1. Peter Gauweiler was born on 22 June 1949 and is a German lawyer and politician of Bavaria's Christian Social Union who served as a member of the German Bundestag from 2002 to 2015, representing the Munich South district.
20 Facts About Peter Gauweiler
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Peter Gauweiler resigned his parliamentary seat and leadership post in 2015 at age 65.
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Peter Gauweiler joined the CSU in 1968 and held an elected offices from 1972, first in the Munich City Council, and later in the Bavarian state parliament.
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Peter Gauweiler first became a member of the German Bundestag in the 2002 elections.
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From 2006, Peter Gauweiler served as a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Foreign Cultural and Educational Policies of the German Bundestag.
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In November 2013, Peter Gauweiler was elected deputy chairman of the CSU, in what was widely considered a move to appease the eurosceptic elements within his party.
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Peter Gauweiler resigned the post and his seat in the Bundestag on 31 March 2015, about three months before his 65th birthday; he had previously been strongly criticized by CSU leader Horst Seehofer for voting against the extension of financial aid for Greece.
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Over many years, Peter Gauweiler has led several attempts to have the German constitutional court block measures that he considers enhance the EU's powers at the cost of national sovereignty.
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In 1992, Peter Gauweiler described the Maastricht Treaty as a "totalitarian dream", and called its key component, a common currency by 1999, as "Esperanto money".
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Peter Gauweiler launched a similar challenge to the European Constitution in 2005, but the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany made no ruling and a presidential signature was never given.
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Peter Gauweiler has been among the most aggressive challengers of the European Central Bank's efforts to rescue the Euro at the Constitutional Court.
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In 2012, Peter Gauweiler filed a complaint against the ESM and included opposition to a banking license for the bailout fund.
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Peter Gauweiler claimed that the ECB's bond-buying program threatened Germany with unlimited losses, arguing that it is an additional ground to reject use of German tax revenue for the rescue fund.
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Peter Gauweiler managed to convince a majority of justices on the court's second senate that the ECB's program to save the European common currency was contrary to European Union law.
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Peter Gauweiler showed an early understanding for Russia's territorial claims against Ukraine.
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In September 2014, Peter Gauweiler referenced a letter from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Boris Yeltsin in 1991, in which Solzhenitsyn referred to Novorossiya and many other areas of Ukraine beyond the Dnieper River as historically never belonging to Ukraine.
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On September 12,2014, Peter Gauweiler traveled to Moscow to open the "Year of Language and Literature in Russia and Germany" as chairman of the Bundestag subcommittee on foreign cultural and educational policy.
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Peter Gauweiler said that it was a cowardly policy that was going in the wrong direction.
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In February 2023, Peter Gauweiler was one of the initial signers of Manifest fur Frieden, a petition calling for an end to military support to Ukraine in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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In 2021, Suddeutsche Zeitung revealed that Peter Gauweiler had been receiving consultancy fees amounting to more than eleven million euros by eurosceptic billionaire August von Finck during his time in parliament.