Al-Wazir was born in Offenbach am Main, Hesse, the son of an upper-class Yemeni father and a sudeten German mother. He holds dual citizenship of Yemen and Germany. His parents divorced while he was a child, and he spent several years of his youth in the Yemeni capital with his father, an experience he later described as very influential in his personal development. After his Abitur in 1991, he studied political science in Frankfurt, where he earned a degree.
Political career
Al-Wazir joined the German Green Party in 1989, and has been a member ever since. From 1992 to 1994 he was chair of the party's youth organisation in Hesse. He has been a member of the Landtag since 1995 and is co-chair of the Hessian Green Party. He was the leader of the Greens during the Hesse state election of 2008, and as such was the Green candidate for the position of Minister-President of Hesse. His party gained 7.5% of the votes. In the aftermath of the election, he pushed hard for a "red–green–red" coalition consisting of the Social Democratic Party, the Greens, and the far-leftDie Linke party. This would have succeeded if not for an internal revolt by SPD members, forcing a new election in January 2009. In the 2009 elections, he again stood as the Green candidate for minister-president. Surveys showed Al-Wazir to be Hesse's most popular politician at the time of the vote. This time his party, also benefitting from popular anger at the SPD, increased its share to 13.7% of the vote, but the Greens remained out of government. On 18 January 2014, after the 2013 state elections, Al-Wazir became Deputy of the Hessian Minister-President Volker Bouffier and Hessian Minister of Economics, Energy, Transport and Regional Development in a Black-Green coalition. Thus they formed only the third CDU-Green government in Germany's 16 federal states and the first in a big and socially diverse region. As one of Hesse's representatives at the Bundesrat, Al-Wazir is a member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and the Committee on Transport. Al-Wazir was a Green Party delegate to the Federal Convention for electing the president of Germany in 2017.
Al-Wazir is married to a Yemeni woman, with whom he has two sons. They also split time between Germany and Yemen. Al-Wazir's surname has been an aptronym since he assumed ministerial office in 2014, as الوزير "al-wazīr" is Arabic for "the government minister."
