Hubert Aiwanger

Hubert Aiwanger was born on 26 January 1971 in Ergoldsbach, Lower Bavaria, the son of a farmer. He grew up in Rahstorf, a hamlet that belonged to the municipality of Inkofen until 1978 and has since been part of the town of Rottenburg an der Laaber, with a brother one year older and a sister ten years younger. He remained in Rahstorf throughout his life. As a young man he chaired the Catholic Rural Youth Movement (Katholische Landjugendbewegung), and he grew up speaking a strong Central Bavarian dialect that later became part of his public identity. From his school days he was known as "Hubsi".

Aiwanger attended the Burkhart-Gymnasium in Mallersdorf-Pfaffenberg, taking his Abitur in 1990. After compulsory military service he studied agriculture at the Fachhochschule Weihenstephan (today Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences) from 1991 to 1995, supported by a scholarship from the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel Foundation, and graduated as a Diplom-Agraringenieur (FH). He then worked on his parents' farm, which kept dairy cattle and breeding sows.

Aiwanger joined the Free Voters in 2001 and stood for the Rottenburg an der Laaber town council in 2002. He became local chairman in Rottenburg, chairman for Landshut county from November 2004 and briefly the first district chairman for Lower Bavaria. From March 2008 he sat on the Rottenburg town council and the Landshut county council.

On 25 March 2006, at a delegates' meeting in Garching bei München, he was elected chairman of the Free Voters of Bavaria in a run-off, 340 votes to 322, succeeding Armin Grein. In October 2014 he was re-elected with 92 percent.

At the Bavarian state election of 28 September 2008 he led the Free Voters into the Landtag for the first time with 10.2 percent and won a seat for Lower Bavaria. On 3 October 2008 he was elected leader of the parliamentary group, which he led in opposition until 2018. An attempt to enter the European Parliament in 2009 failed at the five percent threshold.

On 20 February 2010 the Federal Association of Free Voters was founded as a party in Münster with Aiwanger as founding chairman, and on 27 March 2010 he was also elected chairman of the federal association of voter groups in Berlin. He was re-elected federal chairman in October 2013 with 88 percent.

In opposition the Free Voters used direct democracy: a 2013 popular initiative ended university tuition fees in Bavaria, a 2014 campaign helped restore the nine-year Gymnasium (G9), and a campaign against road-improvement levies on homeowners led to their abolition from 1 January 2018.

After the state election of 14 October 2018, in which he took 25.0 percent of first votes in Landshut, the Free Voters formed a coalition with the CSU. On 12 November 2018 Aiwanger became Deputy Minister-President of Bavaria and Minister of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy. He kept both posts after the election of 8 October 2023, in which he won the Landshut constituency directly with 37.2 percent. In 2025 he led the Free Voters into the federal election and stood in the Rottal-Inn constituency, which the CSU won. He held his state offices and both party chairmanships until his death.

Aiwanger was a Roman Catholic and lived all his life in Rahstorf near Rottenburg an der Laaber. He was not married. His partner was Tanja Schweiger, Landrätin (district administrator) of the district of Regensburg since May 2014, and they had two sons, born in 2012 and 2016. A committed hunter, he chaired the Rottenburg district group of the Bavarian Hunting Association from spring 2004 until his death. He was regularly parodied by the cabaret artist Wolfgang Krebs on the BR programme quer.

Aiwanger positioned the Free Voters as a voice of rural, small-business and property-owning Bavaria, summed up in the line "Freiheit, Eigentum, Heimat" (freedom, property, homeland) used in his own campaign videos. Before the 2013 federal election he presented the party as a protest force against euro bailout policy.

On migration he supported asylum for the politically persecuted, whom he called "guests for a time", welcomed the closure of the Balkan route in 2016 and called for managed immigration on the Canadian model.

As economy and energy minister he backed more wind turbines in Bavaria (presenting plans in late 2021 for 500 to 1,000 more), local energy generation and a major expansion of hydropower. He long opposed new transmission lines such as SuedOstLink before accepting in November 2022 that it would be built. He was a vocal critic of the federal heating law, the EU combustion-engine phase-out and what he described as ideological climate and nutrition policy. In 2014 he argued in an RT interview against blaming only Russia for the Ukraine crisis.

Aiwanger is credited with transforming the Free Voters from a federation of municipal voter groups into a party that entered the Bavarian Landtag in 2008 and the Bavarian government in 2018, breaking the CSU's tradition of governing alone or with only one established partner. His party's popular initiatives ended university tuition fees in Bavaria, helped restore the nine-year Gymnasium and abolished road-improvement levies on homeowners. Political scientists saw his sharp, populist rhetoric as both divisive and, in the view of communication scholar Olaf Hoffjann, a factor that limited the growth of the AfD in Bavaria. He remained a polarising figure to the end, admired by supporters for plain speaking and criticised by opponents for coarsening political debate.

Aiwanger received the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in Silver (Bayerische Verfassungsmedaille in Silber), awarded by the Bavarian Landtag. The year of the award has not been confirmed in the sources used for this page.

Aiwanger was a frequent guest on German political talk shows, including Markus Lanz and Maischberger, and a prolific user of X (formerly Twitter), where he had more than 90,000 followers. He deleted his Twitter account in February 2012 after criticism of jokes he had posted and reopened it in February 2016. His speeches at the political Gillamoos fair in Abensberg were a fixture of the Bavarian political calendar, and his Central Bavarian accent made him a favourite target for impersonators such as Wolfgang Krebs.

In 2019 Aiwanger said at a hunting event that Bavaria and Germany would be safer if every decent man and woman could carry a knife, a remark the opposition condemned and he later said had been maliciously misinterpreted. On the day of the 2021 federal election he posted exit-poll figures on Twitter about two hours before polls closed, together with a call to vote for his party; the Federal Returning Officer examined the case and Landtag President Ilse Aigner demanded an apology. During the COVID-19 pandemic he was criticised for warning of an "apartheid discussion" over vaccination; he announced on 11 November 2021 that he had been vaccinated.

On 10 June 2023, at a rally in Erding against the federal heating law, he said the silent majority must take democracy back and used a coarse phrase about politicians in Berlin, drawing accusations of AfD-style rhetoric. In May 2024 he compared the Greens to other extremists on Maischberger.

The most serious controversy was the leaflet affair. On 25 August 2023 the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that he may have written an antisemitic pamphlet in the 1987/88 school year. Aiwanger denied writing it but said one or a few copies had been in his school bag; his older brother then said he was the author. Former classmates made further allegations about his conduct as a teenager, some of which he said he could not remember. Markus Söder asked him to answer 25 written questions and on 3 September 2023 decided not to dismiss him. Josef Schuster of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and Charlotte Knobloch were sharply critical; the historian Michael Wolffsohn found his apology convincing. Prosecutors in Regensburg investigated the former teacher who had passed the leaflet to the media and closed the case in July 2024.

On 4 November 2026 Aiwanger was in Berlin for the opening of the Free Voters' new office in the capital. According to party sources he had already cancelled an interview planned for that morning because he was unwell, and at the afternoon event Bavaria's Minister of State for Digital Affairs, Fabian Mehring, spoke in his place. Aiwanger stayed in his hotel in Berlin-Mitte near Friedrichstraße; there was initial talk of a stomach bug. He later could not be reached and was found dead in his room. His death was confirmed to dpa by government sources and to the Tagesspiegel by party and police sources, who said there was no indication of third-party involvement. BR reported that the criminal police were investigating, as is routine. He was 55. The cause of death has not been made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced when this page was written.