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Matthias Otte was born to Lore Otte, née Hauter, and Max Otte (1928-1983), a vocational school teacher and local politician. After his father's death, he took his father's first name Max. In 1983, Otte graduated from high school in Plettenberg. From 1983 to 1989, he studied economics with a focus on economics at the University of Cologne. He graduated in 1989 with a degree in economics. During his studies, he spent a year abroad from 1986 to 1987 on a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at the American University in Washington, D.C. He received his second degree from Princeton University in New Jersey (USA) as a Master of Arts in Public Affairs in 1991. At Princeton, he received his doctorate in 1997 under Aaron Friedberg with the thesis A Rising Middle Power? - German Foreign Policy in Transformation.
Otte worked as a consultant for international organizations and the public sector at Kienbaum and Partners from 1989 to 1994 and was an employee of the Gütersloh Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) in 1995. From 1997 to 1998, he was employed by Arthur D. Little. He advised various companies and organizations, including Munich Re, the German Federal Ministry of Economics, and the United Nations. From 1998 to 2000, Otte was an assistant professor of international economics and international management in the Department of International Relations at Boston UniversityHe was also involved in setting up the Executive MBA Program Business Integration at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg from 2001 to 2005. In 2001, he became a tenured professor of general and international business administration at Worms University of Applied Sciences (C3 position), where he taught marketing, international business studies, and finance and investment in the departments of international business and foreign trade and tourism. From 2011 to 2016, he was a professor of quantitative and qualitative business analysis and diagnosis at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria. In 2018, he retired from civil service at his own request. From the winter semester 2011/2012 to the winter semester 2016/2017, he also held regular lectureships at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Erfurt in the field of study of economics. Otte has been a fund manager since 2005.
Otte was a member of the CDU from 1991 until 2022. In spring 2017, he became a member of the Werteunion, which elected him on 29 May 2021 in Fulda as its new federal chairman, succeeding Alexander Mitsch. At the end of January 2022, Otte declared that he would leave his post at the Werteunion in abeyance, as well as suspending "all other party-political activities." In January 2022, Otte was nominated by members of the AfD's Federal Assembly for the election of the German President. With 140 votes, he received the second most votes in the election (Frank-Walter Steinmeier received 1045). Otte thus received fewer votes than the AfD could have had eligible voters present at the Federal Assembly, but seven more votes than AfD eligible voters actually attended the assembly.
