Michael Theurer

Michael Theurer (born 12 January 1967 in Tübingen) is a German economist and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He took his Abitur at the Martin-Gerbert-Gymnasium in Horb am Neckar, served from 1986 to 1987 with Airborne Brigade 25 in Calw, and studied economics at the University of Tübingen, graduating in 1995 as a Diplom-Volkswirt. He joined the FDP and its youth organisation, the Young Liberals, in 1983, and chaired the Young Liberals in Baden-Württemberg from 1991 to 1994.

From 1995 to 2009 Theurer was lord mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Horb am Neckar. He sat in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg from 2001 to 2009 and, from 2006 to 2009, was deputy chair of the FDP/DVP parliamentary group. He was deputy state chair of the Baden-Württemberg FDP from 1999 to 2011 and state chair from 2013 until 2024, and a member of the federal party presidium from 2013 to 2024.

He was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2017 and chaired its Committee on Budgetary Control from 2011 to 2014. Elected on the Baden-Württemberg list for the Karlsruhe-Stadt constituency, he then served in the Bundestag during the 19th and 20th electoral terms, and was deputy chair of the FDP parliamentary group from 2017 to 2021.

In the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Theurer was Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport from December 2021 to September 2024, under minister Volker Wissing, and from January 2022 also the federal government's commissioner for rail transport.

On 24 July 2024 the federal cabinet decided to appoint him to the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank. The Bundesbank board was heard on 26 July 2024 under section 7(3) of the Bundesbank Act and raised no objection. He joined the board on 2 September 2024, responsible for banking and financial supervision and for financial stability. He left the Bundestag at the end of 1 September 2024; Julian Grünke succeeded him. Theurer told the Neckar-Chronik that, as an economist, a life's dream was being fulfilled, and said that Finance Minister Christian Lindner had asked him in the spring of 2024 whether he would accept the post if it were offered. He remained an FDP member but resigned his party offices, citing the political neutrality required of Bundesbank board members.

Early life and education

Upbringing and schooling

Michael Theurer was born on 12 January 1967 in Tübingen, on the Neckar in Baden-Württemberg. He is Protestant and the son of a pharmacist and a social pedagogue; he grew up in Horb am Neckar, where from 1981 to 1986 he was a youth leader in the local Protestant parish. He has said that his father wanted the birth to fall on Thursday, 12 January, rather than on Friday the 13th, and that he arrived shortly before midnight. His father took part in local politics with the Freie Wähler, the non-party free-voter associations common in German towns, but avoided joining a party; a 2012 profile described arguments with him as the start of Theurer's political interest.

The Martin-Gerbert-Gymnasium in Horb am Neckar, where Michael Theurer took his Abitur in 1986.

He passed the Abitur in 1986 at the Martin-Gerbert-Gymnasium in Horb. In a 2017 interview with the Südwest Presse he called himself a shy and capable pupil who was rarely top of the class, and gave his Abitur average as 1.4. He contributed to the school newspaper Rüttelsieb, which carried pieces on South American revolutionaries and on South American music.

Military service and journalism

After school he performed basic military service (Grundwehrdienst) from 1986 to 1987 with the Bundeswehr's Luftlandebrigade 25, an airborne brigade stationed in Calw. He has said that he thought seriously about civilian alternative service because he was active in the peace movement, considered nuclear weapons very dangerous, and had demonstrated against the NATO Double-Track Decision and the rearmament that followed. He nevertheless chose the armed forces, on the argument that they were needed to defend freedom. Of the posting he recalled that basic training taught soldiers to rely on one another, that duty in the brigade staff was useful preparation for later administrative work, and that he lost ten kilograms.

From 1988 to 1990 he completed an editorial traineeship and worked as a local reporter for the regional daily Schwarzwälder Bote, based in Oberndorf am Neckar, with a short spell as local editor in Schramberg. He was drawn, he later said, by the range of subjects and by meeting people, and he had originally wanted to become an economics journalist. A profile published while he was a member of the European Parliament reported that he had also considered studying religion and politics, and that the paper's economics editor persuaded him to read economics instead.

University and the Young Liberals

In November 1983, aged 16, Theurer joined the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and its youth organisation, the Junge Liberale. He has tied that choice to the liberal formula of as much freedom as possible and as little state as necessary, and has named the then foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as the party figure he most admired. A 2012 profile noted that, unlike Genscher and much of the FDP, he had as a teenager joined protests against NATO's nuclear rearmament. From 1991 to 1994 he was state chairman of the Junge Liberale in Baden-Württemberg.

He studied economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre) at the University of Tübingen from 1990 and graduated in 1995 as a Diplom-Volkswirt. With Harald W. Sondhof he published, in 1995, a Tübingen economics discussion paper on why local telecommunications networks in the United States had been kept out of competition and how technology was undermining that regulatory monopoly. Asked what the degree had taught him, he answered that a theory which fails in practice cannot be right, and described himself as a pragmatist wary of doctrinal narrowness. The state chairmanship of the Young Liberals ran through most of his student years, and he was still enrolled at Tübingen when he was elected lord mayor of Horb.

Municipal politics

City council and the 1994 election

Theurer’s local career was based in Horb am Neckar, a Große Kreisstadt in the Freudenstadt district of Baden-Württemberg. The biography published by the Bundestag, drawn from the member’s own information, records that from 1989 to 1994 he chaired the joint group of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Freie Wähler on the Horb city council. In the state’s municipal constitution the council, the Gemeinderat, is the town’s main organ and is elected for five years; the mayor is chosen in a separate direct election.

A Südwest Presse caption places him on the evening of 11 December 1994, the night of his election as Oberbürgermeister. In a Große Kreisstadt that is the title of the directly elected head of the municipality, who chairs the council and its committees, votes there, directs the administration and represents the town externally. The same newspaper later wrote that he had turned the CDU incumbent out of office and, at 27, was Germany’s youngest Oberbürgermeister. He took up the post in 1995, the year he completed a Diplom in economics at the University of Tübingen. A mayor’s term in Baden-Württemberg is eight years and runs independently of the council term.

Lord mayor of Horb am Neckar

He remained Oberbürgermeister from 1995 until 2009, longer than a single statutory term. Horb stands on the upper Neckar; the municipality describes itself as a town of nearly 26,000 people living in 17 districts across about 120 square kilometres.

The principal transport dispute of the mayoralty was the Hochbrücke, a high bridge intended to take through-traffic out of the town centre. In 1987, under the CDU mayor Hans Hörner and a CDU majority on the council, a citizens’ petition for the bridge was rejected in favour of a large inner relief road. In 1997, with Theurer in office, a referendum produced a 69 percent majority for the bridge and against routing federal road B28 through the Gäu. In 2001 the town, the Freudenstadt district and the regional council in Karlsruhe agreed what local reporting called a historic compromise: the Horb bridge would have priority over a tunnel for the town of Freudenstadt. The city advanced one million euros toward the federal planning, and Theurer later said campaigners had pressed for the project’s place in the federal transport plan, describing it as a successful citizens’ project and as “drilling thick boards.” In a 2024 interview he dated his own involvement to collecting signatures for the bypass, then under construction, while he was still a schoolboy. The groundbreaking on 2 November 2018 came years after he had left the town hall.

The mayoralty ended after his election to the European Parliament. On 27 September 2009 the news agency dpa reported that a new election had been required because Theurer was the first Oberbürgermeister in Baden-Württemberg to win a seat there. Peter Rosenberger, identified as a CDU politician and the sitting Bürgermeister, was the sole candidate and stood as an independent; the town gave him 98.45 percent of the vote, on a turnout of 66.91 percent among 18,932 people entitled to vote.

District council and the Nordschwarzwald association

From 1999 to 2021 he was a member of the Kreistag of Landkreis Freudenstadt and, until 2004, chair of its FDP group. The district council is the Landkreis’s main organ: the Landrat presides, and the other members are elected for five years. In November 2020 Theurer asked Landrat Klaus Michael Rückert to release him from the honorary mandate. On 13 April 2021 the Südwest Presse reported that the Kreistag was about to decide on the request; the Bundestag biography dates the end of the membership to 2021.

From 2004 to 2009 he also sat in the assembly of the Regionalverband Nordschwarzwald, the regional planning association for the northern Black Forest. The association, a corporation under public law, describes the Verbandsversammlung as its main organ. That assembly elects the chair and two committees, one for planning and one for administration, the economy and transport, and the association states that the assembly currently has 56 members.

Baden-Württemberg politics

Landtag of Baden-Württemberg

Michael Theurer sat in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg from 2001 until the end of August 2009. The directory for the 14th legislative period listed him, then also lord mayor of Horb am Neckar, for constituency 45, Freudenstadt. At the election of 26 March 2006 the Free Democratic Party (FDP) share there was 19.8 percent (9,093 votes), its highest in any constituency and 7.0 points above 2001; the direct mandate went to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate Carmina Brenner. Statewide, the FDP took 8.1 percent and 10 of 128 seats in 2001, and 10.7 percent and 15 of 139 seats in 2006.

In that Landtag the FDP/DVP group had 15 members. Its chair was Ulrich Noll; Theurer was a deputy chair, with Heiderose Berroth and Friedrich Bullinger, from 2006 to 2009. Landtag president Peter Straub later said Theurer's early work had concentrated on the standing committee and the finance committee, with advisory roles on the committee under Article 10 of the Basic Law and the election-review committee. From 2006 he remained on the finance committee and was deputy chair of the new committee on European affairs, elected on 19 July 2006 beside the CDU's Christoph-E. Palmer.

Theurer resigned the mandate at the end of August 2009 after his election to the 7th European Parliament. Friedhelm Ernst took up the succession on 8 September 2009.

State party leadership

On his own account, Theurer belonged to the FDP state executive in Baden-Württemberg from 1991 to 2011 and was deputy state chair from 1999 to 2011. The Landtag election of 27 March 2011 cut the party's share from 10.7 to 5.3 percent and its seats from 15 to seven in a house of 138, ending its place in the CDU-led government. The state executive resigned as a body. At an extraordinary congress in Stuttgart on 7 May 2011, Theurer challenged the incumbent chair, Birgit Homburger. The first ballot tied at 180 votes each; in the runoff Homburger received 199 and Theurer 192, with seven votes against both and two abstentions. Theurer then said the state association stood fully behind Homburger.

Homburger did not stand again after the FDP failed to re-enter the Bundestag at the September 2013 federal election. On 2 November 2013 about 400 delegates met at the Filharmonie congress centre in Filderstadt. Four candidates sought the chair. Theurer, then a member of the European Parliament, and Hans-Ulrich Rülke, chair of the Landtag group, both missed an absolute majority in the first round, which eliminated the consultant Hosam el Miniawy and the evangelical theologian Kasten Jung. Theurer won the runoff by 199 votes to 188. He had argued for a shared leadership with the group chair rather than combining both offices in one person. Rülke accepted the post of first deputy chair and was elected to it with 93.5 percent of the vote.

During his chairmanship, dated by the Deutsche Bundesbank from 2013 to 2024, the state party regained part of the ground lost in 2011. At the Landtag election of 13 March 2016 the FDP received 445,498 votes, 8.3 percent, and 12 of 143 seats, all of them second mandates. At the election of 14 March 2021 it received 508,429 votes, 10.5 percent, and 18 of 154 seats, again only through second mandates. In Bundestag elections in the state, its second-vote share was 12.7 percent in 2017 and 15.3 percent in 2021. A state congress in the summer of 2023 confirmed him with 78 percent.

He gave up the state chair, and his seat on the FDP federal presidium, with effect from 1 September 2024. In a letter to members he wrote that the statutory neutrality required of a member of the Deutsche Bundesbank executive board made the resignations necessary; he remained a party member. On 5 January 2025 a congress in Fellbach elected Rülke, Landtag group chair since 2009 and running without an opponent, with just under 85 percent of the votes of about 400 delegates, so that the party and parliamentary leadership were again held by the same person.

European Parliament

Elections and mandate

Michael Theurer was a member of the European Parliament from 14 July 2009 to 23 October 2017. He sat for the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. From 27 January 2012 until the end of the 2009–2014 term he was also a member of that group's bureau.

Michael Theurer speaking in the European Parliament hemicycle.

At the 2009 European Parliament election in Germany, on 7 June, the FDP received 2,888,084 votes (11.0 percent) and 12 seats, with turnout at 43.3 percent. Theurer was eighth on the party's single federal list, behind Silvana Koch-Mehrin, and that place fell within the twelve seats won. In the first half of the term he was a full member of the Committee on Regional Development (16 July 2009 to 18 January 2012) and, from 4 July 2011, of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy.

He was re-elected at the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany on 25 May. The federal returning officer recorded the FDP at 3.4 percent and three of Germany's 96 seats, against 11.0 percent and 12 seats in 2009; turnout was 48.1 percent. Eight months earlier, at the 2013 German federal election, the FDP had taken 4.8 percent of second votes and was not among the parties given seats in the new Bundestag. A congress in Bonn on 19 January 2014 placed Alexander Graf Lambsdorff first on the federal list (86.2 percent of the delegate vote) and Theurer, from Baden-Württemberg, second (85.2 percent), with Gesine Meißner third. Second place was enough for re-election. The second mandate ran from 1 July 2014 to 23 October 2017. From 13 October 2014 he chaired the delegation for relations with Australia and New Zealand and sat on the Conference of Delegation Chairs.

Budgetary control

On 23 January 2012 the ALDE group nominated Theurer to chair the Committee on Budgetary Control, in succession to the Dutch liberal Jan Mulder, who had held the chair temporarily since October 2011. The group had first proposed another German liberal, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis. Ingeborg Grässle, of the European People's Party, objected because of plagiarism allegations about Chatzimarkakis's doctoral thesis, and Theurer, then new to the committee, was put forward instead. Parliament's record lists him as chair, and as a member of the Conference of Committee Chairs, from 23 January 2012 to 30 June 2014. He had been an ordinary member of the committee only from 19 to 22 January 2012. A Bundestag biography drawn from his own information dates the chairmanship from 2011 to 2014.

As rapporteur he produced the report of 30 January 2014 on evaluating the Union's finances according to results achieved, presented as a tool for the European Commission's discharge procedure (A7-0068/2014). After re-election he remained a full member of the budgetary control committee from 1 July 2014 until the mid-term reconstitution in January 2017, and was a substitute on Industry, Research and Energy until 15 June 2016.

Tax, transparency and economic committees

Theurer was a full member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs from 1 July 2014 to 18 January 2017 and again from 19 January 2017 until he left the Parliament.

After the LuxLeaks disclosures by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Parliament set up a special committee on tax rulings and similar measures. Theurer and the Portuguese socialist Elisa Ferreira were co-rapporteurs of its report, A8-0317/2015. Parliament adopted the resolution on 25 November 2015 and on 2 December 2015 created a successor committee, TAXE 2, to pursue unfinished questions on harmful corporate-tax regimes, cooperation among member states and aggressive tax planning.583853_EN.pdf)

Theurer and the Danish social democrat Jeppe Kofod were the TAXE 2 co-rapporteurs. The committee adopted their report on 21 June 2016.583853_EN.pdf) It took account of the Panama Papers, the consortium's documents on offshore companies published on 9 May 2016, as well as LuxLeaks. On 6 July 2016 Parliament adopted the resolution by 514 votes to 68, with 125 abstentions. The text recalled a Commission estimate that tax evasion and avoidance cost up to €1 trillion a year, and an OECD estimate of a global corporate-income-tax loss of between 4 and 10 percent.

The resolution called for a review of the Directive on Administrative Cooperation, public country-by-country reporting by multinationals, and a proposal before the end of 2016 for a common consolidated corporate tax base. It asked for a common Union list of tax havens, with sanctions that could also reach companies, banks, accountancy and law firms and tax advisers involved with listed jurisdictions, and for an EU-wide withholding tax so that profits made in the Union would be taxed at least once before leaving it. Further recommendations covered binding rules on patent boxes, a code of conduct for advisers, protection for whistleblowers and journalists, and a public Union register of beneficial ownership.583853_EN.pdf)

From 24 June 2016 until 23 October 2017 Theurer sat on the committee of inquiry into alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application of Union law on money laundering, tax avoidance and tax evasion. On the economic committee he was rapporteur for the report of 14 June 2017 on a proposed Council directive on mechanisms for resolving double-taxation disputes (A8-0225/2017).

Bundestag

Elections of 2017 and 2021

Theurer became a member of the Bundestag at the federal election of 24 September 2017. A state delegates’ assembly of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Baden-Württemberg, meeting on 19 November 2016 in Donaueschingen, had elected him to first place on the party’s state list. He also stood as the FDP’s constituency candidate in constituency 271, Karlsruhe-Stadt. In the final count he received 13,829 first votes, 8.6 percent of the valid first votes and 5.4 percentage points more than the FDP had received there in 2013. The direct mandate went to Ingo Wellenreuther of the Christian Democratic Union, who was returned as the directly elected member for the constituency; the CDU took 45,821 first votes, or 28.5 percent. The FDP’s second votes in Karlsruhe-Stadt were 19,251, or 12.0 percent, and turnout was 77.6 percent. Theurer entered the 19th Bundestag on the state list, with Karlsruhe-Stadt recorded as his constituency.

He headed the Baden-Württemberg list again for the election of 26 September 2021. At the state delegates’ meeting in Friedrichshafen on 17 October 2020, about 400 delegates elected him lead candidate with 91.3 percent of the vote. Before polling day, regional broadcaster SWR listed him among the candidates for the Karlsruhe-Stadt direct mandate and noted that he held first place on the state list. He received 15,793 first votes, 10.0 percent, 1.4 percentage points more than in 2017. The direct mandate passed to Zoe Mayer of Alliance 90/The Greens, directly elected in constituency 271; the Greens received 47,473 first votes, or 30.0 percent, while the CDU fell to 30,921 first votes, or 19.5 percent. The FDP’s second votes in the constituency were 20,615, or 13.0 percent, and turnout was again 77.6 percent. Theurer was returned for the 20th Bundestag on the state list. He gave up that seat with effect from the end of 1 September 2024, and Julian Grünke of the FDP succeeded him.

Deputy chair of the parliamentary group

After the FDP’s return to the Bundestag, Christian Lindner was elected unanimously as chair of the parliamentary group at its first meeting on 25 September 2017. On 20 October the group completed its executive. Theurer, listed as elected on the Baden-Württemberg state list, received 83.54 percent of the votes for the portfolio “Vorankommen durch eigene Leistung” (“getting ahead through one’s own effort”).

The same ballot assigned portfolios to Katja Suding, Stephan Thomae, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, Christian Dürr and Frank Sitta, who received 89.87 percent, 96.2 percent, 88.46 percent, 92.31 percent and 94.81 percent respectively. The Bundestag’s biography for the 19th electoral term records Theurer as deputy chair of the FDP parliamentary group. In that term he was not a full member of a standing committee. He sat as a substitute member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs, the Committee on Health and the Committee on Tourism, and of the Joint Committee. The biography for the 20th electoral term dates the deputy chairmanship to 2017–2021, covering the 19th Bundestag, and records his membership of both the 19th and the 20th Bundestag.

Federal transport and digital policy

Parliamentary state secretary

Theurer served from December 2021 to September 2024 as parliamentary state secretary to Volker Wissing, the Free Democratic Party minister for digital affairs and transport in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. On 8 December 2021, the day Scholz was elected, Bundestag president Bärbel Bas announced the new government's line-up and named Theurer with Daniela Kluckert and Oliver Luksic as the three FDP parliamentary state secretaries at the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport. Theurer's subjects were railways, the environment and Europe; Kluckert took digital infrastructure and electromobility, and Luksic roads, logistics and aviation.

On 12 January 2022 the cabinet made him commissioner for rail transport, succeeding Enak Ferlemann. The brief was an overall rail strategy and a voice for the sector in government. Theurer named capacity, quality and customer focus as the test of a more attractive railway, and said he would push the existing master plan while seeking clearer structures at Deutsche Bahn, with a public-interest network beside competitive operators.

Rail transport

Punctuality set the terms of the job. In 2022, 65.2 per cent of Deutsche Bahn long-distance trains were on time, ten points worse than in 2021; a train counted as late from six minutes, and cancellations were left out of the figure. Theurer told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the government had inherited a backlog, asked passengers for understanding and an apology, and said the network was in so serious a state that a general overhaul, the Generalsanierung, had no alternative. He said the government had told Deutsche Bahn's management, then led by Richard Lutz, that punctuality had to improve markedly. Lutz, he reported, blamed an overloaded network; Theurer answered that the state owned that duty and was taking it up, with the first schemes, including the Riedbahn between Frankfurt and Mannheim, already financed, and with much of a carbon surcharge on the truck toll from 2024 earmarked for rail.

The method was to close busy corridors for about five months and renew them at once, rather than patch under traffic. On 16 September 2023 the government and Deutsche Bahn set out 40 such corridors, more than 4,000 kilometres, to be tackled through 2030, starting with the Riedbahn in 2024 and, in 2025, Hamburg–Berlin and Emmerich–Oberhausen. Wissing called it a commitment to rail. About €40 billion extra was promised by 2027—€11.5 billion in the budget and financial plan, €12.5 billion from the Climate and Transformation Fund, €3 billion from Deutsche Bahn and €12.5 billion as further equity—and a public-welfare-oriented infrastructure company inside the group was to start on 1 January 2024. Long-distance and freight trains would be diverted, and regional passengers moved by bus.

The other dispute was the Deutschlandticket, the €49 local-transport pass. At its first anniversary Theurer called it a large step—no fare zones, a mostly digital sale, and more than 11 million subscriptions, including what he called real shifts from the car—and said arguments with the Länder over price and subsidy only unsettled passengers. He wanted fewer transport associations and more digital sales, not further federal cash, noting that local transport is a state task and that regionalisation funds had risen from €9.6 billion to €11.2 billion, with the annual increase lifted from 1.8 to 3 per cent. In June 2024 Der Spiegel reported that, answering the Christian Democratic Union, he would not say how the money would be shared among the Länder, citing a core of executive responsibility closed to parliamentary inquiry. CDU transport spokesman Michael Donth called that arrogant and said the federation, having introduced the ticket, was leaving passengers, states and municipalities uninformed.

Leaving office

On 24 July 2024 the cabinet decided to appoint Theurer to the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank; a hearing at the bank was still outstanding, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. He said neutrality on the board ended forty years of political office, and that Finance Minister Christian Lindner had asked him earlier in the year whether he would take the post. Consulted on 26 July under the Bundesbank Act, the executive board raised no objection. Theurer left the Bundestag at the close of 1 September 2024. The parliamentary biography dates both the state secretaryship and the rail commissionership to September 2024, when he joined the bank. Welt reported on 6 September that Wissing had said, that Wednesday, the FDP agriculture spokesman Gero Hocker was to succeed him in both posts. The paper described Hocker as scarcely known in the industry and the opposition Union as irritated, with long-distance punctuality still under two-thirds, the Deutschlandtakt delayed, regional and freight budgets under strain, and a rail-financing law still unpassed.

Deutsche Bundesbank

Nomination and appointment

On 24 July 2024 the federal cabinet resolved to appoint Michael Theurer, then parliamentary state secretary for digital affairs and transport and rail commissioner, to the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, subject to a hearing at the bank. In the same round the Bundesrat proposed former North Rhine-Westphalia finance minister Lutz Lienenkämper of the Christian Democratic Union, and sitting board member Sabine Mauderer was to become vice president. Theurer, state chairman of the Free Democratic Party in Baden-Württemberg, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that forty years in honorary and full-time politics would end because “the neutrality of the Bundesbank’s executive board requires it.” He told the Neckar-Chronik that, as an economist, a long-held ambition was being fulfilled, and that Finance Minister Christian Lindner had asked him in the spring whether he would accept the post if it were offered. He said he would remain an FDP member but give up his party offices, including the state chair and his place on the federal presidium.

Under section 7(3) of the Bundesbank Act, the Federal President appoints the board: the federal government nominates the president, the vice president and one further member, and the Bundesrat, with the government’s agreement, nominates the other three. Members must be specially qualified, the nominating bodies must hear the board, and terms are eight years or, exceptionally, at least five. On 26 July 2024 the board heard Mauderer and Theurer, raised no objections, and informed the government. Mauderer, a member since 2018, was then still responsible for financial stability among other areas. Section 12 makes the bank independent of instructions from the federal government in the exercise of its statutory powers. In a letter reported at the end of August, Theurer wrote that he would leave the state chair and the federal presidium at the end of 1 September 2024 because the new office’s “legally required neutrality” demanded it, while remaining a party member. The bank dates his Bundestag mandate, the state-secretary post and those party offices as ending in 2024, and from 2 September Mauderer was vice president and Lienenkämper and Theurer had joined the board.

Supervision and financial stability

That decision gave Theurer banking and financial supervision and financial stability. The portfolios of President Joachim Nagel, Mauderer, Burkhard Balz and Lienenkämper included, respectively, economics and legal services; markets and sustainability; cash and payments; and human resources, audit and compliance. Information technology, statistics, risk control and research were assigned temporarily to Nagel, Mauderer and Balz. Theurer sits on the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank as the Bundesbank’s member for Germany, alongside Mark Branson of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). He is also a Bundesbank member of the Financial Stability Committee, chaired by the Federal Ministry of Finance and composed of the ministry, the Bundesbank and BaFin, and a member of the Committee on the Global Financial System at the Bank for International Settlements.

On 21 November 2024 in Frankfurt he presented that year’s Financial Stability Review as a view of the German financial system as a whole, not of single institutions. After nearly a decade of very low interest rates, he said, the rise since mid-2022 had been the strongest in 25 years; the system had weathered it and vulnerabilities were easing, though rates were not expected to return to their old lows. Residential prices had risen on the quarter for the first time in two years. Commercial prices had at least stopped falling, but he still saw further declines as very likely because of more remote work, online shopping and stricter energy standards, and he called commercial real estate an elevated risk, concentrated in a few banks and insurers and a focus of supervisors.

The priority, he said, had to be “a resilient financial system,” which required continuous monitoring and scope to adapt macroprudential measures under stress. He also argued that oversight of non-bank financial intermediaries needed a stronger macroprudential perspective and closer monitoring.

Political positions and controversies

Economic and fiscal views

Theurer paired criticism of aggressive avoidance with competition on rates rather than bases. After the Paradise Papers, he told Deutschlandfunk on 8 November 2017 that differing national systems in the single market opened loopholes for multinationals, and that the remedy was binding European Union law. A uniform European tax base could not be manipulated, he said, and Germany could not close the gap alone. He called for a common consolidated corporate tax base and for every profit leaving the EU to be taxed at least once, with competition then running through rates.

He defended the constitutional debt brake. In a September 2019 Focus essay he called plans to loosen it, including an off-budget "climate bond," a "fatal dam break." Investment, he wrote, should be paid for by cutting subsidies and selling federal holdings, not by new debt.

On climate and transport he argued for prices rather than bans. In a January 2020 interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he called a carbon cap with emissions trading the core of climate policy, able to meet the Paris Agreement goals while keeping prosperity and jobs. A "renunciation and prohibition ideology," including a general speed limit and diesel bans, would miss those targets and destroy jobs. He wanted EU fleet limits changed for technological openness, and equal tax treatment of synthetic fuels so combustion engines could, in his words, run in a practically climate-neutral way.

The diesel conflict set him against Environmental Action Germany (Deutsche Umwelthilfe, DUH). In November 2018, as the CDU weighed a congress motion to review the group's charitable status, Theurer told Handelsblatt that "everything" about it belonged on the test bench. Campaigns based on "extremely questionable measurements," he said, had forced through driving bans and "cold expropriations" of millions of diesel drivers. He called the DUH a "lobby and Abmahnverein" and accused the federal government of funding its "campaign against the automobile industry." Managing director Sascha Müller-Kraenner replied that charitable status is decided by the tax office, not the CDU, and had repeatedly been confirmed. The group was then in court over bans in 29 cities.

On fuel prices he contemplated breakup. In June 2022, as parliamentary state secretary and Baden-Württemberg FDP chair, he told t-online that the temporary fuel-duty cut seemed not to be reaching drivers. As an "ultima ratio," and as a "threat backdrop," he wanted a European debate on breaking up the oil companies, citing the coalition agreement's "abuse-independent unbundling" of entrenched markets. A windfall-profit tax, he said, would be "driving out the devil with Beelzebub"; Economics Minister Robert Habeck and the Federal Cartel Office should first watch the firms, and the office should be strengthened. SPD deputy Sebastian Roloff called the suggestion constructive.

Public disputes

The sharpest clash over enforcement came in the 2021 federal campaign. After finance minister Danyal Bayaz of the Greens opened an online portal for anonymous tips on tax offences, Theurer spoke of a "Blockwart mentality." Bild had called the project a "tax Stasi." Bayaz said a campaign did not justify "historically forgetful Stasi or Nazi comparisons," and Habeck said such comparisons played down the "dictatorship of the GDR." Minister-president Winfried Kretschmann answered that anonymous reports had long been possible by letter or email and that the portal only digitized them.

Theurer also differed in public with federal chair Christian Lindner. In May 2020, after the state Green board urged Tübingen mayor Boris Palmer to leave over remarks on coronavirus protections, Theurer told Bild am Sonntag that Palmer was "warmly welcome," that the state FDP was "a home for critical minds," and that Palmer was "a combative, clever mind who sometimes overshoots the mark." Palmer refused: an ecologist, he said, would argue with the FDP every day about substance. Lindner wrote that Palmer did not fit the party and that "we don't need him either."

After Thomas Kemmerich was elected minister-president of Thuringia with AfD votes, Theurer told the Augsburger Allgemeine that replacing the leader would be wholly unnecessary, but that the party needed to discuss "the leadership style of the chairman, who acts in an increasingly solitary way." In the Bundestag group's review, Der Spiegel reported, he said he had been misunderstood and that Lindner had his full confidence; the magazine described the relationship as strained. Later in 2020 he urged Lindner, in the Stuttgarter Zeitung and Stuttgarter Nachrichten, to clear the "Thuringia trauma" by not letting Kemmerich, now "a symbol," run again as lead candidate. Lindner had already given that advice. After the March 2021 state election Theurer pressed for talks with the Greens and the SPD, calling a "traffic light" an "innovation turbo" and better than what he termed a hollowed-out CDU, while adding that it "need not be a blueprint" for federal politics. Der Spiegel reported that many in the FDP still saw greater overlap with the CDU.

Personal life and other roles

Family

Michael Theurer was born on 12 January 1967 in Tübingen. The biography published by the Bundestag for the 20th electoral term, which the parliament notes is the member's own declaration, describes him as Protestant, married and the father of two children, without naming his spouse or the children.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 August 2016, he and the physician Antje Giede-Jeppe were married in a civil ceremony at Schloss Dettingen in Horb am Neckar, with about 150 guests present. The Schwarzwälder Bote reported that Giede-Jeppe, a neurologist with a doctorate then working at the university hospital in Erlangen, and Theurer kept their surnames, and that they had maintained a long-distance relationship because of their work. Theurer, then a member of the European Parliament and state chairman of the Free Democratic Party in Baden-Württemberg, told Bild that he had married his long-time partner. Bild reported that they had met in 2006 at a scholarship ball of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Munich. The local paper added that the bride's mother said a church wedding would follow the next Saturday in Grebenstein, in the district of Kassel.

Outside offices

The same archived Bundestag page publishes the side activities required under the parliament's rules of conduct: functions in companies, in public-law bodies, in associations and foundations, and participations in companies or partnerships. It states that the figures are gross amounts actually paid, including compensation, equalization payments and benefits in kind, and are not taxable income.

In companies, the disclosure lists an honorary seat on the council of Agora Energiewende (Smart Energy for Europe Platform, SEFEP gGmbH) in Berlin until 8 December 2021, and membership of the expert council of CNC – Communications & Network Consulting AG, also in Berlin, until that day, with an annual gross payment of €11,900. He chaired the supervisory board of Leuco AG in Horb am Neckar until 8 December 2021; the page records a gross payment of €37,688.65 for 2021. In public-law bodies, he sat on the administrative board of KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) in Frankfurt until 15 December 2021, with a gross payment of €7,424.41 recorded for 2021.

Among associations and foundations, the disclosure lists honorary membership of the board of trustees of the Baden-Badener Unternehmer Gespräche, with no end date; of the board of trustees of the German committee of AIESEC in Bonn until 8 December 2021; and of the political advisory board of the Initiative Deutsche Infrastruktur in Frankfurt until the same date. He was an honorary member of the administrative board of the Reinhold-Maier-Stiftung in Stuttgart until 1 September 2024, and of the advisory board of the Verband Deutscher Eisenbahn-Ingenieure from August 2022 until 1 September 2024, the date the biography records as the end of his Bundestag membership. Both the narrative biography and the disclosure list an honorary place on the board of trustees of the Theodor-Heuss-Stiftung in Stuttgart, without an end date. The foundation's trustee list dated October 2026 still included him; it states that trustees are unpaid and appointed by the executive board, and describes the foundation as independent and non-partisan.

Under capital participations, the disclosure names TWF Metallbearbeitungs Holding UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Horb am Neckar and gives no payment figure for that interest.