Stefan Zierke

Stefan Zierke (born 5 December 1970 in Prenzlau) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag. He first entered the Bundestag on 22 October 2013 and has sat through the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st legislative terms for the Brandenburg constituency Uckermark – Barnim I. In the Bundestag elected in February 2025 he holds the seat on the Brandenburg state list, in third place, after placing second in the constituency.

The son of a machine master and a dental nurse, he grew up in Prenzlau, then in East Germany, completed a toolmaker’s apprenticeship at the town’s valve works, and in 1990 served with a local survey unit, six months in the National People’s Army and six months in the Bundeswehr. He retrained as a travel clerk, ran the travel offices of Volksbank Uckermark, qualified as a tourism specialist (Touristikfachwirt), and from 2003 managed the Uckermark tourism association. From 2005 until 15 March 2018 he was managing director of tmu Tourismus Marketing Uckermark GmbH.

He joined the SPD in 2008, won a seat on the Prenzlau city council in 2009 and chaired its SPD group, and also sat on the Uckermark district council. In June 2025 he resigned both local mandates, citing the workload of the Bundestag and the presidency of the Federal Association of the Camping Industry in Germany. The Bundestag biography lists him as a member of the SPD’s Brandenburg executive, chair of the SPD sub-district Uckermark, and speaker of the Brandenburg state group in the SPD parliamentary group. He is married and has two children.

Zierke was the SPD’s direct candidate in the constituency at the 2013 federal election. The SPD received 23,235 first votes (23.5 percent), behind the Christian Democratic Union on 38.9 percent, and he has been a member of the Bundestag since that year. For the 19th term the archived biography records him as elected on the Brandenburg state list; at the 2017 election in the constituency the SPD’s first-vote share was 19.4 percent and the CDU’s 30.6 percent. He was directly elected in 2021, when the SPD took 38,247 first votes (29.6 percent). On 23 February 2025 Hannes Gnauck of the Alternative for Germany won the seat with 53,912 first votes (38.3 percent); Zierke, with 27,211 (19.4 percent), returned on the state list.

On 14 March 2018, the day the Bundestag elected Angela Merkel chancellor for a fourth term, the SPD named Zierke parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, together with Caren Marks, under minister Franziska Giffey. He held that office until 2021. In the 21st Bundestag he is the SPD group’s spokesperson for tourism, a full member and deputy chair of the Committee on Tourism and a member of the Transport Committee, and the Bundestag’s register of interests lists him on the supervisory board of Autobahn GmbH des Bundes from 14 November 2025.

Early life and education

Stefan Zierke was born on 5 December 1970 in Prenzlau, in the northeast of the German Democratic Republic, and grew up in the town, now in the Uckermark of Brandenburg. A profile published by the Nordkurier in September 2013, drawn from an interview before his first Bundestag candidacy, described him as the son of a Maschinenmeister and a dental nurse, and quoted him as saying that as a child he had always wanted to go into the woods and become a forester.

From 1977 he attended the Polytechnische Oberschule Lindenschule in Prenzlau and completed the tenth class. Under the GDR school law of 1959, the Polytechnische Oberschule was the compulsory common school: classes generally stayed together from the first year through the tenth, with the stated aim of a qualified leaving certificate for every pupil. Only about a tenth of a year group was admitted to the Erweiterte Oberschule, the direct route to the Abitur. Vocational training was organized on a dual pattern, with lessons at a vocational school and practical work inside an enterprise.

Zierke did not take the Abitur route. In 1987 he began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker (Werkzeugmacher) at the Armaturenwerk Prenzlau, the town's valve works. On 13 February 1964 the GDR Council of Ministers had decided to build the plant in order to industrialize the north of the republic; the VEB Armaturenwerk Prenzlau was founded on 1 January 1966, gate-valve production started in March 1969, and refrigerant valves were added from 1972. Turnover reached about 200 million marks in 1989, output went to 22 countries, and with some 1,500 employees the works was by far Prenzlau's largest employer. From 1966 to 1986 it trained 2,300 skilled workers in its own workshops and vocational school, pairing bench and machine practice with classroom instruction.

He later said that the toolmaker's trade was supposed to be followed only by military service with the surveyors in Prenzlau and then by a degree in mechanical engineering. His own curriculum vitae places that service in 1990, in Vermessungseinheit II in Prenzlau. In the 2013 interview he said the political rupture had thrown those plans off course: he spent six months in the uniform of the National People's Army and six months in that of the Bundeswehr. The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own disclosures, records the toolmaker apprenticeship and a return to the plant as a toolmaker in 1991, but does not mention military service.

The works did not survive German reunification as a single enterprise. An attempt on 12 July 1990 to keep it together as AWP GmbH failed, and in 1991 the company was divided into four larger successor firms and several smaller ones, after employees struck against mass redundancies. Zierke said that, with short-time working and the end of the old large plant in prospect, he looked at about the age of twenty for another occupation and chose retraining as a travel clerk (Reiseverkehrskaufmann). He told the Nordkurier that holidays were pleasant, that the subject carried positive associations, and that the occupation had not existed in the GDR. The Bundestag biography dates that apprenticeship, examined by the chamber of industry and commerce (IHK) in Potsdam, from 1991, and lists him as a qualified travel clerk by 1993. That change of trade, rather than the mechanical-engineering degree he had planned, was the start of his later work in the travel business.

Professional career

From 1993 Zierke worked as a travel clerk and expedient, handling bookings and travel documents, at BAF Reisen in Prenzlau. In 1994 he became head of the travel offices of Volksbank Uckermark eG. The travel desks now run by VR-Bank Uckermark-Randow eG in Prenzlau and Templin date that agency business to 1994.

From 1997 he took a further qualification at the chamber of industry and commerce in Berlin. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own disclosures, records it as a course of study toward the title Touristikfachwirt. A 2014 Bundestag profile says he studied tourism in Berlin from 1997 and finished under the related chamber title Tourismusfachwirt. The biography attaches the certificate to the Berlin chamber rather than to a university.

In 2003 he became managing director of the Tourismusverband Uckermark e.V. It is a registered association, entered on 29 May 1991 at the Amtsgericht Neuruppin under VR 2571, with its seat at Stettiner Straße 19 in Prenzlau; the association dates its founding to 1990. It describes itself as the interest body for tourism in the Uckermark, in northeastern Brandenburg. Members have included the district marketing company, the Sparkasse Uckermark, local tourism associations, cultural organisations and individual businesses; the district administrator chairs the board. From a restructuring in January 2017, required by European Union state-aid rules, the association has had no staff and has taken no project grants from the Landkreis Uckermark. It is financed by membership fees and its own funds, and it contracts the district-owned company each year to do the operational work.

From 2005 he was also managing director of tmu Tourismus Marketing Uckermark GmbH. The company was founded on 25 January 2005 and entered in the commercial register at Neuruppin (HRB 7143) on 7 March 2005, with Zierke as managing director and €25,000 of share capital held entirely by the Landkreis Uckermark. Its object is the regional and supra-regional tourist development and marketing of the Uckermark and the surrounding area. At the same Prenzlau address as the association, it is the district's destination-management organisation: it prepares strategies with local partners, markets the area, runs projects, and is the body the district expects to deal with the state and with Brandenburg's state marketing company. There is no supervisory board; a consultative advisory board exists, and the district exercises the shareholder's rights. In 2018 it employed five people, spent a district grant of €350,000 for services of general economic interest, and the participation report lists turnover of €69,760 and a surplus of €5,952.

In 2012 the GmbH entered the first federal competition "Nachhaltige Tourismusregionen", organised by the Federal Environment Ministry, the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation and the German Tourism Association. On 13 May 2013 Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier and the association's president, Reinhard Meyer, named the Uckermark the winning region. It had reached a final with the Allgäu, the Bavarian Forest, Juist and the Black Forest; 34 regions from 12 states had applied, and the Eifel received a separate prize for work on biological diversity. The ministry cited a network of businesses using renewable electricity, building energy-efficiency work and regional organic products, and operators offsetting emissions through the regional MoorFutures scheme. The 2014 profile, based on Zierke's account, presents that entry as part of linking tourism with environmental limits in a structurally weak district and of pulling local tourism associations into one approach.

After he entered the Bundestag, the association's members on 11 December 2013 unanimously changed the shareholder agreement so the GmbH could appoint two managing directors. Anet Hoppe was to serve with him. Landrat Dietmar Schulze, also chair of the association, said Hoppe would do the main work and that Zierke would be engaged, and paid, only by the hour. She was entered as managing director in 2014. His paid outside activity in that post was reported to the Bundestag as ending on 15 March 2018. The district's 2018 participation report lists him as managing director until 12 July 2018, and a register notice of 28 September 2018 states that he no longer held the office. Hoppe has remained managing director.

Local and party offices

Stefan Zierke joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 2008 and, from his entry into the Bundestag in 2013, held party posts in the Uckermark and on the Brandenburg state executive alongside offices inside the SPD parliamentary group. Until 2025 he also sat on the Prenzlau city council and the Uckermark district council.

Municipal mandates

From 2008 Zierke sat for the SPD in Prenzlau’s Stadtverordnetenversammlung, the city council. His curriculum vitae dates both his chairmanship of the SPD group on that council and his chairmanship of the supervisory board of Stadtwerke Prenzlau GmbH, the municipal utility wholly owned by the city, to 2009–2014. A council paper of 4 December 2008 had proposed appointing him, with Jürgen Hoppe, as one of the SPD members of that board. The city’s participation report for 2014 lists him as chair from 1 January to 28 September 2014, and as a member of the city council; after the local elections of May 2014 the board was reconstituted on 29 September 2014 under Marek Wöller-Beetz.

He joined the Kreistag of Landkreis Uckermark at the district election of 25 May 2014, returned as one of four SPD members in Wahlkreis 2 (Prenzlau). The Bundestag’s register of members’ outside offices records both that district-council seat and the Prenzlau council seat as honorary mandates ending on 16 May 2025. On 22 June 2025 the Nordkurier reported that, after more than 15 years in local politics, he had written to both bodies to resign. He wrote that the extra demands on his time could no longer be reconciled with the care local office required, pointing to his work as the SPD Bundestag group’s tourism-policy spokesperson, his renewed membership of the transport committee, and the presidency of the Bundesverband der Campingwirtschaft in Deutschland. He called the decision consistent rather than a discouraged withdrawal, and said Prenzlau remained his home and that he would stay reachable.

Uwe Jürgen Schmidt succeeded him on the city council. On the district council, Peter Reiss of Brüssow took the seat under the succession rule for the SPD list. A spokesperson for the district administration said that when a member does not take up or gives up a mandate, the district returning officer writes to the candidate on that party’s list, in the relevant constituency, who received the most votes; Reiss had accepted and was to be sworn in by the chair of the Kreistag at its next sitting.

SPD offices in Brandenburg and the Bundestag group

In the party organization, his curriculum vitae lists the chair of the SPD local branch (Ortsverein) in Prenzlau for 2021–2022, the chair of the SPD Unterbezirk Uckermark from 2018, a seat as assessor (Beisitzer) on the Brandenburg executive from 2016, and, from 2015, the speakership of the Brandenburg Landesgruppe in the SPD Bundestag group. In July 2023 the Unterbezirk’s members confirmed him as chair for a further two years; the board page names Sylvia Papendorf, Michael Witt and Martin Stransky as deputies. The Brandenburg SPD’s directory still lists him as chair of the Uckermark Unterbezirk. On 21 June 2025 a state party congress in Cottbus chose a new executive and the state association named Zierke among the Beisitzer, at the congress that re-elected Dietmar Woidke as state chair. The current Bundestag biography likewise describes him as a member of the Brandenburg SPD executive, as Unterbezirksvorsitzender of the SPD Uckermark, and as speaker of the Brandenburg state group.

From 2015 to 2018 he was chair (Vorsitzender) of the Landesgruppe Ost, the grouping of SPD members from the eastern Länder; the biography places that chairmanship immediately before his term as Parliamentary State Secretary from 2018 to 2021. The eastern group’s own site later lists him as one of its deputy speakers, with Frank Junge and Kathrin Michel as the speaking pair and Elisabeth Kaiser, Annika Klose and Martin Kröber as the other deputies. In the 18th Bundestag he also sat on the speaker circle (Sprecherkreis) of the Seeheimer Kreis, an organized current inside the SPD parliamentary group: a January 2016 capture of the circle’s history page names him, with Doris Barnett, Ulla Schmidt, Brigitte Zypries and others, among the members of that circle for the legislative period that opened in 2013.

Bundestag elections

Since 2013 Stefan Zierke has been the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in Bundestag constituency 57, Uckermark – Barnim I, in Brandenburg. The district takes in the whole of Uckermark and part of Barnim. In 2013 the Barnim portion was the towns of Eberswalde and Schorfheide together with the municipal associations Britz-Chorin-Oderberg and Joachimsthal (Schorfheide). The delimitation used in 2017, and still in force for 2025, added Wandlitz and Amt Biesenthal-Barnim; the rest of Barnim remains in constituency 59.

Each voter has two votes. The first vote (Erststimme) is for a candidate in the constituency, and the candidate with the most first votes finishes first there. The second vote (Zweitstimme) is for a party’s state list, a closed list whose order the party has already fixed, and it decides how many seats the party receives. Someone who does not finish first in the constituency can still enter the Bundestag in that list order, after members of the same party who were elected in constituencies have been counted against the party’s seats. From the 2025 election a party candidate who leads a constituency receives the seat only if the party’s second votes in the state cover it, the rule known as Zweitstimmendeckung.

At the election of 22 September 2013 the constituency had 160,234 eligible voters and turnout of 62.8 percent. Zierke, the SPD constituency nominee and fifth on its Brandenburg state list, received 23,235 first votes (23.5 percent). Sabine Stüber of Die Linke received 25,673 (26.0 percent). Jens Koeppen of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was elected with 38,394 votes (38.9 percent). Zierke’s seat in the 18th Bundestag was a list mandate for Brandenburg, with constituency 57 named as his district. The stenographic record of the chamber’s first sitting, on 22 October 2013, includes him among the members whose names were called.

The enlarged constituency voted on 24 September 2017. Of 184,716 eligible voters, 70.3 percent turned out. Zierke, fourth on the SPD state list and again the constituency candidate, received 24,843 first votes (19.4 percent), just behind Steffen John of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with 25,804 (20.2 percent). Koeppen kept the direct mandate with 39,102 votes (30.6 percent). For the 19th Bundestag the official biography again records the mandate as election over the state list, associated with constituency 57.

On 26 September 2021 there were 182,836 eligible voters and turnout of 71.6 percent. Zierke, third on the SPD state list, won the constituency with 38,247 first votes (29.6 percent). Hannes Gnauck of the AfD was second with 26,163 (20.3 percent), and Koeppen third with 22,991 (17.8 percent). The constituency electoral committee declared Zierke elected. The biography for the 20th term therefore marks the mandate “Direkt gewählt” for constituency 057.

The election of 23 February 2025 reversed that plurality. Of 180,128 eligible voters, 78.9 percent cast ballots. The final result of the Federal Returning Officer names Gnauck as elected in the constituency with 38.3 percent and Zierke as runner-up with 19.4 percent, equal to 53,912 AfD and 27,211 SPD first votes; Zierke’s share was 10.3 percentage points below his 2021 result. The CDU received 25,664 first votes (18.3 percent). SPD second votes in the constituency were 19,510 (13.8 percent). Zierke was again third on the SPD Brandenburg list admitted for the election. In the 21st Bundestag the mandate block records him as elected over the Brandenburg state list, and lists constituency 57 as a candidacy rather than as a direct seat. The same biography still describes him as the directly elected member for that constituency since 2021. That sentence refers to the mandate he won in 2021, not to the list seat he holds after finishing second to Gnauck in 2025.

Committees and spokesperson roles

In the 18th Bundestag (2013–2017), Stefan Zierke was an ordinary member of the Committee on Tourism (Ausschuss für Tourismus) and of the Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure (Ausschuss für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur), both from 22 October 2013 until the end of the term on 24 October 2017. The tourism committee is the Bundestag’s principal forum for tourism policy. The present 14-member body works on Germany’s position as a destination, staffing and digitalisation in the sector, conditions for travel agencies and tour operators, and travellers’ rights, including at European Union level. The transport committee prepares plenary decisions on legislation affecting roads, rail and other modes; the Bundestag describes the field as touching a major economic location and a hub of European passenger and freight traffic.

He was not, in that term, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) group’s lead spokesperson on tourism. His curriculum vitae lists him for 2013–2017 as the group’s deputy spokesperson on tourism policy and as its spokesperson on cycling policy (radpolitischer Sprecher). In an April 2017 reply published by Abgeordnetenwatch he called himself the SPD Bundestag group’s cycling-policy spokesperson (fahrradpolitischer Sprecher) and referred to increases, during that electoral term, in the federal budget line for cycle paths along federal roads and to additional money for cycle highways.

The archived biography for the 19th electoral term (2017–2021) does not list a seat on the transport or tourism committees. In the 20th Bundestag he returned to the tourism committee as an ordinary member and as the SPD group’s Obmann, or parliamentary-group coordinator, from 26 October 2021 to 25 March 2025. The Bundestag biography states that he has been the group’s tourism-policy spokesperson since 2021; the archived 20th-term record does not list a transport-committee seat. An Obmann or Obfrau is each parliamentary group’s main contact for its leadership inside a committee. Obleute help set the group’s line in committee, agree agendas and keep an overview of the detailed work.

In the 21st Bundestag the official membership list records him as an ordinary member, deputy chair and Obmann of the Committee on Tourism, and as an ordinary member of the Transport Committee (Verkehrsausschuss). The tourism committee was constituted on 21 May 2025 with 14 full members, three of them Social Democrats, including Zierke. Anja Karliczek of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) was elected chair that day. On 20 May 2025 the SPD parliamentary group elected its working-group spokespersons, a role it treats as that of Obmann or Obfrau: Zierke for tourism and Isabel Cademartori for transport. The group’s profile lists him as a member, not the spokesperson, of the transport working group, from 21 May 2025. On 24 June 2025 the group named him its candidate for deputy chair of the tourism committee, the office the Bundestag biography records him as holding. The biography’s summary of the term since 2025 is membership of the transport committee, the tourism-policy spokespersonship, and the deputy chair of the tourism committee.

The same membership list names him only as a deputy member (stellvertretendes Mitglied) of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development and Future Issues (Parlamentarischer Beirat für nachhaltige Entwicklung und Zukunftsfragen), not as a full member. The council presents itself as a watchdog on sustainability policy. It accompanies the federal government’s national strategy for sustainable development, starts debate across departmental lines, reports regularly to the Bundestag and submits an annual report with recommendations on medium- and long-term planning. The SPD group’s profile records a separate, short assignment: membership of its working group for that council from 9 to 15 September 2025 only. That entry does not describe a full seat on the council.

Apart from the committee seats, the Bundestag register of members’ interests lists Zierke as a member of the supervisory board of Die Autobahn GmbH des Bundes, in Berlin, from 14 November 2025. The company is wholly owned by the Federal Republic, represented by the Federal Ministry of Transport. Its corporate object is the federation’s tasks of planning, building, operating, maintaining, financing and managing the assets of the federal motorways; it also handles financial management for federal highways.

Under the articles of association and the Co-determination Act (Mitbestimmungsgesetz), the supervisory board at 31 December 2025 had ten shareholder representatives and ten employee representatives. Two shareholder representatives are proposed by the Bundestag committee responsible for the budget and two by the committee responsible for transport; six further shareholder representatives are appointed by the federation. The 2025 corporate-governance report places Zierke on the board from 15 November 2025, the day after the date given in the parliamentary register, for the remainder of that reporting year. The company’s organisation page, which also lists other members of the Bundestag on the shareholder side, continued to name him. Management and the supervisory board are required to cooperate in the company’s interest: management agrees its strategy with the board, submits specified transactions for consent and reports regularly on relevant questions. A presidium of the board prepares decisions on the appointment and dismissal of managing directors and on strategic questions, and an audit committee follows financial reporting, risk management, compliance, internal audit and the external audit.

Parliamentary State Secretary

On 14 March 2018 the Bundestag elected Angela Merkel chancellor for a fourth term, and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group named Caren Marks and Stefan Zierke as its parliamentary state secretaries at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. The Federal Chancellery published that assignment on 16 March 2018 in the Bundesanzeiger, in the list attached to the notice of the government formed on 14 March. Franziska Giffey, who succeeded Katarina Barley, received her certificate from President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and took the oath in the Bundestag that day; the ministry recorded that Zierke and Marks were sworn in as well. Zierke’s Bundestag biography dates the post from 2018 to 2021, inside the Fourth Merkel cabinet. A profile on the Bundestag’s youth site described parliamentary state secretaries as intermediaries between government and parliament, with an office in a ministry as well as in the Bundestag, working to the minister.

Public notices show him representing the ministry on care, demographic change, and voluntary engagement. On 1 October 2018, at a conference of Land senior citizens’ councils in Kassel, he called the work of family caregivers invaluable and pointed to multigenerational houses, local dementia alliances, the ministry’s care telephone, and advice for children and young people who look after relatives. On 5 October he visited Adorf im Vogtland, one of nine model municipalities in “Demografiewerkstatt Kommunen,” a ministry project supporting local planning for an ageing population. On 6 November in Potsdam he presented volunteer passports to more than 300 people active in sport in Brandenburg. In December 2020 he handed over the first grant under a European Social Fund programme against loneliness in later life, worth 5 million euros for 29 projects until September 2022, starting with 250,000 euros for Bildungseinrichtung Buckow e.V. in Schorfheide.

In an interview published on 21 August 2019 he said that, as parliamentary state secretary, he was responsible for the federal programme “Demokratie leben!”, which funded local work against right-wing extremism, religious extremism, and antisemitism. He described his part as visiting projects and taking what participants reported back to the ministry and the Bundestag, and he singled out a meeting with young people in Dresden because, he said, projects in eastern Germany mattered particularly to him. He added that Giffey wanted the programme to continue after the funding period due to end in 2019.

Hospice and palliative care were a repeated part of the same schedule. On 29 April 2019 in Potsdam he spoke when bodies in Brandenburg signed the Charter for the Care of the Severely Ill and the Dying, and said that people should not be left alone in one of the hardest times of life. On 12 September 2019, at the 25th anniversary of the German Association for Palliative Medicine, he announced a further three years of ministry funding for the association’s coordination office so that the charter’s recommendations could be carried into practice. On 12 May 2021 he greeted a first digital network meeting, using Brandenburg as the case, on care for children and young people with life-limiting illnesses where specialists are distant and provision crosses Land borders, and said that such care must not depend on where a family lives.

On 19 May 2021 Giffey asked Merkel to dismiss her, citing the continuing controversy over her doctoral thesis, and said she would remain the SPD’s lead candidate for the Berlin House of Representatives. Merkel took the decision with respect and regret. SPD co-chairs Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans said that Christine Lambrecht, already minister of justice and consumer protection, would lead the family ministry as well, on an acting basis, until the legislative period ended, rather than under the cabinet rule that would have passed the portfolio to the education minister. A government cabinet list updated on 20 May 2021 names Lambrecht in both posts. The office ended with the Scholz cabinet: Anne Spiegel of Alliance 90/The Greens took the oath as family minister on 8 December 2021, and the ministry recorded that Marks and Zierke, who had remained in post, were farewelled that day with Lambrecht. On 9 December Spiegel swore in Ekin Deligöz and Sven Lehmann, who succeeded them.

Honorary offices

The Deutsche Parlamentarische Gesellschaft is a registered association, not a formal body of the Bundestag. It uses the former Reichstagspräsidentenpalais beside the Reichstag in Berlin so that current and former members of the Bundestag, state parliaments and the European Parliament can talk across party lines away from publicity. A report of 16 October 2025 put membership at about 2,000, with some 60 staff and roughly two to three million euros a year from the federal budget.

The Bundestag’s side-activity record lists Zierke as honorary president from 30 November 2022 until 25 September 2025. The narrative biography on the current page still says “since 2022,” with no end date. That start followed a voided vote. On 27 April 2022 a members’ meeting elected a board as one list, with Zierke of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as the intended president and deputies from the SPD, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Greens, the FDP and the Left, and no one from the Alternative for Germany. On 12 September 2022 the Amtsgericht Berlin-Mitte, on an application by AfD members Stephan Brandner and Malte Kaufmann, issued an interim injunction (12 C 59/22 eV) holding that block vote invalid because the statutes did not allow it.

On 23 September 2025, the day before a members’ meeting, Hasepost reported, citing Stern, that the outgoing board had nominated Armin Laschet of the CDU to succeed Zierke, with confirmation expected as a formality. Laschet’s Bundestag biography lists him as president from 2025, and the 16 October report described him as in office for about two weeks.

The Bundesverband der Campingwirtschaft in Deutschland (BVCD) appears in the Bundestag lobby register as a trade association. Its own entry says it represents campsite and motorhome-pitch operators before authorities and other bodies and is a federal platform for the camping industry. First filed on 9 March 2022, and listing 80 member organisations in its September 2026 version, the entry names Zierke as president and as one of five people who directly conduct that representation, and notes that he sits in the Bundestag. The Bundestag publishes the presidency as honorary, with no end date.

He has held the post while serving as the SPD group’s tourism-policy spokesperson. On 22 June 2025 the Nordkurier reported that he was leaving the Prenzlau city council and the Uckermark district council, linking the strain to that spokesperson role, a return to the transport committee, and the BVCD presidency. It quoted him that the tasks had reached a limit he would not cross at the expense of local duties.

Until 8 December 2021 he was an honorary member of the Stiftungsrat of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur in Berlin. The 1998 Bundestag bill establishing it described that public-law foundation’s purpose as helping to examine the causes, history and consequences of dictatorship in the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR, and as keeping alive the memory of the injustice and its victims.

The disclosures also list an honorary board seat at the Kurt Schumacher Society (Kurt-Schumacher-Gesellschaft). The 19th-term entry called him deputy chairman, as the current biography, based on members’ own information, still does. From 10 May 2025 he is a Beisitzer of the AWO Bezirksverband Brandenburg Nord, and from 2 September 2025 an honorary member of the political advisory board of the Wirtschaftsforum der SPD. The biography, but not that schedule of offices, also names the AWO branch in Prenzlau, founding roles in the Prenzlau grammar-school support association and in “Wir für Prenzlau,” the Kunstverein Templin, a support association of the inland-shipping museum in Oderberg, donor status at the Bürgerstiftung Barnim Uckermark, the ACE Auto Club Europa, Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband and NaturFreunde Deutschlands. Among other disclosed outside posts, rather than association offices, are a supervisory-board seat at Die Autobahn GmbH des Bundes from 14 November 2025 and an honorary one at GLG Gesellschaft für Leben und Gesundheit mbH until 19 May 2025.

Political positions and public reception

Zierke, of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), has described his Bundestag work as linking northeastern Brandenburg to federal law. In a January 2025 Nordkurier interview he called tourism one of the Uckermark’s main economic factors, tying that to his earlier management of the district’s tourism-marketing company and to his unpaid presidency of the Bundesverband der Campingwirtschaft in Deutschland, which Abgeordnetenwatch lists beside the mandate.

He has argued against copying better-known neighbours. In February 2025 he told the Märkische Oderzeitung that Barnim, the Schorfheide and the Uckermark should be marketed together as “NaturReich,” with sustainability—not a local Spreewald gherkin—as the product. He cited industrial heritage and the Finow Canal in Eberswalde, and cycling, canoeing and hiking; mass tourism and large hotels, he said, did not fit Oderberg. He recalled the Uckermark’s 2013 award as Germany’s most sustainable travel region. In a speech entered in the record on 11 June 2026 he backed the National Tourism Strategy’s case for less bureaucracy, a permanent cut in value-added tax on meals to 7 percent, linked transport, digital networks, training and managed recruitment, and a standing forum of federation, Länder, municipalities and industry, set against extreme weather and demand for reliable destinations.

On the Berlin–Brandenburg i2030 site he put reliability first and, for Uckermark–Barnim, named the northern corridor—the Heidekrautbahn and the Nordbahn—the link toward Poland, and more frequent commuter services, which he said needed federation, Land and municipalities to finance together. In June 2025 he told the Nordkurier of a 2013 “coup” in the transport committee that put Verkehrsverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (VBB) tickets onto ICE trains, offered as proof that “large wheels” could be turned for small regions; the paper attributed that account to him. The exception itself ended independently of that claim. In March 2025 the paper reported that DB Fernverkehr, the long-distance arm of Deutsche Bahn, had cancelled, from 14 December, VBB tickets on ICE and IC trains between Berlin and Prenzlau, Potsdam and Cottbus, and Berlin and Doberlug-Kirchhain. State secretary Ina Bartmann called that “very regrettable”: the railway’s alternatives would almost triple the cost and were unaffordable.

As parliamentary state secretary for family affairs from 2018 to 2021 he listed, on Abgeordnetenwatch, engagement policy, democracy promotion, demographic change and welfare care. He described “Demokratie leben!” as funding local partnerships, Länder centres and projects against right-wing extremism, violent Salafism and antisemitism, at about €116 million a year. On 1 October 2018 in Kassel he called family care “incalculable work.” The ministry noted nearly 2.9 million people then needed care, two thirds of them looked after at home by relatives; he pointed to more than 1,000 advice points, the care telephone and a ten-day paid break under Pflegezeit. Youth-council chairs pressed him on associations as “workshops of democracy,” pupils’ free time and BAföG credit for voluntary work. In September 2026, asked about respite care (Verhinderungspflege), he wrote that the bill was still in procedure and that his group also found the passage critical.

In September 2017 he called lobbying part of democracy, described himself as a “lobbyist for our region,” and backed a mandatory Bundestag register plus an “executive footprint” for ministerial drafts. In September 2021 he rejected a “legislative footprint” for members’ own contacts as something that would “almost paralyse” deputies and the administration, clash with the free mandate and be barely checkable. He has not signed Abgeordnetenwatch’s transparency pledge; the camping presidency is listed as unpaid, and regional papers have treated it as workload, not a scandal. In December 2018 a constituent called his vote to extend unanaesthetised piglet castration a scandal. He answered in January 2019 that it was a CDU compromise, with an end date of 31 December 2020 and €38 million in the 2019 budget for equipment. He would have preferred an earlier ban, he wrote, but said farms were not ready and that imports would have meant pigs “with a much longer path of suffering.”

Regional coverage is portrait and campaign reporting, not a sustained controversy. The Nordkurier and the Märkische Oderzeitung cast him as a tourism specialist; a Tagesspiegel Background briefing of 4 August 2025, in the introduction available without a subscription, added holiday-region transport and concern at the Alternative for Germany (AfD). In January 2025 he said the tone at stalls had grown harsher, blamed people who wanted to damage or abolish democracy, and treated that as a reason to continue.

The constituency did not follow that argument on 23 February 2025. In Uckermark – Barnim I, final figures gave AfD candidate Hannes Gnauck 38.3 percent of first votes (53,912), up 18.1 points, and Zierke 19.4 percent (27,211), down 10.3; the CDU candidate took 18.3 percent. On second votes the AfD led with 36.0 percent and the SPD fell to 13.8 percent, down 17.5; turnout was 78.9 percent. Zierke, the direct member since 2021, returned in third place on the Brandenburg SPD Land list. In June 2025 he left the Prenzlau city council, held since 2008, and the district council, writing that Bundestag work no longer fitted local office. The Nordkurier noted the camping presidency and the loss to Gnauck. He called the step consistent, not a resignation, and said Prenzlau remained his home.

Personal life

Stefan Zierke was born on 5 December 1970 in Prenzlau, in northeastern Brandenburg. The Bundestag biography states that he is married and has two children, without naming his spouse or the children. A September 2013 profile in the regional daily Nordkurier described him as the son of a Maschinenmeister, a machine supervisor, and a dental nurse, and reported his recollection that as a child he had wanted to become a forester and spend his time in the woods.

He has remained in Prenzlau and the surrounding Uckermark. The transparency platform Abgeordnetenwatch lists Prenzlau as his place of residence. In a March 2022 interview with Die Welt he said that he had lived all his life in the Uckermark, which he called his private as well as his political home. His website states that the family likes living in the northeast of Brandenburg. In June 2025, writing to Prenzlau’s city assembly and the Uckermark district council as he gave up those local seats, he closed with the lines “Prenzlau remains my home. I remain reachable.” The Nordkurier identified him in that report as an SPD politician from Prenzlau.

The 2013 profile named his wife as Sandra, then a personnel specialist (Personalfachkauffrau), and stated that the couple had been married since 1996 and had two children. Zierke told the paper that his family’s support was one reason he was willing to seek a Bundestag nomination. Die Welt later repeated the 1996 marriage date and specified one daughter and one son; the children’s names are not given in these accounts.

Published accounts of his spare time stay close to that household. The Nordkurier called him an avid hiker and dancer. He told Die Welt that he walks with his dog and family in the Uckermark, usually goes dancing with his wife, and prefers holidays by caravan, playing cards in the awning and otherwise resting. Short trips stayed in the region: the campsite at Thomsdorf, in Boitzenburger Land, was his first stop, a place with forest and lakes that he had already visited as a child with his parents. Longer holidays, he said, were usually in France or Italy. His Labrador Retriever, Ida, joined the shorter outings and stayed at home or in kennels when the journey was longer.