In parliament, Pflüger served as disarmament policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group from 1994 to 1998. From 1998 to 2002, he was chairman of the Committee on European Affairs. In the years from 2002 to 2005, he served as foreign policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU Parliamentary Group. Between 2000 and 2010, Plüger was a member of the federal executive committee of the CDU under the leadership of chairwoman Angela Merkel. In the negotiations to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2005 federal elections, Pflüger led the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on foreign affairs; his counterpart from the SPD was Gernot Erler. In November 2005, he was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Defence under minister Franz Josef Jung, a position in which he remained until October 2006. During his time in office, he managed to negotiate the continuing cooperation with President Karimov and the Uzbek government to use the Termez airbase by the German armed forces in December 2005. Career in state politics, 2006–2010 In March 2006, Pflüger was elected the top candidate of the CDU for that year's state elections in Berlin. After spending almost no time preparing his election campaign, he lost to incumbent Klaus Wowereit of the SPD, as all the polls had indicated. Keeping his promise to remain active in Berlin politics even in case of an electoral defeat, Pflüger assumed the responsibility as the chairman of the CDU Parliamentary Group in the Berlin House of Representatives and gave up his position as a Parliamentary State Secretary. As an opposition leader, he fought, unsuccessfully, against the closure of Tempelhof Airport. Another aim of his work was to create a more business-friendly environment in Berlin to reduce the high unemployment rate. Pflüger was an outspoken advocate of opening the CDU for a possible coalition with the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens (a so-called "Jamaica"-coalition). From 2006 until 2012, Pflüger also served as member of the Executive Council of the European Peoples Party (EPP). During his political career, Pflüger wrote books, especially on environment/energy and on foreign and security policy. A New World War?: the Islamist Challenge to the West (Ein neuer Weltkrieg? Die islamistische Herausforderung des Westens), which was published in 2004. Career in the private sector In 2010, Pflüger announced his decision to withdraw from his political functions and