Roland Theis

Roland Theis (born 17 March 1980 in Neunkirchen) is a jurist and politician in Germany of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from Saarland. He has been a member of the Bundestag since 25 March 2025, directly elected for the constituency of St. Wendel and sitting with the CDU/CSU group. At the federal election of 23 February 2025 he won constituency 298 with 33.9 percent of the first votes (47,875), ahead of Social Democratic candidate Christian Petry on 28.6 percent; turnout in the constituency was 85.2 percent.

He is a citizen of Germany and of France, and is the son of a mother from Alsace. In a 2018 interview he described that parentage — a father from Saarland and a mother from Alsace — as the basis of his two citizenships. The Bundestag’s biography, which the parliament notes is drawn from members’ own statements, records that he is a Roman Catholic, is married and has two children. He lives in Illingen.

Theis passed the Abitur in 1999 at the Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium in St. Wendel and then did military service. From 2000 to 2005 he studied law and political science at Saarland University and at the Université Aix-Marseille III. He passed the first state examination in law in 2005 and the second in 2008, and is an alumnus of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. From 2007 to 2009 he was a corporate lawyer at SaarLB, the Saarland Landesbank. He taught from 2005 to 2022 at Saarland University, the Université de Lorraine and Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and since 2022 has lectured at Sciences Po on the Nancy campus.

From 2005 to 2010 he chaired the Saarland Young Union. He was a member of the Landtag of Saarland from 2009 to 2017, parliamentary managing director of its CDU group from 2013 to 2017, and secretary-general of the CDU in Saarland from 2010 to 2017. From 2017 to 2022 he was state secretary in the Ministry of Justice and in the Ministry of Finance and Europe, and the state’s plenipotentiary for European affairs. In that office he set out the state government’s France Strategy, which aimed to establish French as a second everyday language in Saarland by 2043. He led the CDU Saar list for the European Parliament in 2019 and in 2024; neither candidacy produced a seat. After the CDU’s defeat in the 2022 Saarland state election he refused the state chairmanship, saying he would not place on his family and two young children the strain of a possible minister-presidency, and he took a deputy party post instead. He sat in the Landtag again from 2022 until 2025 as deputy chair of the CDU group.

In the 21st Bundestag he is the CDU/CSU coordinator on the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, deputy chair of the group’s European-affairs working group, a member of the Defence Committee and of its working group, and chair of the Saarland Landesgruppe. The parliament also lists him as a full member of the Subcommittee on International Order, the United Nations and International Organisations and as a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Outside parliament he is volunteer state chair in Saarland of the victim-support organisation Weißer Ring.

Early life and education

Family and upbringing

Roland Theis was born on 17 March 1980 in Neunkirchen, in the German state of Saarland. The biography published by the Bundestag, which the parliament notes is based on information supplied by members themselves, describes him as Roman Catholic, married, and the father of two children.

In a November 2018 interview he said that he was the son of a father from Saarland and a mother from Alsace, and a citizen not only of Germany but also of France. The Saarländischer Rundfunk has reported the same dual nationality, describing him as the son of an Alsatian woman. He added that he was grateful to have worked in a Franco-German context in his studies, his profession and politics, and he spoke of a daughter who would turn 25 in 2043.

He has stated that he grew up in the Ostertal and lives in Illingen with his wife and two children. A February 2025 profile by the Saarländischer Rundfunk likewise placed his home in Illingen.

Schooling and military service

In 1999 Theis passed the Abitur at the Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium in Sankt Wendel, and then performed military service.

It was a Catholic Gymnasium of the Society of the Divine Word, the congregation founded by Arnold Janssen. The order dates the school to 1898, as part of its mission house in the town; external boys were admitted from 1969 and girls from 1984. The Rheinpfalz reported in January 2020 that it had taken no new pupils since 2016/17, after no new sponsor was found, and that teaching was to end that school year. The order later dated the official closure to 31 July 2023.

That military service was Wehrdienst in the Bundeswehr, finished before university study began in 2000. Compulsory service for young men was still in force: on 24 March 2011 the Bundestag suspended peacetime conscription with effect from 1 July 2011.

University studies

From 2000 to 2005 Theis studied law and political science at Saarland University and at the Université Aix-Marseille III. Saarland University opened in November 1948, combining French and German educational traditions, and has its main campus in Saarbrücken. The Saarländischer Rundfunk places the French part of the course in Aix-en-Provence. Aix-Marseille University states that it was created on 1 January 2012 by merging the region's three universities.

In 2005 he passed the first state examination in law (the Erstes Juristisches Staatsexamen). The same biography lists him, under 2008, as an Altstipendiat of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the term for a former holder of one of its scholarships, without giving the years of the award.

Legal and academic work

Training and early legal work

Theis studied law and political science from 2000 to 2005 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken and at the Université Aix-Marseille III. He passed the first state examination in law in 2005 and the second in 2008. Under the German Judges Act, the qualification for judicial office—the usual full legal qualification in Germany—is acquired by completing a university law degree with the first examination and then a preparatory service with the second state examination. That preparatory service lasts two years and includes compulsory stages in a civil court, criminal justice, an administrative authority and a law office, with further optional stages that may be spent abroad or at international bodies. A regional profile states that, during his studies and legal traineeship, he completed training placements in Brussels and Berlin. The Bundestag biography lists him, from 2008, as an alumnus of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

From 2001 to 2005 he was a student assistant at the university chair of constitutional and administrative law and later a research assistant to Wolfgang Knies. Knies was full professor of that subject in Saarland University’s faculty of law and economics from 1971 until he retired in 2003. The faculty’s 2019 death notice records that he also sat, as an expert in broadcasting law, on the Commission for Determining the Financial Requirements of Broadcasters (Kommission zur Ermittlung des Finanzbedarfs der Rundfunkanstalten, KEF) from 1975 to 1980 and again from 2002 to 2009. The same regional profile states that Theis worked for Knies in the KEF. The commission, a body of the Länder, checks whether the financial needs reported by ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio and ARTE were calculated accurately and consistently with economy and thrift, and it recommends the level of the broadcasting contribution, which the Länder then set.

From 2007 to 2009 he worked as an in-house lawyer (Unternehmensjurist) at SaarLB, the Landesbank Saar, in Saarbrücken. The bank describes itself as a German-French institution based in the cross-border Greater Region, with further offices in Mannheim, Paris, Lyon and Strasbourg. The regional profile places his work in the bank’s executive staff.

University teaching

From 2005 to 2022 his Bundestag biography lists him as a lecturer (Dozent) at Saarland University, the University of Lorraine and Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, commonly known as Paris II. Saarland University opened in November 1948 as a bilingual institution meant to join French and German academic traditions. Paris-Panthéon-Assas describes itself as the direct heir of the Paris faculty of law and economic sciences; after the 1968 university reforms it took its name from its historic sites around the Panthéon and the rue d’Assas, and on 1 January 2022 the former Paris II was reconstituted under the present name. The Université de Lorraine describes itself as present across the Lorraine region and involved in the area’s economic and social development.

Since 2022 he has been listed as a part-time lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) at the Nancy campus of the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). On 22 August 2022 the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported that the institute’s director, Mathias Vicherat, had appointed him a nebenamtlicher Lehrbeauftragter—a role the paper also called a guest professorship—to teach in the political-science bachelor’s programme at the European campus in Nancy, starting with the autumn semester on 29 August 2022 and extending through the summer semester. Sciences Po’s Nancy campus, established in Lorraine in 2000, is where undergraduates follow the European Union and Franco-German partnership minor. Saarländischer Rundfunk has separately noted that he gives courses at Sciences Po.

Local politics and the Junge Union

Municipal mandates

Theis’s first elected offices were councils in the Neunkirchen district of Saarland. From 1999 to 2009 he sat on the city council (Stadtrat) of Ottweiler, and from 2004 to 2009 on the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Neunkirchen. In a Saarbrücker Zeitung interview of 15 September 2009, after he had entered the Landtag of Saarland, he gave the same account: membership of the Ottweiler council from 1999 to 2009, and of the Kreistag for the previous five years. Those terms therefore ran through his years as a law student and junior lawyer and ended as the Landtag mandate began.

A Landtag biography archived on 16 April 2017 records a later municipal seat. From 2014 he was a member of the municipal council (Gemeinderat) of Illingen, also in Landkreis Neunkirchen, and the profile’s list of public offices still included that council. The biography does not state when the Illingen seat ended. By 2025 he was living in Illingen.

Separate from the council seats were local offices in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The 2017 Landtag profile listed him, from 2005, as chairman of the CDU Stadtverband Ottweiler and, from 2012, as deputy chairman of the CDU Kreisverband Neunkirchen. In the 2009 interview he likewise described himself as chairman of the CDU in the city of Ottweiler. The district chairmanship is a party post, not a seat on the Kreistag. On 3 November 2018 a district party congress in the sports hall at Münchwies elected him Kreisvorsitzender with 100 of 104 votes, succeeding Tobias Hans, who had led the association for six years. The Saarbrücker Zeitung reported his re-election at a further congress in September 2021 at the Big Eppel in Eppelborn. The Kreisverband’s legal notice has continued to name him, by then a member of the Bundestag, as its chairman. His later offices in the state party, including the secretary-generalship, belong to the CDU’s Land leadership rather than to these local posts.

Junge Union

The Junge Union Deutschlands (JU) is the youth organization of the CDU and the Bavarian Christian Social Union. It describes itself as programmatically, organizationally and financially independent of the two parties. Membership runs from the age of 14 to 35 and does not require joining either party; members are enrolled in a Kreisverband, and the association is divided into state, regional and local branches. The Schüler Union operates inside it as a working group.

Theis chaired the Junge Union in the Neunkirchen district from 1998 to 2005 and was Landesvorsitzender of the Junge Union Saar from 2005 to 2010. Saarländischer Rundfunk’s 2025 profile records the same state chairmanship. In September 2009 he told the Saarbrücker Zeitung that he was then still Landesvorsitzender of the Junge Union, chairman of the Ottweiler CDU and a member of the CDU state executive. The Landtag biography also lists him as a member of the federal Junge Union’s international commission from 2004 to 2012, and as deputy chairman of that commission from 2007. Before the district JU post, the same biography records him as Landesvorsitzender of the Schüler Union Saar from 1995 to 1999.

Landtag of Saarland

Terms from 2009 to 2017

Roland Theis was a member of the Landtag of Saarland from 2009 to 2017. The CDU group's profile dated his entry to 30 August 2009, the day of that year's state election. A Landtag profile archived in April 2017 listed the mandate he then held as one taken on the statewide list (Landesliste), with him deputy chairman of the CDU group from 2012 to 2015 and its parliamentary managing director from November 2015.

In the CDU group formed for the 2012 legislative period, the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported Klaus Meiser as chairman of the 19-member caucus, with Günter Becker, Gisela Rink and Theis—then also the party's secretary-general—as deputies and Tobias Hans as parliamentary managing director, as Minister-President Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and the SPD sealed a grand coalition. On 24 November 2015, two days after Hans lost the Landrat election in Neunkirchen district, the group made him chairman and Theis parliamentary managing director, as the newspaper and the Landtag profile both record. The Bundestag biography instead dates that office to 2013–2017.

As of April 2015 the group site listed him on the committees for justice, constitutional and legal questions and electoral scrutiny; economic affairs, labour, energy, transport and mine safety; and Europe and the Interregional Parliamentary Council. The Landtag profile also listed membership of the media council of the Landesmedienanstalt Saarland. His parallel office as secretary-general of the CDU Saar is covered with his party leadership.

At the 26 March 2017 election the CDU won 40.7 percent and 24 seats. On 16 May 2017 Saarländischer Rundfunk reported that Volker Oberhausen, 58, a business graduate from Homburg-Einöd and long-time chair of the CDU Saar's Protestant working group, would succeed him: Theis was to become state secretary for justice and Europe, and a state secretary, unlike a minister, could not remain a deputy. The group had yet to name a new parliamentary managing director; Theis was to keep the secretary-generalship at least until the federal election. His years as state secretary are covered separately.

Opposition years, 2022–2025

Theis returned at the election of 27 March 2022 and, according to Saarländischer Rundfunk, sat again from April 2022. The official result and the list of those elected gave the SPD 43.5 percent and 29 of 51 seats, the CDU 28.5 percent and 19 seats (down 12.2 points) and the Alternative for Germany three seats, an absolute SPD majority that left the CDU group in opposition. He was elected in constituency 3, Neunkirchen, third on the CDU constituency list behind Stephan Toscani and Hermann-Josef Scharf, and the official roll lists him in that order among the CDU members returned there. Until he left, Saarländischer Rundfunk described him as deputy chairman of the CDU group and its spokesman on European Union policy; the Bundestag biography likewise lists the deputy chairmanship for 2022–2025.

On 4 December 2024, in debate on two AfD motions about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Theis called the three AfD members "Vaterlandsverräter" ("traitors to the fatherland") and "Söldner des Kreml" ("mercenaries of the Kremlin"). One motion sought to add "Das Saarland ist dem Frieden verpflichtet" ("The Saarland is committed to peace") to the state constitution; the other asked the government to press for an end to weapons deliveries into the crisis region and for negotiations between the warring parties. AfD chairman Josef Dörr said only war profiteers and the arms lobby would win, that Russia would not lose, and that each passing day produced more losers; Christoph Schaufert said the people of Ukraine also wanted the fighting to end.

Theis said the AfD was spreading false Russian narratives in an "Informationskrieg", including the claim that the war existed only because the West was helping Ukraine—"Wer in einem Informationskrieg diese Narrative verbreitet, der macht sich zum Söldner des Kreml"—and called it a "völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskrieg Putins", an illegal war of aggression by Vladimir Putin. He said the war was directed "gegen unser Volk" and that anyone who sided with the aggressor was "kein Patriot, der ist kein Pazifist, der ist ein Vaterlandsverräter wie Sie"; of a ceasefire, "Sie sagen Frieden, Sie meinen Unterwerfung. Wir wählen die Freiheit" ("You say peace, you mean submission. We choose freedom"). SPD deputy Nadia Schindelhauer called the war an attack on a sovereign state and on freedom, democracy and self-determination, and said Ukraine's defence included arms deliveries. Presiding officer Christina Baltes (SPD) replied, "Herr Theis, solche Worte sind hier wirklich nicht üblich" ("Mr Theis, such words are really not usual here"). The Saarbrücker Zeitung wrote that the epithet had been used in the Landtag before but that Baltes reacted differently than in a comparable earlier case, and named the three AfD members as Dörr, Schaufert and Carsten Becker.

On 23 February 2025 Theis won the Bundestag direct mandate in St. Wendel and gave up the Landtag seat; Saarländischer Rundfunk and the Saarbrücker Zeitung named Sebastian Schorr, CDU group leader on the St. Wendel council and head of the interior ministry's cabinet and parliamentary unit, as his successor. Abgeordnetenwatch records that Theis left the Landtag on 27 March 2025 and that Schorr took the seat; the Bundestag dates his membership there from 25 March 2025.

Leadership in the CDU Saar

Secretary-general

Theis became secretary-general of the Saarland Christian Democratic Union in 2010, while Peter Müller was still state chair. By mid-January the Saarbrücker Zeitung was already introducing him as the new secretary-general. Delegates formally elected him at the state congress in Schmelz on 13 November 2010 with 98.6 percent, more than the 94.08 percent with which Müller was confirmed as chair the same day.

He then served under Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who succeeded Müller on 28 May 2011 in Dillingen with 95.6 percent (326 votes in favor, 10 against and five abstentions). At the congress in Theley on 17 November 2012 he was not on the ballot; the Saarbrücker Zeitung noted that his term ran until 2014. He stayed in the office after that. When he became state secretary for justice and Europe in May 2017, the party said he would keep the secretary-generalship through the federal campaign, though, as the CDU’s parliamentary deputy leader Peter Strobel put it, “not in the front row.” On 4 November 2017 the 67th state congress in Saarbrücken elected the Bundestag member Markus Uhl as his successor with 85.3 percent. Kramp-Karrenbauer was confirmed the same day with about 98.4 percent (303 in favor, five against, one abstention).

On 3 November 2018 the CDU in the Neunkirchen district elected him Kreisvorsitzender. In the Münchwies sports hall he received 100 of 104 votes, with no opponent, succeeding Tobias Hans, who had led the district association for six years.

European Parliament candidacies

Germany fills its seats in the European Parliament by proportional representation. A party may file one list in each Land or a single nationwide list; lists that the same party files in several Länder are linked, and its seats are then divided among those lists by the Sainte-Laguë method. The CDU uses Land lists. The Christian Social Union stands only in Bavaria. A Saarland CDU lead candidate therefore needs the state list to win at least one of the seats given to the CDU nationwide, not merely a strong result inside the state.

A delegates’ meeting in Saarbrücken on the evening of 10 February 2019 chose Theis, then state secretary for justice and Europe, with 278 of 281 votes (98.9 percent), after a unanimous nomination by the state executive in Tholey. Dagmar Heib and Hanno Thewes followed him on the list. On 26 May the CDU won 161,897 votes in Saarland, 32.5 percent—2.5 points below 2014, but above its national 22.6 percent (8,438,975 votes and 23 seats). The Federal Returning Officer then applied a divisor of 400,000 to the CDU’s Land lists. Saarland’s quotient, about 0.40, rounded to zero. Theis said nationwide turnout had left the Saar list short on vote weight. For the first time, no candidate from Saarland was elected. The state CDU had been without a member since Doris Pack, an MEP from 1989 to 2014, left the parliament.

On the evening of 19 January 2024, in Dillingen, delegates again placed Theis first, with 259 of 264 votes (98.1 percent). On 9 June the CDU took 147,522 votes in Saarland, 29.3 percent, down 3.2 points, and again won 23 seats nationally, this time with 23.7 percent. The divisor was again 400,000, and the Saarland list again received no seat. The Saarländischer Rundfunk reported that Theis, unsuccessful in 2019 as well, was among the Saarland candidates left without a mandate.

The 2022 party leadership

After the CDU’s defeat in the 2022 Saarland state election on 27 March 2022, parts of the party wanted Theis, then 42 and the outgoing justice state secretary, as the next state chair. He refused, giving a personal reason, while attention turned to Landtag president Stephan Toscani. The Saarbrücker Zeitung also reported his warning of an “Anfang vom Ende” of the party if the renewal went wrong. He later told the Saarländischer Rundfunk that he would not impose on his family and his two young children the strain of a possible minister-president’s office, and that he had accepted only a deputy post.

On 28 May 2022 the congress in Eppelborn elected Toscani chair. A Landtag member who was there wrote the next day that Theis, still Neunkirchen district chair, became a deputy chair, with Daniela Schlegel-Friedrich, Nadine Schön, Uwe Conradt and Silke Maringer, and that Frank Wagner was elected secretary-general. The Saarländischer Rundfunk described Toscani’s job as setting the party’s course again after it had lost the state government.

State secretary for justice and Europe

Appointment and portfolios

On 17 May 2017 the Landtag of Saarland re-elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer of the Christian Democratic Union minister-president of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party, and the cabinet appointed its state secretaries the same day. Roland Theis became state secretary in the Ministry of Justice and, in the Ministry of Finance and Europe, state secretary for European affairs. Ulli Meyer held the finance brief in that ministry; Stephan Toscani was minister of both departments. Theis was also the Land’s plenipotentiary for European affairs. His Bundestag biography, based on his own account, dates the offices to 2017–2022. He stayed when Tobias Hans succeeded Kramp-Karrenbauer on 1 March 2018.

Public justice business was mostly administrative. On 31 August 2020 Theis set out about €20 million for Ottweiler prison and its Saarlouis section, covering the perimeter fence and cameras, a rebuilt control centre, alarms, digital radio, fire protection and renovation. He called it a commitment to Ottweiler as a justice town and to its 185 jobs. With Saarland University, the ministry also joined “Digitale Präsenz bei Gericht”, a three-year study of video hearings backed by about €700,000 from the federal justice ministry. Theis said it should show which further statutory rules digital procedure still needed.

European and cross-border policy

The sharpest test of the European brief came with the COVID-19 pandemic. On 16 March 2020 Germany sharply limited crossings into France, Luxembourg and several other neighbours. Travel without a compelling reason stopped, and Saarland, bordering both countries, was affected twice. Of 35 crossings toward France, 29 were soon closed, leaving six open, among them the Goldene Bremm. Theis later called the closures a shock.

In a February 2021 interview he also said the positive had outweighed the negative, because cross-border cooperation had saved lives. Saarland hospitals took 28 seriously ill patients from Lorraine that spring, and more in November. In May 2020 Grand Est and the French state made him co-chair, with Jean-Luc Bohl and the sub-prefect of Thionville, of a “Business Act Grand Est” group on cross-border recovery in education, health, research, industry and tourism.

The France Strategy predated him. Presented in 2014, it aimed to make French a second everyday language in the Land by 2043. In an interview published on 12 November 2018 Theis called the idea “more languages, more opportunities”. He cited a study in which 62 percent backed it, said France had been Saarland’s largest export market since 2017, with more than 150 French firms present and about 18,000 inward commuters a day, and put bilingual nurseries at about 200, or 40 percent. He also said the European Commission had treated the strategy as a good-practice case of multilingualism in border regions.

At a Sprachenrat Saar forum on 5 December 2018, the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported a shared view that implementation had stalled. Norbert Gutenberg, the council’s chair, said there was neither a real plan nor a budget, and that the timetable was too long and not ambitious enough. Theis announced a “new agenda with a to-do paper”: bilingual tourist signs and ministry websites, and an image campaign treating the strategy as a locational advantage. He said every Saarlander should know as much French as his or her needs required. The ministry said 220 of 480 nurseries were bilingual, often with a single bilingual member of staff, and that about a third of children started French in year one and all of them in year three. Speakers also described parental resistance to a policy meant to add to English, not replace it.

A joint review by the Saarland Court of Audit and its counterpart in Grand Est, dated 15 January 2025, found the 2043 goal had never been defined so that it could be checked: no share of the population, no language level, and no split between schools and other measures. Pupil numbers in French had not risen since the strategy began. About 52 percent of nurseries were bilingual, but French from year one still reached only about 25 percent of primary pupils. The auditors said they could not forecast whether the target would be met. The review also covered years after he had left office.

Saarland held the presidency of the Greater Region executives’ summit in 2019–2020. The grouping brings together Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Grand Est, Luxembourg and Belgian partners. At the handover on 20 January 2021 Theis said coordination had restored commuting quickly, that health ministers had sketched a pandemic plan, and that continuing the Task Force Grenzgänger at the Saarland Chamber of Labour was indispensable for more than 200,000 cross-border workers. He told L’Essentiel the priority was to avoid another closure. On 20 January 2022 he joined an intermediate summit by videoconference under the French presidency, on industry, energy, floods and drought, food, culture and health.

Departure in 2022

The offices ended after the 2022 state election. The SPD had an absolute majority, so no coalition talks were required, and the new Landtag was to elect Anke Rehlinger minister-president on 25 April, 29 days after the vote. She was elected that day. On 26 April the Landtag consented to her ministers and they were sworn in. Theis’s term as state secretary and plenipotentiary ended with that handover.

Election to the Bundestag

The St. Wendel constituency

Constituency 298, St. Wendel, is a Bundestag seat in Saarland. For the 2025 federal election the federal returning officer assigned it the whole of Landkreis St. Wendel; the municipalities of Eppelborn, Illingen, Merchweiler, Ottweiler and Schiffweiler in Landkreis Neunkirchen; Lebach and Schmelz in Landkreis Saarlouis; and Heusweiler in the Regionalverband Saarbrücken. The other municipalities of those areas were placed in constituencies 296, 297 or 299.

At the 2021 election the largest first-vote share in the constituency went to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), on 35.1 percent, ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 32.1 percent. Der Spiegel named the candidates as Christian Petry of the SPD, already a member of the Bundestag elected in 2017, and Nadine Schön of the CDU, who lost the constituency seat she had won in 2017.

Schön did not stand in 2025. A CDU Saar delegate meeting on 21 December 2024 named Roland Theis, from Illingen, as the constituency candidate in her place and put him first on the state list.

Each voter has two votes. The first is for a person in the constituency. From 2025, under the electoral law as amended in 2023, a party candidate gains that constituency seat only with the most first votes and only if the seat is covered by the party’s second votes in the Land, the rule known as Zweitstimmendeckung. The second vote is for a party’s closed state list and determines how many Bundestag seats the party receives. The returning officer states that the automatic direct mandate used through the 2021 election no longer exists.

The 2025 result

The election was held on 23 February 2025. In the final result for constituency 298, Theis received 47,875 first votes, 33.9 percent, 1.8 percentage points above the CDU share in 2021. Petry was again runner-up, with 40,408 votes and 28.6 percent, down 6.5 points. The Alternative for Germany received 29,038 first votes, 20.5 percent, up 11.5 points. Of 168,073 eligible voters, 143,181 cast a ballot, a turnout of 85.2 percent and 4.4 points higher than in 2021.

Second votes in the constituency were divided 30.3 percent for the CDU (42,957 votes, up 3.8 points), 22.2 percent for the SPD (31,468, down 15.2 points) and 20.7 percent for the AfD (29,391, up 11.3 points).

The returning officer’s alphabetical list of those elected records Theis as elected in constituency 298, at 33.9 percent, and notes that he had also been a candidate in first place on the Saarland CDU list. The CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag describes the mandate as a direct election for constituency 298 and dates his membership from 25 March 2025, the start of the 21st electoral period. The Bundestag biography likewise lists a constituency mandate for Wahlkreis 298, St. Wendel, Saarland.

From Landtag to Bundestag

The list placing preceded the poll. On the evening of 18 December 2024 the CDU Saar said its executive had unanimously nominated Theis, then a deputy state chair and a member of the Landtag of Saarland, as the party’s lead candidate, with the state delegate assembly to fix the list the following Saturday. On 21 December, in the Saarbrücken Congresshalle, he received 281 of 288 valid votes, 97.6 percent. Markus Uhl, the candidate in Homburg, was placed second.

Saarländischer Rundfunk reported that Theis intended to use a Bundestag seat to argue for less bureaucracy and for more security and prosperity in Saarland. In the talks on the CDU basic programme the year before, he had pressed for wording that effective protection of the external border should make controls on internal European borders unnecessary. In the 2025 campaign he nevertheless supported Friedrich Merz’s call for lasting border controls in Germany.

After the constituency result, the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported that Theis would give up his Landtag seat and that Sebastian Schorr would succeed him. Schorr, of the CDU in St. Wendel, chaired the party group on the town council and headed the cabinet and parliament unit in the state interior ministry.

Work in the Bundestag

Committees and the Saarland group

Theis has been a member of the Bundestag since 25 March 2025, in its 21st electoral term, sitting with the CDU/CSU on a direct mandate for constituency 298, St. Wendel, in Saarland. The parliament lists him as a full member of the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union and as the CDU/CSU Obmann, the group’s coordinator, in that committee. At its constitutive sitting on 21 May 2025, conducted by Vice-President Omid Nouripour, he was one of eleven CDU/CSU members of the 34-member body, whose chair is Anton Hofreiter of Alliance 90/The Greens. He is also a full member, and Obmann, of the Subcommittee on International Order, the United Nations and International Organisations, and a full member of the Defence Committee. He is a deputy member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and of the Petitions Committee.

In the parliamentary group the CDU/CSU lists him as deputy chair of its working group on European Union affairs and as a member of its defence working group. On 25 March 2025 the Saarland Landesgruppe, the state’s CDU members in the joint group, elected him chair, succeeding Nadine Schön, who had held the post from 2017 to 2025.

Franco-German and security roles

The Bundestag lists Theis as an ordinary member and a board member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, as chair of the Deutsch-Französische Parlamentariergruppe (the German-French parliamentary friendship group), and as a deputy member of the German delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

On 27 May 2025 Saarländischer Rundfunk reported a letter from Theis and five other parliamentarians from Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and Alsace, including members of the parliament of France, to Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) and his French counterpart, Bruno Retailleau. It proposed marked lanes for daily commuters, joint German-French checks in the hinterland at peak hours, and joint refusals of entry, framed as a shared policy rather than a national closing of the border, and meant for a resolution when the Assembly met in Paris and the cross-border committee in Mainz.

Debates and political positions

On 24 September 2025, in the first reading of the 2026 budget (Drucksache 21/600), Theis gave what he called his first speech, on Einzelplan 14 for the Defence Ministry. He said restoring defence capability had to be European in aim and method, with a stronger European pillar of NATO, and that security against aggression by Russia rested on military capability and on NATO and the European Union. Support for Ukraine, he said, followed from solidarity with an attacked democracy, from German interest, and from respect for people who for three and a half years had been defending their country. To Stephan Brandner (AfD), who pressed him on Nord Stream, he said the AfD had not spoken of alliance defence and was diverting attention from “friends in the Kremlin”, and that “Germany First” was a separate path for a party closer to Moscow and Beijing than to Brussels. The CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens applauded; Andreas Paul (AfD) called the speech an impertinence, and Nouripour congratulated Theis on the maiden speech.

On 24 September 2026, in the debate on priorities for the European Commission’s 2027 work programme, Theis said more states were seeking partnership with the Union, that more than 60 percent of people in the United Kingdom thought Brexit a mistake, and that a widening set of trade and security partners was an “axis of reason” opposed by the AfD, the Kremlin and China. AfD members interrupted that others drew near only because Germany paid, and Peter Boehringer said “Mister Brexit” would therefore be the next prime minister.

Later that day, on the AfD motion against EU membership and military assistance guarantees for Ukraine (Drucksache 21/8124), moved by Markus Frohnmaier and others, Theis called the text a disgrace for its perfidy. Air defence, he said, protected beds and hospitals rather than “air”, and Ukraine was defending the European peace order as well as itself. As the president called time, he added that Ukrainians had freely chosen Europe and that Germany would go with them. The CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens applauded, while Götz Frömming (AfD) said Theis wanted to press Germany into a war that was “not our war” and Frohnmaier said the chamber was not the Ukrainian Rada.

During Ronald Gläser’s speech in that debate — Gläser said the Union was preparing German entry into the war — the record has Theis shouting “Sie sind ein Hetzer! Sie sind ein Hetzer und ein Vaterlandsverräter noch dazu!” (“You are an agitator and, on top of that, a traitor to the fatherland!”). On 8 October 2026 Nouripour returned to the sitting, said the words had been addressed to Frohnmaier, and issued a retrospective Ordnungsruf for that personalised disparagement; Diana Zimmer (AfD) interjected “Sehr gut!”

On 18 April 2026 Deutschlandfunk reported that Theis had welcomed a Paris meeting the day before on a possible mission to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Europe, he said, should leave the sidelines and define its role in what the station called the Iran war, acting independently of the United States; opening the strait was in the worldwide interest and central to the global economy. The report added that Britain and France wanted, with Germany and Italy, to lead a mission that was to be strictly peaceful and defensive and to support mine clearance.

Civic commitments and writing

Associations and victim support

The Bundestag biography of Roland Theis, which the parliament states rests on the member’s own information, lists membership of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, a Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft, the Partnerschaftsverein Illingen-Civray, the Union des Français de Sarre, the Vereinigung der Jäger des Saarlandes since 2016, and the Reservistenverband. The Verband der Reservisten der Deutschen Bundeswehr says it represents Bundeswehr reservists and has more than 115,000 members.

His published notice of outside activities, separate from the free-text biography, records an unpaid co-chairmanship of the advisory board of the Deutsch-Französisches Hochschulinstitut (DFHI-ISFATES) in Metz. The institute, a cooperation of the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft des Saarlandes and the University of Lorraine founded in 1978 under a state treaty, lists him as vice-president of the Conseil de l’ISFATES. A 2024 council list names him as Saarland’s representative and, then, a Landtag deputy for the district of Neunkirchen.

The same notice lists an unpaid state chairmanship of Weißer Ring e.V., Landesverband Saarland. On 8 February 2023 the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported that Theis, then 42, a former state secretary for justice and deputy floor leader of the CDU in the Landtag, had been elected to the office. The paper put the Saarland branch at about 760 members, 68 of them specially trained volunteers who assist victims of crime. A February 2025 profile by Saarländischer Rundfunk also described the chairmanship as voluntary, and the branch website has shown him opening a state members’ meeting.

Weißer Ring was founded in Mainz on 24 September 1976 as a charitable association to support victims of crime and to work on crime prevention. It reports more than 40,000 members and about 3,000 volunteer helpers in more than 400 local offices, and says it takes no public subsidies.

The SR profile named angling, hunting and hiking among his pastimes and noted that he posted photographs of walks through the Saarland.

Publications

In November 2025 Edition Schaumberg published Theis’s first novel, Verfluchtes Schweigen, subtitled a culinary crime story set in south-western France (ISBN 978-3-910306-26-4), as a paperback of about 240 pages. In the publisher’s account, a hunter who is a retired policeman is found dead in the valley of the Célé, and Commissaire Émile Goudeau’s inquiry is bound up with the Second World War, the Waffen-SS and the malgré-nous.

The Saarbrücker Zeitung reported on 13 November 2025, just before the book appeared, that Theis had written crime fiction rather than a book about politics. He called the novel, among other things, “a declaration of love to the south-west of France”, and said that, as the son of a woman from Alsace, the postwar fate of the malgré-nous had long occupied him. The article described them as about 130,000 people from Lorraine and Alsace who were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, afterwards accused in France of collaboration, and formally recognised as victims rather than traitors only in 2010. Theis said writing the book had felt like a holiday in his head, but that the manuscript stayed in a drawer through the European and then the Bundestag campaigns until Edition Schaumberg accepted it.

In a December 2025 review, Oliver Keymis, a former vice-president of the North Rhine-Westphalia Landtag, placed the story in Figeac, in the Lot, and treated it as readable regional crime fiction—touching the May 1944 deportations from Figeac—rather than as high literature.