24 Facts About Bernd Lucke

Bernd Lucke was born on 19 August 1962 and is a German economist, professor, author and former politician.

Bernd Lucke co-founded the Alternative for Germany in 2013 and served as the party's federal chairman until July 2015, when he was displaced and left the party soon after.

Bernd Lucke had been elected a member of the European Parliament for the AfD in 2014 and served the five-year full term as a member of various other new parties, similar to some other former AfD MEPs.

Bernd 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 party shift to extremist positions; Bernd Lucke subsequently left the party.

Bernd Lucke's father was an engineer, and his mother was a schoolteacher.

From 1982 to 1984, Bernd 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.

Bernd Lucke completed his doctorate in 1991 with a dissertation on price stabilization in world agricultural markets under Jurgen Wolters at the Free University of Berlin.

Bernd Lucke has been an advisor to the World Bank and a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Bernd Lucke is a frequent guest on political talk shows in Germany.

Bernd 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.

Bernd Lucke 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.

Bernd Lucke first contested an election as a member of the Free Voters in the 2013 Lower Saxony state election but was not elected.

Bernd 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.

On 4 July 2015, Bernd Lucke was displaced as leader of the party Alternative for Germany by his former deputy, Frauke Petry, in a leadership election after several months of infighting.

On 9 July 2015, Bernd 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.

In 2015, Bernd Lucke was announced as the LKR's top candidate for the Bundestag ahead of the 2017 German federal election.

The party stood in the 2019 European Parliament election, but all its MEPs, including Bernd Lucke, lost their seats.

Bernd Lucke continued to work as a public commentator on economic and political affairs after his career as an MEP.

However, in 2019, Bernd 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.

In October 2019, Bernd Lucke left politics and returned to academic work at the University of Hamburg as an economics teacher.

Bernd Lucke was unable to deliver two lectures after being assaulted by an Antifa activist.

Bernd Lucke turned down an offer by the university to host online classes and, later that month, could resume lectures under police protection.

Bernd Lucke has worked as an opinion columnist for Welt am Sonntag since 2019.