Nicola Beer (born 23 January 1970) is a German lawyer and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who has been serving as a

Member of the European Parliament A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the ECSC) first met in 1952, its ...

since 2019, and as one of its

Vice-Presidents A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on ...

Early life and career

Beer finished highschool with a bilingual degree in German and French in 1989. She went on to study law at the University of Frankfurt from 1991 until 1997.

Political career

Career in state politics

Beer became member of the FDP in 1991. She was first elected as member of the

Landtag of Hesse The Landtag of Hesse (german: link=no, Hessischer Landtag) is the unicameral parliament of the State of Hesse in the Federal Republic of Germany. It convenes in the Stadtschloss in Wiesbaden. As a legislature it is responsible for passing l ...

in the 1999 state elections. Between 2008 and 2009, she served as deputy chairperson of the FDP parliamentary group, under the leadership of chairman Jörg-Uwe Hahn. In the cabinets of minister-presidents Roland Koch and Volker Bouffier, Beer served as State Secretary for European Affairs at the Hessian State Ministry of Justice between 2009 and 2012. In this capacity, she represented Hesse on the

European Committee of the Regions The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) is the European Union's (EU) assembly of local and regional representatives that provides sub-national authorities (i.e. regions, counties, provinces, municipalities and cities) with a direct voice w ...

. Between 2012 and 2014 she was State Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs in Hesse.

Career in national politics

Beer was a FDP delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the

President of Germany The president of Germany, officially the Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: link=no, Bundespräsident der Bundesrepublik Deutschland),The official title within Germany is ', with ' being added in international corres ...

in 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2017. In late 2013, incoming FDP chairman

Christian Lindner Christian Wolfgang Lindner (born 7 January 1979) is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) serving as the Federal Minister of Finance since 8 December 2021. He has been the party leader of the liberal FDP since 2013 and a Memb ...

nominated Beer for the office of Secretary General; on 7 December 2013 she got elected (with 84.3% of all votes. At the political convention of the FDP on 15 May 2015 she got reelected with 88.4% of all votes.

Member of the German Parliament, 2017–2019

Ahead of the 2017 elections, Beer was elected to lead her party’s campaign in the state of Hesse. In the – unsuccessful – negotiations to form a

coalition government A coalition government is a form of government in which political parties cooperate to form a government. The usual reason for such an arrangement is that no single party has achieved an absolute majority after an election, an atypical outcome in ...

with the Christian Democrats – both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) – and the

Green Party A green party is a formally organized political party based on the principles of green politics, such as social justice, environmentalism and nonviolence. Greens believe that these issues are inherently related to one another as a foundation ...

, she was part of her party's delegation. She later became a member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment.

Member of the European Parliament, 2019–present

In September 2018, Beer announced that she would lead the FDP list and run for a parliamentary seat in the 2019 European elections. Following her election, Beer was part of a cross-party working group in charge of drafting the European Parliament's four-year work program on digitization. She has been serving as one of its

; in this capacity, she has been part of the Parliament’s leadership under Presidents David Sassoli (2019–2022) and

Roberta Metsola Roberta Metsola (; née Tedesco Triccas; born 18 January 1979) is a Maltese politician serving as President of the European Parliament since January 2022. Metsola was first elected to as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 2013, and be ...

(since 2022). She also joined the

Committee on Industry, Research and Energy The Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) is a committee of the European Parliament. Its areas of responsibility relate to industry, especially technology-intensive manufacturing, information technology, and telecommunications. It also ...

. Since 2021, she has been part of the Parliament's delegation to the Conference on the Future of Europe. Since 2019, Beer has been one of the three deputies of

in his capacity as FDP chairman. In the negotiations to form a so-called

traffic light coalition In German politics, a traffic light coalition (german: Ampelkoalition) is a coalition government of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and Alliance 90/The Greens. It is named after the parties' traditi ...

of the

Social Democrats Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promot ...

(SPD), the Green Party and the FDP following the 2021 federal elections, Beer led her party's delegation in the working group on European affairs; her co-chairs from the other parties are Udo Bullmann and Franziska Brantner. Beer repeatedly publicly denied the consensus of climate science.Bernhard Pötter
FDP-Generalsekretärin Nicola Beer: Mit Klima-Fake-News nach Brüssel
taz.de. 26 Januar 2019, accessed on 5 September 2021. In German. For example, Beer spoke in a tweet in 2017 of the "alleged occurrence of more extreme weather events" using the

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

"#Fakenews". In a statement, Beer described the "causality of extreme weather situations and climate change" as "scientifically refuted". In contrast to Beer's statement, the greater magnitude and probability of "extreme weather events" has been deemed to be linked to human activity since the

IPCC Sixth Assessment Report The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the sixth in a series of reports which assess scientific, technical, and socio-economic information concerning climate change. Three ...

Other activities

* Deutsche Industrieforschungsgemeinschaft Konrad Zuse, Member of the Senate * International Martin Luther Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2018) * Deutsche Stiftung Frauengesundheit, Member of the Board of Trustees * Association of Private Higher Education Institutions (VPH), Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2015) * Heraeus Bildungsstiftung, Member of the Advisory Board * Hessenpark, Member of the Advisory Board * Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Member of the Board of Trustees * Museum of World Cultures, Member of the Board of Trustees *

Stiftung Lesen Stiftung Lesen (Reading Foundation) is a non-profit organization based in Mainz, Germany under the patronage of Joachim Gauck. Stiftung Lesen acts as a stakeholder for reading promotion on a national and international level. It contributes to read ...

, Member of the Board of Trustees * World Vision Deutschland, Member of the Board of Trustees * German-French Lawyers’ Association (DFJ), Member * German-Israeli Association (DIG), Member *

Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe ) , formation = 1952 , type = ''Eingetragener Verein'' , status = , purpose = Medical care, humanitarian relief, youth programmes , headquarters = Berlin , location = Germany ...

(JUH), Member *

ZDF ZDF (, short for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen; ; "Second German Television") is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all fe ...

, Member of the Television Council (2015-2016)

Personal life

Beer is a mother of

twin Twins are two offspring produced by the same pregnancy.MedicineNet > Definition of TwinLast Editorial Review: 19 June 2000 Twins can be either ''monozygotic'' ('identical'), meaning that they develop from one zygote, which splits and forms two e ...

s. In 2001, she separated from the children's father, fellow FDP politician Volker Stein.Thomas Remlein (28 September 2016)
Der Ruf nach Nicola Beer wird lauter
''

Frankfurter Neue Presse The ''Frankfurter Neue Presse'' (FNP) is a German daily newspaper, based in Frankfurt am Main and focused on local and regional topics. History The FNP was founded on 15 April 1946 under a license of the American military government. It was lic ...

''. Since 2018, she has been married to lawyer Jürgen Illing.

References

Literature

* Beer, Nicola, Internationales Biographisches Archiv 36/2012 from 4 September 2012, in Munzinger-Archive (Beginning of the articl
available for free

External links

Nicola Beers Homepage (German)

CV at the FDP-parliamentary group in Hesse

on Parliamentwatch {{DEFAULTSORT:Beer, Nicola Women members of State Parliaments in Germany 1970 births Politicians from Wiesbaden Members of the Landtag of Hesse Living people MEPs for Germany 2019–2024 Free Democratic Party (Germany) MEPs Members of the Bundestag for the Free Democratic Party (Germany) Female members of the Bundestag Members of the Bundestag 2017–2021 21st-century women MEPs for Germany