Paul Ziemiak

Paul Ziemiak (born 6 September 1985 in Stettin, now Szczecin, Poland) is a politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany. He has sat in the Bundestag since 2017 and holds the direct mandate for the constituency Märkischer Kreis II in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Joint Committee, and he chairs the German–Polish Parliamentary Group. From 2014 to 2019 he was federal chairman of the Junge Union, the youth organization of the CDU and the Christian Social Union, and from 2018 to 2022 he was secretary-general of the federal CDU. Since 2022 he has been secretary-general of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia and chairman of the party's Südwestfalen district association.

His family came to West Germany as Aussiedler and settled in Iserlohn. At the 2014 congress where he was elected Junge Union chairman, he described himself as the child of Polish Aussiedler whose family had left Stettin with three suitcases, and he said he had spoken no German on his first day of kindergarten. He joined the Junge Union in 1998 and the CDU in 2001, sat on the Iserlohn city council from 2014 to 2019, and worked as an employee of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Düsseldorf before entering parliament. The Bundestag biography, drawn from the member's own disclosures, states that he is married and has three children.

The Junge Union congress of 2014 chose the then 29-year-old from Iserlohn with 63 percent of the vote; Benedict Pöttering received 37 percent, and Ziemiak succeeded Philipp Mißfelder. At the CDU federal congress in Hamburg on 8 December 2018, delegates elected him secretary-general on the nomination of the new party chair, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. As the only candidate he received 62.8 percent; he called the result an "honest" one, and reporting contrasted it with the 98.9 percent Kramp-Karrenbauer had received when she was elected secretary-general the previous February. Tagesschau reported that he had first turned the job down out of loyalty to Friedrich Merz and Jens Spahn, and that he accepted only after Kramp-Karrenbauer's election as chair. He stayed in the office under her successor, Armin Laschet. After Merz became party chairman, Mario Czaja took over as secretary-general in January 2022.

In the 2021 federal election Ziemiak won constituency 150, Märkischer Kreis II, with 33.6 percent of the first votes (47,937), ahead of Bettina Lugk of the Social Democratic Party on 30.4 percent. In the 2025 federal election he held the renumbered constituency 149 with 38.8 percent (58,968 first votes); Lugk received 22.7 percent and the Alternative for Germany 20.9 percent, on a turnout of 80.1 percent. On 7 November 2022 the CDU state executive in Düsseldorf backed a proposal by the state chair and minister-president, Hendrik Wüst, that Ziemiak become secretary-general of the state party and start at once in an acting capacity, with a formal election left to a later congress. At the state congress in Hürth on 28 October 2023, delegates elected him to that office with 87.4 percent of the vote.

Early life and education

Family and migration from Poland

Paul Ziemiak was born on 6 September 1985 in Stettin, now Szczecin, Poland, under the name Paweł, the younger son of two physicians. His father was a gynaecologist in Stettin and his mother later a paediatrician; they met at a clinic on the Szczecin Lagoon, and an older brother was born in 1978. In 2025 he described his paternal grandmother as coming from Zakopane and his paternal grandfather as a career officer who fought in the Second World War; a Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung biography says one grandfather served in the Home Army and was later harassed as an anti-communist, and that the family’s Catholicism—Ziemiak has cited Pope John Paul II—remained a reference after emigration. Documented German ancestry, which he has traced to farmers in Ukraine and townspeople in Solingen, let them enter the Federal Republic as Aussiedler.

They left in 1988, when he was three. He has said that his parents, dissatisfied under Wojciech Jaruzelski, including during the martial law of 1981–1983 against Solidarity, booked a weekend coach trip from Stettin via the Baltic and by ship toward Hamburg, then stepped off and did not return. The family passed through the transit camp at Friedland and the North Rhine-Westphalia reception centre at Unna-Massen. Officials Germanised the boys’ first names without asking them; he has said that only a later procedure, with his consent, fixed Paul as his name and Paweł as his birth name.

They settled in Iserlohn, in the Sauerland, first in emergency housing and then in a social flat in a Gerlingsen high-rise he remembers as wholly Polish-speaking. He has recalled a kiosk ban from an owner who, he said, assumed that “all Poles steal,” and has called himself then “doubly marked.” Polish licences were not at first recognised; his father retook examinations and worked as a guest physician, and both parents took academic courses at the Goethe-Institut. The Catholic parish of St. Michael, attended by many Polish Aussiedler, was a support, and he learned German in kindergarten, speaking none, he has said, on his first day.

Schooling in Iserlohn

He has written that he attended the Catholic kindergarten Heilig Geist in Iserlohn, and he learned German in primary school as well as in kindergarten. He took the Abitur at the Internatsschule am Seilersee, where he was a class representative and student speaker; his website dates the examination to 2005, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung biography to 2004. That biography says he met his future wife at the school. They married in 2016 and have three children.

University studies and employment

After school he studied law at Osnabrück University and then at the University of Münster, with practical periods in the United States that he has placed in Columbus, Ohio, and Houston, Texas. He joined two Catholic student fraternities, assisted at a law institute and freelanced for an international chemical company. His mother died of cancer when he was 22, while he was nursing her. He failed the first state examination in law, including on a second attempt by his later account, left without a degree, and has likened the stage he reached to a bachelor’s qualification, which was not conferred.

He next enrolled in corporate communications at the private Business and Information Technology School in Iserlohn and did not finish that course either. By September 2014 he was described as studying that subject after having broken off law. Alongside his studies he worked in Düsseldorf for PricewaterhouseCoopers, which the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung describes as a communications post. In June 2014, as he prepared to seek the national chair of the Young Union, manager magazin still called the 28-year-old a law student and a working student there, with another young CDU politician; the firm treated political activity as private. He remained a working student, including for an auditing firm, until he entered the Bundestag. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members’ own disclosures, lists that occupation as employee of PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, Düsseldorf; in December 2018, when the missing degrees drew comment, Der Spiegel noted that the record then read “employee/student.”

Local politics and the Junge Union

Youth parliament, city council and the state Junge Union

Ziemiak joined the Junge Union (JU), the joint youth organization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), in 1998, and the CDU in 2001. On his own account, his first office was the chair of Iserlohn's newly established children's and youth parliament, which he held from 1999 to 2001.

He then rose inside the JU in south-western North Rhine-Westphalia. The Junge Union Südwestfalen confirmed him as district chairman on 9 April 2011; the association said he had led it since 2009. On 24 November 2012, at the state congress in Bocholt, he was elected state chairman as the only candidate. Of 220 delegates, 196 voted for him, 18 against and six abstained, reported as 92 percent. He succeeded Sven Volmering, who left after six years on age grounds, and said he wanted a hearing for every current in the JU and a critical culture of debate.

From 2014 to 2019 he also sat on the council of Iserlohn and, until 2017, was deputy leader of the CDU group, according to the biography he filed with the Bundestag and to the state CDU. That term overlapped the federal JU chairmanship and, from 2017, his entry into parliament.

Federal chairmanship, 2014–2019

Philipp Mißfelder had chaired the federal JU for twelve years, longer than any predecessor, and at 35 was too old to stand again. On the evening of 19 September 2014, at the Deutschlandtag in Inzell, delegates elected Ziemiak, then 29 and still the North Rhine-Westphalian state chairman, over the JU's federal deputy Benedict Pöttering. Ziemiak received 196 votes and Pöttering 115, with one abstention: 63 percent to 37 percent of the votes counted as valid. Mißfelder called the ballot an experiment: the last contested election for the chair, he said, had been in 1973, and the organization had avoided such votes since.

Before the vote, reporting found little distance between the candidates. Both stood to the right of the CDU line under Chancellor Angela Merkel, criticized the pension at 63, and warned the Union not to ignore the Alternative for Germany; Ziemiak argued for taking that party's politicians on in argument. After the count he brought Pöttering on stage and said the JU could work only as a team. He called Germany a "land of opportunities" and recalled that his parents had come from Poland in 1988 as Aussiedler "with three suitcases and two children." The JU itself put its membership at 117,000 and described itself as Europe's largest youth organization.

The next two regular congresses returned him unopposed. At Paderborn, 85 percent confirmed him on the evening of 14 October 2016. Before 316 delegates he demanded a sharper line against the SPD, faster removal of people with no right to stay, and a hold on pension changes until after the 2017 federal election, and he called the grand coalition chaotic. On 5 October 2018 in Kiel he was re-elected for two years with 91.1 percent, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the best result in the JU's history. He said he could not sleep with the CDU at 26 percent in the polls and that the grand coalition was stumbling from crisis meeting to crisis meeting.

He did not finish that term. In December 2018 he became CDU secretary-general, in Die Welt's account the first sitting JU chairman to move straight into a national party leadership office. On 16 March 2019 a Deutschlandtag at the Congress Center in Berlin elected Tilman Kuban, the Lower Saxony JU chairman, by 200 votes to 119 for Stefan Gruhner of Thuringia. CDU chair Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told about 320 delegates she wanted a JU that would put pressure on the party. The Bundestag's current biography dates the chairmanship 2014 to 2019. The entry for the 19th electoral term, and the North Rhine-Westphalian CDU, stop at 2018, the year of the last regular election and of the move to the secretary-generalship.

Role on the CDU federal executive

The CDU statute published on 1 June 2016 lists the Junge Union Deutschlands as one of the party's federal associations. Its voting members are elected officers, including the secretary-general, plus specified office-holders and Land chairs not already seated. Chairs of the federal associations are not on that list: like CDU minister-presidents, they attend executive meetings only in an advisory capacity.

His Bundestag biography for the 19th term nevertheless said the chairmanship made him a member of the federal executive "thereby," and his website describes that seat as a share in party decisions and a voice for the younger generation. The advisory place ended with Kuban's election in March 2019. It no longer decided Ziemiak's own seat: the secretary-general is a voting member under the same statute, and he had held that office since December 2018.

Bundestag elections and parliamentary work

2017 candidacy in Herne – Bochum II

At the election of the 19th Bundestag on 24 September 2017, Paul Ziemiak stood for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in constituency 141, Herne – Bochum II, in North Rhine-Westphalia. The district covered the whole of Herne and, in Bochum, the boroughs of Bochum-Nord and Bochum-Ost.

He did not win the constituency. Michelle Müntefering of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was directly elected there. On the final count the SPD received 52,672 first votes (41.9 percent) and the CDU 30,361 (24.1 percent), 6.2 points below the CDU share in 2013. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 16,799 votes (13.4 percent), Die Linke 10,064 (8.0 percent), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) 8,448 (6.7 percent) and Alliance 90/The Greens 6,992 (5.6 percent). Turnout was 71.4 percent: 127,974 of 179,247 eligible voters cast ballots. On the party-list vote the SPD led with 34.2 percent, ahead of the CDU on 23.4 percent and the AfD on 13.4 percent.

Ziemiak entered parliament on the CDU state list for North Rhine-Westphalia rather than by a constituency majority. At the state delegate assembly in Bad Sassendorf on 18 February 2017, when he was federal chairman of the Junge Union, delegates gave him eleventh place on that list with 84.4 percent of the votes; Hermann Gröhe headed it.

Direct mandates in Märkischer Kreis II

For the election of the 20th Bundestag on 26 September 2021 he moved to constituency 150, Märkischer Kreis II. The seat comprises nine municipalities in the Sauerland: Altena, Balve, Hemer, Iserlohn, Menden, Nachrodt-Wiblingwerde, Neuenrade, Plettenberg and Werdohl. He won the direct mandate with 47,937 first votes (33.6 percent), 4,591 ahead of Bettina Lugk of the SPD, who received 43,346 (30.4 percent). Daniel Bläsing (AfD) took 12,933 votes (9.1 percent), Ingo Stuckmann (Greens) 12,866 (9.0 percent) and Jochen Lipproß (FDP) 12,749 (8.9 percent). Turnout was 73.4 percent, with 143,689 ballots from 195,816 eligible voters. The list vote was narrower and reversed the order of the two largest parties: the SPD received 29.6 percent and the CDU 28.3 percent. The North Rhine-Westphalian returning officer recorded Ziemiak as elected, and the Bundestag biography for the term records a directly won seat in constituency 150. He held that mandate while he was the CDU’s federal general secretary, an office the same biography dates from 2018 to 2022 and which his financial disclosure ends on 31 January 2022.

A statewide renumbering left the same nine municipalities as constituency 149 for the election of the 21st Bundestag on 23 February 2025. Ziemiak again won the seat, with 58,968 first votes (38.8 percent), 5.2 points above his 2021 share. Lugk was second with 34,522 votes (22.7 percent). Wolfgang Grudda of the AfD was third with 31,658 (20.9 percent), and the AfD’s first-vote share in the constituency rose 11.8 points from 2021. Turnout was 80.1 percent: 153,042 of 191,152 eligible voters. On the list vote the CDU led with 34.0 percent, followed by the AfD on 21.3 percent and the SPD on 18.3 percent. The constituency electoral committee, meeting at the Märkischer Kreis offices in Lüdenscheid, adopted that count as the official result.

Committees and parliamentary bodies

In the 19th Bundestag the archived roll lists Ziemiak as a substitute member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, of the Committee on European Union Affairs, and of the subcommittee on civilian crisis prevention, conflict management and networked action. It does not list him as a full member of Foreign Affairs, and it records no rapporteurship. From 2018 the mandate ran alongside the federal general secretaryship.

In the 20th Bundestag he was a full member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and a substitute member of the Committee on the Interior and Community (Inneres und Heimat). That term’s biography does not place him on Foreign Affairs or on the Joint Committee.

In the 21st Bundestag he is again a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. At the committee’s constitutive meeting on 21 May 2025, Armin Laschet of the CDU/CSU was elected chair; the committee seated 42 full members, 14 of them from the Union, including Ziemiak. He is also a substitute member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Interior Committee, and a full member of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss). Since 2022 he has chaired the German–Polish Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag.

Secretary-generalship of the CDU

Election in December 2018

On 8 December 2018, the day after Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer won the CDU leadership election, delegates at the federal party congress in Hamburg elected Paul Ziemiak secretary-general of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He was the sole candidate, nominated to succeed her in the office she had held since February. Of 801 valid votes, 503 were for him, or 62.8 percent; 834 ballots were cast in all, including 29 abstentions and four invalid votes.

The share was treated as a weak result for an unopposed nominee. Kramp-Karrenbauer had been elected secretary-general in Berlin on 26 February 2018 with 785 of 794 valid votes, about 98.9 percent, the best result since the office was created in 1967. Ziemiak, then 33 and federal chairman of the Young Union, called the Hamburg tally an "honest result" and an incentive to work hard. Tagesschau described it as a damper left by the leadership fight, and Deutsche Welle called him the youngest secretary-general in the party's history.

The nomination was also a gesture after that contest. Ziemiak, from North Rhine-Westphalia like Friedrich Merz and Jens Spahn, had first refused the job out of loyalty to those two rivals. Kramp-Karrenbauer said she offered it again on the Friday evening, after her narrow victory over Merz, and that he then accepted; participants said he had told Young Union delegates he would not vote for her. She presented the choice as a way to involve younger members and conservative critics of Angela Merkel. Ziemiak said the task was to renew the party with a clear course and clear language, and that the CDU had to be "the party of the rule of law."

Party organization, the pandemic and the 2021 campaign

The secretary-general runs the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus in Berlin and the federal campaign. Early on, that apparatus was judged badly prepared for online argument. After a 2019 video by the YouTuber Rezo attacking the CDU, a reply film was produced and never released, and Ziemiak later said mistakes had been made. The headquarters then opened a newsroom of twelve people to watch the media and social networks. By December 2020 he was calling the CDU digitally capable "down to the smallest local branch" and setting the election-year aim of a "modern digital campaign machine."

The COVID-19 pandemic repeatedly delayed the congress to replace Kramp-Karrenbauer. A special congress set for 25 April 2020 was cancelled; a December meeting of the 1,001 delegates was neither politically acceptable nor permitted, and party law barred a purely digital election of the chair. Ziemiak urged the executive to fix a digital congress for January 2021. On 16 January, at the first fully digital federal congress — the January 2021 leadership election — he announced that Armin Laschet had beaten Merz in a runoff, 521 votes to 466, with four abstentions among 991 ballots. Norbert Röttgen was out after a first round in which Merz led Laschet by five votes. Delegates used a digital booth; only the presidium, the candidates and technicians were at a studio on the Berlin fairgrounds, and the vote still needed postal confirmation. The party reported denial-of-service attacks aimed mainly at its website. Ziemiak said it had prepared for them; the voting system was not reached, and Laschet said the risk had been handled excellently. Laschet said Ziemiak should stay. The secretary-generalship was not on the ballot.

On 6 July 2021 Ziemiak presented the Bundestag campaign at headquarters. Its motif, which he called the "Union circle," was meant to signal cohesion, and he described the CDU as the party of "both/and" rather than "either/or." Posters used faces rather than slogans alone; Tagesschau reported that women shown as a nurse and a police officer were CDU staff, which Ziemiak put down to not pulling people in those jobs off duty during the pandemic. On 17 July, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Laschet, the Union candidate and North Rhine-Westphalia's minister-president, visited flood-hit Erftstadt. Pictures showed Laschet laughing behind Steinmeier as he spoke about the victims; Laschet apologised the same day, calling the impression inappropriate. At the 2021 federal election on 26 September the CDU took 18.9 percent of second votes and the CSU 5.2 percent. The Union's combined 24.1 percent was later described as its worst federal result.

Thuringia, the Laschet candidacy and departure in 2022

The sharpest early crisis was in Thuringia. On 5 February 2020 the state parliament elected Thomas Kemmerich of the Free Democratic Party minister-president with votes from his party, the CDU and the Alternative for Germany. Ziemiak called it "a black day for Thuringia," said an election with AfD votes "splits our country," and accused the FDP of having "played with fire." He criticised CDU deputies for accepting a minister-president chosen with the votes of "Nazis such as Mr Höcke" and said new elections would be best. Kramp-Karrenbauer said the state deputies had acted against the federal party's decisions and requests.

On 10 February she told the presidium she would not seek the chancellor candidacy and would give up the chair after organising the succession by the summer. She said the candidacy and the party leadership belonged together, and that parts of the CDU had an unresolved relationship with the AfD and the Left. Merkel asked her to remain defence minister. The step had not been cleared with the rest of the leadership. Ziemiak stayed through the interval before a new chair was elected.

In April 2021 Laschet and Markus Söder, leader of the Christian Social Union, both wanted the Union nomination for chancellor. After six and a half hours the CDU federal executive chose Laschet, 31 votes to Söder's nine, with six abstentions. Söder had said he would give way if the board picked Laschet. The campaign that followed ended in the September defeat, and Laschet did not continue as chair.

In the party's first membership ballot, the December 2021 leadership election, Merz was chosen to succeed him with 62.1 percent. A digital congress on 22 January 2022 elected Merz chair and his nominee, Mario Czaja, secretary-general; party law again required a postal ballot. Announced on 31 January 2022, it gave Merz 95.33 percent and Czaja 94.24 percent, after just under 93 percent for Czaja online. Czaja then took office, ending Ziemiak's term, which had run since December 2018 under Kramp-Karrenbauer and then Laschet.

Political positions

Migration, integration and internal security

Campaigning in September 2014 for the chair of the Junge Union, the youth organization of the CDU and the CSU, Ziemiak told the Deutschlandtag in Inzell that anyone for whom sharia counted for more than German law would not be helped by integration courses, only by the criminal code. Die Welt reported the remark as part of a conservative pitch; he won the chair with 63 percent.

On 16 October 2015 he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that an upper limit had to be fixed, offering 250,000 people a year as a basis for talks among the federal government, local associations, aid groups, police and volunteers, and saying a higher figure could still be acceptable. He said the Junge Union stood behind Chancellor Angela Merkel but rejected her claim that closing borders was an illusion, insisting the federal police could stop people seeking to enter. Before the CDU congress in Karlsruhe that December, he told n-tv the party had to show a limit to what Germany could bear, because municipalities were coping only through volunteers. The number should be set with the Länder, local associations, security agencies and aid organizations; once passed, the Dublin rules should apply again, including the Basic Law rule that asylum need not be granted after entry through another EU state.

Economy, social policy and climate

In an interview published on 22 September 2014 he told the Rheinische Post he wanted the grand coalition's pension at 63 repealed: the deduction-free pension after 45 contribution years agreed by the CDU, CSU and SPD. He did not begrudge a building worker those years, he said, but objected to financing the benefit from younger contributors while fewer people paid for more benefits. A May 2016 Süddeutsche Zeitung profile reported that he had that March called the introduction a mistake, urged linking retirement age to life expectancy, and said the government should shift from a "social-policy fireworks display" to promoting the economy.

Before the December 2014 Cologne congress he joined Carsten Linnemann of the business wing and Karl-Josef Laumann of the employees' wing in pressing the leadership on kalte Progression, the bracket creep that lifts pay into higher rates without a real gain. Merkel conceded a pledge to find room, still in that legislative period and only as a first step, to relieve taxpayers, if the budget stayed balanced and taxes were not raised.

As general secretary he kept climate spending inside those rules. On n-tv in September 2019 he said a carbon tax "costs a lot of money but in the end achieves little," and preferred certificate trading, in which fewer permits cut emissions. Protection would "definitely" cost money, he said, but the party would hold the debt brake and the balanced budget; rail, wind turbines and power lines took decades because Germany was "planning itself to death." When Greta Thunberg called a coal exit only in 2038 "absurd," he wrote in February 2019 that she had ignored jobs, security of supply and affordability — "pure ideology" — and added "Poor Greta."

European integration and the party system

In September 2014 he said the Junge Union needed a clear edge against the AfD, which stirred fears rather than solved problems, and that he would debate its then leader, Bernd Lucke. Coalitions, he said, were not his subject; the point was to keep the AfD out of the Bundestag. In a Spiegel essay of 6 November 2019 the exclusion was absolute: Thuringia's AfD leader Björn Höcke was, for him, a Nazi, and the AfD with him was becoming an "NPD 2.0." Coalitions or any other cooperation would betray Christian Democratic values; the AfD wanted to destroy the Union in order to replace it and was neither bourgeois nor conservative.

On 20 January 2024, as general secretary of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the WerteUnion's plan to found a party threatened neither CDU nor CSU. "Such populist movements are competition for other populist movements and parties, and not for a party of the centre," he said, and membership of competing parties was impossible: "The WerteUnion was never part of the CDU. It is not. Nor will it be in future." Welt reported that the group was not an official Union subdivision and that an expulsion case was open against its chairman, Hans-Georg Maaßen.

At Inzell he said energy policy had to speak with one European voice, so prices could not be used to blackmail Germany, which Welt read as a reference to Russian gas. On 21 November 2020 he urged in the Tagesspiegel a new free-trade attempt between the European Union and the United States after the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership failed, set against Asia's larger regional pact, and wrote that quarrels with Donald Trump had not broken an alliance he tied to the pandemic, political extremes, climate protection and digital prosperity.

Party leadership in North Rhine-Westphalia

Appointment by Hendrik Wüst and elections as state secretary-general

On 30 August 2025 the Christian Democratic Union in North Rhine-Westphalia re-elected Paul Ziemiak as state secretary-general (Generalsekretär) at its 47th congress in Bonn. The Iserlohner Kreisanzeiger reported 91 percent. The association's count was 91.0 percent for Ziemiak and 98.0 percent for state chair and minister-president Hendrik Wüst, with about 680 delegates. WDR had reported beforehand that the congress would meet at the World Conference Center, with an agenda built around the municipal elections of 14 September.

On the evening of 7 November 2022 the state executive in Düsseldorf backed Wüst's proposal; Rheinische Post reported that the item had not been on the agenda, and Der Spiegel wrote that support was unanimous. He succeeded Josef Hovenjürgen, who had become a parliamentary state secretary in Ina Scharrenbach's ministry after the black-green government was formed. Wüst's campaign manager, Thomas Breuer, was to be state managing director at the party headquarters on Wasserstraße. Ziemiak, a member of the Bundestag since 2017, took the office only provisionally (kommissarisch) until a congress could elect him; Tagesschau described the Düsseldorf post as full-time.

Wüst pointed to Ziemiak's time as federal secretary-general, from 2018 until early 2022, his knowledge of the party locally, and what he called modern party work and a generational change. Ziemiak had left the federal office when Friedrich Merz became chair and appointed Mario Czaja; he said he looked forward to an exciting task.

Press commentary treated the choice as a signal, not as a statement of Ziemiak's motive. On 17 November 2022 WDR's Jochen Trum, writing for Tagesschau, called it a resounding surprise: an unusual move from the federal secretariat to the same office in a state party, readable in Berlin as a retreat into provincial politics, and a disappointment to those who had expected a woman. Trum saw a message to Merz—Wüst, discussed as a possible reserve leader of the Union, gaining an organizer in Düsseldorf and a listening post in the capital. Spiegel called it a comeback one level down, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted how firmly a younger woman had been expected.

Delegates elected him for the first time at the 45th congress in Hürth on 28 October 2023: of 636 ballots, 15 were abstentions, and of 621 valid votes 543 (87.4 percent) were in favour and 78 against. WDR reported the same share. The Bundestag register of outside activities lists a gross monthly payment of 8,950 euro from the state CDU for the office. In July 2026 Come-on reported that figure; Ziemiak said the pay, published on the Bundestag website, was oriented to the salary of a federal parliamentary state secretary.

The Südwestfalen district and the federal executive

On 14 November 2022 a district congress at the Hotel Kaisergarten in Neuenrade elected him chair of the CDU association Südwestfalen, succeeding Klaus Kaiser of Arnsberg, who had led it since 14 October 2011. Come-on recorded 136 votes in favour, seven against and two abstentions, calculated as 93.8 percent, with no opponent. Friedrich Merz was the main speaker. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own disclosures, lists Ziemiak, based in Iserlohn, as district chair since 2022.

Tagesschau reported that the 36th federal party congress opened on 6 May 2024 and re-elected Merz as federal chair. The congress results list Ziemiak among the further members of the federal executive, the Beisitzer, with 778 votes, or 81.13 percent.

State campaigns and the public role in NRW

For the 2025 Bundestag election the state association placed Ziemiak third on its list, behind Friedrich Merz and Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker. For the municipal elections on 14 September 2025, with run-offs on 28 September, the Düsseldorf headquarters under Ziemiak issued a handbook for local candidates. Rheinische Post reported in December 2024 that the guide called campaigns hard work rather than self-runners and advised on candidate selection, events and activity during the summer holidays.

Before the Bonn congress he told WDR that the municipal campaign had to reckon with the Alternative for Germany in former Social Democratic strongholds in the Ruhr: "red threatens to turn blue," he said, and the SPD leadership did not want to see it. The day after the vote he told Deutschlandfunk that the so-called firewall—the CDU's incompatibility resolution with the AfD—still applied, and that democrats would support one another in the run-offs.

Foreign policy and German–Polish relations

The German–Polish Parliamentary Group

Paul Ziemiak, born in Szczecin, has chaired the German–Polish Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag since 2022, and the biography still lists that chairmanship in the 21st term. Its first formal meeting of the 20th term, on 12 May 2022, was held with Ziemiak, a Christian Democratic Union member, already in the chair. Deutsche Welle reported discussion of Poland after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees, cuts to German teaching for the German minority, and a Berlin memorial to Polish victims of the Second World War. Ziemiak spoke of “great respect” for Poland’s reception of refugees and of aligning language teaching with the 1991 good-neighbourliness treaty.

On 12–13 April 2023 Ziemiak led a cross-party delegation to Warsaw, meeting parliamentarians, the minister for European affairs and Ryszard Galla, then the Sejm deputy of the German minority. He proposed a parliamentary assembly on the Franco-German model, which he said deputy marshal Ryszard Terlecki and Kazimierz Gołojuch of Law and Justice, then chair of the Polish group, received favourably, and he ranked Berlin–Warsaw with Berlin–Paris for the European Union.

From 2 to 5 July 2024 a Sejm delegation led by Marek Krząkała of Civic Platform visited Berlin as government consultations resumed for the first time since 2018, a step Ziemiak said he had sought. Ukraine and the assembly dominated; visitors included the new majority and the opposition, among them Gołojuch, by then a deputy chair, and deputy marshal Krzysztof Bosak. Ziemiak called parliamentary cooperation steadier than recent government relations and spoke of a “new start” after the October 2023 election. He had called the cut in mother-tongue German lessons, from three weekly hours to one, discrimination contrary to the 1991 treaty and the 2005 minorities law. On reparations he said the CDU/CSU, like the government, treated the legal question as settled, though the group was not unanimous; in July 2024 the claims were not discussed, while compensation for surviving Polish forced labourers was.

Positions on Poland, Ukraine and European security

In the 19th Bundestag he was a substitute on the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on European Union Affairs and the subcommittee on civilian crisis prevention. In the 20th term he was a full member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and a substitute on interior affairs; from 25 March 2025 he was again a full member of Foreign Affairs, and a substitute on development and interior.

In opposition he criticised the pace of military aid. On 2 March 2023 he told Polskie Radio that, on help for Ukraine, Germany was “not the engine, but a brake”. In September 2024 he said Berlin had ignored Polish warnings about Ukraine and about dependence on Russian energy, and that the later shift on Ukraine owed much to pressure from neighbours: “It is not a strong Germany that frightens Poles today, but a weak one.” After the first round of the French election that summer he told phoenix that Poland must not be a stopgap, that the Weimar Triangle of France, Germany and Poland had to stay stable, and that a harder dialogue with Paris made Berlin–Warsaw more necessary.

In Warsaw on 1 August 2024, with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, he said Polish policy, in government and opposition, sought Europe’s largest land force so as not to depend on others alone, while still treating the EU and NATO as essential. He said earlier German policy, including Nord Stream 2 planned without Poland, was seen in Warsaw as naive, and that Steinmeier’s link between the uprising and Ukraine’s war had been welcomed.

Foundations and commemorative work

His current biography, drawn from members’ own statements, lists membership of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation since 2018, of the Foundation for German–Polish Cooperation since 2022, and of the German Poland Institute’s board of trustees from 2022 to 2024. The 20th-term disclosure gives the cooperation-foundation council seat from September 2022, the institute trusteeship from 2 December 2022 to 31 December 2024, and an Adenauer Foundation executive-board seat that the 21st-term list does not repeat.

The group pressed for the German–Polish House in Berlin, authorised in October 2020 and taken forward by the German Poland Institute and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In July 2024 a parliamentary-district site was still being sought; Ziemiak called the delay regrettable and said surviving Polish forced labourers still lacked compensation. He later noted that Chancellor Olaf Scholz had promised redress for surviving forced labourers and uprising victims without a figure, and in September 2024 said a restart with the government of Donald Tusk was visible in the consultations and in Steinmeier’s visit, but that the payments and the house still needed decisions.

Reception and controversies

The 2018 nomination and questions of qualification

On 8 December 2018 the CDU congress in Hamburg elected Ziemiak, then chair of the Junge Union, secretary-general on the proposal of the new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. He received 62.8 percent. Tagesschau reported that observers treated the figure as a setback: she had taken 98.9 percent when elected secretary-general the previous February. Ziemiak thanked delegates for this "honest result" ("ehrliches Ergebnis"). Der Spiegel called it a slap for the chair and a no-confidence vote in Ziemiak, whom some supporters of Friedrich Merz and Jens Spahn saw as a turncoat.

Kramp-Karrenbauer said she had offered him the job, soon after Angela Merkel stepped back as chair, if she won; he refused out of loyalty to Merz and Spahn, both from North Rhine-Westphalia, and accepted only when she asked again on Friday evening. The Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted her placing that approach "at the edge of the dance floor." Ziemiak said he had not voted for her. The paper reported an unpleasant whiff ("Geschmäckle") in the Merz and Spahn camps, and wrote that Junge Union members called the appointment a "dirty deal" and noted his unfinished studies.

Hermann Hesse, treasurer of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion, went further on Facebook, calling the choice a "Griff ins Klo": it was "unbelievable," he wrote, to propose someone who had "never earned money by ordinary work" and could not "show a proper qualification." Die Welt later noted that he had broken off law studies. A 2022 Süddeutsche profile said he had studied law in Osnabrück, Münster, Columbus and Houston without a degree; at the 2018 election, tagesschau still described him as a student of corporate communications.

Social-media disputes

In February 2019, after Greta Thunberg called a German coal exit only in 2038 "absolutely absurd," Ziemiak wrote that she had offered "not a word about jobs, security of supply, affordability. Only pure ideology," with a see-no-evil monkey emoji and "Poor Greta!" Die Welt reported that Renate Künast called him cold and un-Christian, and that Kathrin Vogler of Die Linke asked how small his confidence must be to "take on a 16-year-old from Sweden."

In August 2019, when Ralf Stegner and Gesine Schwan bid jointly for the SPD leadership, he tweeted that Stegner had "now finally found a woman" and that if they "adopted Kevin" the pair could restage Married... with Children. Der Spiegel said "Kevin" meant Jusos chair Kevin Kühnert. SPD secretary-general Lars Klingbeil called the post "very juvenile." Kühnert answered that, after the murder of Walter Lübcke, the CDU had deplored a coarsened debate, and asked whether it took itself seriously.

In June 2021 he called a video message by Carolin Emcke to the Greens' congress an "unbelievable and historically forgetful lapse." She had said future resentment would likely target climate researchers rather than "Jews and cosmopolitans," feminists or virologists; he read that as a comparison involving hatred of Jews. After a phone call he withdrew the charge, writing that the full speech neither compared nor played down hatred against Jews, and that a differentiated argument needed more than a tweet. Greens deputy Konstantin von Notz welcomed the retraction.

Assessments of the federal secretary-generalship

Tagesschau wrote in late 2020 that he had first been labelled a "miscast," and that the reply to YouTuber Rezo's May 2019 video on "the destruction of the CDU" looked stiff: a film with Philipp Amthor was shot and never shown. Ziemiak later said mistakes had been made; headquarters then ran a newsroom he called a "crisis radar." The same account said the Thuringia crisis sharpened his profile, as he argued for a firm line against the AfD. Der Spiegel reported that he first dismissed Rezo's criticism as false claims, then offered to talk and conceded, "we do not get everything right."

In the 2021 mask affair he told Bild live that Nikolas Löbel of the CDU and Georg Nüßlein of the CSU must give up their Bundestag seats at once: the conduct was "indecent, and it shames us," and leaving the group was not enough. After the September defeat he said in Münster that it honoured Armin Laschet to take sole blame, but that the loss was more than one person. He accepted a share of it and said a people's party could not mean "breadth as arbitrariness."

The Süddeutsche Zeitung's January 2022 portrait, "Helmsman in permanent distress," listed the Rezo storms, Thomas Kemmerich's election with AfD and CDU votes, Kramp-Karrenbauer's resignation, the contest between Laschet and Markus Söder, the mask deals and a historic Bundestag result. It said he would be remembered for the CDU's worst federal election, which he knew, but also as the only CDU candidate to take a constituency from the SPD and as organizer of the first digital election congress. From February 2022 he was an ordinary member; Merz replaced him with Mario Czaja. Tagesschau later wrote that Merz had shown him the door and that the 2021 campaign was called a flop inside the party, including at a Junge Union gathering, even though the digital congresses had raised his standing. In November 2022 Hendrik Wüst brought him back as North Rhine-Westphalian secretary-general.