Peter Altmaier
Peter Altmaier, born 18 June 1958 in Ensdorf Saarland. He is a German politician who has served as the Chief of Staff of the German Chancellery and as Federal Minister for Special Affairssince December 2013. Previously he was Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from May 2012 to December 2013. A fluent English-speaker with a deep interest in EU politics, Altmaier is widely seen as one of Chancellor Angela Merkels most trusted advisors and respected for his "compromising style."
Political Career
Altmaier has been a member of the CDU since 1976. He began his career as a research assistant for public and international law at Saarland University in 1995 and later at the European Institute of Saarland University. His tenure lasted until 2000. He worked for the European Commission from 1990 to 1994.
Altmaier has been a member of the Bundestag since 1994. When the Bundestag created a committee to examine whether then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and others in the governing SPD party inflated economic figures before the 2002 federal elections to hide a growing budget deficit, he was chosen by his parliamentary group to lead the inquiry. From 2006 to 2011 Altmaier was president of Europa-Union Deutschland, the German section of the Union of European Federalists. Altmaier became a secretary of state in the Federal Ministry of the Interior in 2005. In this capacity, he publicly admitted in 2009 that Germany followed a request of the government of Saudi Arabia to grant influential cleric Abdullah Ibn Jibreen police protection in a Berlin hospital where he was undergoing heart treatment; the decision garnered sharp criticsm from the opposition parties, with the Green Party questioning why Germany hosted someone who “has called for the killing of Shiites [and] praised Osama bin Laden.”
Education
He studied law at Saarland University
