Eduard Müller (German politician)

Eduard Müller (born 15 November 1818 in Quilitz near Glogau – 6 January 1895 in Neisse) was a German Roman Catholic priest and politician from the Prussian Province of Silesia.

In Protestant Prussia, Müller was elected to the Preußischer Landtag (Prussian Diet) in November 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

When the Prussian assembly first met in December, Müller lobbied for a unification of the Catholic members into a fraction[1] He is credited as a co-founder of the Centre Party (Germany) (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) in 1871.

In the 1871 elections to the new Reichstag, he surprisingly defeated the incumbent in the constituency of the Duchy of Pless-Rybnik in of Upper Silesia, Victor Herzog von Ratibor, the Duke of Ratibor, a Free Conservative Catholic aristocratic landowner who recently had headed a delegation to the Vatican.

Liberal deputy Eduard Lasker expressed the shock of the entire chamber about the "astonishing victory of a nobody"[2] and that the eminent incumbent had been 'driven out of his district in the name of the Catholic religion', by a man like Father Eduard Müller "whose merits," as Lasker put it, "may be extraordinarily great, only the world knows little of them, and still less the district in which he has been elected.