Name: Ralf Pichler
Age: 37
Marital status: single
Place of residence: Hamburg-Eimsbüttel
Diploma: chartered engineer informatics
Work: TES Electronic Solution

My roots

Siegen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany probably comes closest to the meaning of the words "my home". I was born, however, in Bucharest in Romania, and raised in Siegen in Germany. Since July 2007 I have been living in Hamburg- Eimsbüttel where I feel comfortable owing to the easy-going nature of the inhabitants of Hamburg. For professional reasons I have also spent 7 years in Stuttgart. Apart from Germany and Romania, my family roots also reach to Austria and Hungary, so I feel comfortable calling myself a European.

My political development

I gradually became involved in politics via political agendas and forums online as well as personal experiences in my professional life. My political interest, therefore, covered a multitude of topics. I criticized software-monopolist Microsoft, learned from my experiences at the time of the dotcom bubble burst and took offence to the general economic imbalance. As a result of my own affectedness I gradually started to take a critical look at our economic and social system. Due to my nature as an engineer, I am constantly looking for ways to improve the situation.

The development of Global Society

In order to be able to use it a base for a concept for a change of the world, the society and the economy I developed my own survey at the end of 2003. My methodology was derived from technical feasibility studies. I looked at existing approaches and tried to find and common points and directions in order to first develop and then realize them at a later point. The result was published on the website global-society.net. New findings derived from the collaboration with Attac and the Newropeans are constantly added here, leading to a continuous ptimisation of possible solutions.

My activity with Attac

Since the end of 2004 I have been a member of Attac, an organization that is views globalisation critically. I have been working predominantly in the EU task group, which I represented on the board of Attac Germany between 2005 and 2008. During this time I have learned a lot about the co-operation with people of different views about how the world should or could work. At a European Attac conference in 2006 in Stuttgart I managed a workshop about the "Sustainable development of the EU" (PDF 297KB).

Commitment to the Newropeans

I have also been a member of the Newropeans since the beginning of 2007. As geographical officer for Northern Germany I am the contact person for the general public.

I am running for the EU elections 2009 as candidate for the Newropeans in Germany because I consider the democratisation of EU structures as a base of any further progress. It cannot be tolerated any longer that government representatives of the member states use the EU level to undermine reasonable democratic limits to the separation of powers in their home countries! The big parties are taking advantage of this deficit of democracy instead of finding a way to overcome it. We, the Newropeans, are a completely different type of party. We want to govern and act on behalf of democracy and all citizens in order to abolish this problem.