Frank-Walter Steinmeier (; born 5 January 1956) is a German politician who has served as President of Germany since 2017. He was previously Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2017, as well as Vice-Chancellor of Germany from 2007 to 2009. Steinmeier was Chairman-in-Office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2016.
Steinmeier is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), holds a doctorate in law and was formerly a career civil servant. He was a close aide of Gerhard Schröder when Schröder was Minister-President of Lower Saxony during most of the 1990s, and served as Schröder's chief of staff from 1996. When Schröder became Chancellor of Germany in 1998, Steinmeier was appointed Under-Secretary of State in the German Chancellery with responsibility for the intelligence services. From 1999 to 2005, he served as Chief of Staff of the Chancellery.
Following the 2005 federal election, Steinmeier became Foreign Minister in the first grand coalition government of Angela Merkel, and from 2007 he additionally held the office of vice chancellor. In 2008, he briefly served as acting chairman of his party. He was the SPD's candidate for Chancellor in the 2009 federal election, but his party lost the election and he left the federal cabinet to become leader of the opposition. Following the 2013 federal election, he again became Minister for Foreign Affairs in Merkel's second grand coalition. In November 2016, the governing CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, which held a large majority in the Federal Convention, nominated him as candidate for President of Germany. He left the cabinet on 27 January 2017. He was elected president by the Federal Convention on 12 February 2017 with 74% of the vote. On 13 February 2022, he was re-elected by the Federal Convention for a second and final term with 78% of the vote.
Steinmeier is known as a reform-minded moderate within the SPD.Frank-Walter Steinmeier Financial Times, 9 September 2008. As chief of staff, he was a principal architect of Agenda 2010, the Schröder government's reforms of the welfare state. His lenient policies toward countries such as Russia and China have earned him criticism both in Germany and internationally, and he has been criticised for prioritising German business interests over human rights.
Personal life Early life and education Steinmeier was born in 1956 in Detmold. Although his full name is Frank-Walter, his friends call him Frank. His father, Walter Steinmeier (1928–2012), was a carpenter affiliated with the Church of Lippe (one of Germany's few Calvinist regional church bodies, and a member church of the Protestant Church in Germany). His mother, Ursula Steinmeier, born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), came as a refugee from a Lutheran part of Silesia during the flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II.
Following his Abitur, Steinmeier completed 15 months of military service with the German Air Force in Goslar from 1974 to 1976. He then studied law and political science at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Brigitte Zypries was a fellow student. In 1982, Steinmeier passed his first and in 1986 his second state examination in law. He worked as a scientific assistant to the professor of public law and political science at Giessen University until he obtained his doctorate in law in 1991. Steinmeier's dissertation explored the state's role in preventing homelessness.
Family life Steinmeier is married to Elke Büdenbender and has one daughter. On 24 August 2010, he donated a kidney to his wife.
In 2015, Steinmeier served as best man at the wedding of Rüdiger Grube and Cornelia Poletto in Hamburg.
Interests Steinmeier enjoys jazz, and is an avid football fan.
Religion Steinmeier is a Reformed Protestant and an active member of the Reformed Bethlehem congregation in Neukölln. He was baptised into his father's church (the Church of Lippe) as a youth.
Early career Steinmeier became an adviser in 1991 for the Law of Communication media and media guidelines in the State Chancellery of Lower Saxony in Hanover. In 1993, he became director of the Personal Office for the prime minister of Lower Saxony, Gerhard Schröder. In 1996, he became the Secretary of State and head of the State Chancellery of Lower Saxony.
Political career at the federal level Schröder Federal Chancellery (1998–2005)
In November 1998, Steinmeier was appointed as Secretary of State, a junior Chancellery bureaucrat, and Commissioner for the Federal Intelligence Services at the office of the chancellor following Schröder's election victory. He replaced Bodo Hombach as the head of the office of the chancellor in 1999, after the latter entered European Union politics. He retained his Secretary of State rank and therefore was the only Head of the Chancellery to not be appointed Minister for Special Affairs, i. e. not to have cabinet rank, from 1984 to today. During this period, Steinmeier was also one of the advisors to Schröder. He was crucial in securing a red-green majority in parliament for Schröder's contentious "Agenda 2010" of economic reforms. Because of his effective management beyond the spotlight of politics, he was nicknamed () – a pun on , the German for grey eminence.
As Commissioner for the Federal Intelligence Services (a title often held by the Head of the Chancellery), Steinmeier was responsible for coordinating Germany's intelligence services. In 2003, he supported Schröder in his controversial decision to forge a coalition with Russia and France against the U.S.-led war against Iraq. Meanwhile, he approved the decision to install a German intelligence officer in the Qatar-based office of General Tommy Franks, the American commander of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, who passed on to the United States information being gathered in Baghdad by two German intelligence officers operating there.
In 2004, Steinmeier participated in diplomatic negotiations settling on compensation payments with Libya for victims of the 1986 terrorist bombing of the LaBelle disco in Berlin.
A major controversy during Steinmeier's term as chief of staff was the imprisonment of a German-born Turk, Murat Kurnaz, in Guantánamo Bay from 2002 until August 2006. Steinmeier denied during a parliamentary inquiry in March 2007 that he had blocked Kurnaz's release. Instead, he claimed that Berlin had feared Kurnaz was a threat and should go to Turkey, not Germany, if released. Only after Merkel's election was Kurnaz released and brought back to Germany.Judy Dempsey (17 May 2007), Letter From Europe: In German town, a foreign minister paves way for future The New York Times.
First term as Foreign Minister (2005–2009) On 22 November 2005, after the 2005 federal elections, Steinmeier became Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Grand coalition cabinet led by Angela Merkel. He was the first SPD Foreign Minister since Willy Brandt (1966–1969).
Upon taking office, Steinmeier led the preparations for Germany taking over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2007.
Following Franz Müntefering's departure from the cabinet on 21 November 2007, Steinmeier also filled the position of Vice-Chancellor.Andreas Cremer and Brian Parkin, , Bloomberg, 13 November 2007.
During his time in office, Steinmeier was widely regarded as having good working relations with Angela Merkel, but often took a different stance on foreign affairs. By and large, he allowed Merkel to set the pace in foreign policy, working harmoniously with her on a range of foreign policy issues, from confronting Iran over its nuclear program to negotiating binding goals to combat climate change. In one significant foreign policy disagreement, Steinmeier held in 2009 that Germany should by 2013 lay the groundwork for withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, a deployment that around two-thirds of Germans opposed by then. Unlike Merkel, he also favoured Turkish entry into the European Union.
Also, Steinmeier became known for his rather Russia-friendly stance, arguing strenuously for engagement with the increasingly assertive power to the east, rather than its isolation. He formulated a policy toward Russia deliberately reminiscent of "Ostpolitik", the eastward-facing policy pioneered by Chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s. Together with Gernot Erler, the SPD's leading Russia expert and the deputy foreign minister, Steinmeier in 2008 initiated Germany's so-called Partnership for Modernization with Russia, which became an official EU policy in 2010.
Pressed by lawmakers to say more on his attitude toward Russia in the wake of the high-profile murders of opposition figures Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko at a January 2007 hearing at the European Parliament, Steinmeier stated that "[t]here is a certain trend toward [media] hysterics and one needs to get a sense of reason back into the debate".
Dr Frank Umbach had warned as early as February 2006 that Germany had become too dependent on Russia but Steinmeier, citing the new Ostpolitik, disregarded him. In March 2007, Steinmeier published a long article in reply to Umbach explaining his rationale on the EU being such an exceptional role model on international cooperation that Putinite Russia would unavoidably get "like us" by mere "intertwining of interests" (Verflechtung), and also that "a pan-European peace order and a lasting solution to important security problems (...) can only be achieved with Russia, not without it or even against it". Steinmeier helped to admit Putin's Russia into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which occurred in 2011.
On 18 December 2007, Steinmeier and Dmitry Medvedev signed an agreement on behalf of BASF to exploit another gas field. At the time, 40% of German demand was satisfied by Russian supply.
Steinmeier went with Merkel to the 21st NATO Summit in Bucharest, and they formed a common front with French president Nicolas Sarkozy to block the proposal backed by U.S. president George W. Bush and Eastern European leaders of accession of Georgia and Ukraine to membership in the organization, with the intent of keeping good relations with the Kremlin.
In May 2008, he became the first foreign official to hold talks with President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after they took up their new positions following the 2008 Russian presidential election.
In 2006, Foreign Affairs published an analysis of the state of US and Russian nuclear forces, concluding that post-Cold War US nuclear forces seemed designed to carry out a preemptive strike against Russia or China and that the planned missile defense would be valuable primarily in an offensive context as an adjunct to a US first-strike capability. The article elicited a semi-official Russian response from ex-PM Yegor Gaidar in the Financial Times a few days later. In 2007, the US government was reportedly deeply irritated, although publicly silent, about Steinmeier, who had sounded supportive of Russian accusations that a planned US missile defense complex in Poland would upset the strategic balance in Europe – and who then left without challenge Russian General Nikolai Solovtsov's threat of retaliation against Poland and the Czech Republic if they deployed U.S. defensive systems.
Russian opposition activists later celebrated when Steinmeier and the SDP lost the 2009 election, signaling their discontent with Steinmeier. Oleg Petrovich Orlov, head of the Memorial human rights group, said that Steinmeier had prolonged Schröder's policies on Russia and that Germany's policies were "extremely bad for civil society, democracy and the country as a whole".
In February 2009, Steinmeier became the first member of Merkel's cabinet to be received by the incoming Obama administration.