Germany: Who is CDU parliamentary leader Jens Spahn?

Despite being still only 45, Jens Spahn has a tumultuous career behind him. Germany's COVID-era health minister — a job that left him under investigation over misuse of public money — was on Tuesday re-elected leader of the parliamentary group of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian allies the Christian Social Union (CSU), with a resounding 85% of the vote.

It's a job previously held by his CDU colleagues Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel, and Friedrich Merz, and it seems reasonable to assume that Spahn harbors ambitions to one day follow those figures into the chancellery. Indeed, Spahn was once an opponent to Merz in the battle to succeed Merkel as CDU leader — though they both ended up losing out to her preferred candidate, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

But to become chancellor, Spahn would have to win an election, and that might be difficult, given that a recent poll found he was Germany's least popular politician — behind even his boss Merz, whose approval ratings have sunk to unprecedented lows.

A resilient conservative

Nevertheless, Spahn's career has shown resilience. State prosecutors dropped their investigation into his COVID-era dealings in March, and Tuesday's vote shows he still enjoys the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues.

That is despite some friction in the ranks. Spahn's main job is to ensure that the CDU/CSU's 208 Bundestag members vote with the government, a job that has occasionally proved surprisingly difficult: In early December 2025, he had to cajole several young CDU parliamentarians to vote in favor of the coalition government's new pension plan.

"There's been a lot of criticism from outside," Ursula Münch, director of the Tutzing Academy for Political Education, told DW at the time. "The results of his efforts to maintain the unity of the parliamentary group certainly aren't completely convincing. But the challenges are of course, immense — there are huge issues to deal with and only a very narrow majority."

Spahn might have a similar battle on his hands this year, when the Bundestag debates the government's planned health care reforms.

The boy from the Dutch border

Jens Spahn was born in 1980 in the small village of Ottenstein, in northwestern Germany, just a few miles from the Dutch border. This, he has often said, became significant for his life, because his childhood experiences of shopping across the border taught him to value the freedom of movement provided by the European Union. He is now head of the German-Dutch parliamentary group.

He is both Catholic and openly gay, though his religion plays a bigger role in the biography on his website, where he says his faith gives him "strength, peace, and confidence" every day. By contrast, he has largely kept his sexuality out of his politics. "Being gay is not a political achievement in itself. As a program, it is not enough," he told Der Spiegel magazine in 2012. "I do not pursue gay clientele politics." In 2017, he married his partner, Daniel Funke, who works for German media company Burda.

Spahn spent part of his late teens and early twenties earning a banking qualification at the WestLB bank in Münster, though he has been politically active since his youth: He joined the Christian Democrats' youth organization, the Junge Union, at 15, became head of the local CDU branch at 19, and was elected to the Bundestag just three years later, in 2002. His formal education, meanwhile, barely had time to keep up with his burgeoning political career: He gained a Master's Degree in political science while already in parliament.

He has been a member of the Bundestag ever since, taking on increasingly weightier roles: He became the party's health policy spokesperson, spent three years as a parliamentary state secretary in the Finance Ministry under the veteran CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble, before joining the Cabinet himself as health minister in 2018, in Angela Merkel's fourth and final government.

The infamous 'mask affair'

It was this job that proved fateful for the ambitious politician, because, when COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, his job suddenly made him one of the most prominent political figures in Germany. Under his oversight, the Health Ministry ordered huge quantities of protective equipment using a so-called "open-house" process — something deemed outside the EU's rules for government acquisitions.

Millions of face masks were subsequently found to be defective, which meant the ministry refused to pay for them, which in turn led to lawsuits that may end up costing the state up to €3.5 billion. Not only that, at one stage, Spahn's ministry bought 570,000 FFP-2 masks from Burda, his husband's employer.

The German federal court of audit, the Bundesrechnungshof, sharply criticized what became known as the "mask affair." Spahn's successor in the Health Ministry, Karl Lauterbach, ordered a special investigation into the scandal, whose report, leaked to the media last June, concluded that it cost the state billions in taxpayers' money. Nevertheless, the prosecutor's decision to drop its investigation suggests that Spahn personally has been exonerated from wrongdoing.

That was not the only time that Spahn's financial management skills have been scrutinized. Around the same time, the minister was under fire for taking a loan to buy a villa in Berlin for €4.1 million from a bank where he had previously been on the administrative board — with the press at the time suggesting that he had received favorable terms.

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Populist flirtations — but not with the AfD

Politically, Spahn has continually been edging towards the right of the CDU. He outspokenly criticized Merkel's handling of the refugee crisis in 2015, and in 2024 — despite his professed love for open borders in his youth — he suggested that EU law needed to be suspended to deal with illegal immigration. As health minister, he once even advocated using ultrasounds to check the age of illegal immigrants.

Spahn has also been known to indulge in populist rhetoric. When he took on his role as parliamentary leader last year, he triggered a major backlash by suggesting that the government should treat the Alternative for Germany(AfD) like any other opposition party — despite the fact that sections of the far-right party have been officially deemed anti-constitutional. He later backtracked, insisting that he had never meant to "normalize" the party.

How well he is able to master his Bundestag office during Merz's term may decide Spahn's future. When he was offered the post, many wondered whether it was wise of Merz to appoint an erstwhile rival to such a vital role — but Spahn has shown loyalty to his boss and the chancellor appears to value his influence and management skills in the party. Whether or not he ever becomes a chancellor candidate for the CDU is an open question — there are plenty of other politicians in the running. But at his age, he knows he can bide his time.

Edited by Rina Goldenberg