Life and career

Philipp Rösler was born in Khanh Hung, Ba Xuyen Province, in the former South Vietnam, now Soc Trang Province, Vietnam. He was adopted from a Roman Catholic orphanage near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) by a German couple that already had two biological children and then Rösler was brought to Germany at the age of nine months. He grew up in Hamburg, Bückeburg and Hanover, where he graduated from high school in 1992. After training to become a combat medic in the German Bundeswehr (the Federal Defense Force), Rösler was exempted to study medicine at the Hannover Medical School. Following this, he continued his education at the Bundeswehr hospital in Hamburg. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 2002 and left service as a Stabsarzt (a rank for German medical officers equivalent to an army captain) in 2003. He is a Roman Catholic, and a member of the General Conference of the Central Committee of German Catholics. He has been married to Wiebke Rösler, also a physician, since 2003. The couple has twin girls, Grietje and Gesche, born in 2008.

Political career

Rösler has been a member of the FDP and its political youth organisation since 1992. He was secretary of the FDP in the state of Lower Saxony from 2000 until 2004 and has been chairman of the FDP parliamentary group in the Lower Saxon state assembly since 2003. From 2001 until 2006, Rösler was a member in the regional assembly of Hanover (district), where he was also deputy chairman of the parliamentary group. In May, 2005, he was elected an observer of the federal FDP executive committee. He received 95% of the votes, the best result of that party conference. At the state party conference in March, 2006, Rösler was elected as chairman of the Lower Saxon FDP with 96,4% of the votes; he succeeded Walter Hirche, who had decided to step down after twelve years at the helm. In April, 2008, Rösler was confirmed as the Lower Saxon FDP party chairman, receiving 95% of the votes.

At the federal party conference in June, 2007, Rösler was re-elected as a member of the party executive committee. The following month, he was elected to stand as his party's main candidate in the Lower Saxon state election in January, 2008. In that election, he received 10.9% of the votes in his local constituency, Hanover-Döhren. On February 18, 2008, Rösler was appointed minister for economy, labour and transport[6] as well as deputy prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony.

In October 2009, Rösler succeeded Ulla Schmidt as Federal Minister of Health in Angela Merkel's cabinet. Rösler succeeded Rainer Brüderle as Federal Minister of Economics and Technology on 12 May 2011 and Guido Westerwelle as Chairman of the FDP on 13 May 2011 and was also instated as Vice-Chancellor of Germany on 16 May 2011.


Dr. Philipp Rösler, Vietnamese Adoptee now Vice Chancellor for Germany

Sources: motherland.ccom.com.vn