After completing his legal clerkship in Heidelberg, Krichbaum passed the second state examination in 1995 and subsequently worked until 2002 as a self-employed economic consultant for MLP AG in Pforzheim.
Political career
Krichbaum joined the Junge Union in 1979 and also the CDU in 1983. He was deputy chairman of the CDU city association Pforzheim from 1999 to 2009 and he serves a district chairman of the CDU Enzkreis / Pforzheim since 2009.[citation needed]
Krichbaum has been a member of the German Bundestag since the 2002 elections. From 2005, he served as a deputy spokesman for the European Parliament of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, under the leadership of the group's chairman Volker Kauder. During that time, he was also his parliamentary group's rapporteur on Romania.
From 2007 until 2021, Krichbaum chaired the Committee on European Affairs. In addition to his committee assignments, he has been a member of the German delegation to the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly since 2019.[1]
Krichbaum was always directly elected as a representative of the constituencyPforzheim in the Bundestag. In his first election in 2002, he was able to regain for the CDU the direct mandate lost in 1998 to the SPD against the state leader of the SPD Baden-Württemberg, Ute Vogt. He defended this in 2005 with 46.9% and in 2009 with 40.7% of the first votes. In the general election in 2013, he reached with 49.5% of the first votes the best result of the CDU in this constituency since the federal election in 1983.[2] In his fifth federal elections 2017, he could not repeat this result, but won the direct mandate with 36.4% of the votes.[3]
