Tobias Lindner

Biography

Tobias Lindner was born on 11 January 1982 in Karlsruhe and went to High School in Wörth am Rhein. After his graduation, he served his alternative civilian service at the regional office for environmental protection and ecology in Karlsruhe in the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, in German Landesanstalt für Umweltschutz Baden-Württemberg. He pursued his studies in Technical Economics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) from 2002 to 2007. After he obtained his diploma Lindner continued to work for the Chair of Economic Theory as research assistant until June 2011 which is when he obtained his PhD in Political Economy. Today, Lindner lives in his hometown Wörth am Rhein.

Political career

Tobias Lindner has been a member of the Association of Alliance 90 / The Greens as of 1998. He joined the Grüne Jugend, the Green Party's youth organization, in 1998 and was elected as spokesperson of the Grüne Jugend in the German Federal State of Rheinland-Pfalz in 2000.

From 2004 until 2011 Lindner served as the chairman of Germersheim county and community Wörth am Rhein. He has been a member of the county council Germersheim since 2007 and has led the parliamentary party from 2009. From 2009 to 2011 he was member of the city council Wörth am Rhein as well as chairman of the parliamentary county council. He represents Rheinland-Pfalz on the Green Party's national committee.

In June 2011, Lindner became a member of the German Parliament when he filled in the seat of Ulrike Höfken who had previously resigned. Since then, Lindner has been serving on the budget committee and the audit committee. He is also a member of the defence committee. In addition, he served as deputy chairman of the German-Irish Parliamentary Friendship Group.

In the 2013 federal elections, Lindner was reelected. On the budget committee, he is his parliamentary group's rapporteur on the budgets of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Defence, the German Bundesrat and the Federal Court of Auditors. In addition, he serves as deputy chairman of the German-Canadian Parliamentary Friendship Group.

Military procurement

When German Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière cancelled the Euro Hawk surveillance drone program, one of the federal government's key defense projects, which failed because it was unable to fulfill the requirements necessary to be certified to fly in German airspace, Linder sharply criticized the government for "the biggest procurement disaster of the last 20 years."

Relations with the African continent

Lindner has in the past voted in favor of German participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions as well as in United Nations-mandated European Union peacekeeping missions on the African continent, such as in Darfur/Sudan (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015), South Sudan (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015), Mali – both EUTM Mali (2013, 2014 and 2015) and MINUSMA (2013, 2014 and 2015) –, and Liberia (2015).

On Somalia, Lindner has a mixed voting record. He initially supported Operation Atalanta (2011) but has since regularly abstained from votes on extending the mandate for the mission (2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015). In 2014, 2015 and 2016, he voted against extending the mandate for participation in EUTM Somalia.

Other activities