Thomas Dörflinger (politician, 1965)

Thomas Dörflinger (2014)

Thomas Dörflinger (born August 27, 1965 in Tiengen ) is a former German politician ( CDU ). From 1998 to 2017 he was a member of the German Bundestag . Since January 2018 he has been the owner of dtt consult & media eK The company deals with opinion polls, public affairs and journalism.

Life

education and profession

After graduating from the Klettgau-Gymnasium in Tiengen in 1984 , Dörflinger did his military service and then, from 1985, studied history and political science at the University of Konstanz , which he completed in 1992 as a Magister Artium (MA). After a subsequent traineeship at RTL Radio , he worked as an editor and editorial manager at RTL Radio Südbaden from 1993 . After the company closed in 1994, Dörflinger was initially unemployed until 1995 when he became a research assistant to Claudia Nolte , then Federal Minister for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth . From 1997 to 1998 he was an editor at the Black Forest Bote .

Party career

Dörflinger joined the Junge Union as a student in 1979 and joined the CDU in 1984. Since 1995 he has been a member of the board of the CDU district association Waldshut and was deputy district chairman there until 2018.

Dörflinger is a member of the Berlin Circle , an informal CDU internal conservative group made up of modernization and Merkel skeptics. In July 2011 he presented his own “theses on the necessary programmatic realignment of the CDU”. In it, he criticized, among other things, the leadership style of the party leadership under Merkel. All important substantive decisions of the past few years have been decreed from above: the realignment of family policy, the abolition of compulsory military service, the departure from secondary school, the tax cut plans. In this context, Dörflinger warned: "It is a matter of time before the reaction of the party base changes from the usual grumbling into loud protest". The CDU had to learn inner-party democracy again. Elsewhere he described the uncertainty and loss of trust of the members and supporters, caused by an increasingly blurred party profile. He explained "The programmatic vendor's tray, which one would like to call the 'Karstadtisierung' of the CDU, is neither economically nor politically sustainable". The program threatens to degenerate into “instructions for the Chancellor's electoral association”. In the same year he called for a broad debate in the media about the course of the CDU at the party congress in Leipzig.

In 2012 Dörflinger drafted a "Berlin Manifesto" for the Berlin Circle. It emerged from this that the Berlin Circle wanted to strengthen not only conservative but also Christian and market liberal approaches within the CDU. Opinions about the ten-page draft ranged from "substantial in terms of content" to "the thing is so bad that there is nothing to publish". The announced public presentation of the paper has been canceled.

Member of Parliament

From 1998 to 2017 Dörflinger was a member of the German Bundestag. From 2005 to 2007 he was chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group in the committee for family, senior citizens, women and youth and deputy family policy spokesman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group. Dörflinger had been chairman of the German- Swiss parliamentary group since 2003 .

Thomas Dörflinger has always entered the Bundestag as a directly elected member of the Waldshut constituency . In the 2009 Bundestag election , he received 41.5% of the first votes . In the 2013 federal election, he increased his first-time vote to 51.4%. Dörflinger did not run for the 2017 federal election .

Dörflinger was a member of the European Union parliamentary group of the German Bundestag .

Other engagement

From 2004 to 2018 Dörflinger was Federal Chairman of the Kolping Society in Germany. From 2005 to 2018 he was a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK).

Private

Thomas Dörflinger is Catholic , has been married since 1992 and has two sons. His father Werner Dörflinger was also a member of the German Bundestag for the CDU from 1980 to 1998.