David McAllister

Born in Berlin in 1971, with a British civil servant father and a German music teacher mother, David has dual British German citizenship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

His strong business credentials as a member of the supervisory board of Volkswagen and as a Lawyer complement his political perspective as a Member of the European Parliament and Vice Chairman of the International Democrat Union in Germany.

He spent the first eleven years of his life in communist Berlin and experienced first-hand the seismic shifts as the Soviet bloc dismantled and West and East Germany reintegrated. Consequently he became interested in politics very early; reading every newspaper he could get his hands on until his political career proper started in 1991 when he became District Chairman of the “Junge Union”; the German Christian Democrats’ (CDU) youth organization. In 1998 David became a Member of the State Parliament of Lower Saxony, ?and ? has since held a number of positions including Mayor of his hometown, Bad Bederkesa, Secretary-General of the CDU in Lower Saxony and Chairman of the CDU Group in the State Parliament. He has been Party Chairman of the CDU in Lower Saxony since 2008 and has served as Prime Minister of Lower Saxony from 2010 till 2013.