Beatrix von Storch

I am driven by the firm conviction that Germany needs fundamental reforms. Germany should once again have an exemplary constitutional state, parliament should once again provide the stage for genuine debate and effectively control the government. Citizens should be actively involved in important decisions through the possibility of referendums and plebiscites, as in Switzerland.

I was born in Lübeck in 1971. My parental home was characterised by Christian, civic and liberal values. After completing an apprenticeship as a bank clerk in Hamburg, I studied law in Heidelberg and Lausanne. I specialised in competition and antitrust law as well as inheritance and family law. In 1998, the last year of Kohl's government, I completed my studies with the First State Examination in Law. This was followed by my legal traineeship in Potsdam and then my work as a lawyer in the field of insolvency law.

I was already politically active during my time as a student. I was outraged by the Kohl government's violations of the law against those who had been politically persecuted in the SBZ between 1945 and 1949. That's why I founded the group "Students for the Rule of Law" together with other students at that time. We were particularly proud at the time that we managed to get Michael Gorbachev to speak at one of our major events.

In 1996, I did an internship in the US Congress with Congressman Lee Hamilton, who sat on the International Relations Committee for the Democrats. This gave me an insight into the US political system during the Clinton administration. While in Germany it was only the parties that set the tone, in the USA I was able to observe how strong the liberal-conservative base was there - completely normal citizens, without party membership, but equipped with the claim and the self-image of being able to participate in decision-making and shaping. That impressed me very much.

Later, I continued my political commitment alongside my main job as a lawyer. Finally, I founded the Civil Coalition with my future husband and other comrades-in-arms, including the well-known FAZ journalists Karl Feldmeyer and Klaus Peter Krause. We were a small group of middle-class rebels who took historian Arnulf Baring's call for "citizens to the barricades" seriously and wanted to put it into practice.

We were united by our belief in values such as freedom, justice and family and our commitment to more direct democracy and citizen participation. The model for this was the strategies of the liberal-conservative grassroots movements in the USA in the time of Ronald Reagan, from which the Tea Party movement later emerged. We wanted to make our contribution to breaking the "reform logjam" in Germany and strengthening the rule of law and democracy.

Our activities included writing to MPs in the state parliaments and the Bundestag, collecting signatures and organising citizens' alliances in the constituencies. We made intensive use of the internet as a new powerful tool to wake up the citizens and inform them about grievances. We also took to the streets and organised demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of citizens took part in our protests against the euro bailouts and the ESM.

The support of this protest movement was then also extremely helpful in the founding of the AfD as a new liberal-conservative force. I devoted all my energy to building our party and was later elected to the EU Parliament, to the federal executive committee and as spokesperson for the Berlin AfD. In the EU Parliament, I focused on challenging the established parties and forcing them to show their colours. In addition to Euro and European policy, my main political topics were domestic and legal policy. In the German Bundestag, my focal points are domestic and security policy. I was a member of the committee of enquiry into the Breitscheidplatz attack, I am a member of the Committee on the Interior and Home Affairs, a deputy member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and deputy chair of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag.

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