Boris Palmer

Boris Erasmus Palmer (born 28 May 1972) is a German independent politician and former member of the Green Party. He has been mayor of Tübingen since January 2007. From March 2001 to May 2007, he was a member of the Baden-Württemberg Landtag, the State parliament in Stuttgart.

Palmer's controversial and polarizing positions put forward with great self-conviction led to the withdrawal of support from his party in the 2020 municipal elections, and a process to oust him from party ranks was started the following year.

Background

Palmer was born in Waiblingen, Baden-Württemberg. His father, Helmut, dubbed Remstalrebell ("Rems-valley rebel") was a very well known and controversial figure and perennial candidate. In a Deutsche Welle interview for the program Talking Germany with Peter Craven, Palmer described his father as a rebel who became a political activist in the 1950s, when "all the old fascists, all the old Nazis were back" in power, and said that his grandfather Siegfried Kilsheimer was a Jew who had to flee to the United States in 1938. The former state minister and CDU member Christoph Palmer is a second nephew of Helmut and a second cousin of Boris Palmer.

Palmer graduated from high school (Abitur) at the Steiner School in Winterbach-Engelberg in 1992. From 1993, Palmer studied history and mathematics at the University of Tübingen and in Sydney. In 1996, he joined the Green Party.

Career

After graduating from Tübingen in 1999 Palmer worked as a scientific assistant for the Green Party in the Bundestag, the German Federal parliament, in Berlin.

In March 2001 he won a seat in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg and was appointed party spokesman for environmental and transportation issues.