# Sebastian Maack

# Sebastian Maack

Sebastian Maack (born 21 June 1969 in Berlin) is a German politician of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) and a member of the Bundestag. The 21st Bundestag constituted itself on 25 March 2025, after the federal election of 23 February 2025. Maack holds his seat through the AfD state list in Berlin, and he stood as the party's constituency candidate in Berlin-Reinickendorf (Wahlkreis 76).

In the official final result for that constituency, the AfD received 23,866 first votes (18.0 percent). Marvin Schulz of the Christian Democratic Union won the direct mandate with 40,867 votes (30.9 percent), and Julian Gregor Holter of the Social Democratic Party was second with 28,956 votes (21.9 percent). The *Tagesspiegel* identified Maack as the AfD direct candidate and reported that, on the preliminary count, his 18 percent left him third and that he would enter parliament via the state list. Abgeordnetenwatch records him in fourth place on the Berlin list.

Maack completed the Abitur at a Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf (1982–1989) and studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Berlin from 1989 to 1995, graduating as a Diplom-Ingenieur. From 1995 to 2016 he worked on commercial information-technology projects concerned with digitisation and process optimisation, partly in employment and partly freelance, and in 1996 he served ten months of basic military service. He was a member of the [Christian Democratic Union of Germany](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany), and of its pupil and youth organisations, from 1982 until 2014, and he joined the AfD in February 2014. After the 2016 Berlin election the *Tagesspiegel* described the then 47-year-old IT consultant as the new AfD borough councillor for citizen services and public order in Reinickendorf, with a first official working day in early December 2016. He remained in that borough office until 2021.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member, and the AfD group's spokesperson (*Obmann*), of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and a full member of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation. Since 2018 he has chaired the AfD's federal specialist committee on family and demography and has sat on the party's federal programme commission; since 2023 he has been treasurer of the Berlin AfD. The Bundestag's biography, which it states is based on members' own information, records that he is married and has three children. The same page's statutory disclosure lists gross income from a large number of residential tenancies, concentrated in Ludwigsfelde, Rüdersdorf and Bischofswerda, together with a letting in Schruns/Tschagguns in Austria.

## Early life and education

### Childhood and schooling

Sebastian Maack was born on 21 June 1969. The biography published by the Bundestag gives that date and states that members' biographical entries rest on their own disclosures; it does not name a place of birth. A *Tagesspiegel* report of 7 November 2016, on the AfD's new district councillors in Berlin, described him as 47, which fits a birth date in June 1969.

From 1982 to 1989 he attended a Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and completed the Abitur. The AfD parliamentary group's profile repeats those years and that qualification. Neither account names the school or records earlier schooling, subjects or results.

### Studies at the Technical University of Berlin

He then studied industrial engineering (*Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen*) at the Technical University of Berlin from 1989 to 1995 and graduated as a *Diplom-Ingenieur*. The Bundestag lists his occupation in the form *Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur*. The university's Faculty of Economics and Management describes the programme as the origin of the faculty and states that the then Technische Hochschule Berlin introduced it in 1926/27 as the first course of its kind in Germany. His published biographies do not record a technical concentration or a thesis topic.

### Military service

In 1996 Maack performed ten months of basic military service (*Grundwehrdienst*) in the Bundeswehr. He turned 27 on 21 June of that year. The same biography dates his work on commercial information-technology projects from 1995 to 2016, so the months in uniform fall at the start of that employment rather than before his degree. No official or party profile names a branch, unit or garrison.

Conscription in Germany had not yet been suspended. From 1 January 1996 the *Wehrrechtsänderungsgesetz* shortened basic service from twelve months to ten, followed by two months of standby during which conscripts could be recalled. Berlin was treated differently from the rest of the old Federal Republic until unification. Allied reserved rights had kept some federal statutes from applying fully in West Berlin; section 1 of the Sixth Transitional Act provided that such law would apply there without restriction once the act entered into force. On 20 September 1990 the federal government told the Bundestag that the conscription act was to be extended to Berlin (West) without a transitional period as soon as those rights were lifted. In an answer of April 1996, transmitted by the Defence Ministry, the federal government stated that unification in 1990 had extended conscription to men living in Berlin, and reported that 5,358 Berliners born in 1969 had already been called up for basic service, while 1,149 of that cohort remained liable to call-up after the age of 25. Maack's disclosures do not say whether his own service was one of those Berlin call-ups. They do place his secondary schooling and his degree course in the city, and they date the service to the year in which that cohort was still being drafted.

## Professional career

### Information-technology work

The Bundestag lists Sebastian Maack's occupation as Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur, the German graduate qualification in industrial engineering. In the member biography it publishes, which it states is based on the members' own information, he reports studying Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen at the Technical University of Berlin from 1989 to 1995 and graduating as a Diplom-Ingenieur. The same account places 1995 to 2016 in commercial information-technology projects on digitisation and process optimisation, done partly as an employee and partly freelance, and records ten months of basic military service in 1996 within that span. The entry names no employers, clients or systems.

A 2021 *Der Tagesspiegel* profile of leading candidates for the Reinickendorf district assembly is more specific about roles and does not match those dates. It described him as having previously been a development lead in various software houses. After an Abitur in 1988, the profile said, he studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, received his diploma in 1994, worked that year as a software developer in Nuremberg, then performed basic military service, and afterwards held various jobs in information technology. It names neither the software houses nor the Nuremberg employer. The later parliamentary biography instead dates the diploma to the end of his studies in 1995 and the military service to 1996.

### Transition out of private employment

He left commercial IT work to take a district post. After the September 2016 election in Berlin, *Der Tagesspiegel* profiled the new district councillors of the Alternative for Germany and described Maack, then 47, as an IT consultant assigned citizen services and public order in Reinickendorf who still had to finish a professional project before he could start. His first official day was set for the beginning of December 2016, and an office in the Teichstraße was still being prepared.

Before that start he told the newspaper that he regarded the citizen-office portfolio as positive and that process optimisation was one of his strengths. He wanted more efficiency without new posts, and pointed to self-service terminals already used in the citizen offices of Marzahn-Hellersdorf for photographs and fingerprints as a way to take routine work off staff and save time. He said he felt humility about telling someone who had done the job for thirty years how it might be done better, and that employees had so far received him warmly.

The Bundestag biography records the council term that followed as running from 2016 to 2021. The next occupation it lists, and the one given in his statutory disclosure as his professional activity immediately before his own membership of parliament, is not a further commercial IT post. It is work in Berlin from 2023 to 2025 as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (scientific staff member) for Gerrit Huy, an AfD member of the Bundestag elected on the Bavarian state list.

## Party membership and local offices

### Christian Democratic Union

Sebastian Maack's biography on the Bundestag website, compiled from members' own statements, says that from 1982 to 2014 he belonged to the Schüler Union, the Junge Union and the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). The Schüler Union describes itself as a voice for school pupils and apprentices who want to take part in politics on Christian-democratic lines. The short Bundestag entry lists no CDU party office beyond that membership.

Profiles published when he was about to enter borough office treated the CDU years as roughly three decades. In September 2016 the *Tagesspiegel* described the then 47-year-old IT consultant as having been a CDU member for more than 30 years before he joined the AfD. The *Berliner Abendblatt* reported that he put the break down to anger at what he saw as the CDU's increasing "social democratisation" (*Sozialdemokratisierung*).

### Joining the AfD in Reinickendorf

The Bundestag biography dates his membership of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from February 2014 and lists him as *Bezirkssprecher* — district spokesperson — of the party in Reinickendorf from 2015 to 2016. An *Abendblatt* profile of October 2016 likewise placed the change of party about two years earlier.

After the Berlin elections of 18 September 2016 the Reinickendorf AfD faction, chaired by Rolf Wiedenhaupt, settled on Maack as its candidate for the borough executive. He told the *Tagesspiegel* that the AfD wanted a "constructive dialogue" and that he would follow that line alongside three CDU members and one Social Democrat. The *Abendblatt* reported that the district party board nominated the freelance IT consultant unanimously, and that Wiedenhaupt, initially also discussed for the post, did not stand after critical press coverage.

### District assembly and earlier candidacies

In the same 2016 elections Maack stood for the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin in constituency Reinickendorf 6. The AfD received 2,299 first votes there, 10.0 percent, and the CDU took the seat with 39.7 percent. The *Abendblatt* identified him as the AfD candidate in that constituency and reported his share as 10 percent. In the parallel election to Reinickendorf's *Bezirksverordnetenversammlung* (BVV), the 55-member borough assembly, the AfD won 14.4 percent, eight seats and one of the five seats in the *Bezirksamt*, the borough executive.

At the constitutive sitting on 27 October 2016 the assembly elected him to that executive on the first ballot, with 27 of 55 votes. The CDU and the SPD had formed a *Zählgemeinschaft*, a voting alliance for the executive election; the new *Bezirksamt* then comprised three CDU members, one Social Democrat and Maack for the AfD. He served as *Bezirksstadtrat* (borough councillor) until 2021.

The September 2021 elections ended the AfD's claim to a Reinickendorf executive seat. By 24 November 2021 Maack was sitting instead as a member of the AfD group in the BVV. Berlin repeated the 2021 borough elections on 12 February 2023. In Reinickendorf the AfD took 10,810 votes (9.9 percent, 4.5 points below 2016) and again six seats; the official list of those elected names Maack first among the six, ahead of Wiedenhaupt and four others. A *Tagesspiegel* Reinickendorf newsletter reported that the AfD's six seats were unchanged from the assembly elected in 2021, and that on the Monday evening after the repeat — 13 February 2023 — the group unanimously chose Maack as faction chair because Wiedenhaupt was entering the Abgeordnetenhaus.

While he still held that Reinickendorf seat, the AfD in Marzahn-Hellersdorf put him forward for a different borough. After 16 failed ballots for Michael Adam, the group proposed Maack, then 54 and described as a self-employed IT consultant from Hermsdorf, for the public-order portfolio and as deputy borough mayor, a post the party claimed as the second-largest group. At the June 2023 sitting the BVV rejected him by 33 votes to 11. The local paper *Die Hellersdorfer* reported that the CDU, SPD, Left, Greens and Animal Protection Party had decided to vote against him; SPD faction chair Günther Krug said his group had questioned Maack and would oppose him as a bloc, pressing him on whether he distinguished himself from figures on the AfD's hard right.

Maack gave up the Reinickendorf mandate with effect from 24 September 2023, and with it the faction chair. The local outlet *Kiezblatt* published his statement thanking the group for just under two years' work and presenting the step as part of a redistribution of offices inside the Reinickendorf AfD. Lawyer Michael Zischka, already on the faction executive, was named as the next chair, and Jens-Uwe Meißner as the member who would succeed Maack in the assembly.

## District councillor in Reinickendorf

### Appointment and portfolio

At the Berlin elections of 18 September 2016, held with the vote for the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin, the Alternative for Germany took 14.4 percent of the list vote in Reinickendorf — 17,696 votes — and eight of 55 assembly seats, enough for one of the five borough-executive seats. The assembly met on 27 October 2016 and elected the Bezirksamt the same day, after a counting alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) had divided the portfolios. Sebastian Maack, then a 47-year-old information-technology consultant, was confirmed on the first ballot by 27 of 55 members.

He had preferred family and youth, but received citizen services and public order — the citizens' offices and the public-order office — and said he meant to apply as much of the local AfD programme there as he could. CDU district chair Frank Steffel said the result had to be accepted and that the post was the party's due. Maack told *Der Tagesspiegel* that the brief suited process optimisation, that he wanted efficiency without new posts, and that he would approach long-serving staff with humility. His office on Teichstraße was still being fitted out; his first official day was early December 2016. The Bundestag biography, based on his own information, dates the office from 2016 to 2021.

### Citizen services and public order

In November 2016 he proposed self-service terminals, already used in Marzahn-Hellersdorf for photographs and fingerprints, to take routine work off the counter without extra staff.

On 9 November 2020 such machines opened at the citizens' offices in the town hall, Tegel and Reinickendorf-Ost. Customers could enter data and take a biometric photograph before an appointment for an identity card, passport, children's passport or electronic residence title; unused data were deleted after 48 hours, and the fee was charged only when the application was processed. Maack said the shorter counter time would help clear the backlog from the spring lockdown and reduce contact during the pandemic.

The *Berliner Morgenpost* reported in June 2017 that he had had more than 50 cars towed and was checking flea markets more strictly. In March 2019 he paired stricter enforcement of illegal dumping and litter with legal disposal and public information, and said every case would become a formal offence file, rather than a warning fine that records no personal details, so repeat offenders could be traced.

Tenant advice was handled in the same department. A 2018 agreement between the Senate department for urban development and housing and the twelve boroughs gave each borough 100,000 euros a year, and in Reinickendorf the SPD, Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) and [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) had also raised local funds to 15,000 euros for 2018 and 2019. Since 2016 the Berlin tenants' association had offered four hours a week at the town hall and two at the Fontanehaus in the Märkisches Viertel.

### Controversies during the term

In January 2019 the SPD, Greens and Left said he had let most of the combined 115,000 euros lapse instead of adding sites. Maack replied that only five of 40 appointments had been booked, so more locations were hard to justify; SPD group chair Marco Käber said the room was signed only as pension advice.

On 20 May 2019 the borough contracted the Heimatverein Reinickendorf. Chair Volker Rhinow signed with Maack, and the administration said the old service had been little used. A weekday hotline arranged about 60 hours a week of advice by tenancy lawyers in neighbourhood premises, from 08:00 to 20:00, while the tenants' association's slots stayed bookable on the same number. Maack said working people and families would no longer have to plan around fixed hours.

A joint resolution of the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke, reported by the *Tagesspiegel* on 20 November 2019, treated that contract as more serious than a delayed naturalisation ceremony. It said he had let 2018 state funds lapse, citing legal doubts and no local need, then hired a new club with no record in tenant advice, which AfD group chair Wiedenhaupt had presented at the party's 2017 Christmas gathering as activity in the "pre-political space" the state executive wanted local branches to occupy. The groups alleged changed tender rules, no approach to experienced providers, 119 euros an hour — about three times a usual rate — and almost 30,000 euros for a booking hotline, and said money the Abgeordnetenhaus had voted solely for advice might be promoting the club. Maack answered that the previous provider lacked capacity, that the Heimatverein was the only bidder, and that consultations had tripled. *Neues Deutschland* later wrote that he had co-founded the association. On the ceremony he said he welcomed the idea, but that it was not a mandatory duty and he had no spare capacity, so he was checking demand.

Housing certificates drew an earlier dispute. In March 2017 *taz* reported that Maack, like AfD councillor Thomas Braun in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, refused a Wohnberechtigungsschein to recognised refugees who had only a decision from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. His press notice rejected a Senate proposal to issue certificates once refugee status was granted, and said a valid residence permit was still required. During the wait for an electronic permit — about 14 weeks, an interior spokesman said, or a year or more, advisers said — they could not get a certificate or a subsidised flat, although the Senate chancellery had told boroughs in December 2016 that the Federal Office's letter sufficed. Maack wrote that the foreigners' authority first had to consider expulsion on serious public-security grounds; advisers quoted by *taz* called that nonsensical.

On 4 January 2021 the SPD group said that shortly before Christmas, in the hard lockdown, AfD members including candidates for that autumn's elections had gathered without permission on a borough car park in front of the town hall. Citing staff who watched, it said neither distance nor masks were kept, that Maack stood at [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) without a mask, and that employees called the police, who ended the gathering. Käber said a councillor supervising enforcement of the protection rules had to set an example, and called the conduct politically untenable. *Neues Deutschland* in September 2021 quoted him calling the behaviour unbearable and damaging to the borough, but dated the gathering to January rather than just before Christmas.

## Position within the AfD

### Federal policy roles

Sebastian Maack's Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on the member's own information, states that since 2018 he has chaired the federal specialist committee on family and demography (Bundesfachausschuss für Familie und Demografie) of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has sat on its federal programme commission. In November 2022 the AfD-aligned Desiderius Erasmus Foundation held a seminar, "Deutschland 2050", at Schloss Reinbek near Hamburg; the programme paired "conservative ethics" with "Demographie im 21. Jahrhundert – Familienpolitik versus Migration". *taz* reported that Maack, identified as an AfD district-level representative from Reinickendorf, was scheduled to speak, with the MEP Maximilian Krah and others, before about 60 guests. Christel Stöffler of the Hamburger Bündnis gegen Rechts told the paper that Maack and the Saxony-Anhalt politician Martin Reichardt had stood close to the dissolved "Flügel"; the column treated the seminar as spreading an extreme-right worldview.

### The former Flügel and the Kompetenz-Netzwerk

The Erfurt Resolution of March 2015, presented by Björn Höcke and André Poggenburg and published on the site of what became Der Flügel, called the AfD a "movement of our people" against "social experiments" such as gender mainstreaming and multiculturalism, and a "resistance movement against the further hollowing-out of the sovereignty and identity of Germany". Maack was not among the first signatories named there. A 2019 compilation of the partial Land-by-Land lists that the grouping posted in the spring of 2015, and later removed, includes him under Berlin as "Sebastian Maack, Beisitzer Bezirksvorstand"; the compiler noted that offices and views might since have changed.

On 12 March 2020 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the informal network around Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz as a right-wing extremist endeavour and called the two proven "right-wing extremists". Kalbitz called the decision politically motivated; [Alice Weidel](/people/alice-weidel) said nothing of substance had been shown. After the federal executive demanded dissolution by the end of April 2020, *Der Spiegel* reported, Höcke said the network would disband but that he, Kalbitz and other viable "Flügler" would continue their course; Weidel welcomed the step as one toward unity. In March 2022 the administrative court in Cologne held that indications of anti-constitutional endeavours were sufficient for the AfD to be treated as a suspected case. Although the Flügel had formally dissolved, the court said, its leading figures still had considerable influence, and an ethnic concept of the people—preserving the German people in its ethnic stock and excluding "foreigners"—had been central to the Flügel and the Young [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany), contrary to the Basic Law. The party prevailed only on the point that a public claim of 7,000 Flügel members lacked the required indications.

In the Berlin party, *taz* reported, Maack founded a platform called the Kompetenz-Netzwerk, which included state chair Kristin Brinker and, the paper wrote, above all figures from the völkisch current. The then treasurer, Frank-Christian Hansel, called it "the attempt to revive the dissolved Flügel in Berlin under a new label". Maack rejected that description. *taz* argued that the membership still pointed toward the Flügel, citing the deputy Thorsten Weiß, organiser of the 2019 Kyffhäuser meeting, who in October 2022 invited Höcke to Berlin for the launch of a platform called Idearium. A 2021 analysis by the Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin (apabiz) likewise wrote that Maack, placed first on the Reinickendorf list for the borough assembly, had clearly identified with the former Flügel.

### Berlin state executive

*taz* described an earlier "Berliner Kurs", associated with [Beatrix von Storch](/people/beatrix-von-storch), former state chair Georg Pazderski and the since-departed federal co-chair [Jörg Meuthen](/people/jorg-meuthen), as a failed attempt at self-moderation aimed at coalition capability and at sidelining the völkisch-nationalist wing. Brinker, state chair from 2021 and leader of the AfD group in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin, had risen with support from what the paper called völkisch networkers, Maack among them. By 2023 the two women were in a truce, and von Storch nominated Brinker.

At the state congress on 18 March 2023 in Spandau, 169 of 211 members present voted for Brinker, who had no opponent—80.9 percent of the valid votes. The AfD had taken 9.1 percent in the February 2023 repeat election to the Abgeordnetenhaus, up from 8.0 percent in 2021 but short of the 12 percent Brinker had set as a minimum. Maack was elected state treasurer in place of Hansel, who did not stand again after, *taz* reported, losing a contested federal candidacy to the camp around co-chair Tino Chrupalla that the former Flügel had backed. The Bundestag biography records the treasurership as held since 2023.

*taz* wrote that the new executive included more people from the völkisch current, or close to it, than any previous Berlin board. Jeannette Auricht, identified as an organiser (Obfrau) of the former Flügel in Berlin, remained a deputy spokesperson; Rolf Wiedenhaupt and Alexander Bertram, whom the paper treated as close to that current and whose names it said appeared on a leaked email list of it, became deputies alongside press spokesman [Ronald Gläser](/people/ronald-glaser), while Gunnar Lindemann stayed an assessor. *taz* wrote that this alliance remained Brinker's power base, while she was expected to keep a comparatively restrained public manner.

## Election to the Bundestag

### Earlier federal candidacy

Maack first stood for the Bundestag on 26 September 2021. At a Berlin state conference of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 12 June 2021, held in a tent in Biesdorf, the then district councillor challenged Beatrix von Storch for first place on the state list. She won the runoff with 110 of 219 delegate votes to his 71, a margin the *taz* described as only just clearing the quorum. [Gottfried Curio](/people/gottfried-curio) took second place and Georg Pazderski, leader of the Berlin AfD group, fourth. Abgeordnetenwatch records Maack’s 2021 candidacy only in the constituency, with no state-list place, and no mandate in the 20th Bundestag.

He was the AfD candidate in constituency 77, Berlin-Reinickendorf. In the original count Monika Grütters of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won with 34,233 first votes (27.2 percent), ahead of Torsten Einstmann of the Social Democratic Party on 32,445 (25.8 percent). The AfD took 12,249 first votes (9.8 percent), the share Abgeordnetenwatch attributes to Maack, and 9.8 percent of second votes (12,296). Turnout was 72.8 percent of 176,585 eligible voters.

The Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) ordered a partial repeat after irregularities in Berlin. On 11 February 2024 voting was rerun in 455 of 2,256 city polling districts, including 30.8 percent of those in Reinickendorf and the associated postal-vote districts. In the combined final result Grütters kept the seat with 32,972 first votes (29.5 percent) and Einstmann stayed second on 24.1 percent; the AfD rose to 12,583 first votes (11.3 percent) and 11.4 percent of second votes. Turnout in that combined result was 65.1 percent.

### 2025 campaign and results

On 27 December 2024 the federal president dissolved the 20th Bundestag and set the election for 23 February 2025. The previous October the Berlin AfD had met in Jüterbog, Brandenburg, having found no hall in the city, and placed von Storch first with about 87 percent, Curio second and Ronald Gläser third. Maack was fourth on the state list and again the direct candidate, now in the renumbered constituency 76. He finished third. Marvin Schulz (CDU) won with 40,867 first votes (30.9 percent), called by the *Tagesspiegel* the best CDU first-vote share in Berlin, and succeeded Grütters, who did not stand again. Julian Gregor Holter (SPD) was second with 28,956 (21.9 percent); Maack received 23,866 (18.0 percent).

Turnout was 77.8 percent of 172,428 eligible voters, 12.7 points above the constituency’s final 2021 figure. Klara Schedlich of Alliance 90/The Greens and Katina Schubert of Die Linke received 17,136 first votes (12.9 percent) and 15,584 (11.8 percent); the Free Democratic candidate took 4,737 (3.6 percent). Second votes went to the CDU on 35,169 (26.4 percent, unchanged), the AfD on 23,124 (17.4 percent, up 6.0 points), the SPD on 22,997 (17.3 percent, down 5.7), the Greens on 17,074 (12.8 percent), Die Linke on 15,729 (11.8 percent, up 7.3), the Bündnis [Sahra Wagenknecht](/people/sahra-wagenknecht) on 7,083 (5.3 percent) and the Free Democrats on 5,986 (4.5 percent). The AfD’s first-vote share rose 6.8 points.

Across Berlin the AfD won 296,990 second votes (15.2 percent, up 5.8 points) and four seats. Curio, also second on the list, took the direct mandate in Marzahn-Hellersdorf with 29.5 percent. The three list seats went to von Storch (place 1), Gläser (place 3) and Maack (place 4).

### Mandate in the 21st Bundestag

The 21st Bundestag convened on 25 March 2025. Maack’s membership for 2025–2029 comes from the Berlin state list, not the Reinickendorf direct mandate held by Schulz. The Bundestag biography lists him as elected on the Berlin list, with constituency 76 as his candidacy; Abgeordnetenwatch records list position 4 as the basis of the mandate.

## Parliamentary activity

### Committee posts

In the 21st Bundestag, Sebastian Maack is a full member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and of the Committee on Digital Affairs and State Modernisation. On the education and family committee he is also the Alternative for Germany group's Obmann, the member who coordinates that group's work there. The Bundestag biography does not list him as chair or deputy chair of either committee.

The digital-affairs committee named him rapporteur, with rapporteurs from the other groups, for the bill consenting under Article 91c of the Basic Law to the state treaty on a National Once-Only Technical System (NOOTS). On 8 October 2025 the committee recommended adopting the bill unchanged, with the votes of the Christian Democratic Union/CSU, the AfD, the Social Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens, against those of Die Linke.

The Federal Agency for Civic Education lists him as an ordinary member of its Kuratorium for the 21st electoral term. The board has 22 members of the Bundestag, seated by group strength, and reviews the agency's work for effectiveness and political balance. The agency's list of ordinary members, dated 11 September 2025, places him with the AfD members.

### Family, education and demography

On 15 May 2025, debating the government program, Maack called families the basis of society's future, cited fewer marriages and more children taken into care, and said the coalition agreement neither defined a family nor met what he called a demographic catastrophe. On 26 June 2025 he backed more time for all-day primary-school care where parents wanted it, but said paying only for outside care pressured parents who stayed at home, and restated a proposal for a care payment (Betreuungsgehalt) at the same rate either way.

On 9 October 2025, on an AfD family-policy motion, he rejected counting as a family any people who take responsibility for one another. A single mother and child still counted, he said, because the father remained and the group spoke of families parenting apart; abortion, he added, was a decision in which a child also dies. On 7 May 2026, on motions to reorient the Federal Institute for Population Research and for a family-friendly society, he said that if the fertility rate held, 100 people would leave 26 descendants in three generations, and that Germany ignored this more than other developed countries.

On 25 November 2025 he tied pension finance to births and said the family and education budget had nothing aimed at raising the birth rate. On 5 December 2025 he voted against the pension bill that would hold the pension level at 48 percent of average earnings until 2031 and fully equalize child-raising periods; it passed. On 5 July 2026 he wrote that the system could not continue as it was, but opposed tying the retirement age automatically to life expectancy, preferring an age set by the number of children and years of contributions. On 15 October 2026 he said the gap between children wanted and children born was widest among the self-employed. On 11 June 2026 he voted to reject a Greens motion for a broad BAföG reform with higher need-based rates; that recommendation passed. On 10 September 2026 he called the 2027 education and family estimates a record-spending plan that cut support for the poorest and, in his view, was unconstitutional.

### Digital policy and state modernisation

At the first reading of the NOOTS bill on 27 June 2025 he welcomed a national once-only system. Using child benefit, he contrasted a birth certificate and a further application with recording a name and account number in hospital so payment could follow. Linked registers, he said, would make identity theft more serious, so data security and limits on misuse by the state were required.

At the second reading on 16 October 2025 he said a treaty with the Länder alone left municipalities out. Amending Article 91c so the federation could set information systems down to local government would be cleaner, he argued, but the AfD would still vote for the treaty. The Bundestag passed the bill that day in second and third reading, with the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and AfD in favour and Die Linke against, in a vote that was not a roll-call.

On 17 October 2025, on modernising administration, he said plans failed when they digitised rules that were too complex, and, from his time applying Berlin-Reinickendorf's ban on misuse of housing, argued that repeal would save more than optimisation. On 25 November 2025 he told the digital ministry's budget debate that interacting statutes, European Union law and delay by other ministries could stall the agenda, while the AfD would still accompany cuts in bureaucracy. On 15 January 2026 he called the government's bureaucracy report well aimed but without an overarching strategy. On 19 December 2025 he voted against a bill whose main digital element was an electronic withdrawal function for online distance contracts; it passed. On 23 June 2026 he wrote that the state, not citizens, should economise, and described himself as the AfD group's member responsible for cutting bureaucracy.

## Outside income, writings and personal life

### Disclosed income and offices

Under section 45 of the Members of the Bundestag Act (*Abgeordnetengesetz*), a member of the Bundestag must notify the President, within three months of taking the seat and of any later change, of paid activities alongside the mandate and of functions on a board or other leading or advisory body of an association or similar organisation. If the income from such an activity exceeds €1,000 in a month or, where payment is not monthly, €3,000 in a calendar year, the gross amount has to be stated as well. The administration publishes the particulars that are subject to publication on the member's biography page after processing the notice.

Maack's published return consists of property lettings, itemised by tenant and place and labelled as annual gross amounts. The biography page dated 30 October 2026 prints separate lines numbered 1 to 72, with no line numbered 46, 71 entries in all. Sixteen are given as Ludwigsfelde and eight as Rüdersdorf, both in Brandenburg; fourteen as Bischofswerda, eleven as Sebnitz and twenty-one as the Erzgebirgskreis, in Saxony; and one as Schruns/Tschagguns in Austria, at €34,101.54, the largest single figure. Added together, those annual gross amounts come to €438,616.62.

On 23 June 2026 Der Tagesspiegel, drawing on an analysis by [Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel) and Parliamentwatch, reported that 232 members had declared about €10.6 million in side income since the start of the legislative period. It ranked Maack third, with €439,000 from 72 lettings, behind [Ophelia Nick](/people/ophelia-nick) of Alliance 90/The Greens, at about €2.7 million and largely from company profit distributions, and Alexander Engelhard of the [Christian Social Union in Bavaria](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria), at about €1.5 million from a family mill. Parliamentwatch reproduces the letting lines, recorded on 11 March 2026, and classifies them under spatial planning, building and housing. The Bundestag biography lists Maack on the committees for education, family, senior citizens, women and youth and for digital affairs and state modernisation, and does not list him on the committee for housing, urban development, construction and municipalities. The same disclosure records an unpaid deputy chairmanship of the Verein konservativer Bezirkspolitiker in Berlin e.V., and, as his occupation before the mandate, employment as a research assistant to the member Gerrit Huy.

### Publications

On 18 March 2026 the publisher tredition issued Maack's novel *Und nun der Sieg gelungen* as a German-language softcover of 540 pages, ISBN 978-3-384-84502-3. The publisher's description presents two dissimilar sisters, Stephanie and Claudia, who meet mainly at Christmas in their parents' house. In that text Claudia, with her partner Ralf, is active in what the blurb calls the Antifa, while Stephanie works as a project manager and her partner Stefan belongs to a student corporation; the couples' paths cross in Berlin. The same text calls the book a novel about love and hate, betrayal and loyalty, and whether family can outweigh conviction. A report on a presentation in Berlin on 21 March 2026 described the novel as his first and stated that he had previously published two information-technology specialist books, without naming them.

### Family and student corporations

The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own statements, records that Maack was born on 21 June 1969, is married and has three children.

In an article of 18 June 2018, Christian Meyer wrote in the newspaper *nd* that Maack, then an Alternative for Germany borough councillor in Reinickendorf, was a member of the Landsmannschaft Baltia Rostock and the Landsmannschaft Thuringia Berlin, and that both belonged to the Coburger Convent. Reporting the March 2026 book presentation, which it said he had called as an *Alter Herr*, the local outlet HauptstadtEcho described him as an alumnus of those two corporations and called them *schlagend*, meaning corporations that require academic fencing. A question submitted on Parliamentwatch on 14 September 2016, asking whether he belonged to the "Burschenschaften Thuringia Berlin and Baltia Rostock", remained marked unanswered. The Bundestag biography does not mention the corporations.

## Public reception

### Local political criticism

Berlin coverage of Maack’s years in Reinickendorf has focused on an Alternative for Germany office-holder running citizen services and public order. In 2016, before he took those departments, Social Democratic Party faction chair Thorsten Koch told *taz* that the governing Christian Democratic Union and the SPD had agreed “despite great stomach aches.” In March 2017 *taz* reported that Maack, like Thomas Braun in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, withheld housing-entitlement certificates from recognised refugees until they held an electronic residence permit. His press release rejected a Senate instruction to accept the federal refugee-status certificate alone, because the immigration authority first had to check whether expulsion on serious public-security grounds might apply; the Senate chancellery warned that further refusal would disadvantage applicants, and refugee advisers called the argument nonsense.

In November 2019 Der Tagesspiegel printed a joint resolution of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke accusing him of letting 100,000 euros for tenant advice lapse in 2018 and then hiring the new Heimatverein Reinickendorf. It said AfD faction chair Rolf Wiedenhaupt had presented the club at a 2017 Christmas party as work in the “pre-political space,” and that 119 euros an hour was about three times the usual rate. Maack replied that the Berliner Mieterverein had lacked capacity, that the Heimatverein was the only bidder, and that appointments had tripled.

In 2021 *nd* quoted Left leader Felix Lederle saying Maack had reworked police crime figures until they seemed to show that refugees tended to be criminal, and reported that the later contract went to a club he had co-founded, which Lederle called already tainted. Lederle said he posed as a sheriff and as respectable and businesslike, while an AfD rally outside the town hall in the January 2021 lockdown observed neither distancing nor masks; SPD leader Marco Köber called that conduct intolerable and said the local AfD was damaging the borough’s reputation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung used his remark that he could “enforce law and order” there to ask whether district cooperation with the party was already winning bourgeois voters.

### Assessments of his party placement

*nd* called him a firm supporter of Björn Höcke, whom *nd* called a right-wing extremist, and Greens chair Hinrich Westerkamp said he stood at the front of federal congresses. In March 2023 *taz* wrote that in the Berlin party he “counts as a radical networker,” having founded a “Kompetenz-Netzwerk” which, besides state chair Kristin Brinker, drew mostly on the völkisch current of the formally dissolved Der Flügel. Treasurer Frank-Christian Hansel called it “the attempt to revive the dissolved Flügel in Berlin under a new label.” Maack rejected that; *taz* said the membership, notably Thorsten Weiß, organiser of the 2019 Kyffhäuser meeting, left little doubt it was close to the Flügel, and treated his election as treasurer in Hansel’s place as a gain for that current.

In September 2026 the founder of Reinickendorf gegen rechts told *taz* that Maack, by then in the Bundestag, and Wiedenhaupt had both backed the Höcke wing, and that the Reinickendorf AfD was particularly far right within the Berlin party. *Tagesspiegel* reported that in February 2025 he took 18 percent of first votes, finished third, and was expected to enter on the state list, the first Reinickendorf AfD politician in the Bundestag. On 17 July 2025, as the group’s deputy family-policy spokesman, he said fertility had fallen to 1.35 children per woman and to 1.23 for “German women,” and called mass immigration a costly pseudo-solution beside a “genuine family offensive.” Asked on abgeordnetenwatch how the AfD would raise births among German women “surely without a migration background,” he replied on 1 August by citing tax relief for parents and saying that only the AfD made higher birth rates a priority.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/sebastian-maack