Ralph Brinkhaus

Ralph Brinkhaus (born 15 June 1968 in Wiedenbrück, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag for the constituency of Gütersloh I. A qualified economist and tax adviser, he has held that seat as a directly elected member since 2009. From September 2018 to February 2022 he was chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

He took his Abitur at the Gymnasium Nepomucenum in Rietberg, completed training at Robert Bosch GmbH, did military service, and studied economics at the University of Hohenheim. After the tax-adviser examination he worked for an auditing firm and in industry, and he has practised as a self-employed tax adviser in Gütersloh since 2004. The Bundestag’s biography, based on his own disclosures, lists him as Roman Catholic and married. He sat on the Gütersloh city council from 2004 to January 2012, chairing the CDU council group from 2007 to 2009, and he is chairman of the CDU district association of Ostwestfalen-Lippe.

From 2014 to 2018 he was a deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU group, responsible for the budget, public finances and local government. On 25 September 2018 the group elected him chairman in a secret ballot, by 125 votes to 112 for the incumbent Volker Kauder, with two abstentions. Kauder had led the group for 13 years and was the candidate of Chancellor Angela Merkel and of Horst Seehofer, then chairman of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Merkel had asked the group to retain Kauder; afterwards she described the outcome as an hour of democracy in which there was nothing to sugarcoat.

After the 2021 German federal election the CDU/CSU was in opposition, and Brinkhaus’s renewed term as group chairman was set to run only until the end of April 2022. On 27 January 2022 he wrote to members of the CDU and CSU that he would not stand again, and he proposed moving the vote to 15 February so that Friedrich Merz could combine the party chair with the group leadership. The group elected Merz that day with 162 of 186 votes and no opposing candidate. Brinkhaus remained the directly elected member for Gütersloh I, taking 40.0 percent of the first votes in 2021 and 41.6 percent on 23 February 2025. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation and of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and Future Issues, and a substitute member of the Finance Committee.

Early life and education

Childhood in Ostwestfalen

Ralph Brinkhaus was born on 15 June 1968 in Wiedenbrück, in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region of North Rhine-Westphalia. Wiedenbrück was still a town of its own. On 1 January 1970 it was joined with Rheda and the municipalities of Batenhorst, Lintel, Nordrheda-Ems and St. Vit to form Rheda-Wiedenbrück. The town lies in the district of Gütersloh.

He grew up in Mastholte, a locality of the neighbouring town of Rietberg. The same early Bundestag biography, which groups religion with place of birth and upbringing, records him as Roman Catholic. Later parliamentary biographies repeat the birthplace and the Catholic affiliation but drop the explicit mention of Mastholte; his own site still gives Rietberg-Mastholte as where he was raised.

Schooling, vocational training and military service

In 1987 he passed the Abitur at the Gymnasium Nepomucenum in Rietberg. The school, run by the town, was founded in 1743 as a Progymnasium and named for John of Nepomuk, patron of the historic County of Rietberg. It has been a full Gymnasium, with an upper secondary stage, since 1972, and so already had that form while he was a pupil.

After school he trained at Robert Bosch GmbH. The Bundestag biography captured in October 2009, the earliest detailed official curriculum vitae, places that training in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Paris. Later official texts are shorter. A biography from the 19th Bundestag names only Stuttgart, and the current entry describes an Ausbildung or dual course of study at Bosch without listing sites. Handelsblatt likewise records an Ausbildungsprogramm at Bosch immediately after the 1987 Abitur.

He then did compulsory service with the anti-tank troops (Panzerjäger) of the Bundeswehr at Augustdorf, in the neighbouring Lippe district. Visiting the Generalfeldmarschall-Rommel-Kaserne there in February 2020, he said he had served at the garrison about twenty-nine years earlier and that, on the last day of his basic service (Grundwehrdienst), he was promoted to Obergefreiter. That recollection puts the end of his service around 1991.

Studies at the University of Hohenheim

Handelsblatt states that he began university only after military service. Parliamentary biographies do not give a year of enrolment or graduation.

The course was economics (Wirtschaftswissenschaften) at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, and Bundestag biographies list him as a Diplom-Ökonom. The university stands on the palace estate at Hohenheim. It received the name Universität Hohenheim in 1968, a year after its Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences had been established as a separate faculty, grown out of applied economics inside the agricultural faculty. Because the published order of his training runs from the 1987 Abitur through Bosch and military service, and because he dated that service to about 1991, the Hohenheim course belongs to the early 1990s rather than to the years straight after school.

The same biographical entries place the Steuerberaterexamen, the state examination for tax advisers, directly after the Hohenheim degree and before his work in an auditing firm and in industry.

Professional career

Brinkhaus's occupation before and during his membership of the Bundestag is that of a Steuerberater, Germany's regulated tax adviser. The Bundestag notes that members' biographies rest on their own statements. The current entry records economics studies at the University of Hohenheim, the tax-adviser examination, work at an auditing firm and in industry, and an independent practice in Gütersloh since 2004. Abgeordnetenwatch, which republishes parliamentary data, lists his qualification as Diplom-Ökonom and Steuerberater.

Auditing and corporate roles

After his degree he worked at a Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, an auditing firm. The biography on the Bundestag website at the start of the 17th electoral term gives the posts in one sequence: after his studies he was Prüfer, Prüfungsleiter and Steuerberater at the firm — an auditor, an audit manager and a tax adviser — and then Referent and kaufmännischer Leiter, a staff specialist and a commercial manager, in industry. That text lists the Steuerberaterexamen beside the Hohenheim degree. The current biography shortens the same path to employment at an auditing firm, the examination, and the two industrial posts. It names neither the firm nor the later employers and gives no dates for the changes of job. His own site follows that outline and describes the tax-adviser post as his last role at the auditing firm.

In a 2018 portrait, Spiegel wrote that he had studied economics in Hohenheim and worked as a "Steuerberater und Wirtschaftprüfer," a tax adviser and auditor. The parliamentary biographies do not record the separate professional title Wirtschaftsprüfer. They record the Steuerberater examination and the audit-firm titles Prüfer and Prüfungsleiter.

Tax advisory practice

In 2004 he set up on his own as a tax adviser in Gütersloh. The 17th-term biography added that the practice concentrated on international accounting (internationales Rechnungswesen). The same entry listed both the occupation before he entered parliament and the paid work continued afterwards as that of a self-employed tax adviser in Gütersloh.

The practice has continued beside the mandate. Under the Members of the Bundestag Act, a member must notify the President of paid work alongside the mandate, including continuation of an earlier profession. Income from such an activity must also be reported if it exceeds 1,000 euro in a month or, where that is not the case, 3,000 euro in a calendar year. Where a statutory duty of confidentiality applies, the client is not named; a description of the industry is given instead, unless even that would identify the client. The biography for the 21st Bundestag publishes the side activity as "Steuerberater, Gütersloh," and uses the same words for the occupation before membership, without a euro amount beside the entry. The 2018 Spiegel portrait still described the tax-adviser work in the present tense.

Party and local political career

Junge Union and CDU membership

Brinkhaus's party path began in the youth organization rather than in the CDU. When he left the Gütersloh council in 2012, the local paper Die Glocke recalled that he had belonged to the Junge Union since 1984 and had joined the Christian Democratic Union only in 1998, with his first council candidacy following in 2004.

Gütersloh council and the district association

In the 2004 municipal election he won a direct mandate in Gütersloh's inner-city voting district 60. On the council of Gütersloh he spoke for the CDU in the finance committee. In 2007 he succeeded Rudolf Bolte as chairman of the CDU council group and held that post until the municipal election of 2009.

The contest for the Bundestag candidacy in Gütersloh I set the next step inside the district party. Die Glocke reported that Brinkhaus defeated four other applicants, among them the sitting district chairman Ludger Kaup, and afterwards took the chair of the CDU Kreisverband Gütersloh from Kaup as well. A later report dated that chairmanship from 2009. Brinkhaus states that he sat on the district executive from 2004 to 2019.

The council seat ended earlier. In January 2012 he resigned it, telling Die Glocke that work in the Bundestag, including as the Union group's rapporteur on finance and capital markets, repeatedly collided with council meetings. Ottmar Kornfeld took his place in the group; Brinkhaus said he would keep the district chair.

He gave that chair up on 25 March 2019 at a Kreisparteitag in the Gütersloh town hall and did not stand again after his election as chairman of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. Landtag member Raphael Tigges, chairman of the CDU city association in Gütersloh since 2008, received 231 votes from 236 members present. Armin Laschet, then minister-president and CDU state chairman, called it no withdrawal, because Brinkhaus had taken on the chair of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. In handing over, Brinkhaus pressed the new executive on housing for contract workers arriving with their families and on retraining as automation cut semi-skilled jobs. The Westfalen-Blatt put membership at 3,722 and falling, with an average age of 62.5.

Ostwestfalen-Lippe and the North Rhine-Westphalia party

The regional post came while he was still district chairman. On the evening of 17 May 2016 a congress of the CDU Bezirksverband Ostwestfalen-Lippe in Schloß Holte-Stukenbrock elected him chairman with 164 of 166 votes, 98.8 percent, in succession to Steffen Kampeter. Kampeter noted that the Bundestag group had already made Brinkhaus a deputy chairman; Brinkhaus said he was following both Kampeter and Kampeter's predecessor Elmar Brok, and spoke of a regional association of 20,000 members.

Delegates re-elected him on 30 June 2018 in Schloß Holte-Stukenbrock with 94.5 percent. On 9 March 2024 a Bezirksparteitag in Bielefeld confirmed him again, the CDU reporting just under 90 percent, and he pointed to the association's "Neustaat" collection of proposals on cutting bureaucracy, aimed at a legislative initiative in North Rhine-Westphalia. The state CDU still lists him as Bezirksvorsitzender since 2016, and on 27 June 2026 the Neue Westfälische reported a further re-election, at a congress addressed by CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann.

The state deputy chairmanship followed within weeks. At the CDU's 38th Landesparteitag in Aachen on 11 June 2016, the state party recorded 443 votes for him as a new deputy state chairman, 70.5 percent, while Laschet was returned as state chairman with 93.4 percent. The 41st congress, in Bielefeld on 9 June 2018, confirmed Brinkhaus with 76.3 percent. When the 43rd congress on 23 October 2021 elected Hendrik Wüst state chairman, the five deputy chairs were Herbert Reul, Ina Scharrenbach, Daniel Sieveke, Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker and Sabine Verheyen. Brinkhaus was not among them.

Bundestag membership

Entry in 2009 and the Gütersloh I constituency

Ralph Brinkhaus has sat in the Bundestag since October 2009 for the Christian Democratic Union. At the federal election of 27 September 2009 he won the direct mandate in constituency 132, Gütersloh, in North Rhine-Westphalia. The state returning officer recorded 44.7 percent of the valid first votes for him, and turnout in the constituency was 72.2 percent. He followed Hubert Deittert, a CDU deputy who had held the district as a directly elected member from 1994 until he did not stand in 2009. The Gütersloh daily Die Glocke, in its obituary of Deittert, described Brinkhaus as his successor in the Bundestag.

The constituency was afterwards designated Gütersloh I and numbered 131. Brinkhaus was returned as its directly elected member at the next two federal elections, with 50.3 percent of the first votes on 22 September 2013 and 46.6 percent on 24 September 2017. Archived Bundestag biographies list that direct mandate for the 18th term (2013–2017) and the 19th (2017–2021). In the 21st Bundestag the same seat is listed as constituency 130, Gütersloh I.

Finance committee and financial-market oversight

The 17th Bundestag opened in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. On 17 December 2009 the plenary unanimously established a nine-member body under section 10a of the Financial Market Stabilisation Fund Act and elected, again without dissent, the joint list on Drucksache 17/227, which named Brinkhaus, Leo Dautzenberg, Bartholomäus Kalb and Georg Schirmbeck for the CDU/CSU. A May 2012 paper by the Bundestag's scientific service described the body as drawn from the Budget Committee and attached to it. It met in secret every sitting week; the Federal Ministry of Finance informed it about the Financial Market Stabilisation Fund (SoFFin), and it could summon the fund's steering bodies and representatives of supported institutions. The paper also gave the body control of the bank-restructuring fund and still listed Brinkhaus among the nine, with Florian Toncar of the Free Democratic Party as chair and Kalb as deputy. The Budget Committee's account of the 17th term repeats that roster—Brinkhaus, Klaus-Peter Flosbach, Kalb and Schirmbeck for the CDU/CSU—but does not list Brinkhaus as an ordinary member of the Budget Committee itself.

That 17 December sitting was also his first speech: he closed the CDU/CSU side of a topical hour, requested by the Social Democratic Party, on the government's position toward a financial transaction tax.

On the Finance Committee he was a rapporteur for the Restructuring Act, on the restructuring and orderly resolution of credit institutions. The committee's report of 28 October 2010, Drucksache 17/3547, is issued in the names of Brinkhaus, Manfred Zöllmer (SPD), Björn Sänger (FDP), Richard Pitterle (Die Linke) and Gerhard Schick (Alliance 90/The Greens). Referred to the Finance Committee in the lead, the bill was taken up on 29 September 2010, heard in public on 6 October and finished on 26 October. The report summarizes a two-stage recovery and reorganization procedure and a restructuring fund, run by the Federal Agency for Financial Market Stabilisation and financed by bank levies scaled to size and interconnectedness, so that resolutions of systemically important institutions would be paid for first by the financial sector.

In the 18th electoral term the archived biography lists him as a substitute member of the Finance Committee and of the Budget Committee, and as a substitute member of the Mediation Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss).

Deputy chair of the CDU/CSU group

On Monday, 13 January 2014, the CDU members of the joint group with the Christian Social Union elected Brinkhaus a deputy chair, responsible for the budget, finance and local-government portfolios. The CDU/CSU association for local politics reported the ballot as 221 votes, 97 percent. Die Glocke, writing the same evening, noted that he had been in parliament only since 2009 and called him one of the deputy chairs under group leader Volker Kauder; the paper described him as one of the group's main interlocutors for Federal Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. In that term he also chaired the German–Indian Parliamentary Group, whose deputy chairs a Bundestag list names as Dirk Wiese (SPD), Kathrin Vogler (Die Linke) and Omid Nouripour (Alliance 90/The Greens).

From 10 to 19 February 2015 he led a six-member delegation to India—Jens Spahn and Frank Steffel (CDU/CSU), Stefan Rebmann and Dirk Wiese (SPD), and Kathrin Vogler (Die Linke)—to meet the Lok Sabha elected in 2014 and to discuss economic development and the rights of women and minorities. The Bundestag account quotes him describing the group, then of 17 deputies, as the parliament's point of contact for Indian institutions, and it records talks in Delhi, including with Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, and a briefing on the Mumbai–Delhi industrial corridor. The biography dates the deputy chairmanship from 2014 to 2018; he was then chairman of the CDU/CSU group until February 2022 and remained a member of the House.

Leadership of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group

The 2018 vote against Volker Kauder

On 25 September 2018 the joint Bundestag group of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) removed Volker Kauder after thirteen years as chairman and elected Ralph Brinkhaus. In a secret ballot the deputy chair received 125 votes to Kauder’s 112, with two abstentions. Kauder had held the post since Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, and was backed by Merkel, CSU leader Horst Seehofer and CSU Landesgruppe chair Alexander Dobrindt. Meeting in the Reichstag building, Merkel asked the group to keep him as necessary to the coalition. It was only the second contested election for the job since 1973.

Brinkhaus, a tax adviser from Ostwestfalen who had entered the Bundestag in 2009 and become a deputy group leader in 2014, had declared the previous month. He asked for “new impulses” and a group more active toward the government; colleagues did not applaud. The ballot followed a summer in which CDU and CSU deputies had met separately over asylum, and in which the grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had twice come close to collapse. Many conservatives blamed Merkel’s migration policy for the rise of the Alternative for Germany. In 2017 Kauder, facing no opponent, had been re-elected on only 77 percent.

Merkel called the result an hour of democracy in which there was also defeat, and said there was nothing to sugar-coat. SPD floor leader Thomas Oppermann called it a revolt against Merkel. Brinkhaus had said he was running “for new momentum in the group, not against the chancellor,” and that the Union should talk to voters, including in the Mittelstand, who had turned away. After the count he said he was delighted, praised Kauder and spoke of demanding projects and of cooperation built on trust. The meeting was then suspended so the group executive could consider the consequences.

Relations with the Merkel governments

Brinkhaus did not turn the upset into a break with the chancellor. For the rest of her fourth term he managed the grand coalition’s business in the Bundestag, while arguing for a more active group on budgets, tax and the organization of the state.

The climate package of September 2019 showed that role. After the climate cabinet published key points for a 2030 programme on 20 September, Brinkhaus opened the Bundestag debate on 26 September. He called the package one of the greatest political projects in the history of the Federal Republic and said the coalition had sought not bans or a sharp rise in the price of CO2 emissions, but “a coordinated, integrated and smart concept that relies on incentives.” Revenue, he said, should relieve citizens and reward lower emissions; the annual review of targets should also be debated in parliament; and the design “must not depend on changing majorities in the federation and the Länder.” Anton Hofreiter of Alliance 90/The Greens replied that a price of ten euros a tonne would not steer behaviour and was socially unfair. Free Democratic Party leader Christian Lindner called the instrument a disguised tax.

Pandemic budgets and the 2021 campaign

The COVID-19 pandemic in Germany turned the chairmanship into the management of emergency finance. On 25 March 2020, with Merkel in quarantine, the Bundestag passed a supplementary budget, set the debt brake aside by the majority of members required under the Basic Law, and created an economic-stabilization fund of up to 600 billion euros, including 400 billion euros in guarantees. New borrowing was put at nearly 156 billion euros. The Article 115 motion passed by 469 votes to 3, with 55 abstentions. Brinkhaus called it the greatest challenge in the history of the Federal Republic, a fight for health, jobs and cohesion. Not every decision would be right, he said; limits on liberty and property had to be temporary, and “we will put everything on the test stand when the pandemic is over.”

On 19 June 2020 the coalition introduced a second supplementary budget and stimulus bill. Finance minister Olaf Scholz pointed to planned net borrowing of 218.5 billion euros and defended a temporary value-added-tax cut, a child bonus and aid for firms and municipalities. Andreas Jung, for the CDU/CSU, called the balanced budget a principle of sustainability, but an absolute exception in which jobs and firms would otherwise be lost. On 15 April 2021 a further draft, raising 2021 spending by just under 50 billion euros and again authorizing borrowing above the constitutional limit, had its first reading. Union budget spokesman Eckhardt Rehberg said credit of 450 billion euros from 2020 to 2022 was startling, while defending the spending as sensible.

In the same season Brinkhaus tried to settle the Union’s candidate question without a public split. On 12 April 2021 he said a choice between CDU chair Armin Laschet and CSU chair Markus Söder should be finished that week, five months before the election, and without contested votes in party bodies. “Both candidates have my confidence,” he said.

The group turned complaints about public administration into a campaign paper. Neustaat, begun by executive members Nadine Schön and Thomas Heilmann in a book of that name and driven by Brinkhaus, was adopted by the CDU/CSU group before the election. Laschet and Dobrindt told the group it should be a substantial part of the Union programme, beside Laschet’s “decade of modernization.” The text said the departmental principle, leaving each ministry largely independent, had become a hindrance on subjects such as digitalization.

At the 2021 German federal election on 26 September, turnout was 76.6 percent. The CDU took 18.9 percent of second votes and the CSU 5.2 percent; their combined 24.1 percent finished behind the SPD on 25.7 percent and ended Merkel’s chancellorship. Two days later the new group of 196 members re-elected Brinkhaus, the only candidate, by 164 of 195 votes cast, with two abstentions, but only until the end of April 2022. Laschet had wanted a caretaker role until the Bundestag met on 26 October; after Brinkhaus refused, he and Söder offered the shorter term so that possible rivals, including Jens Spahn, Friedrich Merz and Norbert Röttgen, would not stand. Laschet admitted campaign mistakes; Brinkhaus said the lead candidate had not reached voters; deputy chair Gitta Connemann demanded personal consequences. Söder saw no governing mandate. The group still backed talks with the FDP and the Greens, while Brinkhaus and Dobrindt ruled out selling out Union positions. Whether those talks would avert a move into opposition was still open.

Opposition leadership and later parliamentary roles

Leader of the opposition

Two days after the 2021 federal election, the Bundestag group of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) re-elected Ralph Brinkhaus as chairman only until the end of April 2022, not for a full year. Of 195 votes cast in a group of 196, 164 were in favour. Armin Laschet and Markus Söder had proposed the short term so that likely rivals, including Friedrich Merz, would not stand and the Union would avoid a contest while coalition talks continued. Der Spiegel wrote that if the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) formed the government, that chair would be central in the Bundestag as Oppositionsführer.

The situation began on 8 December 2021, when the Bundestag elected Olaf Scholz chancellor and Angela Merkel’s caretaker government ended, leaving the CDU/CSU as the largest group outside the cabinet. Oppositionsführer is not an office in the Basic Law or the Bundestag’s rules of procedure. On the day Merz later took the chair, Deutschlandfunk called the word a media label, taken from systems such as Britain’s in which an opposition leader has special rights, and preferred “chair of the largest opposition group,” because the parties outside government do not act as one. In that informal sense Brinkhaus held the place only until 15 February 2022.

Succession by Friedrich Merz

A CDU membership ballot in December 2021 gave Merz 62.1 per cent as Laschet’s successor, and an online party congress in January 2022 elected him party chair with about 95 per cent. He told Brinkhaus that he intended to stand for the group chair “in any case,” a step reported as a plan to join party and parliamentary leadership and to face the coalition as one opposition figure.

On the evening of 27 January 2022 Brinkhaus wrote to the deputies, in a letter Der Spiegel had seen, that it was “no secret” the two differed and had not settled the difference, that both had good reasons, and that the dispute should not become personal or harm the Union before state elections “whose results are so decisive for us.” He proposed moving the vote, due at the end of April, to 15 February, said he would not stand, asked colleagues to carry his successor as they had carried him, and wrote that he would remain a member of the group. Alexander Dobrindt, chair of the CSU Landesgruppe, called the decision forward-looking and thanked him for a “clear political edge.”

On 15 February the group elected Merz with 162 of 186 votes cast and no opposing candidate. Brinkhaus said beforehand that the chairmanship had been “incredibly beautiful and challenging” and that he was at peace with leaving. Der Spiegel noted that the group chair would give Merz a more public platform than the party chair alone. The posts below the chair were already filled, so he continued as an ordinary member; the Bundestag dates the chairmanship from September 2018 to February 2022.

Digital affairs and state modernization

For the rest of the 20th term he was an ordinary member of the Committee on European Union Affairs, of the Joint Committee of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development.

In late 2024 he circulated a 39-page working paper, 100 Vorschläge für den Neustaat (“100 proposals for the new state”); Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it on 26 November 2024, and the file on his site carries a creation date of 5 December. The newspaper quoted his call for a “real transformation ministry” with cross-cutting powers like those of the finance ministry, and for a delivery unit in the chancellery of the kind associated with Tony Blair. He said leadership meant implementation rather than strategy papers, and that parliament should discuss goals before money. The text, he said, was not written for the campaign, but the state’s capacity to function had to be a main theme of the next election and legislative term; he wanted the state made better, not smaller.

The Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernization was constituted on 21 May 2025, and the Bundestag listed Brinkhaus among its CDU/CSU members. The CDU/CSU group lists him as speaker and chair of its working group on digital affairs and state modernization. In the 21st term he is also an ordinary member of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and Future Issues, and a deputy member of the Finance Committee and of the Subcommittee on Crisis Prevention, Strategic Foresight, Stabilisation and Peacebuilding. The Finance Committee’s field matches that of the Federal Ministry of Finance except for budget policy, so that deputy seat is not the Bundestag office for the debt brake.

Political positions

Public finances and the debt brake

Brinkhaus treated a balanced budget as a stance of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, not a rule to keep at any cost. In the COVID-19 pandemic he said Germany could not “save its way out” and should grow out of the slump, as after 2009: borrow first, then lower the debt ratio through higher receipts, if the money went into structures, digitalisation and innovation rather than “helicopter money”. Tax rises, he said in May 2020, were the convenient and wrong path, and he was sceptical of a scrappage premium. In June he told ZDF he hoped to regain the “black zero” in 2021 or 2022; a €130 billion package was affordable, he argued, because of earlier restraint. In August he told Handelsblatt the 2022 budget had to be drawn up again without significant new borrowing, and that suspended insolvency rules or short-time work stretched to 24 months could not simply be extended.

In September he accepted another suspension of the debt brake for 2021, calling it painful for the Union, but said the black zero was an attitude, not a dogma of balance “whatever it costs”. Borrowing to protect jobs and health was justified; using the “sweet poison of debt” to finance investment into the mid-2020s was not. In January 2021 Der Spiegel reported that Brinkhaus, Andreas Jung and Eckhardt Rehberg rejected Chancellery minister Helge Braun’s plan to amend the Basic Law so pandemic debt could be repaid over several years. Rehberg said sound finances were “not negotiable”, called Braun’s idea a personal view, and said the ordinary limit of about €12 billion should apply again from 2022.

Taxation

On the solidarity surcharge Brinkhaus moved between full abolition and the coalition treaty with the SPD. In May 2019 he told Handelsblatt that contracts should be kept — relief for 90 percent of taxpayers, not abolition for all in that term — and that planning should favour education, infrastructure and less bureaucracy over consumption. Spiegel noted that this cut against his call of the previous September for complete abolition while revenues were strong. In August, after Finance Minister Olaf Scholz drafted abolition for 90 percent from 2021 and left the full 5.5 percent rate on the top 3.5 percent, Brinkhaus called the draft the treaty’s first step but said the Union still wanted the levy gone for everyone.

He opposed pandemic levies on wealth. In May and September 2020 he told Deutschlandfunk that high earners already paid more, that much German wealth sat in family firms, and that higher taxes would take capital from those firms “and not from some fincas on Mallorca”. The right course, he said, was “appropriate” taxation of wealthy people, not an excessive one; pressed on inequality and the “C” in the party name, he pointed to transfers such as the basic pension, accepted by the Union only with a means test. In October 2016 he had told the Bundestag that multinationals used legal mismatches to escape tax, hurting revenue and smaller firms, and called the OECD BEPS project a milestone, while reserving judgement on a fiscal union and on simply extending the European Fund for Strategic Investments.

Administrative reform and digital government

In February 2021 Brinkhaus told Welt am Sonntag that Germany needed a “century reform” of its administration, “perhaps even a revolution”: digitalisation, faster planning and permitting, and tighter links from federation to municipalities, so the state could answer crises “quickly, flexibly and uniformly”. The line continued an internal project. In June 2020 CDU MPs Nadine Schön and Thomas Heilmann presented Neustaat, 103 proposals for what they called a radical overhaul of politics and administration. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in June 2021 that Brinkhaus had pushed the initiative and that a Union paper took over its main ideas, including smaller ministries and criticism of the departmental principle as a brake on digitalisation; Armin Laschet and Alexander Dobrindt were reported as treating the paper as a substantial part of the election programme. In November 2024 Brinkhaus told SZ Dossier the next government should go beyond a digital ministry to a “real transformation ministry”, with cross-cutting powers like those of the finance ministry.

Other domestic, European and foreign issues

On climate he said in June 2021 that petrol would become more expensive — “a bit now”, and “properly” so later in the decade — and that fighting climate change would “not be free”. People should not have to sell cars at once, which he called environmentally harmful; the plan was higher prices plus subsidies, along the coalition path of €25 a tonne of carbon on oil and gas from 2021, rising to €55 by 2025.

On migration he paired an open CDU with tighter controls. In December 2018 he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that anyone sharing the party’s values could join, including atheists and people of other faiths, and that this was how a “last people’s party” should mark itself off from the populist right. In October 2021, after visiting the German–Polish border, he warned the SPD, Greens and FDP against a German “special path”: pressure on Belarus and checks should rise, and wider family reunion plus higher benefits risked a “pull effect” while most European Union states moved the other way.

In May 2020 he backed the proposal by Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s president Emmanuel Macron for a €500 billion recovery fund, calling it “good and right” and proof that solidarity could work “without a mutualisation of debts”. Spiegel noted that this came from someone known as a strict Ordnungspolitiker; CDU deputy Christian von Stetten warned the plan must not introduce eurobonds “by the back door”. Brinkhaus wanted the money spent quickly on structural improvement, not spread indiscriminately. After leaving the chair he linked India to the war in Ukraine: in May 2022 he said an Indian visit to Europe should press for condemnation of Russia’s attack, and in October 2024 he told Deutschlandfunk that engagement should include arms exports meant to reduce India’s reliance on Russian weapons.

Electoral record

Direct mandates in Gütersloh I

Ralph Brinkhaus, standing for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), has won the direct mandate in the Gütersloh constituency at every Bundestag election since 2009. The seat is in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the final returns it was constituency 132, named Gütersloh, on 27 September 2009; constituency 131, Gütersloh I, on 22 September 2013, 24 September 2017 and 26 September 2021; and constituency 130, Gütersloh I, on 23 February 2025. For 2013 through 2025 the Federal Returning Officer defined Gütersloh I as the Gütersloh district municipalities of Borgholzhausen, Gütersloh, Halle (Westf.), Harsewinkel, Herzebrock-Clarholz, Langenberg, Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Rietberg, Steinhagen, Verl and Versmold. The district’s other municipalities were assigned to further constituencies, numbered 132 and 137 in 2013 and 2017, 132 and 136 in 2021, and 131 and 135 in 2025.

The table uses final results. First votes are those cast for the constituency candidates. The federal and state returning officers publish them by party and name Brinkhaus as the elected CDU candidate; the Kreis Gütersloh count names the 2009, 2013 and 2017 candidates and matches those totals. Percentages are of valid votes, as officially rounded. The CDU column is the party’s second-vote share, and turnout is the share of eligible voters who voted.

Year	Constituency	Brinkhaus (CDU), first votes	Runner-up, first votes	CDU second votes	Turnout
2009	132 Gütersloh	74,149 (44.7%)	Klaus Brandner (SPD), 53,509 (32.3%)	39.0%	72.2%
2013	131 Gütersloh I	83,869 (50.3%)	Thorsten Klute (SPD), 56,031 (33.6%)	46.3%	72.3%
2017	131 Gütersloh I	81,298 (46.6%)	Elvan Korkmaz (SPD), 48,942 (28.0%)	38.4%	75.4%
2021	131 Gütersloh I	71,185 (40.0%)	Elvan Korkmaz-Emre (SPD), 45,878 (25.8%)	29.4%	76.7%
2025	130 Gütersloh I	79,373 (41.6%)	Elvan Korkmaz-Emre (SPD), 40,229 (21.1%)	33.4%	82.8%

In 2009 the runner-up was Klaus Brandner of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), with 232,944 people eligible to vote. In 2013 Brinkhaus’s 50.3 percent was the only first-vote share above half, and the CDU second-vote share of 46.3 percent was the highest of the five elections. Turnout was 72.3 percent of 233,596 eligible voters, with Thorsten Klute the SPD candidate.

In 2017 the Kreis count recorded Elvan Korkmaz as the SPD candidate. Turnout rose to 75.4 percent of 234,272 eligible voters, while the CDU list vote, 38.4 percent, was 8.2 points below the first-vote share. In 2021 his first-vote share fell to 40.0 percent, the lowest of the five contests, with Elvan Korkmaz-Emre the SPD candidate in second place. Turnout was 76.7 percent of 234,177 eligible voters, and the CDU second-vote share fell to 29.4 percent.

On 23 February 2025 Brinkhaus’s first-vote share was 41.6 percent and Korkmaz-Emre’s 21.1 percent. Kai Röchter of the Alternative for Germany was third, with 32,673 first votes (17.1 percent). Turnout reached 82.8 percent of 232,757 eligible voters, and the CDU list vote was 33.4 percent. In each election from 2009 to 2025 the CDU first-vote share, cast for Brinkhaus, was higher than the party’s second-vote share in the constituency.

Personal life

Family and faith

The Bundestag biography, drawn from members’ own disclosures, lists Brinkhaus as Roman Catholic and married. A Westfalen-Blatt caption on the February 2025 federal election in the Gütersloh district identified his wife as Elke Tombach. He has described home as Rheda-Wiedenbrück.

In December 2018, soon after he became chairman of the CDU/CSU group, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that he was Catholic, that Christian values gave him orientation, and that he engaged with God, while treating questions of faith as “something very private.” Die Tagespost, reporting the interview, quoted him on an early Thursday Mass in Berlin during sitting weeks: a contrast, he said, to a day of one appointment after another, and a return to “the fundamental questions of life.” He tied the “C” in the Christian Democratic Union to a Christian view of the person—free, but bound to solidarity—and said people of other faiths, and atheists, who shared those values were welcome in the party.

The Bundestag’s register of members’ positions records that, until 31 March 2026, he advised without pay the Commission for Societal and Social Questions of the German Bishops’ Conference. The Christian magazine PRO wrote in September 2018 that he had for years taken part in the group’s Stephanuskreis, an interdenominational circle concerned with religious freedom.

Public profile

Newsrooms covering his surprise defeat of Volker Kauder on 25 September 2018 described a little-known tax specialist. Der Spiegel reported that colleagues’ first adjectives were “quiet” and “matter-of-fact,” that he was an East Westphalian “through and through,” and that he was known as a finance expert rather than as an organizer of majorities. The same profile called him approachable but a loner, who had stood against Kauder without assembling alliances or promising posts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung noted a short party career—a 50-year-old tax adviser who joined the CDU only in 1998 and the Bundestag in 2009—and wrote that inside the group he could already be sharp in substance and in tone.

A 2020 Spiegel article returned to the same contrast: he came from East Westphalia and had trained as a tax adviser, and was not only “sober and meticulous,” because the candidacy against an incumbent backed by the Union leadership and by Chancellor Angela Merkel had been taken at full risk.

Football was one of the few private interests the press recorded. Spiegel mentioned, as a “small detail,” that his club was 1. FC Köln. He told the Westfalen-Blatt he rarely went to the ground—“Almost every time I go to a match, Köln loses”—and followed games on the Sportschau or a live ticker, with a jersey and a porcelain billy goat in his Bundestag office. His father and younger brother, he said, supported Borussia Mönchengladbach; his second club was Rot-Weiß Mastholte, where he had played without success. During the 2025 campaign he told the same paper the race had been harder with less television time and “declining prominence,” because he was no longer CDU/CSU group leader.