concentrate on the federal campaign. She notified the executive and the group, a board meeting on 19 May was to arrange a handover, and she said she would remain an ordinary member of the city association. The AL group leader, Stefan Gerl, called the resignation an internal CDU matter. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own information, compresses the Rödermark record into municipal activity in various functions from 1993 to 2017.

District party and MIT posts

In March 2010 a CDU district congress in Mainhausen elected Frank Lortz, a directly elected member and vice-president of the Hessian Landtag, as chair of the district association Offenbach-Land, and added Lips as a new deputy chair beside three deputies who were confirmed. The Offenbach-Post in 2017 still dated that deputy chairmanship from 2010. The Bundestag biography instead dates it from 2011 and continues to list the office.

Since 2003 she has chaired the Offenbach-Land branch of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion (MIT), the CDU/CSU association oriented toward small and medium-sized business. From 2013 to 2021 she was also a deputy federal chair of the MIT. The organisation's report of its 11th federal delegate assembly in Braunschweig, published in MIT News 4/2013, named her among the deputy federal chairs elected when Carsten Linnemann became federal chair. Writing in 2017, the Offenbach-Post used the association's then name, Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsvereinigung, for that federal post.

State leadership and the 2025 list

In June 2024, at a state party congress in the Buderus Arena in Wetzlar, the CDU in Hesse re-elected Minister-President Boris Rhein as state chair and elected Lips as one of the deputy state chairs. Her own account dates the deputy state chairmanship from June 2024; the Bundestag biography records it as held since 2024.

On 14 January 2025 a state delegate assembly in Alsfeld placed her first on the Hessian CDU list for the Bundestag election of 23 February. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported that 326 delegates were present and that she received 94.1 percent; hessenschau gave the share as 94 percent and wrote that the party was entering a Bundestag election with a woman at the head of its list for the first time.

hessenschau described the evening as free of contested candidacies. Helge Braun, who had led the Hessian list at the previous federal election, did not stand. Delegates gave the next places to Michael Brand of Fulda and to Michael Meister of Bensheim. Rhein, as state chair, told the assembly that Lips was now the party's number one.

Bundestag elections

Entry in 2002 and the narrow 2005 mandate

Lips took her seat when the 15th Bundestag opened on 17 October 2002; the stenographic record of that constitutive sitting lists her among the members who voted. At the 2002 German federal election on 22 September 2002 she entered from tenth place on the Christian Democratic Union state list in Hesse, not as a directly elected member. In constituency 188, Odenwald, the direct mandate went to Dr. Erika Ober of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, reported at 45.6 percent. The Federal Returning Officer’s constituency file records 84,190 SPD first votes (45.6 percent) and 76,042 CDU first votes (41.2 percent), with the Free Democratic Party on 6.2 percent and Alliance 90/The Greens on 5.1 percent. Turnout was 82.0 percent of 231,299 eligible voters, and second votes divided 39.7 percent for the SPD and 38.7 percent for the CDU.

The same constituency, still numbered 188, was decided by 79 votes at the 2005 German federal election on 18 September 2005. Lips, the CDU candidate, received 76,696 first votes (42.0 percent); Ober, again the SPD candidate, received 76,617 (41.9 percent). The FDP followed with 5.2 percent, the Greens with 4.9 percent and the Left with 4.0 percent. Of 234,100 eligible voters, 80.2 percent cast ballots, and on the second vote the CDU led the SPD by 35.5 percent to 34.6 percent.

Direct mandates from 2009 to 2017

From the 2009 German federal election the seat carried the number 187. On 27 September 2009 Lips won it with 69,191 first votes (40.4 percent). Detlev Blitz of the SPD took 50,797 (29.6 percent), 18,394 votes behind; Dr. Heinrich Leonhard Kolb of the FDP had 10.7 percent, Dr. Thomas Rehahn of the Greens 9.5 percent, and Sabine Leidig of Die Linke 6.8 percent. Turnout was 75.3 percent of 234,911 eligible voters. Second votes in the constituency were 33.0 percent CDU, 24.9 percent SPD and 17.3 percent FDP.

The Federal Returning Officer’s descriptions for 2013, 2017 and 2021 assign constituency 187 the municipalities later listed as constituency 186: the whole Odenwaldkreis; in Darmstadt-Dieburg, Babenhausen, Dieburg, Fischbachtal, Groß-Bieberau, Groß-Umstadt, Groß-Zimmern, Otzberg, Reinheim and Schaafheim; and, in the Offenbach district, Hainburg, Mainhausen, Rodgau, Rödermark and Seligenstadt. The 2009 results file repeats the 2005 first-vote totals under the new number, so the change from 188 to 187 did not alter the reported electorate.

Lips kept the direct mandate at the 2013 German federal election on 22 September 2013, with 80,323 first votes (46.9 percent) against 57,586 (33.6 percent) for the SPD. The Greens received 6.9 percent, the Left 5.0 percent, the Pirate Party 3.1 percent and the FDP 2.7 percent, and turnout was 75.6 percent. Second votes were 40.9 percent CDU and 28.1 percent SPD.

At the 2017 German federal election on 24 September 2017 the Bundestag again recorded her as directly elected in constituency 187. The CDU first-vote total was 65,654 (36.1 percent), against 52,761 (29.0 percent) for the SPD. Alternative for Germany reached 11.7 percent, ahead of the Greens on 7.8 percent, the FDP on 7.2 percent and the Left on 6.1 percent. Turnout was 78.9 percent of 234,422 eligible voters, and second votes were 32.7 percent CDU, 23.3 percent SPD and 12.2 percent AfD.

Defeat in 2021 and return in 2025

For the 2025 election the Federal Returning Officer listed those same municipalities as constituency 186 rather than 187.

On 26 September 2021, while the seat was still numbered 187, the direct mandate passed to the SPD. Dr. Jens Zimmermann was directly elected in the constituency, and Lips, who had stood there, returned on the Hesse state list. The SPD received 57,172 first votes (32.3 percent) and the CDU 49,367 (27.9 percent). The Greens took 12.2 percent, the FDP 9.7 percent and the AfD 8.5 percent. Turnout was 76.9 percent of 233,901 eligible voters, and second votes put the SPD ahead by 28.0 percent to 24.2 percent for the CDU.

At the 2025 German federal election on 23 February 2025 Lips won renumbered constituency 186 with 65,470 first votes (34.0 percent) to Zimmermann’s 47,730 (24.8 percent). The AfD was third, with 35,564 first votes (18.5 percent), followed by the Greens on 9.0 percent, the Left on 6.1 percent and the FDP on 3.5 percent. Turnout was 84.5 percent of 230,672 eligible voters. Second votes were 30.7 percent for the CDU, 18.8 percent for the AfD and 18.1 percent for the SPD. The seat was the direct mandate: for the 21st electoral term the Bundestag lists her as the member for constituency 186, Odenwald.

Parliamentary committees and offices

Finance and education committees

Her own chronology places her, in that first term, on the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union from 2002 to 2004 and then on the Finance Committee from 2004 to 2013. The Finance Committee’s field follows the responsibilities of the Federal Ministry of Finance except for budget policy; it is normally the lead committee on tax law, customs and the regulation of banks, securities and insurance. A regional report published as the committees of the 18th term were about to be formed described her as drawing on long experience in finance and as already having sat as a deputy member of the education committee.

The Bundestag’s 22 standing committees constituted themselves on the morning of 15 January 2014. Lips, for the CDU/CSU, was elected chair of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment, a body of 34 members, and was also recorded as one of its ordinary members. The committee’s own page in that term described the political task as setting the framework and securing funds for education, science and research. The archived biography for the 18th electoral term (2013–2017) states that she had chaired the committee since 2014 and lists her, in addition, as a deputy member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.

Budget and confidential oversight

In the 19th electoral term she moved from that chair to the Budget Committee as an ordinary member, not as its chair. At the committee’s constitutive sitting on 31 January 2018 the members elected Peter Boehringer (AfD) as chair; the Bundestag press service listed Lips among the CDU/CSU members, with Eckhardt Rehberg as the group’s spokesperson (Obmann) on the committee. The Budget Committee considers, in the annual budget procedure, how much the Federation spends and for what purpose, and it continuously reviews the government’s execution of the budget. After the draft budget is referred from the plenary, the committee’s rapporteurs examine individual spending lines before the committee reports a revised draft back to the House.

On 1 March 2018 the Bundestag elected the members of the body provided for in section 3 of the Federal Debt Management Act (Bundesschuldenwesengesetz). Lips received 579 votes. That body is briefed by the Federal Ministry of Finance on all questions of federal debt; only members of the Budget Committee may sit on it, and they are obliged to keep its proceedings secret. The archived biography for the 19th term lists her as chair of this Bundesfinanzierungsgremium, a role her own account dates to 2018–2021, and a contemporary profile described her as having chaired the body that watches federal borrowing. The same biography records her as an ordinary member of the Vertrauensgremium and as a deputy member of the Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure.

On 21 March 2018 the plenary elected her to the Vertrauensgremium under section 10a (2) of the Federal Budget Code, in place of Rüdiger Kruse, with 583 votes in favour, 32 against, 33 abstentions and four invalid ballots. The Bundestag may, for reasons of secrecy, make approval of expenditure managed under classified economic plans depend on this body, whose members are drawn from the Budget Committee. Unless the House decides otherwise, the Finance Ministry submits to it the economic plans of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) and the Military Counterintelligence Service (Bundesamt für den Militärischen Abschirmdienst); the gremium approves those plans, monitors their execution with support from the Federal Audit Office, meets in secret, and reports the closing totals to the Budget Committee. Its report for July 2017 to December 2019 names Lips among the CDU/CSU members, with Johannes Kahrs as chair. These budget offices do not appear in her biographies for the 20th or 21st terms.

Deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group

On 13 December 2021 the CDU/CSU Bundestag group elected a new executive board under its chair, Ralph Brinkhaus. Lips, member for Odenwald, was one of the deputy chairs. Her portfolio covered European policy, coordination of European work, parliamentary cooperation in Europe, the Bundestag’s liaison office in Brussels, relations with the European People’s Party Group in the European Parliament, and human rights. The Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, anchored in the Basic Law, is the Bundestag’s central forum for participation in European policy: it handles questions of integration, institutions, strategy documents, the EU’s multiannual financial framework and enlargement, and it can in defined cases act in place of the plenary. In the 20th term Lips was not an ordinary member of that committee; the archived biography lists her as a deputy member of it, of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, and of the Health Committee.

The biography for the 21st Bundestag, which opened in 2025, again lists her as a deputy member of the EU affairs committee and states that she has been a deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group since December 2021. It also records her as a member of the group’s Parlamentskreis Mittelstand. On 13 May 2025 the group elected a new executive board, and Lips was again chosen as a deputy chair, with a portfolio of European policy, Europe coordination, parliamentary cooperation in Europe, the Brussels liaison office and the EPP group; human rights were no longer part of her brief.

European and international parliamentary work

EU affairs inside the Bundestag

On 13 December 2021 the Bundestag group of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the CSU elected Patricia Lips a deputy chair for European policy, parliamentary cooperation in Europe, the Bundestag’s Brussels office, the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, and human rights. In October 2026 the Bundestag weekly Das Parlament still described her as the deputy chair responsible for European topics.

Her own account records membership of the committee on European affairs from 2002 to 2004, before she moved to the Finance Committee until 2013. She was not on the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union in the 18th Bundestag (2013–2017) or the 19th (2017–2021). In the 20th electoral term she was a substitute member of that committee. From 25 March 2025, in the 21st Bundestag, she is again a substitute member (Stellvertretendes Mitglied).

The committee is required by the Basic Law and is the Bundestag’s central forum for European policy. It covers integration, institutional questions, strategy documents, the EU’s multiannual financial planning and enlargement, and it can in defined cases act in place of the plenary.

In the March 2025 coalition talks the Rheinische Post reported that Lips led the CDU side of the Europe working group, one of 16 groups staffed by 256 negotiators from the CDU, the CSU and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Alexander Radwan led for the CSU and Katarina Barley, a vice-president of the European Parliament, for the SPD.

On 25 April 2024, in a debate marking twenty years since the eastern enlargement, she called for closer ties with the Western Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, but said the EU first had to strengthen its capacity to act and then its capacity to take in new members. On 17 December 2025, before a European Council, she repeated that those two requirements were inseparable, urged application of the EU–Mercosur agreement, and argued for less regulation. In October 2026 she backed Friedrich Merz’s opposition to raising the EU budget for 2028–2034 from €1.2 trillion to €2 trillion: cuts of several hundred billion euro would not be saving, she said, and a rise of about 40 percent in Germany’s contribution would endanger public acceptance of the EU. She opposed new own resources such as a tax on large technology firms, and further Ukraine aid financed by more EU borrowing.

Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly

The Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly is a joint body of the Bundestag and the National Assembly of France. It was created by an agreement adopted by the National Assembly on 11 March 2019 and by the Bundestag on 20 March 2019, after a working group set up on 22 January 2018, the 55th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty; the constitutive sitting was held in Paris on 25 March 2019.

Each parliament sends 50 members, named at the start of its legislative term with regard to the strength of the groups. The assembly meets in public at least twice a year, normally alternating between Germany and France, under the presidents of the two chambers. It monitors the Élysée Treaty of 1963 and the Aachen Treaty of 2019 and the projects based on them; follows the Franco-German ministerial councils, the Franco-German Defence and Security Council, and international and European questions of common interest, especially common foreign, security and defence policy; and proposes steps toward convergence of German and French law. It adopts decisions and may propose joint resolutions, which the two parliaments are to consider promptly.

Lips was a full member in the 20th Bundestag and is again a full member (ordentliches Mitglied) in the 21st.

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is the parliamentary organ of the Council of Europe. It has 306 representatives and 306 substitutes from the parliaments of 46 member states; Germany, like France, Italy, Turkey and the United Kingdom, holds 18 seats. It meets four times a year for week-long plenary sessions in Strasbourg, and delegations are expected to mirror the balance of their home parliaments; members sit in transnational groups, including the Group of the European People’s Party (EPP/CD).

On 5 June 2025 the Bundestag approved a joint list of Germany’s representatives, with Lips one of six full CDU/CSU members rather than a substitute. Her Assembly profile records her as a German representative from 23 June 2025 in the EPP/CD group, a full member of the Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media from that day and of the Sub-Committee on Culture, Education and Democratic Values from 24 June 2025; no reports are listed.

Role in CDU leadership contests

The 2020–2021 campaign

In February 2020 Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told the presidium of the CDU that she would not seek the chancellorship and would give up the party chair, arguing that the two roles belonged together. A special congress set for 25 April 2020 was postponed as COVID-19 spread; she wrote to members that it could not be held and that the country came before the party. Sixteen members applied, but only three were official candidates: Armin Laschet, minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, Friedrich Merz, and Norbert Röttgen. On 13 March 2020 Merz named the Hessian member of the Bundestag, Patricia Lips, overall director (Gesamtleiterin) of his bid. To newspapers of the Neue Berliner Redaktionsgesellschaft he called her “the person who organizes everything and keeps the overview, so to speak my ‘Stabschefin,’” with about a dozen people on the team. Unlike in his 2018 candidacy, he said, he was much better placed in numbers and quality, and he called the delay “right and sensible.”

The chair was filled on 16 January 2021 at a fully digital congress, the January 2021 leadership election. Merz led the first ballot with 385 votes to Laschet’s 380 and Röttgen’s 224, short of an absolute majority, so Röttgen dropped out. In the runoff Laschet won 521 to 466, from 991 votes cast and four abstentions. Party law required a postal confirmation; on 22 January, with only Laschet on the ballot, he received 796 votes, 83.35 percent of the valid papers. He thanked both rivals for a contest he put at about ten months, and both congratulated him. Lips’s documented part was the organizing role assigned in March 2020; she was not a candidate.

The 2021–2022 membership ballot

Laschet left the chair after the Union’s loss in the 2021 Bundestag election, in which he had been the lead candidate. Members then voted for the first time on the leadership, in the December 2021 leadership election. The result, given on 17 December, was 62.1 percent for Merz, 25.8 percent for Röttgen and 12.1 percent for Helge Braun. Participation was 248,360, about two thirds of the membership, a little over 132,000 online and a little over 115,000 by post. The vote was formally advisory, because only a congress elects the chair; the three candidates said they would accept it, and a digital congress was fixed for 21–22 January 2022.

On 22 January the delegates elected Merz with 915 of 983 valid votes, 94.6 percent, and 16 abstentions, and elected Mario Czaja general secretary. A postal ballot on 31 January confirmed Merz, unopposed, with 95.33 percent and Czaja with 94.24 percent. The team Merz presented for the ballot was a public slate, not a restatement of the 2020 staff post. On 16 November 2021 in Berlin he proposed Czaja as general secretary and Christina Stumpp, a new Bundestag member from Baden-Württemberg, for a deputy general-secretary office the party still had to create. Reports of that presentation name those two beside him, not Lips. A February 2025 hessenschau portrait later called her one of the leading figures in his team when he became chair only on a repeated attempt, and quoted her on an “extremely trusting” relationship and on people who “pull the threads together in the background.” That account does not give her a 2021 title matching the March 2020 “Stabschefin” role.

Standing inside the parliamentary party

On 13 December 2021, four days before the membership result, the CDU/CSU Bundestag group renewed its executive while Ralph Brinkhaus remained chair. Lips was elected a deputy chair for European policy, European coordination, interparliamentary cooperation, the Bundestag’s Brussels office, the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, and human rights. The choice was the group’s, made before Merz was party chair; on 17 December he said the group leadership was not on the agenda. Brinkhaus’s term ran only to 30 April 2022. At the end of January he asked to bring the election forward and stood aside, having been told Merz wanted the job and wishing to avoid an open clash. On 15 February 2022 the group elected Merz with 162 of 186 votes and no opponent. Lips was already a deputy from December, placed there while the party contest was still open, not named to the post by Merz after he had won it.

Political positions

Budgets, debt and the Mittelstand

On 16 July 2012 Lips wrote on abgeordnetenwatch.de that Germany’s debt brake had become a Europe-wide model and that net new federal borrowing was to reach zero by 2016, a balance she said the world economic crisis and payments into the European rescue fund had delayed. Sustainability on debt was a guiding maxim, she added, though she gave no date for paying down debt already incurred.

On 30 September 2022 she opened the Bundestag debate on a CDU/CSU motion, “Stabilitätsunion statt Schuldenunion.” All debt, she said, narrowed future generations’ room for manoeuvre; the pandemic escape clause of the Stability and Growth Pact had been right only once, and “the exception” must not “permanently determine the rule.” She wanted the 60 percent debt and 3 percent deficit benchmarks kept, ruled out mutualising debt, and voted for the motion, which failed. SPD deputy Bettina Hagedorn called it out of its time and a return to playing “schoolmaster” in Europe; the parliament’s account also records Jamila Schäfer of Alliance 90/The Greens saying inflation could not be saved away, and FDP deputy Thorsten Lieb calling the text thin.

The Bundestag biography records that she has chaired the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion in Offenbach-Land since 2003, was its deputy federal chair from 2013 to 2021, and sits in the CDU/CSU circle for the Mittelstand. In January 2025 she told the Hessian CDU list congress that economic policy needed “stability and predictability.” In October 2026 she welcomed the European Commission’s “omnibus” laws as relief for companies and opposed further taxes on European firms.

European Union policy

On 4 November 2025, commenting on the Commission’s enlargement reports, she spoke of “light and shadow”: Montenegro a front-runner and “considerable progress” by Ukraine and Moldova, against backsliding in Serbia and drift in Georgia. Enlargement was “more than ever a strategic and geopolitical necessity,” she said, but only if every accession criterion was met and the European Union was reformed so it would “not weaken the EU, but make it stronger.”

In Das Parlament on 16 October 2026 she backed Chancellor Friedrich Merz against raising the EU budget for 2028–2034 from €1.2 trillion to €2 trillion, saying cuts of some hundreds of billions were not saving and that “drawing from the full” in Brussels, while Germany discussed social-benefit cuts and a 40 percent rise in its contribution, would feed the AfD’s criticism of Europe. She had “great stomach ache” about new own resources, saying Brussels should act only where it added value. Aid to Ukraine had no alternative and mattered for European security, she said, but not through more debt; frozen Russian assets should be used instead. On China, “the pain threshold has been reached” over state-steered prices, and she called for countermeasures, a faster Commission and new partners such as Canada and the Indo-Pacific.

Domestic issues in public debate

She has opposed a general 130 km/h limit on the Autobahn: after the vote of 18 October 2019 she wrote that she preferred incentives, automated driving and alternative drivetrains, and that limits already covered about 30 percent of motorways. On 11 February 2025 she cited an average maximum speed of 117 km/h and said intelligent traffic control often did more for the environment than a flat cap, and on 23 July 2026 she again called 130 km/h not effective because permanent or temporary limits already applied on large parts of the network.

In May 2016 she wrote that she had not backed opposition motions for a fracking ban, which she called rushed, while drinking water and health had “absolute priority,” conventional fracking since the 1960s needed rules, and commercial unconventional fracking should not be allowed. In June 2015 she had backed a bill barring all fracking in water-protection and nature areas, banning unconventional fracking for economic purposes, and reversing the burden of proof for related mining damage.

At the Alsfeld list congress she called the SPD–Green–FDP years under Olaf Scholz “three lost years,” saying the quarrels had destroyed trust the CDU must rebuild and that policy had to return “to the actual lived reality of people.” She described the Alternative for Germany as in large parts antisemitic and hostile to foreigners and as relying on heckling and “deliberate provocations,” and said the Union had “nothing, absolutely nothing, to do” with it.

Civic roles, honors and personal life

Associations and boards

Lips has chaired the Heimat- und Geschichtsverein Rödermark since 1993, when founding chair Reinhard Berker handed over the office; the association still lists her as chair. The Offenbach-Post has described the same continuous chairmanship and reported that she still helps prepare the society's exhibitions, fitting that work around a parliamentary diary.

The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own statements, records two further outside posts that have since ended: membership of the administrative board of Sparkasse Dieburg from 2011 to 2021, and a seat as senator of the Leibniz Association from 2018 to 2022. The association's 2021 annual report lists her, as of 1 September 2021, among the elected senators drawn from public life, a category limited to up to thirteen personalities.

What the Bundestag publishes as disclosure under the members' code of conduct is narrower. For the current mandate the entries are her pre-parliamentary work as a Handelsfachwirtin at Discount-Tex GmbH in Stadtroda, and the unpaid chair of the commission on public finances (Kommission Staatsfinanzen) of the Wirtschaftsrat der CDU e.V. in Berlin, stated as running until 31 December 2025. Abgeordnetenwatch, which republishes those filings, likewise shows the commission post as honorary (ehrenamtlich) and attaches no remuneration band to it. The Sparkasse and Leibniz roles do not appear in that published list of outside functions.

Order of Merit

On 14 December 2020, Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble presented Lips with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Office of the Federal President announced the awards on 1 January 2021 and placed "Lips, Patricia, Rödermark" under Verdienstkreuz am Bande, the order's class of the Cross of Merit on Ribbon. A report in the Rhein-Main-Verlag treated the decoration as recognition of her political work and of voluntary activity in the constituency. Lips said on that occasion that social, cultural and political voluntary work mattered for social cohesion, and that she was glad if her political roles made such work more visible.

Private life

The Bundestag biography states that she was born on 21 December 1963 in Milan, is Roman Catholic, and is unmarried. In a February 2025 interview she said her parents had lived for some years in Italy and that the family moved to Urberach, now part of Rödermark, when she was one and a half. When the Bundestag is not sitting she sometimes does morning desk work at her parents' house on the Gänseeck, overlooking the Gallusplatz, and she described gardening there as a second main pastime. She said she is not drawn to long holidays and prefers short trips, often to Lake Como in northern Italy.