Boris Palmer

Background

Palmer's father, Helmut, dubbed Remstalrebell (Rems-valley-rebel) was a very well known and controversial figure and perennial candidate. In a Deutsche Welle interview for the program Talking Germany with Peter Craven, Palmer described his father as a rebel who became a political activist in the 1950s, when "all the old fascists, all the old Nazis were back" in power, and said that his grandfather was a Jew who had to flee to the United States in 1938. The former state minister and CDU member Christoph Palmer is a second nephew of Helmut and a second cousin of Boris Palmer.

Palmer graduated from high school (Abitur) at the Steiner School in Winterbach-Engelberg in 1992. From 1993, Palmer studied history and mathematics at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and in Sydney. In 1996 he joined the Green Party.

Career

After graduating from Tübingen in 1999 Palmer worked as a scientific assistant for the fraction of the Green Party in the Bundestag, the German Federal parliament, in Berlin.

In March 2001 he won a seat in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg and was appointed party spokesman for environmental and transportation issues.

In 2004 he ran for the office of mayor of Stuttgart, finishing in third place in the first round ballot at 21.5% of votes, a better result than all previous Green candidates for mayor of Stuttgart. He withdrew his candidacy before the second round ballot with an indirect recommendation that his followers should vote for the incumbent mayor Wolfgang Schuster on condition that Schuster would hold a referendum on the controversial project Stuttgart 21, which Palmer is opposed to, if costs would increase significantly. Even though that has been the case, Schuster hasn't kept that promise.

After being re-elected to the Landtag in March 2006, Palmer decided in July to run as mayor of Tübingen and won the election on 22 October with 50.4% of the vote. He subsequently resigned from his Landtag mandate after taking office in January 2007.

Palmer was a Green Party delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2010. In March 2011, the Greens won the Baden-Württemberg state election: after decades, the CDU lost its power. Since then, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg is a Greens politician, Winfried Kretschmann.

On 19 October 2014 Palmer was reelected for another eight-year term.

Palmer is considered a no-frills high-profile politician and was acknowledged for effectiveness and edgy positions and behavior well beyond his own party. Palmer's stance for green-conservative coalitions is well known and has been deemed as controversial within the party. November 2012, after Palmer had been critical about adoption by homosexual couples and got flak about being not much of a team player, the central Green party council did not reelect him. His use of Facebook, e.g. with regard to a landlord that wasn't willing to serve drinks on inn's terrace, has caused some conflicts and doubts about his diplomatic skills. His reelection 2014 however seems to pave the way in a political career on the Berlin federal level.

Other activities

Felicia Langer controversy

In July 2009, Palmer was criticised for recommending antizionist Tübingen resident Felicia Langer for the Federal Cross of Merit.

Criticism on Immigration

Starting in late 2015 Boris Palmer has been heavily criticised by other members of the Green Party as well the party's youth organisation, the Green Youth for his relatively radical (compared to the rest of the party) positions on immigration in combination with the refugee crisis.

In August 2017, some weeks before the German federal election, Palmer published the book Wir können nicht allen helfen ('we cannot help everyone', see also Flüchtlingspolitik (German Refugee Policies).