Laschet successor: Hendrik Wüst elected as the new Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia

The previous State Transport Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) was elected as the new North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister on Wednesday.

He received 103 of the 196 valid votes cast.

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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The black-yellow coalition, which has been in power since 2017, only has a one-vote majority. Since the AfD had announced how the SPD and the Greens would vote against Wüst, it is likely that the additional yes votes are votes from non-attached MPs. Three MPs resigned from both the AfD and its parliamentary group at the end of 2017.

Hendrik Wüst is the twelfth Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. He succeeds the failed Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, who had already announced in the spring that he wanted to move to Berlin regardless of the outcome of the federal election. According to reports, Wüst does not want to make any major changes in the North Rhine-Westphalian cabinet; the new Prime Minister will probably only present a successor to his previous position as Minister of Transport.

Wüst was born on June 30, 1975 in Rhede, Westphalia, where he still lives today with his wife and daughter, who was born in March. The lawyer began his political career in local politics and in the Junge Union, whose state chairman he became in 2000. As the youngest member of the CDU at the time, Wüst entered the state parliament in 2005. In the following year, the then CDU state chairman and prime minister Jürgen Rüttgers made him general secretary of his party.

Shortly before the 2010 state elections, Wüst's political career appeared to be over.

When it became known that a party functionary from the CDU party headquarters had offered some sponsors “partner packages” including “one-on-one talks” with Prime Minister Rüttgers for a lot of money, Wüst took over political responsibility for the “Rent a Rüttgers” affair and resigned from his post as general secretary return.

After that, Wüst remained in the second political row for a few years and, in addition to his state parliament mandate, was the managing director of the North Rhine-Westphalian newspaper publishers' association;

In 2013 he became regional chairman of the influential CDU SME Association (MIT).

After the formation of a new black and yellow government, the now resigned Prime Minister Armin Laschet appointed him Minister of Transport.

The Laschet successor in the office of Prime Minister also ran towards Wüst because, unlike the other possible candidates (among them Building Minister Ina Scharrenbach and Interior Minister Herbert Reul), he has a mandate in the state parliament.

North Rhine-Westphalia is the only federal state whose constitution stipulates that the prime minister must belong to the state parliament.