Tino Chrupalla

Chrupalla was born 1975 in Weißwasser[1] in eastern Germany and passed his Meister exam (Meisterprüfung) as House painter and decorator in 2003.[1][3] He runs a construction company.[4] Chrupalla is married with two children.[5]

In March 2020, two protestors set fire to Chrupalla's car and he suffered mild injuries putting the blaze out. He condemned the attack as a direct attack on his family that went beyond all conceivable boundaries of political debate.[6]

Tino Chrupalla (2020)

In the 1990s, Tino Chrupalla joined the Christian Democratic Youth, linked to the CDU. Chrupalla entered the AfD in 2015 and in 2016 was elected to its district committee for Görlitz.[1] At the 2017 German federal election, he defeated Michael Kretschmer, later Minister-President of Saxony, in the electoral district of Görlitz.[7]

Chrupalla is one of five deputy chief whips of the AfD federal parliamentary group.[8]

Ahead of the 2021 German federal election, Chrupalla was the AfD's leading candidate for the Bundestag alongside Alice Weidel. Together with Weidel, he was elected group leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag on September 30, 2021, replacing Alexander Gauland, who remained as honorary chairman as part of the redefinition of the office.[9]

German newspaper Zeit has characterized Chrupalla as one of the more relatively moderate members of the AfD parliamentary faction.[10] Ahead of the 2021 German federal election, Chrupalla cited border security as his main concern and called for Germany to reinstate border controls to "curb border crime".[11] As federal spokesman, Chrupalla repeatedly called on the AfD to unite and "stop thinking in camps".[12]

In a Bundestag debate on November 8, 2019, on the subject of 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he caused a stir when he accused the Chancellor Angela Merkel of having learned from the Free German Youth in East Germany on how to keep a people in check with propaganda and agitation, based on "strategies of domination and disintegration."[13]

At the invitation of the Russian Defense Ministry in Summer 2021, Chrupalla gave a speech at a conference in which he spoke of Allied "psychological warfare" after World War II, whose re-education allegedly had a lasting impact on German national identity. Chruppalla compared the alleged policies of the Western Allies after 1945 with Nazi propaganda.[14][15]

In December 2021, Chrupalla expressed opposition to mandatory COVID vaccinations during a debate on the show ZDF-Morgenmagazin, but argued vaccination would make sense for the elderly and those who were previously ill. When the moderator Andreas Wunn stated ICU doctors confirmed that 80 to 90 percent of Covid patients in intensive care units were unvaccinated, Chrupalla claimed the numbers were unconfirmed and blamed budget cuts and downsizing of medical departments as the problem for overloaded ICUs.[16][17]

• Official website (german)
• Tino Chrupalla at abgeordnetenwatch.de (german)
• Biography at the Bundestag (german)