Horst Lorenz Seehofer (born 4 July 1949) is a German politician who served as Minister for the Interior, Building and Community under Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2018 to 2021.

[1] A staunch opponent of Chancellor Angela Merkel's response to the 2010s migrant crisis,[2] Seehofer threatened to file a formal complaint with the Constitutional Court,[3] with the historic CDU/CSU alliance in danger of splitting and running against each other in the whole of Germany for the first time, but neither happened.

In 1993, Seehofer ordered that Germany's 117-year-old Federal Health Agency be dissolved following a review of how the government in the 1980s handled the cases of thousands of hemophiliacs who were infected through blood contaminated with HIV.

Ahead of the 2005 elections, Edmund Stoiber included Seehofer in his shadow cabinet for the Christian Democrats’ unsuccessful campaign to unseat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Because of his disagreement with CDU leader Angela Merkel on flat-rate contributions (Gesundheitsprämie) to the federal health insurance[10] he resigned from his leadership post in the parliamentary group on 22 November 2004 but remained deputy chairman of his party and kept his Bundestag seat.

After his party lost more than 17% of the popular vote in the Bavarian state elections of 2008, incumbent Minister-President Günther Beckstein and Chairman of the CSU, Erwin Huber, announced their resignations.

[23] In August 2016, Seehofer said he may break the unity of the "sister parties" (CDU/CSU) and run a separate CSU campaign in the 2017 national elections, a move widely seen as an effort to keep pressure on Merkel (being the leader of CDU) to shift to a more restrictive refugee policy in the European migrant crisis.

[26] On 4 December 2017, he announced to step down as Minister President and not run as leading candidate in the 2018 state elections;[27] instead, he said he would hand over the office to Markus Söder in the first quarter of 2018.

On 1 July 2018, Seehofer rejected the agreement Merkel had obtained with EU countries as too little and declared his resignation during a meeting of his party's executive, but they refused to accept it.

When the 2021 European floods caused Germany's worst natural disaster in more than half a century, with more than 170 dead and thousands missing, Seehofer again faced calls from opposition politicians to resign over the high death toll.

[2] Under pressure from Seehofer and his allies, Merkel later restricted cash benefits for refugees and added Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro to the list of "safe" countries to which migrants can be returned.

[22] He repeatedly called on the federal government to set a cap on the number of refugees Germany should be taking in,[4] saying that the country was able to manage only "200,000 applicants [per year] for asylum … at the most.

[45] In December 2010 and November 2011, Seehofer was the first Minister-President of Bavaria who visited the neighbouring Czech Republic; this was considered an important step in the dispute over the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans after the Second World War.

[citation needed] In an interview with news magazine Der Spiegel in late 2014, Seehofer warned Germany's foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his fellow Social Democrats (SPD) against pursuing a more friendly approach towards Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian War, arguing that "if Mr. Steinmeier is pursuing his own form of diplomacy alongside the chancellor, that would be highly dangerous.

[49] In early 2016, his joint visit with Edmund Stoiber to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin was met by harsh criticism, even from CDU politicians.

[50] In September 2018, a few days after Chemnitz protests against migrants and refugees, Seehofer criticized the debate on migration again saying it is "the mother of all political problems" in Germany.

A father of three, Seehofer failed in a 2007 bid for the CSU leadership when it emerged that he had a daughter born out of wedlock, from an extramarital affair with a much younger staffer of the German Bundestag.