Thomas Rachel

Thomas Walther Rachel (born 17 May 1962 in Düren) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag for the Düren constituency in North Rhine-Westphalia. He has sat in the Bundestag since 1994. The parliament's biography, which rests on the member's own statements, lists him as a political scientist, Protestant, married, and the father of one daughter.

Rachel passed the Abitur in 1982 at the Städtisches Gymnasium am Wirteltor in Düren, held a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 1985, and in 1992 received a Magister Artium from the University of Bonn in political science, history and public law. From 1992 to 2004 he was an employee of the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Stahl in Düsseldorf.

From 1998 he was the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's spokesman on education and research, and from 2003 to 2005 its spokesman on the study commission on the ethics and law of modern medicine. On 25 November 2005 Federal Education Minister Annette Schavan swore him in as parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research; the Bundestag dates that office from November 2005 to December 2021. Since 28 May 2025 he has been the federal government's commissioner for freedom of religion or belief, a post placed at the Federal Foreign Office. In the 21st Bundestag he is an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he chairs the German–Greek parliamentary group.

Inside the CDU he has chaired the Evangelical Working Group of the CDU/CSU since 2003, the Aachen district party since 2011, and the Düren county party since 2012. He was a member of the regional synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland from 2000 to 2024 and has sat on the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany since November 2015. At the 2025 federal election he won constituency 89, Düren, with 64,996 first votes (39.9 percent), ahead of Daniel Walter of the SPD (22.0 percent), on a turnout of 82.6 percent. Taking up the religious-freedom brief, he said that three quarters of people live in a country that restricts freedom of religion or belief, and that he would speak both for those persecuted for their faith and for those discriminated against because they belong to no religion.

Early life and education

Schooling in Düren

Thomas Rachel was born on 17 May 1962 in Birkesdorf, a municipality that on 1 January 1972 was incorporated, with other formerly independent places, into the city of Düren in North Rhine-Westphalia. Published birthplace lines differ in how closely they name that place. The Bundestag biography for the current electoral term says he was born in Düren, and it states that members’ biographical entries rest on their own information; structured data on the same page record the birthplace as “Birkesdorf (jetzt Düren)”. The CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s profile gives “Düren-Birkesdorf”.

He has written that he attended the Martin-Luther-Schule and then the Wirteltor-Gymnasium in Düren. Official biographies date the Abitur to 1982 at the Städtisches Gymnasium am Wirteltor. The school traces itself to a private boys’ school opened on 10 July 1828 by Protestant industrialists in Düren, foremost the cloth manufacturer Leopold Schoeller, who wanted instruction in the sciences and modern languages alongside the city’s humanistic Latin school, which had been raised to that status in 1826. From 1963 it was the Städtisches mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliches und neusprachliches Gymnasium, known locally as the “Natu” and then the largest Gymnasium in Düren; under headmaster Heinz Seeger (1966–1990) it took the name Gymnasium am Wirteltor, after a long-destroyed northern city gate near the grounds. The building in the Theodor-Heuss-Park, formerly Schoeller-Park, has been used since 1960 and has been extended and modernized several times since.

Studies at the University of Bonn

Rachel studied political science, history and constitutional law (Staatsrecht) at the University of Bonn, and in 1992 received the Magister Artium in those subjects. While a student, in 1984–85, he was an elected member of the Engere Fakultät and of the university’s Großer Senat. In 1985 he became a scholarship holder of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The foundation is one of thirteen Begabtenförderungswerke through which the federal government funds scholarships. As the ministry describes the scheme today, the works are meant to reflect a range of political, religious and other currents; the grant is income-related, on the model of federal student aid, with an additional flat payment for study costs and a non-financial programme of seminars, and the foundations rather than the ministry decide who is admitted.

The Bonn years also cover his first recorded offices in party youth politics and in parliament. From 1985 to 1995 he was Kreisvorsitzender of the Junge Union, and from 1988 to 1996 deputy Landesvorsitzender of its association in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Junge Union describes itself as part of the family of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, while remaining programmatically, organizationally and financially independent of the two parties. From 1986 to 1987 he worked as an assistant to the Bundestag member Matthias Wissmann.

Professional career

Wirtschaftsvereinigung Stahl

From 1992 to 2004 Rachel was an employee of the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Stahl (WV Stahl) in Düsseldorf. A Bundestag biography captured in December 2005 records that in 1992 he headed the association’s office in Bonn and that from 1994 to 2004 he was deputy head of its department for fundamental questions and foreign trade (Grundsatzfragen / Außenhandel) in Düsseldorf, overlapping his membership of the Bundestag from 1994.

WV Stahl is the business association of the German steel industry, with its registered office in Berlin and an entry in the Bundestag lobby register; the fields it lists include energy and climate policy and economic and trade policy. In the disclosures required of members, the Bundestag places the employment under professional activity before he joined parliament and records a right of return (Rückkehrrecht). The notice gives neither salary nor hours. The current biography, which the Bundestag says rests on members’ own information, summarises the period only as employment in Düsseldorf from 1992 to 2004.

Advisory and board roles

Later disclosures list advisory and trustee roles rather than a return to a staff post at WV Stahl. Until June 2025 he was an honorary member of the advisory board of the German Institute for Development Evaluation (Deutsches Evaluierungsinstitut der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, DEval) in Bonn. DEval is a non-profit company whose sole shareholder is the Federal Republic, represented by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The advisory board, required by the articles of association, advises on the evaluation programme, methods and findings; Rachel is not on the institute’s current membership list.

Since 2025 he has been a member of the advisory board of Engagement Global’s ASA programme, which the Bundestag also records. ASA is a development-policy scholarship scheme that each year places 280 young adults in projects in Germany and in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and south-eastern Europe. The same notice lists him, until 31 December 2025, on the Zukunftsrat of Westenergie AG in Essen, an energy supplier and subsidiary of E.ON. Neither post is marked honorary, and no payment is stated.

Other entries are marked honorary. They include the Konferenz Diakonie und Entwicklung of the Evangelisches Werk für Diakonie und Entwicklung, which joins Diakonie Deutschland with Brot für die Welt and Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, and the board of trustees of the Hermann Kunst Foundation for the promotion of New Testament textual research in Münster. The foundation supports the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster, and the university’s list of trustees includes Rachel. He is also an honorary trustee of the Leo Baeck Foundation in Potsdam and is an honorary member of the advisory board of the Vereinigung der Deutsch-Griechischen Gesellschaften in Bonn, the umbrella for societies concerned with Greek culture and exchange with Greece. From 27 March 2026 the notices add the board of trustees of the House of One in Berlin, whose building for the three Abrahamic religions is under construction at Petriplatz; that entry is not labelled honorary.

Party career in the CDU

Local and regional offices

Rachel’s offices in the Christian Democratic Union in North Rhine-Westphalia are in the Düren area and in the party’s Aachen Bezirk, the tier above the local associations. His Bundestag biography, which reproduces the member’s own curriculum vitae, lists him as CDU Kreisvorsitzender (district chairman) in Kreis Düren since 2012 and as Bezirksvorsitzender (regional chairman) of CDU Bezirk Aachen since 2011. The CDU Kreisverband Düren-Jülich still names him district chairman. An obituary from the Kreis Düren administration records that Karl Schavier led the district party from 1989 until 2012.

The Bezirk covers the Städteregion Aachen and the districts of Düren, Euskirchen and Heinsberg. On 29 March 2023 a congress in the Kulturmuschel in Jülich re-elected Rachel with 98 percent of the vote. Paul Ziemiak, then general secretary of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, attended. Rachel argued that bringing the lignite exit forward to 2030 required faster structural change in the Rhenish mining region, including adjustment payments for coal workers, tenders for hydrogen-capable gas plants and federal aid for firms already there. The congress also called for more federal help for municipalities housing refugees and for so-called safe countries of origin to be designated, which it said the Greens were blocking. Deputies elected that day were Bernd Krückel, Ingo Pfennings, Hendrik Schmitz and Sabine Verheyen. On 17 May 2025 a congress in Mechernich-Kommern again elected him chairman; the Düren-Jülich association described the margin only as convincing and named Nathanael Liminski, head of the state chancellery, as guest.

Evangelical Working Group of the CDU/CSU

The Evangelischer Arbeitskreis (EAK) of the CDU and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria is the Protestant association inside the Union parties. It was founded on 14 March 1952 in Siegen on the initiative of Hermann Ehlers, then Bundestag president, when about 200 Christian Democrats met to discuss the Protestant profile of their party. The EAK describes itself as the body of Protestant Union members who want a politics accountable “before God and man,” and as a bridge open to non-members. On its seventieth anniversary it put membership at about 200,000. The CDU statute lists it as one of eight federal associations (Vereinigungen), charged with carrying Protestant concerns into party policy. Chairs of those associations attend federal-executive meetings in an advisory capacity, and their federal boards may table motions at the federal party congress.

The EAK’s list of federal chairmen runs from Ehlers through Robert Tillmanns, the CDU politician Gerhard Schröder (1955–78), Roman Herzog (1978–84), Albrecht Martin, Peter Hintze, Angela Merkel (1992–93) and Jochen Borchert (1993–2003). It dates Rachel’s chairmanship from 2003. The magazine PRO reported that he had been on the EAK federal board since 1995 and that a postal ballot after a digital congress on 12 May 2021 confirmed him for a tenth consecutive term with about 97 percent. Deputies included former Thuringian minister-president Christine Lieberknecht and the CSU’s Christian Schmidt. The EAK’s magazine reported a further re-election, with 96.4 percent, at the 55th Bundestagung in Hanover’s Heinz-von-Heiden-Arena during the 2025 Kirchentag.

As chairman he has taken EAK positions into party debate on shop opening and on church papers. In November 2006, identified as head of the Union’s Protestant working group, he told Der Tagesspiegel that Advent must not be sacrificed to “an even more boundless consumer frenzy,” and announced a motion for that week’s CDU congress in Dresden. After the federalism reform moved shop-closing law to the Länder, the draft warned against wider Sunday and holiday opening, cited the constitutional protection of Sundays and holidays, and rejected an “economization of every area of life.” In July 2013 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported a statement in his name against an orientation paper of the Evangelical Church in Germany on marriage and family. Rachel said inadequate theology, and a sociological style marked by “gender” vocabulary, had “fogged” the biblical esteem for marriage, called that unacceptable, and asked for a new Protestant consensus treating marriage as a guiding model.

Bundestag membership and elections

Terms since 1994

Thomas Rachel took his seat when the 13th Bundestag met for its first sitting on 10 November 1994. The Bundestag’s data handbook lists him as a Christian Democratic Union of Germany member in every electoral term from the 13th through the 21st. His official biography, compiled from the member’s own return, describes him as the member for the Düren constituency since 1994; committee posts and his years as a parliamentary state secretary are recorded separately from the electoral record.

Until the electoral-law reform applied at the 2025 election, a candidate with the most first votes in a constituency received that seat, and further members entered from state lists. The Federal Statistical Office’s register of finally elected constituency candidates for 1994 includes Rachel for the Düren seat. In 1998 and 2002 the same series lists him instead among the CDU members elected from the North Rhine-Westphalia state list, in 1998 at list place 21.

The Düren constituency

The seat is the federal constituency named Düren in North Rhine-Westphalia. For the 2013, 2021 and 2025 elections the Federal Returning Officer’s delimitation states that the constituency comprises the district of Düren (Kreis Düren). Its number has changed with the nationwide division of seats: it was constituency 56 at the 1994 and 1998 elections, 91 from 2002 through 2009, 90 from 2013 through 2021, and 89 in 2025, while the official result files kept the name Düren.

On 31 December 2023 the constituency contained 15 municipalities, covered 941.5 square kilometres and had 278,500 inhabitants, a density of 295.8 people per square kilometre. At the 2025 election, 199,301 people were eligible to vote.

Results through 2025

At the election of 16 October 1994, constituency 56 cast 70,897 valid first votes for the CDU (46.2 percent) and 66,986 for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (43.7 percent). Turnout was 83.7 percent, 158,145 of 188,853 eligible voters. Rachel appears in the register of constituency candidates finally elected.

On 27 September 1998 the SPD led the first vote in constituency 56 with 75,330 votes (47.1 percent) to the CDU’s 69,471 (43.4 percent); turnout was 84.4 percent. The directly elected candidate was Dietmar Nietan of the SPD, with 47.1 percent. Rachel entered through the CDU state list.

On 22 September 2002, in the renumbered constituency 91, the SPD again led, with 70,999 first votes (45.5 percent) against 67,622 for the CDU (43.3 percent). Turnout was 80.4 percent. Nietan was again the elected constituency candidate, and Rachel was again among the CDU members returned from the North Rhine-Westphalia list.

The CDU then led the first vote at every subsequent election in the district. In constituency 91 on 18 September 2005 it received 68,166 first votes (45.0 percent) to the SPD’s 64,858 (42.8 percent), with turnout at 77.6 percent. On 27 September 2009 the CDU’s 65,662 first votes were 46.4 percent and the SPD’s 43,655 were 30.8 percent; turnout was 72.1 percent. Those two result files give party totals rather than the candidate’s name. Under the law then in force, the plurality of first votes carried the constituency seat.

In constituency 90 the Federal Returning Officer names the CDU as the party of the elected constituency candidate in 2013, 2017 and 2021. On 22 September 2013 the CDU received 71,903 first votes (50.4 percent) and the SPD 48,849 (34.2 percent), with turnout at 72.9 percent. On 24 September 2017 the figures were 62,711 (41.9 percent) for the CDU and 47,543 (31.7 percent) for the SPD, and turnout was 75.9 percent. On 26 September 2021 the CDU’s 55,719 first votes were 36.7 percent and the SPD’s 46,734 were 30.8 percent; turnout was 77.0 percent. Rachel is recorded as a member in the 16th through 20th terms covering those five elections.

The reform adopted in 2023, and first used on 23 February 2025, changed that rule. A candidate of a party now obtains a constituency seat only by winning the most first votes and by that seat also being covered by the party’s second votes (Zweitstimmendeckung). A first-vote plurality alone does not guarantee a place in the Bundestag. In constituency 89, Rachel (Thomas Walther Rachel) received 64,996 first votes, 39.9 percent, ahead of Daniel Walter of the SPD with 35,854 votes (22.0 percent). The Alternative for Germany received 33,137 first votes (20.3 percent). Turnout was 82.6 percent, 164,552 of 199,301 eligible voters. On second votes the CDU’s share was 33.3 percent (54,483). The Returning Officer’s file of elected candidates records him as returned on the constituency nomination for Wahlkreis 89, with a linked place 9 on the CDU list in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Bundestag lists the mandate as a Wahlkreismandat for constituency 089.

Education, research and bioethics

Committee work and enquete commissions

From 1998 to 2005 Rachel was the CDU/CSU group's Obmann for education and research policy in the Bundestag, a role recorded in the biography published by parliament. The same biography lists him, from 1999 to 2002, as deputy chairman of the study commission "Globalisierung der Weltwirtschaft" (globalisation of the world economy) and, from 2003 to 2005, as the CDU/CSU spokesman on the study commission "Ethik und Recht der modernen Medizin" (ethics and law of modern medicine).

The ethics commission was established on 20 February 2003, on a motion of the SPD, the CDU/CSU and Alliance 90/The Greens, to continue the previous parliament's work and prepare recommendations on medicine and its ethical assessment. Its status report of 6 September 2005, issued because the term ended early, says stem-cell research was no longer the priority. The work centred on the end of life, transplant medicine, the ethics of medical research, and how scarce health-care resources should be distributed. René Röspel (SPD) chaired it and Hubert Hüppe (CDU/CSU) was deputy chair; Rachel was the CDU/CSU Obmann. Half the members were MPs and half outside experts. The body took opinions on ethics committees, protection of research participants, palliative care and the ethics of allocation, and the 2005 text is a stocktaking rather than a finished set of bills.

Parliamentary State Secretary, 2005–2021

On 22 November 2005 Rachel was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary to the federal minister of education and research. His later Bundestag biography dates the office from November 2005 to December 2021, covering the cabinets of Chancellor Angela Merkel. He served first under Annette Schavan. On 5 February 2013 the faculty council of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf declared her written doctoral work invalid and withdrew the degree; Der Spiegel published the council's statement. On 9 February Schavan resigned. Merkel accepted the resignation and named Johanna Wanka, then science minister of Lower Saxony, as her successor. Reporting of the plagiarism affair did not accuse Rachel. He remained state secretary under Wanka and, after Anja Karliczek was sworn in as education and research minister on 14 March 2018, under Karliczek until he left the ministry in December 2021.

He also sat in coalition talks on the brief. In the 2013 CDU/CSU–SPD negotiations, the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia listed him, with Uwe Schummer, on the working group for science, education and research. A roster dated 25 January 2018 again placed him in the CDU contingent of that group, with Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Karin Prien among others.

In the Bundestag he spoke for the ministry on particular files, not as the author of the department's whole record. In the budget debate of 24 November 2016 he said that, since Merkel had become chancellor in 2005, the federal education and research budget had more than doubled and would rise by a further 1.2 billion euros the following year. He described the Pact for Research and Innovation as raising funding for the participating organisations by 3 percent a year, paid by the federation alone. On Wanka's initiative, he said, the federation and the Länder had presented an Excellence Strategy, carrying forward the time-limited Excellence Initiative, the Innovative Hochschule scheme and a programme for more predictable early-career posts. On 11 May 2016 he told the education committee that the federation planned to fund 1,000 tenure-track professorships with one billion euros over ten years, with a federal–state decision expected on 16 June. The Left and the Greens called 1,000 posts small beside a Wissenschaftsrat figure, cited in committee, of 7,000 to 7,500.

During the COVID-19 pandemic he answered for the ministry in the Bundestag debate of 19 November 2020 on help for schools. He said about 300,000 pupils were in quarantine, fewer than 5 percent, and that 95 percent were attending under distancing, hygiene, mask and ventilation rules; closures, he argued, should be a last resort because of the right to education and reliable care for younger children. He put eventual federal spending on the DigitalPakt Schule at 6.5 billion euros and described a further package of 500 million euros each for devices for pupils without their own, laptops for teachers, and IT administrators. Opposition interventions in the same debate asked how much of that money had actually been spent.

Science bodies and public controversies

The state secretaryship carried seats on research bodies. Mandatory Bundestag disclosures list him as a member of the Senate of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft ex officio until 31 December 2021, and as the education minister's representative on the board of governors of the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), with that seat recorded as ending on 1 March 2022. The biography he filed summarises both as running from 2006 to 2021. In the 2008 disclosure he was also listed as acting German chair of the GIF supervisory board, as German co-chair of the mixed commission for German–Russian scientific and technical cooperation, and as a member of the advisory board of North Rhine-Westphalia's stem-cell research competence network.

In the May/June 2018 issue of Evangelische Verantwortung, the magazine of the Protestant working group of the CDU/CSU, which he chaired, Rachel published "Lasst Kinder Kinder sein!". The article criticised a Berlin Senate handbook for kindergarten staff, Murat spielt Prinzessin, Alex hat zwei Mütter und Sophie heißt jetzt Ben (2018), on sexual and gender diversity in early-childhood pedagogy. He asked whether gender identity and sexual orientation concerned small children at kindergarten, whether the statistically usual family was being turned into a problematic special case, and whether Berlin's governing parties risked using children for an ideology. He wrote that the youngest should be allowed to be children without dealing with gender identity, and that questions of sexual diversity did not belong in kindergartens, "not in Berlin and not with us in the district of Düren". Green MP Kai Gehring asked whether those remarks—which he read as treating LGBTI families as a special case and awareness-raising as ideological—were the ministry's position, and what line it took on reducing homophobic and transphobic discrimination through education. Parliamentary State Secretary Michael Meister replied on 10 July 2018 that the text was Rachel's personal opinion as chairman of the Protestant working group, so the government saw no reason to comment further, and that the ministry stood for tolerance and age-appropriate pedagogy.

Churches and religious communities

Protestant church offices

Thomas Rachel, a Protestant member of the CDU/CSU in the Bundestag from Düren, has held unpaid Protestant church offices and seats on religious foundations. The Bundestag biography, based on members’ own information, lists him as a Landessynodaler of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland from 2000 to 2024, a deputy member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) since 2003, an EKD Council member since November 2015, and a trustee of the Leo Baeck Foundation since 2006. The EKD profile still dates the Rhineland seat and the deputy membership from 2000 and 2003, and still names him on the Council, without that 2024 end date.

The Landessynode is the highest governing body of the Rhineland church, which describes itself as the second-largest of the EKD’s 20 regional churches, with about 2.2 million members; it elects the Präses and the Präsidium that leads the church between annual meetings. The EKD Synod, one of three governing bodies, usually meets yearly to pass church laws and debate public questions; each member has two deputies. On 10 November 2015 in Bremen it and the Church Conference elected him, with the SPD politician Kerstin Griese, to the Council, the Leitungsorgan that leads the EKD where other organs are not responsible and represents Protestant Christianity in public. On 9 November 2021 he was re-elected, on the seventh ballot, with 120 of 146 votes.

Disclosures list an honorary trusteeship of the Hermann Kunst Foundation in Münster, which supports research on the earliest recoverable Greek text of the New Testament at the University of Münster; the foundation lists him as a trustee, with no start date in either source. The Leo Baeck Foundation in Potsdam describes itself as a platform for Jewish life, education and interreligious dialogue in Europe, continuing a 1937 foundation of the Jewish Community of Berlin for Rabbi Leo Baeck.

Spokesperson for churches and religious communities

From 2021 to 2025 Rachel was Fachsprecher für Kirchen und Religionsgemeinschaften of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. On the evening of 13 December 2021 the group elected him its spokesperson on church and religious policy, in succession to Hermann Gröhe. Since 2003 he had also chaired the Evangelical Working Group of the CDU/CSU.

In October 2023 he opposed a Council statement to a federal commission, which argued that abortion should in some situations be regulated outside the criminal code, with life protected by strengthening the pregnant woman rather than against her rights. He told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that this was a “Paradigmenwechsel” causing him “große Sorge”: section 218 was a “kluge, ausbalancierte Regelung”, the “doppelte Anwaltschaft” for a woman’s self-determination and the unborn life should not leave criminal law “ohne Not”, counselling should stay, and liberalisation risked a division like that in the United States.

Delegates at the 2023 EKD synod in Ulm, where the council statement on abortion law was debated.

At the synod in Ulm that November, critics were in the majority. Rachel said the compromise—abortion forbidden in principle, but not punished within set limits after counselling—should not be dropped without necessity. Deputy chair Kirsten Fehrs replied that the debate was not closed and that the shift in perspective had to be discussed.

He has treated Christian conviction as a limit on the Alternative for Germany. In September 2023, as working-group chairman, he demanded that Andreas Rödder leave the CDU basic-values commission after Rödder, in Stern, contemplated minority governments sometimes taking AfD votes, treated only a formal toleration deal as a red line, and urged an end to disputes over “falsche Brandmauern”. Rachel said the “C” set “eine klare Grenze nach rechts”, that toleration by the AfD was incompatible with Christian conviction, and that the AfD deliberately tolerated right-wing extremist ideas, antisemitism and racism and was “menschenverachtend, demokratiefeindlich, rechtsextrem”. On 12 June 2024, as religious-policy spokesperson, he said the “C” stopped conservatism sliding into “Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie”.

After statements by Fridays for Future International that the Protestant press service called hostile to Israel, Rachel said on 27 October 2023 that the German group and Luisa Neubauer should distance themselves “eindeutig und konsequent” and separate in structure and name from the international network. The remarks were, he said, unacceptable, and the EKD, which had backed the movement’s climate demands, must not keep ties with organisations spreading prejudice or hatred against Jews.

In Evangelische Verantwortung (June/July 2018), “Lasst Kinder Kinder sein!” criticised a Berlin handbook for kindergarten staff on sexual and gender diversity, saying such questions did not belong in kindergartens. Asked by Green MP Kai Gehring whether this was the education ministry’s line, parliamentary state secretary Michael Meister replied on 10 July 2018 that it was Rachel’s personal opinion as working-group chairman, that the government would not comment, and that the ministry stood for tolerance and age-appropriate teaching.

Foreign affairs and development cooperation

Committees and rapporteurships

In the 21st Bundestag, Thomas Rachel is an ordinary member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development and of the Foreign Affairs Committee, not the development committee’s Obmann. Constituted on 21 May 2025 with 18 members, the committee elected Wolfgang Stefinger of the CDU/CSU as chair; Rachel is one of six Union members. The published list names Denis Pauli (Alternative for Germany) as Obmann and Sanae Abdi (SPD), Schahina Gambir (Alliance 90/The Greens) and Charlotte Neuhäuser (Die Linke) as Obfrauen, but gives Rachel no such title. His Bundestag biography, based on members’ own disclosures, also records him since October 2022 as co-chair of the CDU/CSU working group on Latin America, as rapporteur for Greece on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and as rapporteur for Latin America and Africa on both committees. In the previous term the development committee failed, on 15 December 2021, to elect a chair—the AfD nominee Dietmar Friedhoff lacked a majority—and Rachel, as longest-serving member, chaired it provisionally until 12 January 2022, when Christoph Hoffmann of the FDP was elected deputy chair and took over the sittings.

German–Greek relations and regional portfolios

An archived Bundestag biography from the 16th electoral term records Rachel as deputy chair of the German–Greek Parliamentary Group from 1997 to 2005. He was not on the board in the 19th term, when Gregor Gysi chaired it and Josef Rief was the CDU/CSU deputy. In the 20th term the Bundestag’s board list names Lisa Badum of the Greens as chair and Rachel, with Carsten Träger (SPD) and Stephan Seiter (FDP), as deputies. In the 21st term his biography lists him as chair, and as an unpaid member of the advisory board of the Association of German–Greek Societies.

From 17 to 20 June 2024, still a board member, he travelled with Badum, Träger and Rainer Semet to Athens, Kozani in Western Macedonia and Thessaloniki. The Bundestag’s account, which quotes Badum and not Rachel, describes talks on the energy transition, the coal exit and youth exchange, and meetings with the new Greek–German friendship group and with parliament president Konstantinos Tassoulas. Badum said the financial-crisis dispute still weighed on the relationship.

Debates on development policy

Under the SPD–Green–FDP government, Rachel argued that development policy was dropping religion. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 13 June 2023 he wrote that for four out of five people worldwide religion has a high place in life, and that the government was misjudging cultural and religious patterns in partner countries. In Development and Cooperation on 6 February 2024 he directed the same charge at development minister Svenja Schulze: funding for the International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), started by Germany in 2016, had been cut and might end in early 2025, while the ministry’s Africa strategy and its feminist-development strategy mentioned religion only marginally. Ignoring that context “for ideological reasons”, he wrote, would look neocolonial, and the “self-declared feminist development policy” would fail without it. He set this against work under foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, development minister Gerd Müller and chancellor Angela Merkel.

On the budget he attacked cuts in opposition and later defended a smaller sum against deeper ones. On 12 September 2024, in the first reading of the 2025 budget of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, he called the draft a “historically unprecedented wave of cuts”, said more than €3 billion had gone over three years, and objected to halving the core grant to the UN World Food Programme, from €58 million to €28 million, and to a 45 percent cut for polio vaccination. He also said the FDP again wanted the ministry abolished. Green MP Felix Banaszak answered that Union budget spokespeople, and the CSU general secretary over cycle paths in Peru, had themselves sought further development cuts. Rachel rejected the comparison. On 9 July 2025, speaking for the CDU/CSU in government, he called the cuts painful but necessary, yet said a €1 billion reduction in humanitarian aid was unjustifiable because the World Food Programme could then reach only one in six acutely hungry people in Sudan. On 24 September 2025 he said €9.9 billion for 2026, about 1.9 percent of the federal budget, was not too much, and called an AfD proposal to abolish the ministry and cut its funds by 70 percent “pure clear-cutting”. Green MP Ulle Schauws replied that the coalition was cutting the 2025 development budget by nearly 10 percent and pushing 2026 under €10 billion, including hundreds of millions less for immunisation, which she called irresponsible; Left MP Gökay Akbulut said humanitarian aid was being halved against 2024.

Freedom of religion and human rights

Federal commissioner since 2025

On 28 May 2025 the federal cabinet appointed Thomas Rachel, a Christian Democratic Union member of the Bundestag, Federal Government Commissioner for Freedom of Religion or Belief (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfreiheit). He succeeded Frank Schwabe of the Social Democratic Party. The office, created in 2018 and until then at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, moved to the Federal Foreign Office for the 21st legislative period; missio Aachen describes the original post as a CDU/CSU initiative.

The Foreign Office describes the mandate as closer scrutiny of persecution, arbitrary detention, discrimination and administrative harassment because of religion or belief, or of belonging to none, and as speaking out for those affected. It also asks the commissioner to weigh religious actors in foreign policy, as influential civil-society partners and where religion feeds conflict or human-rights abuses. The federal directory states that he prepares, every two years, a government report on the worldwide situation covering all religions and beliefs. On appointment Rachel said three-quarters of people lived in a country that restricted the freedom, that religion mattered highly to four in five, and that the right was tied to freedoms of conscience, expression, assembly and the press. He called the transfer sensible and a strengthening of the work under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. missio's president, Dirk Bingener, saw a chance to put the issue into talks between governments, but asked how plainly a commissioner inside the Foreign Office would be able to speak.

Before the Bundestag human-rights committee on 3 December 2025 he said two-thirds of people lived in states where the freedom was restricted, sometimes severely. He cited "Sinicization" in China directed at Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians and Muslims, and systematic persecution of the Baháʼí in Iran. He called the Foreign Office posting an advantage because embassies could gather information. In October 2025 he told Domradio that about 30 pastors and other members of the independent Zion Church had been detained across six provinces, and demanded their release.

Writing in Die Welt on 26 December 2025, he described attacks and abductions in Nigeria as violence not reducible to religion alone, and wrote that in Nicaragua, amid the closure of more than 5,600 civil-society organizations, hundreds of church bodies and schools had been shut and clergy and lay people monitored, arrested or expelled. From 25 to 28 April 2026 he travelled to Nigeria for talks in Abuja with clergy, humanists and officials, and in Makurdi, Benue, including a visit to a camp for displaced people. From 14 to 18 September 2026 he went to Pakistan, where he noted constitutional guarantees of religious freedom alongside social and legal discrimination of some groups. From 25 to 27 October 2026 he attended the Community of Sant'Egidio peace meeting in Assisi, 40 years after Pope John Paul II's 1986 gathering, and was to speak at a forum titled "Europe – A Gentle Force?", arguing that religious actors should be drawn into peace efforts.

Political prisoners and parliamentary sponsorship

"Parliamentarians Protect Parliamentarians" (Parlamentarier schützen Parlamentarier), supervised by the human-rights committee secretariat, lets members sponsor persecuted parliamentarians, opposition figures and human-rights defenders. A March 2023 Bundestag profile said Rachel had recently sponsored Maria Kalesnikava (usually Kolesnikowa in German reports), a flutist who became a face of the 2020 protests in Belarus. In September 2020 she tore up her passport at the Ukrainian border to stop her expulsion and was then detained; in 2021 she was sentenced to 11 years on a charge Tagesschau reported as conspiracy to seize power. The 2023 profile also recorded a sponsorship for an Iranian Christian convert.

The Bundestag later reported that he had demanded her release since 2020 and had started a signature campaign whose lists were addressed to the Belarusian government. On 13 December 2025 she was among 123 political prisoners freed, including Nobel peace laureate Ales Bialiatski, after Alexander Lukashenko announced pardons as the United States lifted trade sanctions, including on potash; Viasna said 114 of them, Kalesnikava included, were bused to Ukraine. Rachel called the release a surprise and said that "Free Maria" had at last come true, adding that the sponsorship programme had, in his view, helped keep her case from being forgotten.

Interreligious dialogue

Rachel has been a member of the board of trustees of the Leo Baeck Foundation since 2006. In 2014 the Jewish Abraham Geiger College awarded him its Abraham Geiger Medal. From 27 March 2026 the Bundestag's register of outside activities listed him as an unpaid trustee of House of One in Berlin.

Personal life

Family

The Bundestag biography records Rachel as Protestant (evangelisch), married, and the father of one daughter, without naming his wife or child. A curriculum vitae published by the Federal Foreign Office uses the same formula.

His personal website states that he married his wife Lia in 1997 and that their daughter is growing up bilingual in German and Greek; the parliamentary and ministerial biographies do not repeat those details. At a reception in Athens on 5 October 2022 for German Unity Day, Ambassador Ernst Reichel welcomed “the member of the Bundestag Thomas Rachel with his wife, Frau Rachel-Tsakona,” and called him a particular friend of Greece.

Honors

In 2014 the Abraham Geiger College conferred on Rachel the Abraham-Geiger-Plakette, named for the liberal rabbi Abraham Geiger. The Federal Foreign Office lists the award in his official biography.

Jüdische Allgemeine reported the presentation for the evening of Tuesday, 25 November 2014, at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, during the college’s fifteenth anniversary. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, gave the laudation. She thanked him for supporting liberal rabbinical training since 2006 and for help in establishing the gifted-student foundation ELES, the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk, and called him a “master of science diplomacy” (Meister der Wissenschaftsdiplomatie). Rabbi Walter Jacob, president of the college, and Josef Joffe, a publisher of Die Zeit and chair of the college’s board of trustees, handed over the plaque. Rachel said that recent weeks and months had again brought growing anti-Judaism and hostility toward Israel, which he called deeply oppressive and worrying.

The same biography records a 2002 decoration, the Apostle’s Cross, second class (Apostelkreuz 2. Klasse), conferred by Petros VII, Greek Orthodox pope and patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa.