Michael Georg Link

Michael Georg Link is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Link was a member of the German Bundestag from 2005 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2025, in his constituency of Heilbronn/Baden-Württemberg. From 2023 until the end of the electoral term, he served as deputy leader of the Free Democratic Party Group in the German Bundestag, responsible for all areas of international affairs and military security.

He also served as the German Federal Government’s coordinator of transatlantic cooperation at the Federal Foreign Office from March 2022 until November 2024. In that role, he focused on deepening political relations with the United States and Canada at the federal, state, and municipal levels. He also worked to increase transatlantic people-to-people contacts, especially by promoting exchange programs for young people.

Link has extensive professional experience in international and diplomatic relations. He served as minister of state and commissioner for German-French government relations at the Federal Foreign Office from January 2012 to December 2013. He also served as director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights from July 2014 to June 2017. In this capacity, he chaired numerous international electoral observation missions, such as one to the 2020 US general elections.

Link is a member of the Federal Executive Board of the Free Democratic Party Group and its treasurer. He serves as deputy chair of the Supervisory Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom and he is a board member of the German-French Institute (Deutsch-Französisches Institut).