Stephan Ernst Johann Mayer

Life and career

In 1993 after school Mayer went to Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich to study law. He graduated in 1997 after passing the first state examination in Law. In 2000 he successfully passed second state examination in Law and from 2009 he has been working as a lawyer in the law company Nachmann Vilgertshofer Scharf Barfuß Rechtsanwalts GmbH in Munich.

Political career

From 1994 to 2003, Mayer was a Chairman of the Regional Association of the youth organisation Junge Union in Altötting. Since 1997 he is a Deputy Chairman of the CSU district association Altötting and since then he also belongs to the council of the CSU Upper Bavaria district, led by Ilse Aigner. Since 2006, Mayer is a Deputy Regional Chairman of the Union of Expellees (Union der Vertriebenen (UdV)), and since 2009 a member of the CSU leadership under party chairman Horst Seehofer.

Member of Parliament, 2002–present

Since the 2002 elections, Mayer has been a member of the Bundestag. In the elections to the Bundestag in 2009, he got 60.7 percent of the primary votes and thus achieved the third best result in the whole Germany among all the deputies.

In the Bundestag, Mayer is a full member of the Committee on Internal Affairs and of the Sports Committee. He is also a member of the Parliamentary Control Panel, which provides parliamentary oversight of Germany's intelligence services BND, MAD and BfV. He chairs the so-called G10 Commission, which takes decisions on the necessity and admissibility of restrictions on the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications pursuant to Article 10 of the Basic Law. In addition, he is an alternate member of the Committee on Transport, Building and Urban Development and of the NSA Investigation Committee. Within the group of CSU parliamentarians, Mayer chairs the Working Group for Internal Affairs, law, sport, voluntary work, culture and media of the CSU.

In addition to his committee assignments, Mayer is the chairman of the German-British Parliamentary Friendship Group.

In the negotiations to form a coalition government of the Christian Democrats (CDU together with the Bavarian CSU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) following the 2009 federal elections, Mayer was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on internal and legal affairs, led by Wolfgang Schäuble and Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. Later, in the negotiations to form a Grand Coalition of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (SPD) following the 2013 federal elections, he was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on integration and migration, led by Maria Böhmer and Aydan Özoğuz.

In February 2016, Mayer accompanied the President of the German Bundestag Norbert Lammert on a visit to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.

Other activities

Since 2010, Mayer has been serving as the President of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (Technisches Hilfswerk-Bundesvereinigung e.V.) and President of the Federal Civil Defence and Protection against disasters in Federal Republic of Germany.

Political positions

Following the 2016 Munich shooting, Mayer called for a review of Germany's gun laws and even stricter enforcement, arguing that "I support stricter regulations on the weapons trade and the creation of a European weapons registry modeled on the German national registry."

In early 2017, Mayer and his colleague Armin Schuster of the CDU presented a joint proposal for a flexible target for how many asylum seekers Germany should accept each year as a compromise to end a row between CDU and CSU over immigration. In a letter to the two parties’ chairpersons, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Minister-President Horst Seehofer, they called for Germany to set a new target each year based on the humanitarian situation in crisis zones worldwide and on Germany's ability to absorb newcomers.