Our guest on 04.01.2009
December 30, 2008
Even at the young age of 37, politician David McAllister already exercised a lot of influence. The party chairman of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Lower Saxony is also head of the CDU faction in Lower Saxony’s parliament. The CDU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) hold power jointly in this German state. A German with Scottish roots, McAllister is the Great White Hope of the CDU and considers himself a politician driven by a passion for his work.
David McAllister, is considered a gifted rhetorician who can as easily captivate a parliamentary audience as he can a hall full of hometown folk, all the while maintaining the respect of his political opponents. He’s a quick thinker and a fast talker whose talent for speaking were already evident when he was in elementary school in West Berlin. He was born on 12 January 1971, and spent the first 11 years of his life in West Berlin along with his two sisters, his music teacher mother and his father, who was a member of the British military.
In 1982, his father moved the family to Bad Bederkesa near Cuxhaven on the North Sea. There, at the age of 14, he began his political career when he joined the Junge Union, the independent youth organization of the CDU. Two years later he became a full member of the CDU. In 1991 he became a local district chairman of the Junge Union, and he was elected to Lower Saxony’s Landtag in 1998. In 2001 he became mayor of Bad Bederkesa. Party big Whigs began to notice him then, and he received much support from the then Prime Minister Christian Wulff who helped him to become the party's secretary general in Lower Saxony. David McAllister has strongly influenced his party’s official positions ever since, and remains the head of the CDU parliamentary group in Lower Saxony’s Landtag.
He has been the youngest ever to serve in all the official positions he’s held. When he succeeded Christian Wullf as party chairman of Lower Saxony, he became the second most powerful politician in that state. The next step up the career ladder