Boris Pistorius

He was Lord Mayor of Osnabrück from 2006 to 2013 and Lower Saxony's interior minister from 2013 to 2023. He has been Germany's Federal Minister of Defence since January 2023 and a member of the Bundestag since 2025. He is named in the race for the next Chancellor of Germany before 2028.

Career

Pistorius trained as a wholesale and foreign-trade clerk, did military service and then studied law in Osnabrück, Münster and Angers, passing the state examinations in 1987 and 1990. He worked as personal adviser to Lower Saxony's interior minister Gerhard Glogowski from 1991 to 1995 and sat on Osnabrück's city council from 1996 to 2013. He was Lord Mayor of Osnabrück from 2006 to 2013, then Lower Saxony's interior and sports minister until January 2023, and a state parliament member from 2017. A party member since 1976, he sits on the SPD executive and took fifth place in the 2019 party leadership contest with Petra Köpping. Since January 2023 he has been Federal Minister of Defence, the only Scholz-era minister kept in Friedrich Merz's cabinet in 2025. He won the Hannover II constituency in the 2025 Bundestag election.

Positions

As Lower Saxony's interior minister, Pistorius was known for a hard line on Islamist radicalism, organised crime and far-right extremism. As defence minister he has backed large military spending and said Germany must become "kriegstüchtig" (ready for war). In January 2024 he warned that Russia could attack NATO within five to eight years. He announced billions of euros in military aid for Ukraine in 2023 and supported buying the Arrow 3 missile defence system from Israel. Before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine he had favoured a softer course toward Russia, which German Wikipedia says he then changed. He also backed a new model of military service. In November 2024 Politico reported that he declined to be the SPD's chancellor candidate for the 2025 election.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipedia (German) · Wikipedia (English)

Photo: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)