Norbert Alois Röttgen (born 2 July 1965) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He was Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2009 to May 2012. From 2014 to 2021, he was Chair of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee.
Early life and education
Röttgen graduated from the Gymnasium of Rheinbach, North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his Abitur, he started to study law at the University of Bonn in 1984. He passed his first law examination in 1989, his second examination in 1993 and practised as a lawyer in Cologne. He obtained a legal doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2001; his doctoral thesis was on the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Political career
Röttgen joined the CDU in 1982 while he was still a high-school student. From 1992 until 1996, he served as the chair of the Junge Union, the youth organisation of CDU, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Röttgen was elected to the Bundestag in 1994. From 2002 until 2005 he served as the legal policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. During the First Merkel cabinet (2005–2009), a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD, he served as the Chief Parliamentary Secretary of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag until 2009. In this capacity, he worked closely with the SPD parliamentary floor manager Olaf Scholz to manage and defend the coalition government in parliament. He also served as member of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel (PKGr), which provides parliamentary oversight of Germany's intelligence services—BND, MAD and BfV.
Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, 2009–2011
Following the 2009 federal election, Röttgen was part of the CDU/CSU team in the negotiations with the FDP on a coalition agreement; he joined the working group on economic affairs and energy policy, led by Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU) and Rainer Brüderle (FDP).
From 28 October 2009, Röttgen was the Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the Second Merkel cabinet. He also served as a member of the Board of Supervisory Directors at KfW from 28 October 2009 to 22 May 2012. From November 2010, he was one of the four deputy chairs of the CDU in Germany. Also, in November 2010 he was formally elected as party chair of the CDU in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia after he had successfully bet Armin Laschet in a membership ballot. At the time, he was often mentioned as a potential successor to Merkel as chancellor.
Röttgen, in his capacity as environment minister, led the German delegations to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún and the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, respectively.
In May 2011, Röttgen announced his government's plans to shut all of the nation's nuclear power plants by 2022. The decision was based on recommendations of an expert commission appointed after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Later that year, he teamed up with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in launching the Bonn Challenge, calling for 150 million hectares of forest – an area four times larger than Germany – to be reforested by 2020; the Bonn Challenge was later endorsed at the 2014 UN Climate Summit and supplemented by the New York Declaration on Forests, which calls for an end to deforestation by 2030.
North Rhine-Westphalia state election and dismissal
Following the dissolution of the state's Landtag on 14 March 2012, Röttgen confirmed his intention to run in the subsequent election as the CDU's candidate for the office of Minister-President against the incumbent, Hannelore Kraft of the SPD. Röttgen ran against the debt-financed spending supported by Kraft, and even described the vote as a referendum on Merkel's Europe policies. However, he was widely seen as having failed to commit himself whole-heartedly to state politics, refusing to promise that if he lost the election he would nonetheless lead the opposition in North Rhine-Westphalia; 59 percent of respondents to an FG Wahlen poll said his refusal to commit to the state "damaged the CDU."