Serap Güler

Serap Güler (born 7 July 1980 in Marl) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She has been a member of the Bundestag since September 2021 and, since 6 May 2025, a Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office. She was born in North Rhine-Westphalia into a Turkish family that had come to the Ruhr as guest workers: her father, Nail Celen, had mined in Zonguldak on the Black Sea coast of Turkey and left for a German pit in 1963 under the 1961 recruitment agreement, and her mother, Sevim, joined him in Marl in 1978. She grew up in a mining settlement beside the Auguste Victoria colliery; her father worked underground for nearly 40 years and died in 2021, aged 82, from pneumoconiosis. The Bundestag biography based on her own disclosure records that she is married and lists her religion as Islam.

After the Abitur in 1999 she trained as a hotel specialist from 1999 to 2002, which she places in Dortmund, and from 2002 to 2007 she studied communication studies and German studies. She states that the degree was taken at the University of Duisburg-Essen. From 2007 to 2012 she was an adviser in the North Rhine-Westphalia government, at the ministry for generations, family, women and integration and then at the ministry for health, emancipation, care and old age, and she joined the CDU in 2009.

Güler sat in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2012 to 2017 and, from 2017 to 2021, was State Secretary for Integration in the state ministry for children, family, refugees and integration while Armin Laschet was minister-president. Her own account dates that appointment to 30 June 2017. In the 2021 federal election she stood in Leverkusen – Cologne IV, where Karl Lauterbach of the Social Democratic Party took 45.6 percent of the first votes to her 20.4 percent, and she entered parliament on the North Rhine-Westphalia CDU list. During the 20th Bundestag she was a full member of the Defence Committee, a deputy member of the Committee on Internal Affairs, and deputy chair of the enquiry commission on lessons from Germany's engagement in Afghanistan. At the 2025 election she contested Cologne I and finished 24.6 percent to 24.9 percent behind Sanae Abdi of the SPD, again returning through the state list.

On 6 May 2025, the day Friedrich Merz was elected federal chancellor and the ministers of the new government received their letters of appointment, the Foreign Office recorded Güler as a Minister of State, serving under Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul. On 5 April 2025 a district conference of the Cologne CDU elected her chair, the first woman in that office, with 341 of 452 valid votes (75.44 percent) on the first ballot.

Early life and education

Family and childhood in Marl

Serap Güler was born on 7 July 1980 in Marl, in the Ruhr region of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her father, Nail Celen, had already spent six years as a miner in Zonguldak, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, before, as she later told the Kölnische Rundschau, her grandfather allowed him in 1963 to take a job in a German pit that was supposed to last six months. She placed that departure in the period when Ruhr collieries were seeking workers under the German-Turkish recruitment agreement of 30 October 1961, the arrangement by which Turkish labour could be placed in the Federal Republic. Six months, she said, became two years and then 58 years in Germany, a course she compared with that of many people then called guest workers.

On a summer holiday in Turkey in 1978 he met Sevim; they married, and she moved with him to Marl. The family lived a few hundred metres from the Auguste Victoria colliery, where he worked, in a mining settlement whose houses were painted grey.

She has said she saw little of that work as a child: her father came home exhausted, coal worked into his skin, and, in her account, was not off ill and did not complain in nearly 40 years at the mine. Her brother also became a miner. A 2018 profile described her mother as a cleaner; Turkish was spoken at home, Güler learned German from the grandmother next door, and a friend of her mother's from East Germany translated notes from school meetings. Nail Celen later worked as a gardener and died in 2021, aged 82, of pneumoconiosis. On 21 December 2018 she went underground with him for the first time, during the final shift at the Prosper-Haniel mine in Bottrop, about 1,200 metres down, as hard-coal mining in Germany officially ended.

She was 13 when, in the summer of 1993, far-right extremists set fire to the house of the Genç family in Solingen, killing five people. She later said the attack put a weight on her life, the fear that it could have happened to any of them, and she has dated her own turn toward politics to her university years rather than to that moment. At home, she told n-tv in 2012, politics played no role.

School, vocational training and university

Güler passed the Abitur in 1999 at the Martin-Luther-King-Schule, Marl's municipal comprehensive school (Gesamtschule), which lists her in that year's leaving class. In the eighth grade a Girls' Day took her to Auguste Victoria, above ground only, and a class trip went to the German Mining Museum in Bochum; she has said she then knew little of the work underground.

After the Abitur she trained from 1999 to 2002 as a Hotelfachfrau, a qualified hotel specialist, in Dortmund. Her mother had wanted her to study medicine; the apprenticeship was her own decision, and she was the first in the family to go to university. From 2002 to 2007 she studied communication studies and German at the University of Duisburg-Essen, with the emphasis on political communication, and completed a Magister in 2007. She has said she liked studying in Essen and remembered above all the seminars of Professor Achim Eschbach. A 2021 profile reported that the thesis with which she finished treated the "construction of a myth called parallel society." She has dated an interest in integration, and in politics more generally, to the degree, and described the family as wholly unpolitical.

Born a Turkish citizen, she acquired German citizenship in 2010 and had to give up Turkish citizenship to do so; she told n-tv that she had long thought of herself as German, but that the obligation to renounce the other nationality was why she had waited, and that her parents remained Turkish citizens. After the Magister she spent half a year as a clerk in a ministerial office of the North Rhine-Westphalian government and then worked as an adviser in state ministries.

Entry into politics and the CDU

Advisory work in the state government

In 2007 Serap Güler joined the administration of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Federal Foreign Office and the Bundestag describe 2007 to 2012 as her service as an adviser (Referentin) to the Land government, first in the Ministry for Generations, Family, Women and Integration and then in the Ministry for Health, Emancipation, Care and Old Age.

That post was in the ministerial office of Armin Laschet, integration minister from 2005 to 2010 under Minister-President Jürgen Rüttgers. The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported that she worked as a Referentin in his office while he held the portfolio. Writing in December 2012, the taz identified him as the first integration minister of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and as the minister under whom she entered the Land administration.

After the 2010 state election she stayed in the civil service as press officer (Pressereferentin) to Barbara Steffens, health minister of Alliance 90/The Greens, and remained a Referentin until 2012. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members’ own disclosures, records the same ministries and dates her CDU membership to 2009, while she was still a ministerial aide rather than an elected politician.

In December 2012 the taz called Laschet her political foster father (politischer Ziehvater) and wrote that he had persuaded her to join the CDU, although she said she had not been very interested in politics as a teenager. Die Zeit later described her as a confidante of his, for whom she had already worked as a Referentin when he was integration minister. In 2021 an interviewer for the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger put it to her that she had once called him a friend, mentor, promoter and role model; she did not contest the description, and answered by praising his instinct for mediation and consensus.

Joining the party and early offices

Güler joined the CDU in 2009 and became a German citizen in 2010. The taz noted that December that she had taken citizenship only two years earlier. In a May 2021 interview with Die Zeit she said the 2009 decision had been deliberate. Hermann Gröhe, then CDU general secretary, had told her that complete agreement with a party did not exist, but that there should be large areas of overlap; she wanted a people’s party (Volkspartei) in which different positions could be reconciled rather than a single line imposed. She added that reservations based on her parents’ origin were often assumed, but were not what she had met in the North Rhine-Westphalian CDU. Just after her election to the federal executive, the taz quoted her as saying that it mattered to her that one believed at all, rather than belonging to a party with no use for God.

In May 2012 she entered the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia on the CDU state list, as the group’s first member of Turkish origin. She later told Die Zeit that she had come “from nowhere,” received a list place high enough to be elected, and in the same year was voted onto the federal executive with three other party colleagues who had a family history of migration. At the federal party congress in Hanover that December, a dpa tabulation published by Die Welt recorded her as a new member of the Bundesvorstand with 74.46 per cent of the vote. The taz set that result beside the election of Aygül Özkan and Younes Ouaqasse, and read the choices as a sign of how quickly the CDU was trying to make up ground on integration. Before the congress, Die Welt reported that Laschet wanted the Turkish-origin Landtag member he had promoted elected to the federal board, and that she was valued inside the parliamentary group.

On 29 March 2014 the CDU in Cologne, at a district conference of 417 members in the Maritim Hotel, elected her one of four deputy district chairs, together with Florian Braun, Christian Möbius and Gisela Manderla. Bernd Petelkau was confirmed as chair with 85 per cent; Karsten Möring, a fifth candidate for the deputy posts, fell eight votes short.

Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia

Election and parliamentary roles

Serap Güler was a member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia from 31 May 2012 to 31 May 2017, the whole of the 16th electoral period, entering on place 14 of the state list of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She did not win a constituency at either election in which she stood.

On 13 May 2012 she was the CDU candidate in constituency 19, Köln VII, in Cologne. Martin Börschel of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) won with 23,287 votes (45.6 percent); Güler received 10,846 (21.3 percent). Turnout was 54.2 percent. The Berlin daily taz wrote that December that she had entered in May as the first CDU deputy of Turkish origin in the Landtag. Born on 7 July 1980, she was 31 when the Landtag met. In a 2021 interview she said she had been, at 32, the youngest member of the CDU group, and that the 2012 dissolution had left the party short of candidates, so she was asked to stand. She described Köln-Mülheim as her home constituency.

At the constitutive sitting of 31 May 2012 in Düsseldorf, the Landtag unanimously adopted Drucksache 16/3, a joint proposal of all groups, and elected 22 secretaries (Schriftführerinnen and Schriftführer), Güler among the CDU names. She was also the group's spokesperson for its integration working group and its voice in the integration committee and in plenary.

On 14 May 2017 she stood in constituency 18, Köln VI, from sixth place on the CDU state list adopted in Mönchengladbach on 26 November 2016. Susana dos Santos Herrmann (SPD) won with 17,600 votes (32.08 percent); Güler received 14,519 (26.46 percent), on a turnout of 60.0 percent. The state returning officer named dos Santos Herrmann, not Güler, as the member for Köln VI. Statewide the CDU took 33.0 percent of second votes (2,796,683) and 72 of 199 seats, but all 72 were constituency seats: the party had won six more districts than its first proportional share, and after overhang and compensatory mandates it received none from the state list. Place 6 therefore brought no mandate, and her membership ended with the 16th period on 31 May 2017. She did not return as a deputy. From 2017 to 2021 she was state secretary for integration in the North Rhine-Westphalia government.

Integration work in the state parliament

On 26 September 2013 she opened debate on the CDU motion "Integrationspolitik neu ausrichten!" (Drucksache 16/4012) and called the staffing of the government's integration policy a fiasco from the start. Asked by Ali Bas of Alliance 90/The Greens for examples, she attacked a pilot of anonymous applications in the public service, which she said forced people with a migration history to hide their origin in order to be hired. SPD deputy Bernhard von Grünberg answered that he had already objected in the integration committee, that a departed state secretary had not left because her policy had failed, and that the treatment of a migrant woman colleague was unsolidary.

A motion of 22 September 2015, signed by Armin Laschet, Lutz Lienenkämper, Güler and the CDU group, said crisis management of refugee reception must not obstruct integration. It named language, education and work as the three pillars, called German "the key to integration", and warned against repeating the earlier neglect of language learning for Gastarbeiter. It asked for early German courses for refugees likely to remain; easier rules for teachers of German as a second language at adult-education centres; early-childhood places and schooling with language support; recording of qualifications, including practical experience, at first reception; and a check on whether fees for recognising foreign qualifications deterred applications.

In June 2016 she visited a refugee language course in the Altena library, invited by mayor Andreas Hollstein, where volunteers used what was described as the Liechtenstein method. She praised the town for moving first, but said integration failed if the only demand was that refugees learn German: Germans also had to contribute in daily life, an Integrationsstütze. Comparing Cologne, where she said more than 180 nationalities lived, with smaller places, she said integration worked better in the countryside than in any large city, and she and Hollstein called a new power to assign a place of residence for three years useful.

State Secretary for Integration

Appointment and responsibilities

On 30 June 2017, Minister-President Armin Laschet appointed Serap Güler state secretary for integration in the Ministry for Children, Family, Refugees and Integration of North Rhine-Westphalia. The same day he appointed Joachim Stamp of the Free Democratic Party minister of that department and deputy minister-president, so Güler, of the Christian Democratic Union, served under an FDP minister. The ministry’s later strategy treated that 2017 bundling of aliens’ law, refugee policy, integration and naturalization as a way to connect migration control with integration. The Federal Foreign Office dates the post from 2017 to 2021 and her seat in the Bundestag from September 2021; on 28 October 2021 Gonca Türkeli-Dehnert was appointed her successor. While still state secretary she became, on 1 July 2019, chair of the board of the Stiftung Zentrum für Türkeistudien und Integrationsforschung in Essen, with Andreas Blätte of the University of Duisburg-Essen as deputy and Dirk Halm as full-time board member.

The 2017 coalition agreement required a participation-and-integration strategy to 2030, which Stamp and Güler presented in Düsseldorf on 22 August 2019. Prepared with an advisory council they led, it covered arrival in the first years after immigration, access to school, training and work, and cohesion in what it called an immigration society, on condition that newcomers accept legal rules and basic values. For 2020 the Land budgeted €25 million so that joint work by foreigners’ offices, job centres, school authorities and welfare bodies would extend from twelve municipalities to all 54 districts and independent cities. Güler said some municipal integration centres had no regular contact with the foreigners’ office or job centre.

Language, labour and values policy

On 30 December 2019 Stamp presented immigration statistics focused on language. Among people with a migration history, 69.7 percent of those born in Germany spoke German at home, against 28.1 percent of arrivals since 2000; Stamp called education and German the central investments in integration. Güler said every child, regardless of origin, should be linguistically ready before school. She called that a consensus, but criticized CDU colleague Carsten Linnemann for tying weak German among primary pupils to the killing at Frankfurt central station and disorders at Düsseldorf’s Rheinbad, and she dismissed his proposed 35 percent cap on pupils with a migration history as symbolic.

Clan crime, she said, was chiefly an interior-policy problem of serious offenders who often spoke good German and had not been confronted firmly enough. Insecure residence helped explain, but did not excuse, a shorter route into crime for some Lebanese groups: about 55,000 people in the state held only a Duldung, some 10,000 of them in repeated “chain” toleration for more than eight years, and any cut-off for pre-2015 arrivals was, she said, a federal decision. The Land rather than Turkey had to be the address for people of Turkish origin; parts of the third generation, in her view, were open to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Turkish office for Turks abroad used culture as cover for political influence. Talks with the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB) would continue without, as she saw it, a basis yet for joint projects, and she argued that mothers were the underestimated route to integration inside Turkish families.

The headscarf debate

In early April 2018, after Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz proposed banning headscarves in kindergartens and primary schools, Güler told WDR that forcing one onto a young girl was “pure perversion” because it sexualized the child. Families, she said, often nudged seven- and eight-year-olds; her mother had chosen the scarf as an adult and left her a choice she wanted other girls to have. School and day care were not enough, because the scarf could go back on afterwards, so she asked for a ban in all public space under 14—the age she called religious majority—by federal law. Stamp told Bild that children below that age should not be pressed into a headscarf. On 11 April she told ZDF’s Morgenmagazin that this was not a religious symbol: Islamic custom, she said, did not require the scarf before puberty, so freedom of religion did not apply, while an adult woman’s choice had to be respected. Christine Lüders, head of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, warned against bans aimed at one faith’s symbols.

Laschet backed the idea as something the government should implement, because children could not yet decide for themselves, and Christian Lindner, then federal FDP chairman, said a ban under 14 would strengthen personal development. Spiegel columnist Margarete Stokowski answered that more dress rules did not free women, and Social Democratic Party deputy Ibrahim Yetim said Salafists, not children, should be the target if the scarf was their sign. Under #NichtOhneMeinKopftuch, users called dress a private matter of religious freedom, but Spiegel reported that the tag was driven largely by Generation Islam, in the milieu of Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned in Germany and described by the state intelligence service as reactionary and antisemitic. The group urged its roughly 63,000 Facebook followers to flood Twitter and later claimed 130,000 tweets, many from men framing the row as Islam against the West.

No statute followed. Welt, using the ministry’s reply to SPD deputy Britta Altenkamp, reported a year later that there was still no count of kindergarten girls in headscarves, no register of coercion and no guidance for kindergartens. The plan had narrowed to talks on a handout with Muslim experts, including associations that called a ban disintegrating and populist; Terre des Femmes supported a prohibition, and the paper said Stamp weighed both the legal doubts and parental rights. On 9 December 2019 the Westdeutsche Zeitung reported that Güler, citing a legal opinion, had dropped a ban whose chances before the Federal Constitutional Court were doubtful, in favour of information for parents in kindergartens and primary schools. She still held that a woman must freely decide whether to veil. Lawyer Jörg Ennuschat wrote that religious identity, not only coercion, explained some girls’ scarves, and no court had ruled on a ban for pupils.

Member of the Bundestag

The 2021 and 2025 elections

Güler entered the Bundestag at the federal election of 26 September 2021. In March the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in North Rhine-Westphalia nominated her, then the state's secretary for integration, in constituency 101, Leverkusen – Köln IV, covering Leverkusen and Cologne-Mülheim, against the sitting Social Democratic Party (SPD) member Karl Lauterbach. She was also eighth on the CDU state list. The SPD won the direct mandate with 45.6 percent of the first votes (69,662); the CDU took 20.4 percent (31,197). Güler entered on the list. The Bundestag biography, based on her disclosures, and the Federal Foreign Office both date the membership from September 2021.

For the election of 23 February 2025 the state CDU, meeting in Essen on 14 December 2024, placed her sixth on its list, after Friedrich Merz, Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker, Paul Ziemiak, Anja Karliczek and Günter Krings. She stood in the redrawn constituency 092, Cologne I. Sanae Abdi (SPD) won with 24.9 percent of the first votes (37,717) to Güler's 24.6 percent (37,261). Turnout was 80.2 percent, and on second votes the CDU led the constituency with 22.3 percent. Güler again returned on the state list. She remained a member after 6 May 2025, when she was appointed Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office.

Defence, interior and the Afghanistan enquiry

In the 20th electoral term Güler was a full member of the Defence Committee, listed with the CDU/CSU members when it was constituted in December 2021. The CDU's profile also lists her then as a deputy member of the Committee on Internal Affairs.

On 8 July 2022 the Bundestag created the study commission "Lessons from Afghanistan for Germany's future networked engagement", on a motion from the SPD, the CDU/CSU, Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party. The Alternative for Germany and Die Linke voted against. It was to review Germany's military and civilian engagement in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 and draw lessons for later deployments, separately from the inquiry into the withdrawal and evacuation. Twelve members of parliament and twelve outside experts sat on it. Constituted on 19 September 2022 before Bundestag President Bärbel Bas, it elected Michael Müller (SPD), former governing mayor of Berlin, as chair and Güler as deputy chair.

The interim report, printed paper 20/10400 and more than 350 pages, was adopted on 19 February 2024 and given to Bas the next morning. It credited partial results — a reliable ally, professional personnel, and better living conditions, especially for women and girls, and infrastructure while foreign troops and aid workers were present — but judged that the mission had "strategically failed" to hold those gains after the withdrawal and the Taliban takeover in the summer of 2021. A realistic strategy, enough resources, cooperation among ministries, and an adequate reading of Afghan culture, history and local power had all been missing.

Debating the report on 23 February 2024, Güler argued against calling the twenty years a total failure, citing lower infant mortality and illiteracy, access to energy and clean water, and schooling for many girls and women. She still treated parts of the engagement as failed, and called for realistic, testable goals and a national security council in the chancellery, with a matching parliamentary body, against ministerial "silo thinking".

The commission adopted its final report on 27 January 2025. On 28 January Bas received printed paper 20/14500 from Müller and the member Peter Beyer: more than 100 pages and 72 recommendations to the government and the Bundestag. In the debate of 31 January, Müller said the text had passed unanimously and that the international community had failed strategically in Afghanistan; he asked for a joint situation centre and at least a parliamentary subcommittee able to demand a coordinated account from the government. Güler's speech was entered in the minutes. She wrote that crisis management had to remain alongside territorial and alliance defence, that Germany should not try to remake other political systems at will, and that local responsibility was essential. She again proposed a national security council in the chancellery.

Leadership of the CDU in Cologne

Güler had been a deputy chair of the Cologne CDU since a district conference in 2014. On 5 April 2025 a conference in the Kristallsaal of Koelnmesse elected her chair.

Serap Güler at the lectern of the Cologne CDU during the district conference on 5 April 2025.

She won on the first ballot with 341 of 452 valid votes, 75.44 percent, ahead of Mario Ebel (10.6 percent), Heribert Hirte (8.4), Hans-Günther Kersten (3.9) and Gundolf Siebeke (1.55). The district association and the Kölnische Rundschau called her the first woman to lead the Cologne CDU. She said preoccupation with the party's internal affairs had to stop, and that stability and steady work should follow. She wanted the Cologne CDU to be the city's strongest force at the municipal election that September. The new executive had 16 women and 16 men, with Florian Braun, Andreas Bohl, Janina Jänsch and Ira Sommer as deputy chairs.

Her parliamentary disclosures, apart from the party office, record a seat on the Deutsche Welle broadcasting council from 4 June 2025. They also list her as honorary chair of the Stiftung Zentrum für Türkeistudien und Integrationsforschung in Essen and as a trustee of the Institut für Europäische Politik, without dates for those two roles.

Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office

Appointment in the Merz cabinet

On 6 May 2025 Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) became chancellor of a coalition with the Christian Social Union and the Social Democratic Party. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appointed the federal ministers that day at Schloss Bellevue. Bundestag President Julia Klöckner then read out the government, including Johann Wadephul (CDU) as foreign minister. For the Federal Foreign Office she named Staatsministerin Serap Güler and Minister of State for Europe Gunther Krichbaum, both CDU, and Minister of State Florian Hahn (CSU), as parliamentary state secretaries.

The Foreign Office dates Güler’s tenure from 6 May 2025. She remained a member of the Bundestag, a seat she had held since September 2021 on the North Rhine-Westphalia list. At the handover from Annalena Baerbock on 7 May, Wadephul presented her with Hahn and Krichbaum; Bernhard Kotsch and Géza Andreas von Geyr were the administrative state secretaries.

A Minister of State is not a member of the cabinet. Under the 1974 law, parliamentary state secretaries are attached to a minister, must belong to the Bundestag except when serving the chancellor, and assist that minister in governmental work. Article 62 of the Basic Law confines the federal government to the chancellor and the federal ministers, so the office heads no ministry. The federal president appoints the holder on the chancellor’s proposal, with the minister’s agreement, and the oath is taken before the minister. The president may confer the title Staatsminister, the style used at the Foreign Office for political representation abroad. Pay and the expense allowance are 75 percent of a federal minister’s. The appointment ends with the minister’s tenure and, for a member of parliament, on leaving the Bundestag.

Portfolio, travel and priorities

No published biography assigns her a fixed region. On Africa Day, 5 May 2026, Wadephul said that Africa had been made one of her key priorities and that she had visited Sudan as the first European politician to do so since the civil war began. Before leaving on 21 October 2025 for Chad and Port Sudan, she cited about 25 million people in acute hunger, 15 million children out of school and more than 11 million displaced. She was to see camps in eastern Chad, where more than a million people had fled, and to press for humanitarian access and for the September peace plan of the Quad—the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Germany, she said, had pledged €125 million at the London Sudan Conference that April and was adding €16 million. On 16 October 2026 the German Embassy in Sudan posted that she had met the Darfur governor, Minni Minawi, six months after a Sudan conference in Berlin.

The later notices were departure statements, not accounts of completed talks. On 10 May 2026, bound for Côte d'Ivoire and Togo, she cited trade, violence spreading from the Sahel, language courses at the Goethe-Institut in Abidjan, and Germany’s colonial past in Togo. On 1 June the stated destination was Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, centred on Sudan and the Berlin Principles adopted in April 2026, together with business, energy, migration and cultural relations. On 15 June, before a journey to Syria, the ministry said a delegation would for the first time since the fall of the Assad government travel beyond Damascus, to Tartus, Latakia and Aleppo. She linked an inclusive transition and investment to the chance that some of the more than one million Syrians in Germany might return.

On 28 June 2026 the announced route was the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Jamaica, including Haiti and the United Nations Gang Suppression Force set up in late 2025, the Caribbean Community and trade. Leaving for the United States on 3 October, German Unity Day, she said a new Goethe-Institut would open that day in St. Louis and that she would visit a German school abroad in Chicago. On 19 October she left for Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo: an Ebola response to which Germany had put about €25 million, a political rather than military end to the eastern Congo war, critical raw materials, and talks with the UN mission MONUSCO.

On 19 June 2025 in New York she opened the annual session of the Peacebuilding Commission, which Germany chaired that year, and the same day addressed the Security Council on poverty, underdevelopment and conflict. In March 2026 she said the chairmanship had brought Mauritania and Colombia before the commission and had advised the Security Council on women, peace and security. She called Germany the second-largest contributor to the UN system and restated its candidacy for a non-permanent seat in 2027–28.

Political positions

Güler was a deputy chair, with Mario Voigt, of the commission under Carsten Linnemann that prepared the CDU basic programme In Freiheit leben, adopted at the party congress in May 2024.

Integration, migration and citizenship

She treats citizenship as the end of integration, not its start. In January 2025 she wrote that faster naturalization does not itself integrate anyone, and called for a "generational cut" on dual citizenship. In 2023 she had still wanted both passports for the early generations; she had given up Turkish citizenship in 2010 in order to vote in Germany. In December 2023 she said naturalization should require a commitment to Israel's right to exist, part of what she called non-negotiable German Staatsräson. As state secretary she had said everyone in Germany ought to accept that, and that criticism of Israeli policy was being confused with hostility to Jews.

The 2024 programme places that recognition inside a Leitkultur anyone wishing to live in Germany must accept "without ifs or buts." Güler has said the demand binds the whole society, not only newcomers, and that the Basic Law is not a full rulebook for an immigration country. German, she argues, must be the language of public life, not a language policed at home. After the 2025 election she defended a Migrationswende, including returns at the border that need not wait on neighbors' consent, and said the campaign had failed to separate asylum from labour migration.

With Herbert Reul she wrote in June 2024 that guests or protection-seekers who "wilfully trample on our constitutional state" should be prosecuted and deported, "including to Afghanistan or Syria."

Islam, religious practice and social values

Güler calls herself believing but not strictly practising. In Ramadan 2024 she said she fasts "rather in a Catholic way," giving up alcohol but not food. For several years she sat on the board of a Kolping Society group in Cologne-Mülheim; Armin Laschet had introduced her to Adolph Kolping's work.

She rejects the blanket sentence, which she traces to Wolfgang Schäuble in 2006 and Christian Wulff in 2010, that Islam "belongs to Germany." She had welcomed it, but "in that blanket form it was not right, because there is no such thing as 'the' Islam," and she did not want Wahhabi or political Islam in the country. A December 2023 draft said "Muslims who share our values belong to Germany." After criticism the heading became "Muslims are part of the religious diversity of Germany and of our society," while the text kept: "An Islam that does not share our values and rejects our free society does not belong to Germany." The adopted programme also says sharia does not belong to Germany, bars foreign governments from directing mosques, and backs German-speaking imams trained at German universities.

In April 2024 she said the sentence marked off a Wahhabi Islam with "nothing to do" with the Islam she grew up in. Citing Berlin-Neukölln after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, she called "does not belong" a political judgement inside the rule of law, not a demand that people with a migration history leave. Aiman Mazyek of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany said the line still stigmatized Muslims; he told Stern that copying the AfD had "not been very clever even at school." SPD chair Lars Klingbeil called it rhetorical exclusion of a whole group; Robin Wagener of Alliance 90/The Greens called it a retreat from Wulff. In 2023 she had written that debate fixed on foreign-steered associations or Salafists while most Muslims, only about a fifth of whom were in the large associations, disappeared, and that the state should help smaller congregations leave them.

Turkey and transnational influence

During the Gezi Park protests in June 2013 she said Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government had tried to impose "their opinion and their way of life," and that Hitler comparisons only tightened his support. On the Turkish-Islamic Union (DİTİB) she said in October 2018 that it "could not have done otherwise" over a Cologne mosque opening, because the instruction came from Ankara; North Rhine-Westphalia had frozen cooperation. In 2019 she still saw no basis for joint projects, and said Germany, not Turkey, had to be the address, while Ankara's agency for citizens abroad used culture as political cover.

She has also said he filled a vacuum German politicians left: Turks in Germany had "a deep longing for recognition." In March 2025 she repeated the point and, told he had taken about 67 percent among voters in Germany, called that regrettable, but refused to demand that those voters campaign against him. After the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu she preferred private pressure to a public rebuke, "for the sake of the people who have just been arrested." That matched an interest-led line she restated in April 2024: differences with Erdoğan were large, but stability and a stronger NATO required Turkey, and a purely moral test would leave "hardly any interlocutors."

After Merih Demiral's wolf salute in July 2024 she said the salute and the Grey Wolves should be banned as the Hitler salute is, without denying Turkish identity. The Bundestag register, and the state interior ministry, list her as honorary chair of the foundation Centre for Turkey Studies and Integration Research.

Defence, the Bundeswehr and security

In March 2022 she argued for "arming socially, not at the rifle": a compulsory social year regardless of sex or citizenship, not a quick return to conscription. In December 2023 she said she would discuss Boris Pistorius's idea only with 15 to 30 billion euros, and only if women were included; a social year, with the Bundeswehr beside care work, was more realistic because voluntary service mostly reached the educated. The programme goes further: reverse the suspension in stages, use a contingent draft until a society year exists, and put soldiers regularly in schools. A January 2024 paper with Kerstin Vieregge, quoted by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, called the force far from 203,000 soldiers and proposed youth-officer visits from year 9, a barracks visit for every pupil, and a reserve without an employer's veto.

Before a Bundestag vote that March on Taurus missiles for Ukraine, she spoke of "frightening common ground" between the SPD and the AfD in Olaf Scholz's refusal and in a definition of entering the war close to Alice Weidel's. Germany was already in a hybrid war with Russia, she said; his caution was fear, not prudence. The programme promises Ukraine "comprehensive support," including toward the European Union and NATO, and says a real Zeitenwende needs more than one time-limited special fund.

Controversies and public reception

Grey Wolves allegations

In December 2012, while Armin Laschet was promoting the new Landtag member Serap Güler for the federal executive of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, Die Welt reported that she had attended at least two events at which Turkish right-wing nationalists from the milieu of the Grey Wolves canvassed. In Brühl, the paper wrote, she appeared at an association that identified with the Ülkücü movement, which the domestic intelligence service watched and classified as Turkish right-wing radical and as inciting ethnic hatred; in Duisburg she attended an event with the head of a student group whom researchers at the University of Cologne accused of partial links to the Grey Wolves. Welt said that nobody accused her of nationalist convictions, and Laschet said he had not known of the appearances. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution describes the Ülkücü movement, commonly called the Grey Wolves, as Turkish right-wing extremist, nationalist, antisemitic and racist, and assigns about 12,100 people in Germany to it.

A 2019 Landtag question from the Alternative for Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia reproduced a May 2013 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung passage quoting Güler that other politicians had also been invited and that nobody present had noticed the Grey Wolves recruiting, while noting banners of the association Brühl Türk Kültür Ocağı. In March 2014 she told Welt that she did not consider CDU membership compatible with an open commitment to the Ülkücü movement or with membership of the Idealisten associations. After France dissolved the Grey Wolves in November 2020, she called a comparable step in Germany “diskussions- oder sogar nachahmungswürdig” and said the movement sold radical nationalism as patriotism. In November 2021, when she sought the CDU general secretaryship, Peter Tauber described questions about “contacts” with the Grey Wolves as a campaign, and Güler agreed. Welt treated contacts such as the Brühl event, and ties to the Cologne CDU member Halil Aydemir, who had defended Grey Wolves events, as undisputed, but wrote that they did not show radical views of her own. On 21 November 2019 the state government answered that there were no past or present connections between State Secretary Güler and the Grey Wolves or Milli Görüş.

The Mallorca trip

On 7 April 2022 the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported that environment minister Ursula Heinen-Esser had resumed a holiday on Mallorca after interrupting it on 14 July 2021, during that summer’s flood in North Rhine-Westphalia, and had held a birthday celebration for her husband on 23 July. She confirmed that building minister Ina Scharrenbach, Europe minister Stephan Holthoff-Pförtner and Güler, then state secretary for integration, were among the guests. Heinen-Esser resigned that evening, saying she could not explain her conduct. Güler, by then a member of the Bundestag, wrote on 8 April that “Pietätlos und falsch” both described her behaviour the previous July: a private weekend trip booked weeks earlier should not have been taken, and she apologised for a lack of sensitivity that had suggested the fate of people affected by the flood did not interest her.

Debate over the AfD in Cologne

As CDU chair in Cologne, Güler said in a Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger interview published on 12 October 2026 that there was a difference between cooperation and “Selbstmord aus Angst vor dem Tod”, and that withdrawing one’s own motions because the AfD might support them was the latter. She said the Cologne CDU would no longer withdraw council motions for that reason, that doing so had left it open to pressure from the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Greens, and that it would never vote for an AfD motion. She said this was not a change of course, because the resolution forbade cooperation rather than the abandonment of the CDU’s own ideas. Adopted at the CDU congress in Hamburg on 8 December 2018, that resolution rejects coalitions and similar forms of cooperation with both the Left Party and the AfD.

The next day the Cologne party and council group said that passage had not referred to Cologne and that reports of withdrawn motions came from other district associations. The newspaper wrote that no such Cologne case was known and that Güler had authorized the interview text; some in the local CDU treated the clarification as a retreat, and the Greens had already demanded that the party not tear holes in what they called the Brandmauer. The statement added that, after the September 2025 election, the CDU held 18 of 90 seats and was no longer in a fixed alliance with the Greens; the group would keep a motion even if the AfD signalled support, while seeking majorities only with democratic parties.

Profile among German politicians of Turkish origin

Cemile Giousouf, who took her seat in September 2013, was described by the Bundestag archive as the first CDU member who was a Muslim and had Turkish roots. In April 2010 Der Spiegel reported the appointment of Aygül Özkan, the Hamburg-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, as social-affairs minister in Lower Saxony, calling her the first government minister of Turkish origin. Güler reached the Bundestag later: she was still integration state secretary during the 2021 flood and was a member of parliament by her apology in April 2022. Since 2019 she has sat on the federal executive of the Christlich-Demokratische Arbeitnehmerschaft, the CDU’s employee association; in a 2020 interview with that association she called it the party’s social conscience.