Norbert Lammert was the 12th President of the German Bundestag from 2005 to 2017. He is member of the Christian Democratic Union CDU. Born in 1948 Lammert obtained his abitur in Bochum in 1967 and after his military service in the Bundeswehr he studied political science and modern history at Ruhr University Bochum and at the University of Oxford. Having joined the CDU in 1966 he has started his political career postdoctoral in the city council of his hometown Bochum. In the following years he has different posts within the North Rhine-Westphalian branch of his party before he was elected to the Bundestag in 1980 for the first time. He has kept his mandate continuously until 2017. During his tenure in the Bundestag he served on several committees. Following the 2005 federal elections in which the CDU became the strongest party and formed a grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party, Lammert was elected by the Bundestag as its President. Lammert received 564 of 607 votes cast, including most of the SPD's votes. He was re-elected after the 2009 federal election as well as after the election in 2013. In October 2016, Lammert announced that he would not stand in the 2017 federal elections but instead resign from active politics by the end of the parliamentary term. Since December 2017 he is chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.