# Torben Braga

# Torben Braga

Torben Braga (born 27 August 1991 in Niterói, Brazil) is a German politician of [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany (AfD) and a political scientist. He has sat in the Bundestag since the constitutive meeting of the 21st electoral term on 25 March 2025, holding the AfD's only list seat from Thuringia, third place on the state list. He was a member of the Landtag of Thuringia from 2019 and, from February 2020, parliamentary managing director of its AfD group. He resigned the state mandate on entering the Bundestag, and Elisabeth Mengel-Stähle succeeded him on 26 March 2025.

Braga was born and raised in Niterói. He took the Abitur in 2009 at the Deutsche Schule Rio de Janeiro and, from 2010 to 2018, studied political science and public law at the University of Jena and in Marburg, completing a Master of Arts. He moved to Germany in 2010 and has declined to discuss his years in Brazil, telling *Folha de S.Paulo* that he preferred to keep personal matters private. His Bundestag district office is in Altenburg.

He belonged to the Free Democratic Party from 2012 to 2015 and has been a member of the AfD since 2015. Since 2016 he has sat on the Thuringian state executive, as press spokesman throughout that period and as deputy state spokesperson from 2018 to 2024; from 2015 to 2019 he was a staff member of the AfD Landtag group. In the 2025 German federal election the AfD won 38.6 percent of second votes in Thuringia and eight seats, seven of them by direct mandate. In the Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on [Foreign Affairs](/organizations/foreign-affairs), the Finance Committee, the Subcommittee on Arms Control, Non-Proliferation and International Disarmament, and the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, and a substitute member of the Defence Committee and the Budget Committee. Alongside the mandate he is managing director of, and holds a participation in, atesto UG in Erfurt.

News reporting has described him as a close associate of the Thuringian AfD leader Björn Höcke. After his re-election to the Landtag in 2024 he told *Folha* that a functioning social system and open borders were irreconcilable, and he rejected a classification of the Thuringian AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist, which the newspaper attributed to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. At the March 2025 constitutive sitting he wore a blue flower on his lapel. The historian and memorial-site director Jens-Christian Wagner told the *taz* that he regarded the flower as a cornflower and as a deliberate positive reference to National Socialism; Braga replied in writing that it was not a cornflower and that the imputation was absurd. The same paper's February 2020 reporting placed him in the front row beside Höcke when the Landtag elected the FDP politician [Thomas Kemmerich](/people/thomas-kemmerich) minister-president with AfD votes, and recorded that Philipp Stein of the network Ein Prozent called Braga the strategist of that vote switch.

## Early life and education

### Birth and schooling in Brazil

Torben Braga was born on 27 August 1991 in Niterói, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. The biography on the website of the [German Bundestag](/organizations/german-bundestag), which the parliament states is based on information supplied by members themselves, records that date and place and does not name his parents. Folha de S.Paulo reported in September 2024 that he was born and raised in Niterói and that he moved to Germany in 2010, the year after he left school and the year he entered a German university. He declined to discuss that period, telling the newspaper that he preferred to keep personal matters private, and he asked that the interview be conducted in German. On 27 September 2024, in a written reply on Abgeordnetenwatch, he described German, English and Portuguese as his mother tongues and said he still used them often enough to regard his command of each as native-level.

The Bundestag biography states that in 2009 he passed the Abitur, the German school-leaving qualification for university, at the Deutsche Schule Rio de Janeiro. Folha identified the same institution by its Portuguese name, Escola Alemã Corcovado, and likewise placed the graduation in 2009. The school is not in Niterói. Its profile on the teacher-placement site Lehrer weltweit gives the address as Rua São Clemente 388 in Botafogo, a neighborhood of the city of Rio de Janeiro, across Guanabara Bay from his birthplace. That profile lists a Begegnungsschule founded in 1965 and maintained by the Associação Escolar e Beneficente Corcovado, with German, English and Portuguese as languages of instruction and the Abitur (Allgemeine Hochschulreife) among the qualifications awarded. The profile’s own description presents the school as running from kindergarten through the Abitur and as organized around contact between Brazilian and German cultures. A notice in the Diário Oficial do Estado do Rio de Janeiro of 9 March 2010, reproduced in the Escavador archive of the gazette, names Torben Braga among those who completed ensino médio, the Brazilian upper-secondary course, in 2009 at Escola Alemã Corcovado-Experimental at that Botafogo address. The notice documents the Brazilian course; the Abitur is the qualification given in the Bundestag biography, not a separate line of the gazette text as reproduced.

### Studies in Jena and Marburg

According to the Bundestag biography, he studied political science and public law from 2010 to 2018 in Jena and in Marburg an der Lahn, in Hesse, and completed a Master of Arts. The same page lists his occupation as Politikwissenschaftler, a political scientist. Abgeordnetenwatch records the qualification as an M.A. in political science. Folha, which did not mention Marburg, reported that he studied political science and public law at the University of Jena and that he became involved there with Burschenschaften, traditional student corporations limited to men. The parliamentary biography names the two university cities and the degree but not a Marburg faculty or a thesis title.

Those accounts do not give a street address for the student years. Abgeordnetenwatch lists his place of residence as Altenburg, in Thuringia. The Bundestag biography does not state a home address; the Altenburg address it publishes, Kesselgasse 25, is identified there as a constituency office.

## Student fraternities

### Germania in Jena and Marburg

Accounts of Torben Braga's student years state that he joined two Burschenschaften: the Jenaische Burschenschaft Germania while studying in Jena, and in 2013 the Marburger Burschenschaft Germania after moving to Marburg. The same accounts state that in 2014 he chaired the Marburger Waffenring, a local association of corporations that practise academic fencing, and a 2024 profile still listed him as a member of the Marburg Germania, by then as an *Alter Herr*. In May 2015 the Deutsche Burschenschaft, the umbrella to which that corporation belonged, named him in its own press notice as a member of it and as the association's spokesman for the 2015 business year.

The Marburg house was already disputed. On 19 November 2015 Katharina König, antifascism spokesperson of the Left, said it had held a *Reichsgründungsfeier* early that year, drawing protests of several hundred, and—citing the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*—quoted Marburg's mayor calling its members *Ewiggestrige* ("stuck in the past"). She called it extremely right-wing, said its 2015 chairmanship of the Deutsche Burschenschaft had cemented a shift rightward, and said leading members had [New Right](/organizations/new-right) and neo-Nazi contacts and had invited speakers from that milieu. *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* the same day quoted her on neo-Nazi contacts and on the umbrella moving right through debates on "Aryan paragraphs" and descent.

In 2024 the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Hesse, in an answer by Interior Minister Roman Poseck (CDU) to Green deputies, assessed the *Aktivitas* of the Marburg Germania and of the Burschenschaft Rheinfranken—members still studying, a low double-digit number, not the alumni—as right-wing extremist. dpa and the *Marburger Magazin* reported isolated links to Der III. Weg, Die Heimat (the former [National Democratic Party](/organizations/national-democratic-party)) and the Identitarian movement, use of the houses for right-wing extremist events, and later posts in the Young Alternative held by individual Germania members. The finding concerned those students, not Braga.

### Spokesman of the Deutsche Burschenschaft

For the 2015 business year the Marburg Germania supplied the Deutsche Burschenschaft's spokesman. The association called a press briefing with Braga for 28 May at the Berghotel below the Burschenschaftsdenkmal in Eisenach, presenting the Burschentag as both the 200th anniversary of the original Burschenschaft, founded in Jena in 1815, and a "reorientation" after two years of consolidation.

He told dpa that, despite recent disputes, membership was growing and that he was not worried about the future; *Neues Deutschland* later quoted him on an "anchoring effect" for many students. The association's count, via dpa, was about 120 organisations and about 10,000 members in Germany and Austria, including 75 Burschenschaften; *Die Zeit* put member corporations at fewer than 70 since 2008 and called the umbrella ultra-conservative and right-leaning.

Several hundred members met at the monument on 29 May. The city told dpa that no protest had been registered, a first in years; *Die Zeit* reported that opponents active since 2011 sent only an open letter, while the Thuringian Left still urged resistance to the "reactionary activities of nationalist male societies." The programme was a commemoration, a ceremony and a torch procession at the monument; the Wartburg Foundation had refused the castle march in 2014. The Deutsche Burschenschaft later wrote that a municipal ban on a Wartburg event was again circumvented and that several hundred went up after Braga announced the Berliner Burschenschaft Gothia as chair for 2016.

*Die Zeit* read the guest list as a further shift to the right: Götz Kubitschek, publisher of *Sezession* and a figure of the New Right and the Identitarian movement, and Wilhelm Brauneder, a former Austrian National Council president for the [Freedom Party](/organizations/freedom-party). *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* recalled criticism two years earlier, when an *Ariernachweis*—proof of "Aryan" descent—was to be discussed at Eisenach. dpa noted the charge that had driven corporations out of the umbrella: that it had not acted firmly enough against right-wing extremist currents in its own ranks.

König, citing an interview, attributed to Braga a descent rule for admission: "If someone professes allegiance to Germany and is of German descent, he can be admitted with us." The title followed him briefly into the Landtag of Thuringia. On 19 November 2015 the Alternative for Germany sent him, still described as the association's spokesman, into the interior committee as an intern; the SPD and the Left had him excluded from the sitting. König called that posting proof of a "far-right connection of the AfD under Björn Höcke." The AfD's parliamentary manager, Stefan Möller, called the exclusion a defamation that might breach the Landtag's rules, and said the Deutsche Burschenschaft was not right-wing extremist and was not observed by the Verfassungsschutz.

## Path into the AfD

### Membership in the Free Democratic Party

The biography of Torben Braga on the website of the German Bundestag, which the parliament states is drawn from members' own disclosures, records that he belonged to the Free Democratic Party from 2012 to 2015 and has been a member of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) since 2015. It names neither a local FDP association nor any office in that party. A November 2024 profile by the American-German Institute reported that he had been drawn to the FDP by the Eurosceptic positions associated with Frank Schäffler and left after growing dissatisfied with the party's line on European integration and domestic policy, and with the leadership's discouragement of members sympathetic to Pegida. Pointing to a 2021 interview on the local station JenaTV, the profile also stated that in 2015 he interned with the [Freedom Party of Austria](/organizations/freedom-party-of-austria) in Vienna; neither that internship nor those motives appears in the Bundestag biography.

### State executive and Landtag staff

By November 2015 Braga was working for the AfD group in the Landtag of Thuringia. On 19 November the group sent him, then federal spokesman of the Deutsche Burschenschaft and a member of the Burschenschaft Germania in Marburg, into the interior committee as its intern. On a motion from [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) and the Social Democratic Party, the committee excluded him. Katharina König of Die Linke called it evidence of what she described as the "far-right connection of the AfD under Björn Höcke", citing ancestry debates in the Deutsche Burschenschaft and what she said were neo-Nazi links among leading members of Germania Marburg. Stefan Möller, the group's parliamentary managing director, called the exclusion a defamation campaign, possibly in breach of the Landtag's rules, and denied that the Deutsche Burschenschaft was right-wing extremist or under intelligence observation.

He was then also kept out of the education committee. Before a sitting of the committee for the economy and science, the AfD replaced the internship with an employment contract, a change Höcke confirmed in substance to *Neues Deutschland*; unlike interns, faction employees did not need the other groups' consent to attend. The pay field had been blacked out, but the Landtag administration could still see a grading of E1, the lowest public-service group, ordinarily used for unskilled work, and the red-red-green majority excluded him as insufficiently qualified beside the other staff. On 11 December 2015 coalition members Christian Schaft (Die Linke), Eleonore Mühlbauer (SPD) and Olaf Müller (Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens)) said the administration had advised that E1 contradicted the scientific advisory role of faction staff, and they criticized the contract as precarious employment; Höcke said he was appalled and threatened legal steps.

The Bundestag biography lists him as a staff member of the AfD Landtag group from 2015 to 2019. In July 2018 Andreas Speit, writing in *Die Tageszeitung*, described him as a *Referent* of that group and as a close associate of Höcke.

The AfD in Thuringia reported that its congress in Arnstadt on 22 October 2016 elected Braga one of six *Beisitzer* (assessors) on a twelve-member state executive whose speakers were Höcke and Möller. By March 2017 he was speaking for the state association: cited by dpa and MDR and reported by *Die Zeit*, he said an email from the federal executive about an expulsion case against Höcke did not yet meet the arbitration court's formal rules. In September 2018 the *Süddeutsche Zeitung*, citing dpa, identified him as the state association's press spokesman in comments on a prosecutor's inquiry into a district AfD page. On 11 December 2018 he announced in Erfurt that the state party and the Landtag group had filed an *Organklage* at the Thuringian Constitutional Court against the head of the state domestic-intelligence service and the interior minister over the classification of the state AfD as a *Prüffall*.

That biography states that he has been on the state executive since 2016: *Beisitzer* in 2016–2018 and again from 2024, deputy state spokesman from 2018 to 2024, and press spokesman since 2016. At the congress in Pfiffelbach on 21 November 2020, dpa reported, about 230 members elected him one of the deputy speakers with 75.1 percent. It also lists him as a *Beisitzer* of the district association Greiz–Altenburger Land in 2021–2022 and as treasurer of the Altenburger Land district association since 2022. He entered the Landtag in 2019, which ended the staff post; that mandate is separate from these party offices.

## Thuringian Landtag

### Elections of 2019 and 2024

Braga entered the Landtag of Thuringia at the state election of 27 October 2019. The official list of constituency candidates names him as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate in constituency 30, Weimarer Land I / Saalfeld-Rudolstadt III, and describes him as a political scientist from Ronneburg. In that constituency the AfD received 7,592 votes, 25.4 percent, behind the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany) (CDU) on 9,334 votes (31.2 percent); the direct seat went to Mike Mohring (CDU), and Die Linke took 7,296 votes (24.4 percent). Turnout was 71.0 percent among 42,795 eligible voters. Braga was not elected in the constituency. He took a Landtag seat from sixth place on the AfD state list. Statewide the AfD finished second, with 259,382 list votes (23.4 percent) and 22 of the 90 seats, 11 of them direct mandates and 11 from the list. State returning officer Günter Krombholz announced that the state election committee had certified the result on 7 November 2019.

At the election of 1 September 2024 he won a direct mandate in constituency 44, Altenburger Land II. The statistics office records Torben Braga (AfD) as elected there, on an AfD constituency vote of 10,327 out of 24,155 valid votes, or 42.8 percent, ahead of the CDU on 8,560 votes (35.4 percent). Turnout was 67.9 percent among 36,274 eligible voters. He was also fourth on the AfD state list, but the official return marks the seat as the direct mandate in constituency 44. Across Thuringia the AfD led the list vote with 396,711 votes (32.8 percent) and 32 seats, more than any other party. State returning officer Holger Poppenhäger announced the final result on 12 September 2024, after the state election committee had certified it that day.

### Parliamentary managing director

On 4 February 2020 the AfD group in Erfurt said that Braga had become its parliamentary managing director (*parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer*), succeeding Stefan Möller, who was made deputy. Möller said he wanted to concentrate on his offices as AfD state spokesman and as leader of the party’s group on Erfurt city council, and that concentrating the group’s business on him was no longer necessary after it had gained members at the October election. He held that post the next day, when the Landtag elected Thomas Kemmerich minister-president and the [2020 Thuringian government crisis](/facts/2020-thuringian-government-crisis) began. The Bundestag biography records him as parliamentary managing director of the AfD group from February 2020 in the seventh Landtag and again in the eighth.

In the seventh Landtag, Abgeordnetenwatch lists him as a member of the Council of Elders (*Ältestenrat*), the committee on migration, justice and consumer protection, the constitutional committee and the electoral-review committee. On 8 September 2023 he told the Landtag president that he had resigned, with immediate effect, as a deputy member of the committee that elects judges for life (*Richterwahlausschuss*). The same day the AfD group proposed him as a full member of that committee.

In the eighth Landtag the president reported, in a notice of 18 October 2024, that the AfD group had named Braga as a member of the Council of Elders. A further notice of committee membership, dated 29 January 2025, listed him as a deputy on the committee for justice, migration and consumer protection, whose chair was Stefan Möller, and as a deputy on the budget and finance committee.

### Resignation and succession

The Landtag announced on 25 March 2025 that, after Braga and Stefan Möller of the AfD and [Bodo Ramelow](/people/bodo-ramelow) of Die Linke had resigned their seats on accepting mandates for the Bundestag, Pascal Wloch and Elisabeth Mengel-Stähle would enter for the AfD on 26 March 2025 and Sascha Bilay for Die Linke. The successors had accepted the mandates before the state returning officer. The announcement describes Mengel-Stähle as a clerk in property and housing management in Stadtroda and says that she and Wloch were taking a Landtag seat for the first time. Abgeordnetenwatch records that Mengel-Stähle was the member who succeeded Braga and that he left the Landtag on 25 March 2025 after entering the Bundestag.

## The 2020 Thuringian government crisis

### The Kemmerich election

The Landtag of Thuringia elected on 27 October 2019 had no majority for a usual coalition. Of 90 seats, Die Linke held 29 (31.0 percent of the list vote), the Alternative for Germany (AfD) 22 (23.4 percent), the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 21 (21.7 percent), the Social Democratic Party eight, and Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) five each. The government of Bodo Ramelow therefore had 42 votes. Article 70(3) of the state constitution elects the minister-president by secret ballot: the first two ballots need a majority of members, and if that fails whoever has the most votes on a further ballot is elected.

On 5 February 2020 Ramelow stood again and the AfD nominated the non-party Christoph Kindervater. Ramelow received 43 votes to Kindervater's 25, with 22 abstentions, then 44 to 22, with 24 abstentions. Neither reached 46. The FDP put its leader, Thomas Kemmerich, forward only on a third ballot, and the CDU fielded no one. Landtag president Birgit Keller announced 90 votes: Kemmerich 45, Ramelow 44, Kindervater none, and one abstention. Kemmerich accepted and was sworn in. The ballot was secret. Kindervater's fall from 22 votes to zero matched the AfD's seats, and reporting inferred a bloc AfD vote for Kemmerich, joined by the FDP and nearly all of the CDU, with two opposition votes for Ramelow. The AfD had already said it might back a CDU or FDP minister-president; CDU leader Mike Mohring said his faction had voted as announced and was not answerable for other parties.

Kemmerich called the AfD votes a "perfidious trick" meant to damage democracy and spoke of new elections to remove what he called the "stain" of that support. Reporting found no evidence of a secret pact with the AfD of Björn Höcke. Stefan Möller, the AfD's co-state spokesman, described the sequence as intended: "Yes, that was the point of the whole strategy. We tried to lure Mr Kemmerich onto the platform as a counter-candidate in the first place. He did that. And then we elected him according to plan."

### Contemporary accounts of Braga's role

Torben Braga had become the AfD faction's parliamentary managing director on 4 February; Möller, his predecessor, was named deputy. The Berlin daily *taz* reported that only the AfD benches cheered Kemmerich's election, and that Braga sat in the front row beside Höcke. Philipp Stein, head of Ein Prozent, called Braga the "strategist" of the switch. Braga told *taz* he did not know why, though he called Stein "a clever man." He described the result as a "success" for the AfD, would not say how the faction had prepared, and said: "There were no agreements with other parties."

In a German Press Agency interview the same day he repeated that there had been "no talks with other factions" and dismissed a supposed Thuringian "bratwurst connection." Only a "small circle" inside the AfD, he said, had discussed voting for the FDP candidate on the third ballot, as "one of many variants." The decision to drop Kindervater and vote together for Kemmerich was taken, on his account, with the whole faction shortly before that ballot, and the discussion was contentious because Kemmerich had often spoken negatively about the AfD.

Other accounts placed the plan with the faction or with Höcke, not as a fact of Braga's authorship. *taz* quoted Höcke saying the AfD had played "the tactical card" and written "a small piece of history," without yet being able to elect its own minister-president. Götz Kubitschek wrote that Kemmerich was only "the piece that checkmated King Ramelow." Stein said the faction had carried out, "in minute detail," what had been planned. None of them described a deal with the CDU or the FDP.

### Aftermath

On 6 February, in Pretoria, Chancellor [Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel) called the election "a unique event" that broke the rule against majorities with the AfD. She called it "unforgivable," said the result had to be undone for the CDU, and spoke of "a bad day for the CDU." New elections, she said, were "an option." FDP leader Christian Lindner told the federal executive that it had been a mistake both to stand on the third ballot and to accept the election, and that the party had not expected the AfD to nominate a candidate only for show and then vote otherwise.

Kemmerich resigned with immediate effect on 8 February, said he would return the salary, and stayed on only as caretaker. On 4 March the Landtag elected Ramelow. He took 42 votes on each of the first two ballots, the size of his bloc, and Höcke 22; Höcke then withdrew. On the third ballot Ramelow had 42 votes, 23 against and 20 abstentions. The FDP did not vote. Ramelow refused Höcke a handshake and called the AfD the "arsonists in this chamber."

The switch did not put the AfD into a government. Braga told *taz* the party would rather have given Kemmerich a chance, and that a new election would not necessarily change the seats; on the polls, he said, the AfD would "not exactly be the losers." Hajo Funke argued that the breach had raised, not lowered, the barrier around what he called the "Höcke AfD." Höcke's "Flügel" ("wing"), *taz* reported, called the day "idealism paired with tactical skill." The tactic Lindner said [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) had missed—a nominal candidate, then a switch on the plurality ballot—was one Braga called an AfD success, while denying any cross-party agreement and the personal credit Stein had given him.

## Bundestag membership

### The 2025 federal election

Torben Braga has been a member of the 21st German Bundestag since its constitutive sitting on 25 March 2025, which followed the federal election of 23 February 2025. He holds a list seat for [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany) (AfD) from Thuringia, not a constituency mandate. In the federal returning officer's preliminary directory of those elected he is recorded as a political scientist (Politikwissenschaftler), born in 1991, returned for Thuringia at state-list place 3, with no constituency entered in the column for a further candidacy. The Bundestag biography gives the same occupation and states that he was elected on the Thuringian state list; an editorial note on that page says the biographical particulars rest on members' own statements.

On the final count the AfD took 510,527 second votes in Thuringia, 38.6 percent of valid second votes and the largest party share in the state. That result produced eight AfD seats out of the 18 filled from Thuringia. Seven were constituency seats, in constituencies 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 and 195. Constituency 193, Gera – Greiz – Altenburger Land, was won by [Stephan Brandner](/people/stephan-brandner) (AfD) with 44.8 percent of the first votes. The same preliminary directory shows Brandner as list place 1, elected in constituency 193, and Stefan Möller as list place 2, elected in constituency 189, so the AfD's single Thuringian list seat went to place 3. On 24 February 2025, on the preliminary count, Thuringia's state returning officer, Holger Poppenhäger, had already named 18 successful candidates from the state, eight of them AfD, and listed Braga at Landeslistenplatz 3. The Bundestag publishes a Wahlkreisbüro for him at Kesselgasse 25, 04600 Altenburg.

### Committees and the Franco-German assembly

The Bundestag lists Braga as a full member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (Auswärtiger Ausschuss) and of the Finance Committee (Finanzausschuss), and as a substitute member of the Budget Committee (Haushaltsausschuss) and the Defence Committee (Verteidigungsausschuss). The Foreign Affairs Committee constituted itself on 21 May 2025 and elected Armin Laschet of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) as chair. Of its 42 full members, ten were from the AfD, including Braga. The Finance Committee constituted itself the same day, again with 42 full members and ten from the AfD, Braga among them. It elected no chair: the AfD nominee, Kay Gottschalk, received 11 of 42 votes, and [Olav Gutting](/people/olav-gutting) (CDU/CSU) presided as the longest-serving member on the committee until a chair or deputy chair was chosen.

On 17 October 2025 the Foreign Affairs Committee constituted its subcommittee on arms and proliferation control, non-proliferation and international disarmament (Unterausschuss Rüstungs- und Proliferationskontrolle, Nichtverbreitung und internationale Abrüstung). Braga is one of its nine full members and one of two from the AfD; [Ralf Stegner](/people/ralf-stegner) of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) was elected chair and [Florian Dorn](/people/florian-dorn) (CDU/CSU) deputy chair. The Bundestag describes its remit as current disarmament policy and longer-term aims, including nuclear disarmament, conventional arms control in Europe, and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

The biography also lists him as a full member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly (Deutsch-Französische Parlamentarische Versammlung). It has 100 members, 50 from each parliament, and is to meet at least twice a year, alternating between Germany and France. It was constituted in Paris on 25 March 2019 under the Franco-German parliamentary agreement, adopted by the [National Assembly](/organizations/national-assembly) on 11 March 2019 and by the Bundestag on 20 March 2019, after a joint working group was set up on 22 January 2018 for the 55th anniversary of the [Élysée Treaty](/facts/elysee-treaty).

### Outside activities

Separate from the self-reported biography, the same page publishes interests that members must notify under sections 45 and following of the Members of the Bundestag Act (Abgeordnetengesetz). Braga's entry names, as his occupation before the mandate, managing director of atesto UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Erfurt, and lists the same managing directorship as a paid activity alongside the mandate, together with a participation in atesto UG. The published entry does not state a figure for remuneration.

In August 2024 t-online reported that he had founded the company in Erfurt in mid-June as sole shareholder and managing director, with a commercial-register entry in mid-July. Quoting the register, it gave the object as software to support organizations in advertising; advice on advertising, communication, public relations and political strategy; and stakes in other undertakings. Braga told the outlet that the timing, during the Thuringian state-election campaign, was coincidental, that the object had been drawn broadly, and that the firm was still being set up and had no business with the AfD, its subdivisions, its parliamentary bodies or its office-holders; the state association and the Landtag group denied any such tie. The disclosure also records a public-law function: expert citizen (sachkundiger Bürger) on Altenburg's economic and finance committee, until 31 December 2025.

## Political positions

### Migration and the welfare state

In a German-language interview with *Folha de S.Paulo* on 5 September 2024, Torben Braga, a deputy chair of the Alternative for Germany in Thuringia, said immigration as then practised did not serve German interests and loaded the welfare state rather than filling jobs. In the paper's Portuguese rendering he said a country could not keep a working social system and open borders at once — "Either people stop immigrating or the welfare state is destroyed" — and that an "immigration industry" should not grow under the right of asylum. He rejected a simple anti-immigration label: "We favour a better organisation of the system. The AfD is an anti-immigration party only insofar as one is talking about the migration policy we have today." *Folha* also reported that criticism of the European Union was what had drawn him to the party.

In the Bundestag on 4 March 2026, debating war with Iran, he said Germany "can and will not be a home for further migrants." Asked on abgeordnetenwatch in September 2026 whether border controls are efficient and legitimate, he wrote only that the message contained no concrete question.

### Foreign affairs, security and finance

His first Bundestag speech, on 6 June 2025, answered a Left motion on the Gaza Strip. He traced the catastrophe to the Hamas attack on Israel, then said months of bombing and an eleven-week aid blockade had cost Israel any moral claim to self-defence, and called for arms exports into active war zones, including Israel, to stop until compliance with humanitarian law was assured ("Germany first"). On 15 October 2025 he opposed renewing the Bundeswehr role in the NATO operation Sea Guardian, calling it "symbolic politics at sea" with no terrorism case, prevented attack or significant arms find.

In the Foreign Office budget debate of 24 September 2025 he said spending was being raised to €6.1 billion while development aid "seeps away uncontrolled" and lines for inclusion, diversity and "gender-equitable foreign policy" crowded out schools in Germany and German schools abroad, which he called the basis of "targeted, profitable migration." On 4 March 2026 he said rejecting Iran's regime did not justify war, opposed a German part in it, called an EU ban on Russian imports from 2027 "simply irresponsible," and asked for carbon taxes to be suspended. On 20 May 2026 he said planned United States medium-range missiles would not defend German towns but make the country a launch pad aimed at western Russia, with no Bundestag veto; he shared the aim of refusing foreign first-strike systems, but wanted "our own armed forces," not [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) or OSCE appeals.

On abgeordnetenwatch on 5 August 2026 he wrote that rising carbon dioxide and higher global temperatures were not in dispute, but called German climate policy expensive and ineffective next to a roughly 2 per cent share of world emissions, against China and India, and preferred adaptation to bans. Asked to read the specialist literature, he answered "No," citing his finance and foreign-policy brief and calling the damage figures put to him scenarios, not facts.

### The party and the Verfassungsschutz

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution for Thuringia, not the federal Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), classified the state AfD in March 2021 as a proven right-wing extremist endeavour, the first AfD state branch so labelled. President Stephan Kramer told *taz* that Björn Höcke remained the leading figure after the *Flügel* was formally dissolved, and that the finding rested on programme, positions and extremist contacts. *Folha* attributed that state label to the federal BfV. Braga called the office an institution unknown in any other democracy, "an internal secret police" meant to monitor domestic groups and ultimately defame them. Asked whether German history justified it, he answered "Which history?"; told the reference was Nazism, he said Italy and Austria had no comparable body, called the service a tool of parties "that speak openly of destroying us," and said the classification had "not the slightest relevance" and was wrong.

On 2 May 2025 the federal BfV separately classified the whole AfD as *gesichert rechtsextremistisch* on an ethnic concept of the people; *tagesschau* noted that Saxony, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt had already so labelled their branches. On 26 February 2026 the Cologne administrative court, in interim relief, held that the federal file did not yet justify the upgrade, returning the party for the time being to suspected-case status. Braga told an ARD investigation that blocking judicial appointments in Thuringia to seek oversight of the intelligence service was not extortion, because the extremist label came from the body his group wanted reviewed, and that "good relations" with Höcke would continue in Berlin. In May 2024 he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that local demands to expel Höcke were "absurd," because those making them could not bring the motion.

## Reception and controversies

### The blue flower at the constitutive sitting

At the constitutive sitting of the 21st Bundestag on 25 March 2025, Torben Braga wore a small blue flower on his lapel. The Berlin daily *taz* described a chamber photograph in which he stood with faction leader Tino Chrupalla and the other new deputy from Thuringia, [Robert Teske](/people/robert-teske), both of whom the paper called close associates of Björn Höcke.

The historian Jens-Christian Wagner, director of a concentration-camp memorial, told *taz* that he saw a deliberate positive reference to National Socialism. The blue cornflower, he said, had been the symbol of the antisemitic movement of Georg Ritter von Schönerer and a recognition sign of the Nazi Party while it was banned in Austria in the 1930s, and Braga had presented himself as an "NSDAP supporter." He cited earlier blue fabric flowers worn by the Freedom Party of Austria faction in 2013 and by the Berlin deputy Andreas Wild in 2018.

Braga wrote to *taz* that the flower was not a cornflower and that a positive reference to the NSDAP was "completely absurd." He did not say what it was. On X he called Wagner's criticism, first posted online, the "psychosis of a madman." On abgeordnetenwatch, on 2 April 2025, he repeated that the fabric flower was "recognizably and obviously not a cornflower," so the accusations were unfounded. Wagner told *taz* that the reply matched a familiar sequence, a signal understood on the far right and then a claim of ignorance, which he compared with Höcke's statement in court that he had not known "Alles für Deutschland" was an SA slogan.

A Berlin case had already treated the point as one of possible meaning, not botany. After Wild wore a blue fabric flower at a silent march on 8 November 2018 for the November pogroms, and again in the Abgeordnetenhaus on 29 November, he was called to order; he said it expressed only conservative patriotism. On 28 August 2019 the state [constitutional court](/organizations/constitutional-court) held that the calls did not violate his rights, because the president could take a blue flower as a conscious NSDAP symbol and a Schönerer badge. *taz* also reported that Braga's X biography quoted a line from the Futurist manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Beauty exists only in struggle," and that neither Chrupalla nor co-chair [Alice Weidel](/people/alice-weidel) would comment.

### Networks associated with the Neue Rechte

News reporting has placed Braga in publishing and campaign circles of the Neue Rechte around Götz Kubitschek and Philip Stein, who chairs the association Ein Prozent and runs Jungeuropa Verlag. On 26 April 2023 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the Institut für Staatspolitik and Ein Prozent e.V. as confirmed right-wing extremist endeavors. For Ein Prozent it cited a rise in anticonstitutional statements, völkisch-nationalist ideology, hostility toward migrants, foreigners and Muslims, and a concept of the people based on ethnic descent.

In August 2024 t-online reported that Braga, then deputy chairman of the Thuringian Alternative for Germany, had founded Atesto UG in Erfurt for advertising software and political advice, and that Kubitschek, Erik Lehnert and Stein had lately founded similar firms at the same Berlin notary. Braga said any link "does not exist and was at no point intended," and denied any arrangement with Kubitschek, Ein Prozent or the AfD. Kubitschek's spokesman said he knew nothing of it; Stein did not reply. The report noted the two men's years together in the right-wing Marburg Burschenschaft Germania, and quoted Braga telling Stein that the AfD should cooperate more with "actors in the pre-parliamentary and extra-parliamentary sphere."

On 2 May 2026 Jungeuropa held a publishers' meeting in Altenburg. Correctiv reported a board headed "Ehrenmänner" that named Braga, Teske, Fabian Jank, Jean-Pascal Hohm and Tomasz Froelich as apparent financial supporters, and wrote that Stein thanked Braga and Teske from the stage. Braga was not present. It also identified attendees it linked to the Hammerskin network, the milieu that supported the National Socialist Underground, and the group Knockout 51. On 7 May Braga emailed that the publisher did "valuable work," issuing books that "would not appear elsewhere," and that he backed such projects "in the party's forefield and surroundings" with his "modest means." He would not specify the support or distance himself from Stein: on Correctiv's criteria, he wrote, "I would probably land in the same category."

### Public characterization

The labels for his place beside Höcke are the newsrooms'. In August 2024 t-online called him Höcke's "right hand," a "string-puller," and one of Höcke's closest confidants in Thuringia. An MDR investigation published by tagesschau on 28 February 2025 called him "Höcke's strategic string-puller" and said observers also tied him to the 2020 Kemmerich election. He rejected the phrase "right-wing extremist force," saying the classification came from the agency his faction wanted to control, and refused to expel members as too extreme, which he said would cut the party off from its positions and personnel.

In March 2026 *taz* called him a "close confidant" of Thuringia's AfD leader and "his right hand in Berlin." On 1 July 2026 the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*, in "Wie stark ist Höcke?", wrote that he had moved from Erfurt to Berlin alongside Stefan Möller and was regarded as "the intellectual in Höcke's team," having reached the AfD through right-wing Burschenschaften. A 7 November 2024 profile for the American-German Institute, by a research intern and disclaimed as his view alone, likewise placed Braga in that Thuringian core, with ties to Kubitschek and Stein.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/torben-braga