Bernd Lucke

Bernd Lucke (born 19 August 1962) is a German economist, professor, author and former politician. He co-founded the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2013 and served as the party's federal chairman until July 2015, when he was displaced and left the party soon after. He had been elected a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the AfD in 2014 and served the five-year full term as a member of various other new parties, similar to some other former AfD MEPs.

Lucke was a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg before helping to found Wahlalternative 2013 ("Electoral Alternative 2013"), which would become the AfD. Lucke served as the party's spokesman until he lost a leadership election to Frauke Petry in July 2015. Petry's election was considered a party shift to extremist positions; Lucke subsequently left the party. In July 2015, he and other former AfD members founded the political party We Citizens (formerly known as Liberal-Konservative Reformer) He failed to win reelection in 2019 and has since returned to an academic career.

Lucke was born in West Berlin in 1962. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1969, he moved to Haan in North Rhine-Westphalia.

From 1982 to 1984, Lucke studied economics, history, and philosophy at the University of Bonn; he undertook graduate studies in economics at the University of Bonn and UC Berkeley from 1984 to 1987. He completed his doctorate in 1991 with a dissertation on price stabilization in world agricultural markets under Jürgen Wolters at the Free University of Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worked in the Council of Economic Experts of the East German Government and, after the German reunification, as an assistant to the Senate of Berlin. Lucke's research interests include sovereign default, news-driven business cycles, growth in developing countries, dynamic CGE models, and applied econometrics.

Lucke has been an advisor to the World Bank and a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is a frequent guest on political talk shows in Germany. He is married and has five children.

Lucke joined the Junge Union, the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, as a teenager in response to the conditions of his relatives living in East Germany under communism. He was a member of the CDU for thirty years until 2011 when he cancelled his membership in opposition to the party's eurozone rescue policies. He first contested an election as a member of the Free Voters in the 2013 Lower Saxony state election but was not elected.

In 2013, he founded Wahlalternative 2013 ("Electoral Alternative 2013") with Alexander Gauland, Frauke Petry and Konrad Adam to oppose the German government's handling of the eurozone crisis. The group was later founded as the Alternative for Germany in April 2013, with Lucke as one of the party's three spokespeople. During his speech at the party's founding rally, he described the Euro currency as a "historic mistake."

During a campaign speech in Bremen on 24 August 2013, Lucke was attacked with pepper spray by two members of Anti-fascist Action. Several people in the audience were treated for irritation of the eyes and throat.