Originally he had no plans to go to Europe. It was more by chance, as Daniel Caspary (CDU) admits, that he ended up in the European Parliament. The man who has been leading the group of German CDU/CSU members in the European Parliament for five years remembers the times when he still sat in the local council of Stutensee in the northern part of Baden and pursued his job as a manager at an energy company every Monday evening: „Local politics was my hobby. Originally, I didn’t want to change anything about it.“ But things turned out differently.