Pofalla has been a member of the CDU since 1975. At first he was engaged in the Junge Union. He was chairman of the JU in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1986 to 1992. During his time in parliament, Pofalla served on the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections, Immunity and the Rules of Procedure, the Committee on Legal Affairs, the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and the Committee on Economic Affairs and Technology. From 2004 to 2005 Pofalla was deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU's parliamentary group in the Bundestag under the leadership of Angela Merkel, and served as the Secretary General of the CDU from 2005 to 2009. In the negotiations to form a coalition government of the Christian Democrats and the Free Democratic Party following the 2009 federal elections, he led the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on labour and social affairs; his counterpart of the FDP was Dirk Niebel. After the elections, Pofalla succeeded Thomas de Maizière as Chief of Staff to Chancellor Angela Merkel. During his time in office, he was repeatedly criticized for being rude towards other representatives of the Bundestag and other members of the German government. In September 2011 he seriously insulted Wolfgang Bosbach, senior group leader of the CDU/CSU-group in the Bundestag after an in-house discussion about the enhancement of the European Financial Stability Facility. In the negotiations to form a coalition government following the 2013 federal elections, Pofalla was part of the 15-member leadership circle chaired by Merkel, Horst Seehofer and Sigmar Gabriel. As part of a cabinet reshuffle, he subsequently resigned as head of the Federal Chancellery.
Private sector
In January 2014 it was reported that Pofalla would be joining the supervisory board of Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned national rail network of Germany. He had previously worked for the company's subsidiary DB Netz between 2005 and 2009. At Deutsche Bahn, Pofalla took up a “specially created lobbying post” said to carry compensation of more than a million euros a year. His successor in the Bundestag is Thorsten Hoffmann. After transitioning to the private sector, Pofalla was made co-chairman of the Petersburg Dialogue, a semiofficial German-Russian symposium. From 2018 until 2019, he also served on the German government's so-called coal commission, which was tasked to develop a masterplan before the end of the year on how to phase-out coal and create a new economic perspective for the country's coal-mining regions.
During his time in politics, Pofalla took an active interest in Belarus. In 2012, he publicly condemned the execution of Vladislav Kovalyov and Dmitry Konovalov, both 26, saying this move would further alienate Belarus from Europe. "Lukashenko thus drifts even further away from our European values," he said. "The already heavily burdened relation between Belarus and Europe will be rendered yet more difficult by this." In the context of the Ukraine crisis, Pofalla has commented that “it wasn’t clever of Barack Obama to have downgraded Russia, in connection with the Ukraine conflict, to the level of a regional power.”
Controversy
Pofalla caused controversy when German tabloidBild revealed that he had bought premium Montblanc writing materials worth 3,307.61 euros for his MP office at the expense of the Bundestag in 2009; at the time, it was the highest recorded order by any parliamentarian.
