Nicola Beer

Nicola Beer (born 23 January 1970) is a German lawyer and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who has been serving as a vice president of the European Investment Bank since 2024, under the leadership of president Nadia Calviño.

Beer finished highschool with a bilingual degree in German and French in 1989.

She went on to study law at the University of Frankfurt from 1991 until 1997.

Beer became a member of the FDP in 1991.

She was first elected as member of the State Parliament of Hesse in the 1999 state elections.

In 2001, she separated from the children's father, fellow FDP politician Volker Stein.

Beer was a FDP delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2017.

Between 2008 and 2009, she served as deputy chairperson of the FDP parliamentary group, under the leadership of chairman Jörg-Uwe Hahn.

In the cabinets of minister-presidents Roland Koch and Volker Bouffier, Beer served as State Secretary for European Affairs at the Hessian State Ministry of Justice between 2009 and 2012.

In this capacity, she represented Hesse on the European Committee of the Regions.

Between 2012 and 2014 she was State Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs in Hesse.

During her time in office, Beer was one of several politicians, professors and teachers who successfully pushed for German public schools offering classes in Islam to primary school students using state-trained teachers and specially written textbooks.

In late 2013, incoming FDP chairman Christian Lindner nominated Beer for the office of Secretary General; on 7 December 2013 she got elected (with 84.3% of all votes. At the political convention of the FDP on 15 May 2015 she got reelected with 88.4% of all votes.

She previously was a member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2019 and part of her party's leadership.

Ahead of the 2017 elections, Beer was elected to lead her party’s campaign in the state of Hesse.

In the – unsuccessful – negotiations to form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats – both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) – and the Green Party, she was part of her party's delegation.

She later became a member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment.

For example, Beer spoke in a tweet in 2017 of the "alleged occurrence of more extreme weather events" using the hashtag "#Fakenews".

In a statement, Beer described the "causality of extreme weather situations and climate change" as "scientifically refuted".

In contrast to Beer's statement, the greater magnitude and probability of "extreme weather events" has been deemed to be linked to human activity since the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.

Beer has been an outspoken proponent of Taiwan’s independence; in 2022, she made an official trip to Taipeh and met with President Tsai Ing-wen.

Beer is a mother of twins.

In September 2018, Beer announced that she would lead the FDP list and run for a parliamentary seat in the 2019 European elections.

Led by Margrethe Vestager, she was among the seven-strong “Team Europe” that the centrist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party picked to spearhead its pro-EU, liberal campaign ahead of the elections.

Shortly before the vote, she joined 70 current and former EU leaders – including all the main parties’ lead candidates – calling for a female president of the European Commission or European Council and a gender-balanced leadership.

Following her election, Beer was part of a cross-party working group in charge of drafting the European Parliament's four-year work program on digitization.

Since 2018, she has been married to lawyer Jürgen Illing.

Earlier in her career, Beer was a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2023, where she served as one of its Vice-Presidents.

In parliament, she served as a Vice-President; she was part of its leadership under Presidents David Sassoli (2019–2022) and Roberta Metsola (2022–2023).

She also joined the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, where she has served as rapporteur on the Critical Raw Materials Act.

From 2021, she was part of the Parliament's delegation to the Conference on the Future of Europe.

From 2019 to 2023, Beer served as one of the three deputies of Christian Lindner in his capacity as FDP chairman.

In the negotiations to form a so-called traffic light coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Green Party and the FDP following the 2021 federal elections, Beer led her party's delegation in the working group on European affairs; her co-chairs from the other parties were Udo Bullmann and Franziska Brantner.

In 2023, Beer was nominated by the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz to become one of the vice-presidents of the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Beer has repeatedly publicly denied the consensus of climate science on extreme weather events.