Frank-Walter Steinmeier

Frank-Walter Steinmeier (born 5 January 1956) is a German politician who became president of Germany on 19 March 2017.

Steinmeier was born in 1956 in Detmold.

Although his full name is Frank-Walter, his friends call him Frank.

His father, a carpenter, was affiliated with the Church of Lippe (one of Germany's few Calvinist regional church bodies, and a member church of the Protestant Church of Germany).

His mother, 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 did his military service from 1974 to 1976, then studied law and political science at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Brigitte Zypries was a fellow student.

In 1982 he passed his first and in 1986 his second state examination in law.

He held onto his Secretary of State rank and therefore was the only Head of the Chancellery to not be appointed Minister for Special Affairs, i. e. does not have cabinet rank, from 1984 to today.

During this period Steinmeier was also one of the advisors to Schröder.

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.

Steinmeier worked as a scientific assistant to the professor of public law and political science at Giessen University until he obtained his doctorate of law in 1991.

His dissertation explored the state's role in preventing homelessness.

Steinmeier is married and has one daughter.

Steinmeier became an adviser in 1991 for 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.

When Schröder became Chancellor of Germany in 1998, Steinmeier was appointed Under-Secretary of State in the German Chancellery with the responsibility for the intelligence services.

Steinmeier was appointed in November 1998 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.

From 1999 to 2005 he served as Chief of Staff of the Chancellery.

He replaced Bodo Hombach as the head of the office of the chancellor in 1999, after the later entered European Union politics.

He was previously federal 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.

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.

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 criticized for prioritizing German business interests over human rights.

On 24 August 2010, he donated a kidney to his wife Elke Büdenbender.

He was crucial in securing a red-green majority in parliament for Schröder's contentious "Agenda 2010" of economic reforms.

Following the 2013 federal election, he again became Minister for Foreign Affairs in Merkel's second grand coalition.

In 2015, Steinmeier served as best man at the wedding of Rüdiger Grube and Cornelia Poletto in Hamburg.

Steinmeier enjoys jazz, and is an avid football fan.

Steinmeier is a Reformed Protestant and an active member of the Reformed Bethlehem congregation in Berlin-Neukölln.

He was baptized into his father's church (the Church of Lippe) as a youth.

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.

In November 2016 he was announced as the candidate for President of Germany of the governing coalition, consisting of his own party and the CDU/CSU, and thus became the presumptive electee, as the coalition held a large majority in the Federal Convention.

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 belongs to the right wing of the SPD, known as reformists and moderates.