Michael Müller (politician, born 1964)


Michael Müller is a German politician serving as the Governing Mayor of Berlin since 11 December 2014. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, he also served as President of the Bundesrat from November 2017 until October 2018, which made him deputy to the President of Germany.

Political career

State politics

Müller was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives in 1996 and has been a member ever since, on the 16th June 2001 he took over leadership of the SPD Group in the House of Representatives from Klaus Wowereit who had been elected Governing Mayor of Berlin. After the resignation of Peter Strieder in April 2004, Müller ran for the Berlin SPD State Party Leadership and won, remaining the Leader of Berlin SPD until he lost his re-election bid against Jan Stöß in June 2012.
Following the 2011 state elections in Berlin, Müller served as senator for urban development and the environment from 1 December 2011 to 11 December 2014. One of his most extensive projects, which planned to build business space and apartments on the former Tempelhof Airport, was rejected in 2014 by a clear majority of Berlin citizens in a referendum.

Mayor of Berlin, 2014–present

In December 2014, Müller took over in midterm from incumbent Klaus Wowereit, Berlin's longest-serving mayor since reunification in 1990, who presided over the city's emergence as a popular tourist destination and center for high-tech startups but stepped down after his popularity suffered from the debacle around the Berlin Brandenburg Airport.
Müller had previously made a surprise entry into the race to succeed Wowereit and defeated two candidates initially seen as the most likely successors. Shortly before the election, Müller ran for the Leadership of the Social Democratic Party in Berlin a second time, and won. In the 2016 Berlin Election, he led the party to victory albeit not without some losses. After the election, Müller ended the grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union and formed a new government together with the Green Party and the left-wing Die Linke.

Role in national politics

As one of the state's representatives at the Bundesrat, Müller has been serving on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Committee on European Affairs and on the Committee on Cultural Affairs since 2014.
Müller was an SPD delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2004, 2009 and 2012. In the negotiations to form a coalition government under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2017 federal elections, he was part of the working group on urban development, led by Bernd Althusmann, Kurt Gribl and Natascha Kohnen.

Other activities

Corporate boards