Hans-Gert Pöttering
German politician
Hans-Gert Pöttering (born 15 September 1945) is a German lawyer, historian and conservative politician (CDU, European People's Party), who served as President of the European Parliament from January 2007 to July 2009 and as Chairman of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 2010 to 2017.
He served as a Member of the European Parliament continuously since the first elections in 1979 until 2014 and was Chairman of the European People's Party-European Democrats 1999–2007. When he stepped down in 2014 he was the European Parliament's longest-serving member. As president of the European Parliament, he proposed the creation of the House of European History museum in Brussels.
Early life and education
Pöttering never got to know his father who was killed in action during the last days of the Second World War. After Abitur and military service, he studied law, political science and history at the University of Bonn, the University of Geneva, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and at Columbia University in New York. He took his first state exam in jurisprudence in 1973, earned a PhD in political science and history in 1974 with a dissertation on West German defence policy in the 1950s and 1960s and took his second state exam in jurisprudence in 1976, fully qualifying as an attorney.
Political career
Member of the European Parliament, 1979–2014
Pöttering was a member of the European Parliament from 1979 until 2014. By the end of this period, he was the only member of the European Parliament to have served continuously since the first elections.
From 1984 to 1994, Pöttering was chairman of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence.
“Hans-Gert Pöttering” enters the record as german politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hans-Gert, Pöttering and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Hans-Gert Pöttering” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hans-Gert, Pöttering and German provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q57301. VIAF identifies the subject as 57483042. The Library of Congress control number is n82250192. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2007, 2009 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hans-Gert Pöttering” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.