Armin Grein, one of the founding fathers of the Free Voters and long-time district administrator of the Main-Spessart district, is dead. The party announced this on Monday. The former politician died on Sunday at the age of 84. He was federal chairman of the Free Voters from 1994 to 2010 and regional leader of the party in Bavaria from 1978 to 2006.
In the 1970s, Grein managed to shape individual groups of voters from all over Bavaria into a political force. The democratic potential was already present in many municipalities, wrote Grein in his recently published book about the rise of the Free Voters, “but it was not concentrated and therefore wasted away, at least in part.”
In 1978, the Bavarian State Association of Free Voters was initially founded as an association. Grein, then mayor of Marktheidenfeld, became chairman. “Armin Grein was the decisive figure who laid the foundations for the widely scattered Free Voters to form a unit,” Hubert Aiwanger once said of his predecessor. Aiwanger replaced Grein as party leader in 2006.
Michael Piazolo, Bavaria’s former culture minister and deputy state chairman, called the party father a “grand seigneur” on Sunday evening. The Free Voters “have a lot to thank him for.”