Reinhard Brandl

Reinhard Brandl (born 1 August 1977 in Ingolstadt) is a German politician of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria and a member of the Bundestag for the Ingolstadt constituency in Bavaria. He has sat in parliament since the 17th electoral term, which held its first sitting on 27 October 2009. Since 5 May 2025 he has been parliamentary managing director of the CSU Landesgruppe, the post Alexander Hoffmann left on being elected the group's chairman in succession to Alexander Dobrindt. A Deutsche Presse-Agentur report carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung said that the 43 CSU deputies present elected Hoffmann unanimously to lead the group's 44 members after Dobrindt moved to become federal interior minister, and that Brandl, then 47 and from Ingolstadt, took over Hoffmann's previous office.

He trained as an industrial engineer. After the Abitur at the Willibald-Gymnasium in Eichstätt in 1996, he did compulsory service with the German Air Force at Manching-Oberstimm in 1996–97. From 1997 to 2003 he studied at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in Karlsruhe, graduating as a Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur, and from 2001 to 2003 he also qualified as an ingénieur en génie industriel at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in Grenoble. From 2003 to 2006 he was a doctoral researcher at BMW in Munich, and in 2007 the Technical University of Munich awarded him a doctorate in natural sciences at the Chair for Internet-based Business Systems in the Faculty of Informatics. He then sat on the management of the family firm Erhard Brandl Dipl.-Ing. in Eitensheim (2007–08) and, in 2009, worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in Munich.

At the 2009 federal election he stood for the CSU in the constituency of Ingolstadt, the district of Eichstätt and Neuburg-Schrobenhausen, as successor to Horst Seehofer, who after 28 years did not run again. The federal returning officer recorded 99,482 first votes (57.2 percent) for the CSU in that constituency, against a CSU second-vote share of 49.6 percent and a turnout of 69.8 percent, and named Brandl as elected. In 2025, when the seat was numbered constituency 215, he was elected with 47.1 percent of the first votes (91,839); Lukas Rehm of the Alternative for Germany was runner-up with 20.1 percent. Turnout was 82.4 percent of 237,848 eligible voters, and the CSU's second-vote share in the constituency was 40.3 percent.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Council of Elders, the Joint Committee and the Mediation Committee, and a deputy member of the Defence Committee. The same biography lists him as a voting member of the European Green Deal working group of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly. For the 2021–2025 term, Abgeordnetenwatch recorded him as spokesperson of the Digital Affairs Committee and as a member of the Defence Committee, the Vertrauensgremium and the parliamentary body for the Bundeswehr special fund, and as a deputy member of the Budget Committee. He sits with the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is drawn from members' own statements, describes him as Roman Catholic, married and the father of two children, a CSU member since 1997, and a member of the Eichstätt district council since 2014. A 2010 Bundestag profile records that he joined the Junge Union in 1993, at the age of 16.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Reinhard Brandl was born on 1 August 1977 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, and grew up in Eitensheim, in the district of Eichstätt. The biography carried by the Bundestag, which the parliament notes is drawn from members' own information, lists him as a member of the Catholic Church and states that he is married and has two children.

His family runs a metal-construction business in Eitensheim, Erhard Brandl Dipl.-Ing. In a 2010 interview for the Bundestag text archive he said the firm had been in the family for nearly a century, and that growing up around it had shown him how much a company depends on qualified employees. He said he had always wanted to work in business and had treated a solid training as the way to get there, even after he had already joined party youth work. In 1996 he passed the Abitur at the Willibald-Gymnasium in Eichstätt.

Military service and university studies

From 1996 to 1997 he served his Grundwehrdienst, the basic term under conscription, with the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) of the Bundeswehr at Manching-Oberstimm. Compulsory call-up was still in force: a Bundestag history of the Military Service Act records that basic service, twelve months from 1990, was shortened to ten months in 1996, to nine months in 2002 and to six months in July 2010, and that mandatory call-up was suspended only from 1 July 2011, while the legal duty itself remained for a state of tension or defence.

He then studied industrial engineering (Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen) at the Universität Karlsruhe (TH) from 1997 to 2003 and graduated as a Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur. On 1 October 2009 that university and the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe merged, under the act establishing the institute, into the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which took over the tasks and legal relationships of both predecessors.

From 2001 to 2003 he also studied at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble—the present Grenoble Institute of Technology—and received the title ingénieur en génie industriel. The Karlsruhe faculty of economics kept an integrated double-degree agreement with the École Nationale Supérieure de Génie Industriel of the Grenoble polytechnic, made under a framework agreement of 19 May 1989. German students needed the Vordiplom, four Hauptstudium examinations and two seminars, then spent three semesters at the partner school, including a six-month Diplomarbeit set and supervised by a professor from each institution, and could be awarded both the Karlsruhe diploma and the French diplôme d'ingénieur. The two qualifications recorded for Brandl, with the Grenoble degree dated 2001 to 2003, are the pair that programme was set up to award, although the Bundestag biography does not name the agreement.

Doctorate

From 2003 to 2006 the Bundestag biography lists him as a doctoral candidate at BMW AG in Munich. In 2007 the Technical University of Munich awarded him the degree Dr. rer. nat. at the Chair for Internet-based Business Systems (Lehrstuhl für Internetbasierte Geschäftssysteme) in the Faculty of Informatics.

The dissertation, Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures, was published in 2008 by Gabler in Wiesbaden in the series Gabler Edition Wissenschaft, a volume of xx and 225 pages with a foreword by Martin Bichler. The German National Library catalogues it, under IDN 987989499, as the 2007 dissertation of the Technical University of Munich (ISBN 978-3-8349-0897-1). Later chapters report experiments on those profiles, use them in queueing-network models for capacity planning, and present a proof of concept at the BMW Group, covering that organisation's IT service management and chargeback and a feasibility study of Java/J2EE application systems. In 2007 Brandl, Bichler and Michael Ströbel also published an article of the same title in Wirtschaftsinformatik, volume 49, number 2, pages 83–94.

Professional career

Before he entered the Bundestag in 2009, Reinhard Brandl worked for about six years in industrial research, a family firm and management consulting. The Bundestag’s biography, based on his own statements, lists him as a Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur and gives the sequence as a doctoral candidacy at BMW AG in Munich from 2003 to 2006, a doctorate in 2007, membership of a company’s management in Eitensheim in 2007–2008, and a consulting post in 2009.

Research at BMW

From 2003 to 2006 Brandl was a doctoral candidate at BMW in Munich. His curriculum vitae places that post in the company’s competence centres for IT architectures and for data and object management. The degree, a Dr. rer. nat., was awarded in 2007 by the Technical University of Munich, Faculty of Informatics, at the Chair of Internet-based Business Systems. The post was at BMW and the examination at the university; the published thesis includes a proof-of-concept study of BMW’s IT organisation.

The dissertation, Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures, appeared in 2008 with Gabler in the series Gabler Edition Wissenschaft, with a foreword by Martin Bichler. The chair’s publication list records the 2007 thesis under that title. The same year Brandl, Bichler and Michael Ströbel published a journal version, “Cost accounting for shared IT infrastructures,” in Wirtschaftsinformatik (vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 83–94).

The subject is how to charge business users for shared IT infrastructure—servers, networks and similar equipment—when many applications draw on the same machines. Direct metering is often too expensive, and crude allocation keys can be biased and reward free-riding. The method estimates a “resource profile,” the expected consumption of a customer-facing service, from load tests that large organisations already run before an application goes live, and then uses those profiles as allocation keys. The same estimates feed queueing-network models for capacity planning. The thesis reports experiments on multi-tier applications, including PASTA and the Java Pet Store, and a BMW case study of chargeback practice and of Java/J2EE systems. The journal article describes experiments on infrastructure the BMW Group provided, and how the estimates might fit existing IT service-management processes.

Family firm and consulting

In 2007 and 2008 Brandl was a member of the management of Erhard Brandl Dipl.-Ing. in Eitensheim. In a 2010 Bundestag profile he said that after the doctorate he still saw his professional future in business rather than politics. The same profile, drawing on his account of his upbringing, described the family as having run a metal-construction business in Eitensheim for nearly a hundred years.

The firm was founded in 1901. By 2020–21, under managing director Thomas Brandl, it stood on three activities. Trade magazine metallbau reported that metal construction accounted for about half of a turnover of just under 12 million euros and for 45 of 75 employees; a retail shop for household goods and hardware, with about 1,400 square metres of sales space, also served as a parts store for the metal shop; and a third line was agricultural-machinery service. In July 2024 the Donaukurier reported that, for the first time since the founding, the family company was being led by a team, with Thomas Brandl bringing in two colleagues to secure the succession. Reinhard Brandl’s management role had been limited to 2007–2008, and later Bundestag disclosures do not list an executive post at the firm.

In 2009 he was a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group GmbH in Munich, the occupation the Bundestag records as his last post before parliament. Public accounts do not identify the clients or projects.

Party career

Youth and student politics

Reinhard Brandl joined the Bavarian Junge Union in 1993, aged 16, while still a pupil at the Willibald-Gymnasium in Eichstätt. He later told the Bundestag press service that a federal road carrying about 11,000 vehicles a day ran through Eitensheim past his parents’ house, and that the district Junge Union shared his objection. The group built a full-size wooden model of a new alignment on the church square; the municipal council took up the idea, and a rerouted road opened in 1999. He said that showed joint work could change a local problem, and that a party career was not then his aim.

He joined the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) in 1997, the year he began studying at the Universität Karlsruhe (TH) in Karlsruhe. There he chaired the Karlsruhe branch of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS) in 1999–2000 and was deputy chairman of the RCDS in Baden-Württemberg from 2000 to 2002. His curriculum vitae also lists a seat on the university senate, and work in other academic self-government bodies, from 1999 to 2001.

In the 2004 European election, while a doctoral candidate, he stood for the European Parliament. The Federal Returning Officer’s register of candidates places “Brandl, Reinhard,” born in 1977 in Ingolstadt and described as a Doktorand, at place 27 on the CSU list in Bavaria. He later said that place left little chance of election, but that he kept more than 80 campaign appointments and found that he liked meeting people and looking for practical solutions. He was not returned: official biographies record the candidacy and, from 2009, a Bundestag mandate, but no term in the European Parliament.

In 2007 the Junge Union Bayern elected him Landesschatzmeister (state treasurer). The CSU biographical register dates that office from 2007 to 2013, the year his membership of the Bavarian Junge Union ended; the Bundestag biography otherwise speaks only of various offices at local, district, regional and state level.

Local, district and state offices

That biography says that, since 1997, he has held various CSU offices at Orts-, Kreis-, Bezirks- and Landesebene. The posts that are actually named are narrower. From 2011 to 2017 he chaired the CSU local branch in Eitensheim, a term the branch’s own page still records.

A curriculum vitae issued for the 20th Bundestag lists him as a member of the board of the CSU Bezirksverband Upper Bavaria (Oberbayern) from 2017. The register kept by the Archiv für Christlich-Soziale Politik at the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung dates a deputy chairmanship of that Bezirksverband from 2021, and the association’s page for 2025–2027 lists “Dr. Reinhard Brandl MdB (Eichstätt)” among the deputy Bezirksvorsitzende.

The same curriculum vitae records membership of the CSU party executive (Parteivorstand) in 2017–2019, before the later co-option tied to CSUnet. It also states that he leads the security-policy committee of the CSU working group on foreign and security policy, a party role the historical register dates from 2013 and links to Bundeswehr questions, distinct from any Bundestag committee.

Digital-policy roles in the CSU

CSUnet, the CSU working group on net policy, was founded in 2011 as a virtual association for online discussion and for positions on data retention, net neutrality, data protection, media literacy and open government. At the founding assembly, reported on 15 September 2011, Dorothee Bär was elected chair with 96.8 percent of the vote; the deputies were Brandl, by then a member of the Bundestag, the Landtag member Markus Blume, and Ronald Kaiser.

The historical register lists Brandl as deputy chairman from 2011 until 2022. On 15 November 2022 the CSUnet convention met at the party’s state headquarters in Munich. Bär, who had led the group for more than eleven years, did not stand again, and the assembly elected Brandl chairman unanimously. The Ingolstadt district association reported that she was named honorary chair, also unanimously, that the chairmanship made him a member of the party executive, and that he described CSUnet as a home for people interested in technology and progress. The party website lists him among the co-opted members of the Parteivorstand and names him CSUnet chairman.

The 2022 report put membership at about 1,500 and named Benjamin Miskowitsch, Elisabeth Goger and Ronald Kaiser as deputy chairs. It also identified Brandl, then, as chair of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group’s digital working group, a parliamentary office rather than a CSU party post.

On 23 January 2025 the members’ assembly in Munich confirmed him as chairman and adopted “Deutschland braucht einen Neustart in der Digitalpolitik,” calling for a separate federal digital ministry, faster broadband and mobile rollout, a stronger Federal Office for Information Security, closer civil–military cooperation against digital threats, and support for artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. The party records do not add a separate state title of CSU “digital commissioner” to the CSUnet offices and the related executive seat.

Bundestag elections and the Ingolstadt constituency

The constituency

The Ingolstadt constituency for the Bundestag lies in Bavaria. At the 2025 federal election it was constituency 215 and covered the independent city of Ingolstadt, the whole district of Eichstätt, and part of the district of Neuburg-Schrobenhausen: Burgheim, Ehekirchen, Karlshuld, Karlskron, Königsmoos, Neuburg an der Donau, Oberhausen, Rennertshofen and Weichering, together with Bergheim and Rohrenfels in the Verwaltungsgemeinschaft Neuburg an der Donau. The remaining municipalities of that district were in constituency 213.

The same core—Ingolstadt, all of Eichstätt, and part of Neuburg-Schrobenhausen—was already the seat in 2013, then numbered 217, but that map still included the town of Schrobenhausen and the Verwaltungsgemeinschaft Schrobenhausen (Berg im Gau, Brunnen, Gachenbach, Langenmosen and Waidhofen), with the rest of the district assigned to constituency 215, Freising. From 2017 those Schrobenhausen municipalities were outside Ingolstadt, the remainder of the district was assigned to constituency 214, and the Ingolstadt seat itself was renumbered 216. The municipal list used in 2021 matched 2017. In 2025 the number changed again, to 215, while the municipalities stayed as they had been in 2021.

On 31 December 2023 the constituency contained 42 municipalities and covered 1,845.6 square kilometres, with 343,300 inhabitants, or 186 per square kilometre. Of employees subject to social insurance on 30 June 2023, 44.1 percent worked in manufacturing. The unemployment rate at the end of November 2024 was 3.2 percent.

Results from 2009 to 2021

In 2009 Reinhard Brandl was the Christian Social Union candidate in succession to Horst Seehofer, who after 28 years did not stand again. The Bundestag's account of the handover notes that the CSU sought a new direct candidate after Seehofer became Bavarian minister-president in 2008, and describes the constituency as Ingolstadt together with the districts of Eichstätt and Neuburg-Schrobenhausen. On 27 September 2009 the Federal Returning Officer recorded Brandl as elected in constituency 217 with 99,482 first votes, 57.2 percent. The Social Democratic Party took 15.4 percent of first votes and Alliance 90/The Greens 8.2 percent. CSU second votes were 49.6 percent, ahead of the SPD on 15.4 percent and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) on 12.3 percent. Turnout was 69.8 percent of 252,615 eligible voters. The 17th Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on 27 October 2009. Brandl has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009.

The 2013 list of direct candidates again named Dr. Reinhard Brandl for the CSU in constituency 217 and Dr. Stefan Schieren for the SPD. Brandl was elected with 106,668 first votes, 61.5 percent, 4.4 points above 2009. Schieren's SPD line was 16.5 percent. CSU second votes were 55.9 percent and SPD second votes 17.3 percent. The Alternative for Germany, on the ballot for the first time, took 2.8 percent of first votes and 3.5 percent of second votes. Turnout was 68.6 percent.

In 2017 the seat was constituency 216, the first contest after Schrobenhausen and its Verwaltungsgemeinschaft had left it, and eligible voters fell from 254,661 in 2013 to 238,605. Brandl was again the CSU direct candidate, and the CSU first-vote line—his votes—was 90,383, or 49.5 percent, down 11.6 points. The SPD candidate, Prof. Dr. Werner Widuckel, stood on a line of 13.6 percent, and the AfD candidate, Christina Wilhelm, on 13.0 percent. On second votes the CSU had 41.7 percent, the AfD 15.1 percent, the SPD 13.4 percent, the FDP 9.4 percent and the Greens 7.2 percent. Turnout rose to 77.1 percent.

At the 2021 election, still in constituency 216, Brandl held the direct mandate with 44.9 percent, and Jessica Meier of the SPD was second with 13.9 percent. The official table gives the CSU 83,663 first votes, 44.9 percent; the Greens had 9.8 percent, the AfD 9.6 percent, the Free Voters 8.3 percent and the FDP 5.8 percent. Second votes were more dispersed: the CSU 34.6 percent, the SPD 16.9 percent, the Greens 11.2 percent, the FDP 10.6 percent, the AfD 10.0 percent and the Free Voters 8.4 percent. Turnout was 78.6 percent of 238,384 eligible voters.

The 2025 election

At the February 2025 election, in constituency 215, the Federal Returning Officer recorded Dr. Reinhard Brandl of the CSU as elected with 91,839 first votes, 47.1 percent, 2.2 points above the CSU share in 2021. Lukas Rehm of the AfD was the runner-up with 20.1 percent. CSU second votes were 78,649, or 40.3 percent, and turnout was 82.4 percent of 237,848 eligible voters.

Behind the AfD on first votes were the SPD on 11.0 percent, the Greens on 7.4 percent, the Free Voters on 5.1 percent and Die Linke on 4.0 percent; the FDP fell to 1.9 percent. On second votes the AfD rose to 21.4 percent, 11.4 points above 2021, while the SPD had 10.1 percent, the Greens 9.2 percent, Die Linke and the Free Voters 4.7 percent each, the FDP 3.8 percent and the BSW 3.0 percent.

The contest was the first under the reformed electoral law. A party candidate receives the constituency seat only with a plurality of first votes and only if that seat is covered by the party's second-vote allocation in the Land, known as Zweitstimmendeckung. The Bundestag was capped at 630 members, and overhang and compensatory seats were abolished. In Bavaria the CSU won all 47 constituencies, but its 37.2 percent of second votes produced 44 seats, so the three winners with the lowest first-vote shares—Sebastian Brehm in Nürnberg-Nord (30.2 percent), Claudia Küng in München-Süd (30.4 percent) and Volker Ullrich in Augsburg-Stadt (31.1 percent)—did not enter the Bundestag. Brandl's plurality was covered: the constituency result lists him as elected.

Defence, budget and security policy

Defence committee

Reinhard Brandl, of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, was a full member of the Bundestag Defence Committee in the 18th, 19th and 20th terms (2013–2025). In the 21st Bundestag he is only a deputy member. The Bundestag biography lists the same deputy seat.

From that seat he argued for armed unmanned aircraft for the Bundeswehr. On 16 May 2024 he opened debate on the CDU/CSU motion "Aufbau einer Drohnenarmee" (Drucksache 20/11379). He said the Union had demanded armed drones in every Bundeswehr position paper for more than ten years and that the Social Democratic Party had blocked them on ideological grounds. Citing the war in Ukraine, he said Ukrainian forces were using 10,000 drones a month and aiming at a million a year, so that the Bundeswehr could "keep up for exactly two days", or one day longer on what Defence Minister Boris Pistorius planned to buy. He said those plans contained no armed drone, only reconnaissance systems, and that leased Heron TP aircraft would not suffice even if armed later. He also said drones had been reported over Bundeswehr sites 127 times in 2022 and 446 times in 2023, and that one had been stopped. The motion asked for an unmanned-systems branch, wider procurement, more research, and a legal basis for counter-drone action in peacetime in Germany. The House rejected it the same day: the governing SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and Free Democratic Party, and the Left group, voted against, and the AfD abstained.

SPD member Johannes Arlt called the title a martial headline. He said the coalition had already moved: the German Heron TP had just flown in Germany and its arming had been decided, which he said no CDU defence minister had finished, but data infrastructure and personnel still had to come first. On 6 April 2022 the committees had approved 140 missile sets for the Israeli Heron TP, 60 for training and 80 for operations, at about 152.61 million euros, after the SPD blocked arming in late 2020. The draft, reflecting the 2021 coalition agreement, limited use to mandates that explicitly allowed it and required control units in the theatre, not in Germany. SPD budget politician Andreas Schwarz said protecting soldiers was their only task. In the 31 January 2024 budget debate Brandl said Bundeswehr buying was still in "peacetime mode", asked for a separate procurement cell for the Lithuania brigade, and urged a Taurus order because, he said, German production had stopped and would take three to four years to restart.

Budget rapporteur and the special fund

Brandl was a full member of the Budget Committee from 2013 to 2021 and a deputy member from 2021 to 2025. He was not the principal rapporteur for the defence budget, Einzelplan 14. He spoke for the CDU/CSU on that estimate and, in the 20th term, sat on the body for the Bundeswehr special fund. A government bill of 13 April 2022 proposed a new Article 87a (1a) of the Basic Law: a special fund with its own credit line of up to 100 billion euros, outside the constitutional debt rule but without setting that rule aside for other tasks, with the spending to count toward the NATO benchmark. On 3 June 2022 the Bundestag adopted the amendment by 568 votes to 96, with 20 abstentions and 51 members not voting. The roll call places Brandl among those who did not cast a vote.

Under section 5(4) of the Bundeswehr Financing and Special Fund Act, a Budget Committee body advises on the fund, which is meant to close equipment gaps and to give longer planning certainty for complex projects. It meets in secret. Abgeordnetenwatch lists Brandl as a member for the 20th term.

On 31 January 2024 he called the fund special debt that did not turn a permanent task into a five-year exception. He put the 2020 budget at 362 billion euros overall and 45 billion for defence, and said later spending was 114 billion euros higher in total but only 7 billion higher for defence. "Debt is like a drug: it eases the day, but once it is gone the withdrawal is hard," he said, warning of an empty pot in 2027 and a 56-billion-euro gap in 2028, when ministry figures, he said, implied the defence budget would almost have to double. SPD budget politician Bettina Hagedorn disputed the earlier rise. He answered that gains of about 4 billion euros a year from 2014 to 2021 had depended on SPD support, including then finance minister Olaf Scholz, and that the regular budget was now flat, with about 30 billion euros of new debt from the "clean-up" sitting not going into defence.

Pistorius said alliance and national defence was again the core task, that the fund was only a first step, and that Germany needed a lasting level of at least 2 percent of gross domestic product. He reported 55 procurement submissions above 25 million euros in the previous year, more than 60 percent of the fund under contract, and nearly 20 billion euros to be spent from it in 2024. Green member Niklas Wagener cited, among other items, almost 3.5 billion euros for ammunition from the fund, and said military spending had to sit beside civil crisis tools.

Intelligence oversight

On 14 March 2024 the Bundestag elected Brandl to the Confidential Committee (Vertrauensgremium) under section 10a(2) of the Federal Budget Code: 527 votes in favour, 91 against and 50 abstentions, above the required majority of 368. The CDU/CSU nomination, Drucksache 20/10403, paired him with Yannick Bury, marked as successor to André Berghegger. It approves the secret economic plans for the intelligence services submitted by the Federal Ministry of Finance. Members are drawn from the Budget Committee, are bound to confidentiality, and report only the closing totals back to that committee. The plans are those of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Military Counterintelligence Service.

That budgetary seat is distinct from the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, which scrutinises the services' activities. The election record places Brandl on the Confidential Committee, not on the Panel. Because the committee meets in secret, his positions inside it are not public. Abgeordnetenwatch lists the seat for the 20th term only; for 2025–2029 it records him solely as a deputy on the Defence Committee.

Digital policy

Spokesperson and committee work

In the 20th Bundestag (2021–2025), Reinhard Brandl of the Christian Social Union was digital-policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU group. Abgeordnetenwatch lists him as Sprecher of the Committee on Digital Affairs, a faction post rather than the chair, whom netzpolitik.org identified as Tabea Rößner of Alliance 90/The Greens. The role did not continue. In the 21st term the group’s pages name Ralph Brinkhaus spokesperson and chair of the working group on digital affairs and state modernisation, and do not give Brandl that role. Abgeordnetenwatch’s 2025–2029 entry for him records only a deputy seat on the defence committee.

From opposition he contested the traffic-light coalition on networks and administrative IT. In February 2022, after the Federal Network Agency proposed a universal-service floor of 10 Mbit/s downstream and 1.3 Mbit/s upstream, he said the Union had wanted a “stable and in practice workable, but not excessive” right to fast internet, and a committee debate before the agency decided. Coalition speakers called that floor unambitious. In the 11 September 2024 budget debate he said the draft “spectacularly documented the failure” of digital policy: against a stated aim of a top-ten European place, he cited European Commission comparisons in which Germany had slipped on digital public services, gigabit and 5G, and he said register-modernisation funding was heading from €80 million in 2023 to €10 million for 2025 while the draft cut the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), ZITiS and fibre support from €3 billion toward €1 billion. Digital Minister Volker Wissing answered that bookable fibre had doubled since 2021, 5G covered 92 percent and the Commission had called the fibre catch-up “spectacular.” Brandl later said the first Online Access Act had been missed, with only about a quarter of services available nationwide, and that a cross-departmental digital budget promised in the coalition agreement had not been created.

Cybersecurity and data protection

On 25 January 2023, in Tagesspiegel Background, Brandl argued that Russia’s war against Ukraine required a Zeitenwende in cyber defence. A suspected Russian attack on Viasat had, he wrote, briefly left about 3,000 German wind turbines uncontrollable, and Article 30 of the Basic Law left the federation “only a spectator,” because the BSI could send incident teams only if a Land asked. Among ten proposals were a federal power to attribute and stop serious attacks, capabilities to interrupt them in foreign networks, peacetime use of Bundeswehr personnel in BSI teams, a federal chief information security officer, zero trust and security-by-design. In November 2024 he added that the NIS 2 rules were too complicated for smaller firms and that the BSI offered them too little practical help.

The Scholz coalition agreement rejected “hackbacks” in principle as a means of cyber defence. After an intrusion into Social Democratic Party email, netzpolitik.org answered renewed CDU calls for offensive countermeasures by arguing that striking back is an attack, that attribution is uncertain, and that civilian networks would be the battlefield. Brandl’s 2023 text did not use the word “hackback”; it did ask for the ability to stop attacks “in foreign networks.”

In June 2023 he told netzpolitik.org he was alarmed by advertising segments offered through Xandr, including categories tied to health, sexual orientation and politics, with German firms among the sellers. Sensitive data had to be protected, he said; he doubted the consents met the General Data Protection Regulation and the Court of Justice of the European Union, and he asked for “transparent structures and legal certainty for consumers.” SPD and Green spokespersons likewise questioned consent and urged supervisors to investigate. He later also criticised the EU Artificial Intelligence Act as a risk of over-regulation for smaller firms.

On the Commission proposal to scan private messages for child-sexual-abuse material, he wrote in October 2024 that the Union shared the aim but rejected restricting end-to-end encryption across a whole service, or client-side scanning, without individual suspicion. He supported court-ordered surveillance in concrete cases and hash-matching of known illegal images, rejected mandatory AI scanning for new material and grooming as too inaccurate, and demanded six-month statutory retention of IP addresses, provided the steps did not become mass surveillance. The question cited the Bundestag research service on disproportionate rights interference; he noted that the government had withheld consent on rule-of-law grounds.

Digital sovereignty

Brandl treated reliance on non-European suppliers as a question of security and privacy as well as industry. On 25 April 2024 he called the government’s international digital strategy generalities, including a policy of “disarmament in digital space” that he said would not deter attackers from Russia, China or North Korea. Elon Musk’s control of Starlink, he argued, showed why Germany needed sovereign satellite connectivity, and he criticised Berlin’s part in the EU’s IRIS² programme beside what he described as a harder French line. In September 2024 he cited the CrowdStrike outage, non-European cloud and artificial-intelligence development, and imported handsets, chips and operating systems as reasons to reduce dependence on Microsoft and other foreign suppliers.

A May 2025 essay, whose byline described him as the group’s digital spokesperson in the 20th term rather than the current one, applied that view to procurement. Much administrative IT spending went outside Europe, he wrote, and Safe Harbour, the Privacy Shield and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework had failed or been hollowed out, the first two struck down by the Court of Justice. At least in sensitive administration, “Buy European” should be the standard—open source “an important building block, but not the solution for everything”—with procurement and open interfaces ending one-sided dependence without a ban on non-European products.

Parliamentary leadership since 2025

Election as parliamentary managing director

On 5 May 2025 the CSU group in the Bundestag (CSU-Landesgruppe) elected Alexander Hoffmann as its chair and Reinhard Brandl as its parliamentary managing director (parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer). Hoffmann, who had been managing director for about a year, succeeded Alexander Dobrindt, then the designated federal minister of the interior; Brandl, the member for Ingolstadt, took the post Hoffmann left. Of the group's 44 deputies, the 43 present voted unanimously for Hoffmann. The CSU executive in Munich had already designated that succession in late April, and party chairman Markus Söder had announced Hoffmann's elevation in the party executive the week before. On 6 May 2025 Bundestag President Julia Klöckner administered the oath to Dobrindt as federal minister of the interior.

In the Bundestag's glossary, parliamentary managing directors run a group's day-to-day parliamentary and internal business with its chair: they prepare plenary sittings, agree agendas with the other groups and in the Council of Elders, keep members together for important votes, help fill committee places, and deal with the federal government, the Bundesrat, the party and associations. The CSU Landesgruppe is not a faction of its own but part of the joint CDU/CSU group; its managing director, the Landesgruppe states, organizes internal work and represents the group when the agenda is set in the Council of Elders, and is ex officio deputy to the joint group's First Parliamentary Managing Director, while the Landesgruppe chair is ex officio first deputy chair of that group.

Council of Elders and constitutional committees

The Bundestag lists Brandl as a full member of the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) and as a deputy member of the Defence Committee. The Council of Elders supports the President of the Bundestag and coordinates the chamber's work: it fixes sitting weeks, agrees plenary agendas, and is where disputes between the groups are taken up. Seats follow the strength of the parliamentary groups, and the groups' parliamentary managing directors belong to it; on the business programme it recommends rather than decides, while it does decide internal matters, including the draft of the Bundestag's own budget chapter.

The Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss) under Article 53a of the Basic Law is not a Bundestag committee but, as the Bundestag describes it, a kind of emergency parliament—two-thirds members of the Bundestag and one-third representatives of the Länder—with the rank of a supreme federal organ. It may determine a state of defence, an armed attack on federal territory or one immediately impending, only when immediate action is required and the Bundestag cannot meet in time or is not quorate; the President of the Bundestag chairs it ex officio. On 26 June 2025 the Bundestag adopted the groups' nominations in Drucksache 21/595 and elected Brandl a full member on the CDU/CSU list, with Klöckner recorded as chair.

The Mediation Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss) under Article 77 (2) of the Basic Law is a standing body of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat whose task is to reconcile their differing views of a bill. It is not a super-parliament: it cannot itself change a law and may only submit a compromise proposal for the two chambers to adopt. The same sitting adopted Drucksache 21/596 and elected Brandl a full Bundestag member, with Hoffmann named as his substitute. The biography, as updated on 29 October 2026, still listed him as a full member of the Council of Elders, the Joint Committee and the Mediation Committee.

Franco-German parliamentary assembly

The Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly rests on the parliamentary agreement adopted by the National Assembly on 11 March 2019 and by the Bundestag on 20 March 2019; its constitutive sitting was in Paris on 25 March 2019. It comprises 50 members of each chamber, named under each parliament's own rules, and meets in public at least twice a year, as a rule alternating between Germany and France. Under Article 6 it monitors the 1963 Élysée Treaty and the 2019 Aachen Treaty and the projects based on them, follows the Franco-German ministerial councils and Defence and Security Council, accompanies common European foreign, security and defence policy, and proposes steps to converge German and French law.

The Bundestag biography, which notes that biographical details rest on members' own information, lists Brandl as a voting member of the assembly's European Green Deal working group. The assembly established that group on 6 February 2020, in the 19th electoral term, to follow German, French and European Union climate measures, bilateral climate cooperation and the design and implementation of the European Green Deal, and to draft joint proposals. It met six times; its work was the basis for an assembly decision of 28 June 2021, and the Bundestag now holds the group's page in the web archive of the 19th electoral term.

Local roles, outside offices and disclosure

District council and regional issues

Brandl has been a member of the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Eichstätt since 2014. The date is in his Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, and the seat is also published as a post in a public-law body. The district is part of constituency 215, Ingolstadt, which also covers the city of Ingolstadt and part of Landkreis Neuburg-Schrobenhausen. At the district election of 8 March 2026 he stood again for the CSU. With 54,917 votes he had the largest personal total among the councillors returned. The CSU took 35.1 percent of the vote, 4.7 points less than before, on a turnout of 70.8 percent. The Bundestag entry names the seat and states no euro figure for it.

Long-distance rail is one local issue documented outside campaign material. In 2026 Ingolstadt, on the Munich–Nuremberg high-speed line, had about 50 ICE and IC calls a day. That June the rail union EVG warned that Italo, an Italian operator, could weaken Deutsche Bahn's cross-subsidy of less busy stops by taking profitable routes, and named Ingolstadt among cities that might lose calls. The Ingolstadt CSU group told the mayor the loss would damage the city, said Brandl was seeking extra stops, and asked that he join a letter to the federal transport minister. In October three local politicians who had written to the railway also wrote to him. He replied that losing the stop entirely was, in his view, excluded, because Ingolstadt is the only intermediate halt between Munich and Nuremberg.

Research and security-policy offices

Since 8 July 2019 the disclosure has listed him as chairman of the supervisory board of Artificial Intelligence Network Ingolstadt gGmbH (AININ), with no remuneration stated. AININ describes itself as a non-profit for applied and basic research in information technology, centred on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and for passing that knowledge on free of charge. The board it publishes mixes the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the city and its hospital, Fraunhofer, MediaMarktSaturn, the development agency IFG and Audi's Ingolstadt plant. Christian Lösel is managing director.

He is vice-president of the Gesellschaft für Sicherheitspolitik (GSP) in Bonn (VR 5684), which calls itself a non-partisan charity, founded on 5 January 1952, for public education on security and defence policy. The Bundestag entry does not call the post honorary and states no euro amount; abgeordnetenwatch records it, under the former name Gesellschaft für Wehr- und Sicherheitspolitik, as honorary.

He is also an honorary member of the executive (Präsidium) of Förderkreis Deutsches Heer e.V. Founded in Bonn on 11 October 1995, the association says it brings together politics, society, business and the Bundeswehr, especially the army, and that its purpose includes a capable national industrial base for equipping German land forces.

Until 25 April 2025 he was honorary chairman of the advisory board "Sicherheit und Verteidigung" of the Gesellschaft zum Studium strukturpolitischer Fragen in Berlin. Founded in 1959, the association holds confidential meetings, often in Bundestag rooms, between company and association members and members of parliament; its boards broadly track parliamentary committees. In September 2023 abgeordnetenwatch reported that Brandl had put European Sky Shield on the agenda of an early-February meeting and proposed as speakers Christian Mölling of the German Council on Foreign Relations and Guido Bendler, sales director at the missile firm MBDA. Brandl answered that industry experts were needed to judge whether the government's concept was feasible, and that MBDA had been invited for that reason. The same report said a 2021 inquiry by abgeordnetenwatch and Zeit found that Brandl, Stefan Müller (CSU) and Cem Özdemir (Greens) had not published their roles there until asked, after which the posts were added on the Bundestag site.

Disclosure of side activities

The Members of the Bundestag Act treats the mandate as the centre of a member's work but generally allows outside activity. Within three months of taking a seat, and of any later change, a member must tell the President of the last occupation, paid side work, posts in companies, public-law bodies, associations and foundations, shareholdings, and agreements on future posts or benefits. Income above 1,000 euro a month or, if not monthly, 3,000 euro a year is published to the cent. The Bundestag says many notifiable posts are unpaid. A breach can bring a reprimand, a published finding by the Presidium, and a fine of up to half a year's salary.

Brandl's published list names consultancy at the Boston Consulting Group before he entered parliament, the AININ chair, the Eichstätt council seat, the army-association and GSP posts, and the advisory chairmanship that ended on 25 April 2025. No euro amount is published for any of them.