Anyone who perceives Volker Bouffier only as a jovial father of the country has only one part of his personality in mind, albeit a conspicuous one.
In fact, the jurist is a disciplined and factual worker, a coolly calculating strategist and a shrewd engineer of power.
For half a century he has been fighting for this every day.
Ewald Hetrodt
Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung in Wiesbaden.
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He once joined the "Andenpakt", an exclusive coalition of CDU politicians who have promised never to compete against each other.
Bouffier did not adopt the critical distance to Angela Merkel maintained in the circle of now old men.
On the contrary: With his good relationship with her, after taking over the state chancellery and party chairmanship in 2010, he clearly set himself apart from his predecessor Roland Koch.
Merkel's interest in Bouffier grew when he managed to do black-green in Wiesbaden in 2013, which he failed to do in Berlin.
The Hessian sat at the negotiating table here and there.
Today he is by far the longest-serving Prime Minister of the Republic.
He fought for it longer and harder than anyone else.
The mother was an exile, the father only returned from Russian captivity in 1949 and, as an official in the Hessian local government, suffered for years from the fact that blacks had a hard time in red town halls.
Bouffier was about to join the German national basketball team at the age of 23 when he was so badly injured on a vacation that he didn't know for nine months if he would ever be able to live without a wheelchair again.
It takes a "certain hardness"
In the "Schönfelder", the bible of the law students, he leafed through with knitting needles to which his mother had attached rubber ends.
A friend removed the passenger seat in his Renault 4 so that Volker could sit in the back seat and stretch his leg when driving to Junge Union meetings.
It wasn't a hobby.
It was about nothing less than conquering the red state of Hesse.
Anyone who has worked so hard for it takes a particularly close look before sharing power – or even giving it up.
It was achieved by ten young people, the spearhead of the CDU youth.
Because of their meeting at a rest area off the A5, the group was respectfully nicknamed the "petrol station".
Bouffier came with his own car, Koch was brought from Eschborn by his mother.
While the older one set up a law firm,
the younger one took the lead in the political arena.
When Koch moved into the state chancellery in 1999, Bouffier became interior minister.
Associated with this was the image of the “Black Sheriff”.
Edmund Stoiber (CSU) recalled in May 2018 during a visit by the Union faction in the Wiesbaden state parliament that Volker had already been "a very sharp dog".