German politician serving as Leader of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) from 2008 to 2019 and Minister of the Interior, Building and Community since 2018 under Chancellor Angela Merkel. From 2008 to 2018, he was Minister President of Bavaria. First elected to the Bundestag in 1980, he served as Minister for Health and Social Security in the christian-liberal cabinets of Helmut Kohl from 1992 to 1998, going to the opposition afterwards and returning to the government as Minister of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection in the grand coalition cabinet of Angela Merkel from 2005 to 2008. Following a disastrous result for his party in the 2008 Bavarian state election, he became both Leader of the CSU and the 18th Minister President of Bavaria, an office he had never seeked, after forming a christian-liberal government, the first coalition on state level in five decades. In 2013 he returned his party to an absolute majority on state level. From 1 November 2011 until 31 October 2012 he served as President of the Bundesrat. As such he was Acting head of state of Germany from the resignation of President Christian Wulff on 17 February 2012 until the election of Joachim Gauck as Wulff's successor on 18 March 2012.A staunch opponent of Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy after 2015, Seehofer had threatened to file a formal complaint with the Constitutional Court, with the historic CDU/CSU alliance in danger of splitting and running against each other in whole Germany for the first time, but both did not happen. He is a proponent of a federal cap on the number of refugees the German government is to take in. After faring historically bad in the 2017 federal election with a critisised mimic campaign of the Alternative for Germany, the party receiving its worst result since 1949, and unsuccessfully trying to run for a third term as Minister President in 2018, he was pressured by his party to resign and instead decided to take the office of Minister of the Interior, Building and Community (originally intended for Joachim Herrmann) in Merkel's fourth government, in order to shape the migrant policy after his views. In July 2018, a week-long dissent between Seehofer and Merkel nearly brought down the government and again seriously threatened a CDU/CSU split, but they ultimately found a compromise.