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Bernd Lucke

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Bernd Lucke
MEP a. D.
Lucke in 2014
Leader of the Alternative for Germany
In office
14 April 2013 – 5 July 2015
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byJörg Meuthen
Leader of the Liberal Conservative Reformers
In office
10 November 2018 – 28 September 2019
Preceded byStephanie Tsomakaeva (interim)
Succeeded byJürgen Joost
In office
19 July 2015 – 4 June 2016
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byUlrike Trebesius
Member of the European Parliament
In office
1 July 2014 – 2 July 2019
Preceded bymulti-member district
Succeeded bymulti-member district
ConstituencyGermany
Personal details
Born
Bernd Lucke

(1962-08-19) 19 August 1962 (age 62)
West Berlin, West Germany (now Germany)
Political partyLKR (2015–present)
Other political
affiliations		CDU (1978–2011)
Free Voters (2013)
AfD (2013–2015)
SpouseDorothea Lucke
Children5
ResidenceWinsen (Luhe)
Alma mater
Signature
Websitewww.bernd-lucke.de

Bernd Lucke (born 19 August 1962) is a German economist, professor, author and former politician. He was a co-founder of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2013 and served as the party's federal chairman until July 2015 when he was displaced and left the party soon after. He had been elected a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for AfD in 2014 and served the five year full term, as member of various other new parties, similar to some other former AfD MEPs.

Lucke was a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg before helping to found Wahlalternative 2013 ("Electoral Alternative 2013") which would become the AfD. Lucke served as the party's spokesman until he lost a leadership election to Frauke Petry in July 2015. Petry's election was considered a shift of the party to extremist positions; Lucke subsequently left the party. In July 2015 he and other former AfD members founded the political party Liberal-Konservative Reformer[1][2][3] (formerly Allianz für Fortschritt und Aufbruch,[4] "Alliance for progress and renewal", abbreviated ALFA). He failed to win reelection in 2019 and has since returned to an academic career.[5]

Biography

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Early life and professional career

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Lucke was born in West Berlin in 1962. His father was an engineer and his mother a school teacher. In 1969 he moved to Haan in North Rhine-Westphalia.[6]

From 1982 to 1984, Lucke studied economics, history, and philosophy at the University of Bonn; he undertook graduate studies in economics at the University of Bonn and UC Berkeley from 1984 to 1987. He completed his doctorate in 1991 with a dissertation on price stabilization in world agricultural markets under Jürgen Wolters at Free University of Berlin.[7] After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worked in the Council of Economic Experts of the East German Government and, after the German reunification, as an assistant to the Senate of Berlin. Lucke's research interests include sovereign default, news-driven business cycles, growth in developing countries, dynamic CGE models, and applied econometrics.[7]

Lucke has been an advisor to the World Bank and a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.[8] He is a frequent guest on political talk shows in Germany. He is married and has five children.[8][9][10]

Political career and AfD

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Lucke joined the Junge Union, the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany as a teenager in response to the conditions of his relatives living in East Germany under communism. He was a member of the CDU for thirty years until 2011 when he cancelled his membership in opposition to the party's eurozone rescue policies.[11] He first contested an election as a member of the Free Voters in the 2013 Lower Saxony state election but was not elected.[12]

In 2013, he founded Wahlalternative 2013 ("Electoral Alternative 2013") with Alexander Gauland, Frauke Petry and Konrad Adam to oppose the German government's handling of the eurozone crisis. The group was later founded as Alternative for Germany in April 2013 with Lucke as one of the party's three spokespeople. During his speech at the party's founding rally, he described the Euro currency as a "historic mistake."[13]

During a campaign speech in Bremen on 24 August 2013, Lucke was attacked with pepper spray by two members of Anti-fascist Action. Several people in the audience were treated for irritation of the eyes and throat.[14]

During the 2013 German federal election, Lucke stood as the AfD's top list candidate in Lower Saxony and for the directly elected seat of Harburg but was not elected to either.[15] During the 2014 European parliament election, Lucke was elected as an MEP and negotiated for the AfD to join the European Conservatives and Reformists. Lucke stated that the AfD's preferred partners in the European Parliament would be the British Conservative Party and that they would not team up with "xenophobic" parties.[16]

Following the rise of the Pegida protests in Germany which were welcomed by some AfD state branches, Lucke stated that most of the arguments voiced by Pegida were legitimate and that the movement was a sign that politicians had not listened to concerns felt by ordinary people.[17][18]

On 4 July 2015, Lucke was displaced as leader of the party Alternative for Germany (AfD) by his former deputy, Frauke Petry in a leadership election after several months of infighting.[19] On 9 July 2015, Lucke left the Alternative for Germany, saying that the party had "fallen irretrievably into the wrong hands" after Petry's election and moved too far to the right by adopting what he termed as anti-foreigner positions. He cited also an “anti-western, decidedly pro-Russian foreign and security policy orientation” as well as increasing calls to “pose the ‘system question’ with regard to our parliamentary democracy” as reasons for his departure from the party.[20][21] On 19 July, he and other former members of the AfD founded a new party, the Alliance for Progress and Renewal (ALFA).[21] ALFA has since been renamed Liberal-Konservative Reformer ("Liberal-conservative reformers," LKR) and later Wir Bürger ("Us Citizens").[4]

In 2015, Lucke was announced as the LKR's top candidate for the Bundestag ahead of the 2017 German federal election, however the LKR decided not to contest the election. The party stood in the 2019 European parliament elections but all of its MEPs including Lucke lost their seats.

Post-AfD leadership

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Lucke continued to work as a public commentator on economic and political affairs after his career as an MEP. In 2017, he argued that the German media should not "demonize" the AfD, arguing that voters for the party were concerned about legitimate issues but that the leadership of the AfD had become too extreme.[22] However, in 2019 Lucke supported a proposal by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor the AfD and claimed the party now contained right-wing extremist elements that went against the German constitution.[23]

In October 2019, Lucke left politics and returned to academic work at the University of Hamburg as an economics teacher. He was unable to deliver two lectures after being assaulted by an Antifa activist. At the same time, the student union AStA called for Lucke's removal from the university due to his past association with the AfD and for what they argued was his role in helping the rise of the far-right in Germany.[24] Lucke also turned down an offer by the university to host online classes and later that month was able to resume lectures under police protection. Lucke has also worked as an opinion columnist for Welt am Sonntag since 2019.[25]

Selected publications

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  • Beaudry, Paul; ——— (2009). "Letting Different Views about Business Cycles Compete". NBER Macroeconomics Annual. 24 (1): 413–456. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.510.5974. doi:10.1086/648305. S2CID 7585799.
  • ———; Lütkepohl, Helmut (2004). "On Unit Root Tests in the Presence of Transitional Growth". Economics Letters. 84 (3): 323–327. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2004.02.012.
  • ——— (2003). "Are Technical Trading Rules Profitable? Evidence for Head-and-shoulder Rules". Applied Economics. 35 (1): 33–40. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.203.1671. doi:10.1080/00036840210150884. S2CID 11699815.
  • ——— (1998). "Productivity shocks in a sectoral real business cycle model for West Germany". European Economic Review. 42 (2): 311–327. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.515.4895. doi:10.1016/S0014-2921(97)00067-6. S2CID 154180554.
  • ——— (1997). Theorie und Empirie realer Konjunkturzyklen. Studies in Contemporary Economics (in German). Heidelberg: Physica. ISBN 978-3-7908-1148-3.

References

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  1. ^ "Ex-chief of German anti-euro party starts new eurosceptic group". Yahoo News. 19 July 2015.
  2. ^ "Germany's ex-AfD leader sets up new eurosceptic party". Reuters UK. Archived from the original on 21 August 2015.
  3. ^ SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany (19 July 2015). "ALFA: AfD-Gründer Bernd Lucke gründet neue Partei". SPIEGEL ONLINE.
  4. ^ a b GmbH, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13 November 2016). "Partei um Bernd Lucke: Alfa findet einen neuen Namen". FAZ.NET (in German). Retrieved 13 November 2016.
  5. ^ "Europawahl 2019: Vorläufiges amtliches Ergebnis – der Bundeswahlleiter".
  6. ^ Hendrik Ankenbrand (25 December 2013). "Bernd Lucke. Der Protestant". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved 25 December 2013.
  7. ^ a b Curriculum Vitae Archived 21 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine, University of Hamburg, last updated 26 January 2012. Retrieved 21 April 2013.
  8. ^ a b (de) von Petersdorff, Winand, "Wer ist der Anti-Euro-Professor Bernd Lucke?", Frankfurter Allgemeine, 24 March 2013.
  9. ^ Vasagar, Jeevan, and Harriet Alexander, "Bernd Lucke: Merkel's new rival and Germany's first serious Euroskeptic"[permanent dead link‍], London Daily Telegraph via Ottawa Citizen, 11 April 2013. Similar, earlier story also: Alexander, Harriet, and Jeevan Vasagar in Berlin, "Bernd Lucke interview: 'Why Germany has had enough of the euro'", The Telegraph, 7 April 2013.
  10. ^ Interview: Volkswirtschaftler über die konservative „Wahlalternative 2013" (in German) Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 4 October 2012, retrieved 24 August 2013
  11. ^ "Bernd Lucke. The Protestant". 14 December 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  12. ^ "Torsten Jung Spitzenkandidat der FREIEN WÄHLER Niedersachsen". Archived from the original on 17 November 2012. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  13. ^ "Neue Partei "AfD" will raus aus dem Euro". Archived from the original on 16 April 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  14. ^ "Angriff im Wahlkampf gegen Bernd Lucke". Tagesspiegel. 24 August 2013.
  15. ^ "Lower Saxony direct candidates for the German Bundestag". Archived from the original on 21 September 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  16. ^ "German anti-euro party says won't team up with xenophobes". Reuters. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  17. ^ Hugglet, Justin (10 December 2014). "German Eurosceptics embrace anti-Islam protests". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
  18. ^ "Anti-Islam 'Pegida' march in German city of Dresden". BBC News. 15 December 2014. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  19. ^ "AfD ditches Lucke as party swings to right". 5 July 2015.
  20. ^ "Lucke verlässt seine AfD". www.fr.de (in German). 12 January 2019. Retrieved 11 November 2024.
  21. ^ a b "AfD founder resigns over 'xenophobic' power grab". 9 July 2015.
  22. ^ "'It's wrong to demonize the AfD'". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  23. ^ "Party founder Lucke advocates monitoring the AfD". Der Spiegel. 30 January 2019. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  24. ^ "Tumults in front of the lecture hall - Bernd Lucke's lecture canceled again". Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  25. ^ "Third attempt: Lecture by Bernd Lucke at the University of Hamburg - Police secure building". Retrieved 22 January 2024.
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