Walburga Habsburg Douglas is a German-Swedish lawyer and politician and a member of the Swedish Parliament since 2006. She is also known as Archduchess Walburga of Austria (Walburga Maria Franziska Helene Elisabeth von Habsburg-Lothringen) Archduchess and Princess Imperial of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia, Countess Douglas, (5 October 1958 - ) in Berg am Starnberger See, Germany, the daughter of Otto, Crown Prince of Austria and Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen.

Family and children

Douglas married the Swedish Count Archibald Douglas on 5 December 1992 in Budapest, Hungary. They have a son, Count Moritz Otto Wenzel Douglas (born 30 March 1994).

Professional career

After her Abitur graduation in 1977 in Tutzing, Bavaria, she studied canonical law to the doctoral level in Salzburg.

From 1979 to 1992 she worked as an assistant at the European Parliament. In 1983 she studied at the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. and worked at the office of Reader's Digest in the same city. She worked for the Ministry of Information of the Sultanate of Oman from 1985-1992, and in 2004 she became a member of the board of the Arab International Media Forum in London.

Political career

In 1973 she co-founded Paneuropa-Jugend Deutschland, and was its chairman in Bavaria, and vice chairman on the national level. In 1977 she founded Brüsewitz-Zentrum (Christlich-Paneuropäisches Studienwerk). From 1980 to 1988 she was assistant international Secretary General of the international Paneuropean Union, 1988 to 2004 she was its Secretary General and she is its executive vice chairman since 2004.

She was one of the organizers of the Paneuropa-Picknick at the Iron Curtain on the 19 August 1989, on the border between Hungary and Austria. At this occasion, the fence was opened for the first time, letting more than 660 Germans from the GDR escape from the east. This was the largest number of escapees since the Berlin Wall was built and is seen by many as one of the main symbols of the fall of Eastern European Communism.

Since 2003 she is the chairwoman of the local branch of the Swedish Moderate Party in Flen and on the board of the regional organisation of the party in Södermanland. She is a member of the board of the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation since 2005, a foundation closely linked to the Moderate Party.

In 1999 and 2004 she ran for the European Parliament for the Moderate Party, in 2002 and 2006 she ran for the national parliament (riksdagen). She was elected, 17 September 2006 to the Swedish Parliament, in an election which showed the greatest support for the Moderate Party since 1928. Chairman of the Swedish Parliamentary delegation to the OSCE since 2006.

External links

• Walburga Habsburg Douglas
• Walburga Habsburg Douglas at the Riksdag website