Bernd Lucke


Bernd Lucke is a German economist and politician. Lucke was elected as Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative für Deutschland in 2014. He failed to get reelected in 2019.
He is a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Hamburg, a co-founder of "Wahlalternative 2013", and a founding member of the Alternative for Germany. Lucke lost out on the leadership of the AfD against Frauke Petry in July 2015, which was considered a shift of the party to extremist positions; he subsequently left the party. In July 2015 he and other former AfD members founded the political party Liberal-Konservative Reformer.

Biography

Between 1982 and 1984, Lucke studied economics, history, and philosophy at the University of Bonn and attended graduate studies in economics at the universities of Bonn and Berkeley between 1984 and 1987. He completed his doctorate in 1991 with a thesis on price stabilization in world agricultural markets. His thesis director was Jürgen Wolters of 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 reunification, as an assistant to the Senate of Berlin. His research interests include sovereign default, news-driven business cycles, growth in developing countries, dynamic CGE models, and applied econometrics.
Lucke was an advisor to the World Bank and a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Lucke is a frequent guest on political talk shows in Germany. He is married and has five children.
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.
On 4 July 2015, he was displaced as leader of the Alternative for Germany by his former deputy, Frauke Petry, after several months of factional infighting within the party. On 9 July 2015, Lucke left the Alternative for Germany, saying that the party had "fallen irretrievably into the wrong hands" after Petry's election, and on 19 July, he and other former members of the AfD established a new party, the Alliance for Progress and Renewal. ALFA has since been renamed Liberal-Konservative Reformer.

Selected publications

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