Günter Krings


Günter Krings is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2002. In 2013, he was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Political career

Krings first became a member of the Bundestag in the 2002 German federal election. In his first term from 2002 until 2005, he served on the Committee on Legal Affairs. From 2006 until 2009, he chaired the Parliamentary Advisory Board on Sustainable Development.
From 2009 until 2013, Krings served as deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, under the leadership of chairman Volker Kauder. In this capacity, he coordinated the group's legislative activities on consumer protection, domestic affairs, sports, and minorities. He was also a member of the Committee on the Election of Judges, which is in charge of appointing judges to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. In 2012, he helped steer through parliament legislation on a so-called ancillary copyright for press publishers.
In the negotiations to form a Grand Coalition of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats following the 2013 federal elections, Krings was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on internal and legal affairs, led by Hans-Peter Friedrich and Thomas Oppermann. He has since been serving as Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, under successive ministers Thomas de Maizière and Horst Seehofer.
Since 2017, Krings has been leading the Bundestag group of CDU parliamentarians from North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest delegation within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. In the negotiations to form a fourth coalition government under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2017 federal elections, he was part of the working group on internal and legal affairs, led by Thomas de Maizière, Stephan Mayer and Heiko Maas.

Other activities

In June 2017, Krings voted against Germany's introduction of same-sex marriage.
Ahead of the Christian Democrats’ leadership election in 2018, Krings publicly endorsed Jens Spahn to succeed Angela Merkel as the party’s chair.