Palmer's father, Helmut, dubbed Remstalrebell was a very well known and controversial figure and perennial candidate. In a Deutsche Welle interview for the programTalking Germany with Peter Craven, Palmer described his father as a rebel who became a political activist in the 1950s, when "all the old fascists, all the old Nazis were back" in power, and said that his grandfather was a Jew who had to flee to the United States in 1938. The former state minister and CDU member Christoph Palmer is a second nephew of Helmut and a second cousin of Boris Palmer. Palmer graduated from high school at the Steiner School in Winterbach-Engelberg in 1992. From 1993, Palmer studied history and mathematics at the University of Tübingen and in Sydney. In 1996 he joined the Green Party.
Career
After graduating from Tübingen in 1999 Palmer worked as a scientific assistant for the Green Party in the Bundestag, the German Federal parliament, in Berlin. In March 2001 he won a seat in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg and was appointed party spokesman for environmental and transportation issues. In 2004 he ran for the office of mayor of Stuttgart, finishing in third place in the first round ballot at 21.5% of votes, a better result than all previous Green candidates for mayor of Stuttgart. He withdrew his candidacy before the second round ballot with an indirect recommendation that his followers should vote for the incumbent mayor Wolfgang Schuster on condition that Schuster would hold a referendum on the controversial project Stuttgart 21, which Palmer is opposed to, if costs would increase significantly. Even though that has been the case, Schuster hasn't kept that promise. After being re-elected to the Landtag in March 2006, Palmer decided in July to run as mayor of Tübingen and won the election on 22 October with 50.4% of the vote. He subsequently resigned from his Landtag mandate after taking office in January 2007. In July 2009, Palmer was criticised for recommending antizionist Tübingen resident Felicia Langer for the Federal Cross of Merit. Palmer was a Green Party delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2010. In March 2011, the Greens won the Baden-Württemberg state election: after decades, the CDU lost its power. Since then, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg is a Greens politician, Winfried Kretschmann. On 19 October 2014 Palmer was reelected for another eight-year term. In late 2015, Palmer was heavily criticised by other members of the Green Party as well the party's youth organisation, the Green Youth for his relatively right-wing positions on immigration in combination with the refugee crisis. In August 2017, some weeks before the German federal election, Palmer published the book ''We cannot help everyone. On May 5, 2020, The New York Times reported that "Boris Palmer, the mayor of Tübingen, in the country’s southwest, suggested that reviving the economy mattered more than the lives of potential coronavirus victims, whom he characterized as old and unwell. “Let me be blunt: In Germany, we might be saving people who would be dead in half a year anyway,” he said in a TV interview last Tuesday." New York Times, May 5, 2020 Live Updates, National governments set policies. That doesn’t mean local governments follow them.>
