64 Facts About Frank-Walter Steinmeier

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was previously federal minister of foreign affairs from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2017, as well as vice chancellor of Germany from 2007 to 2009.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, holds a doctorate in law and was formerly a career civil servant.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was a close aide of Gerhard Schroder when Schroder was Prime Minister of Lower Saxony during most of the 1990s, and served as Schroder's chief of staff from 1996.

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

Frank-Walter Steinmeier 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.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier belongs to the right wing of the SPD, known as reformists and moderates.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier's mother, born in Breslau, came as a refugee from a Lutheran part of Silesia during the flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II.

Frank-Walter 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.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier's dissertation explored the state's role in preventing homelessness.

In 2015, Frank-Walter Steinmeier served as best man at the wedding of Rudiger Grube and Cornelia Poletto in Hamburg.

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

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was baptized into his father's church as a youth.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier became an adviser in 1991 for Law of Communication media and media guidelines in the State Chancellery of Lower Saxony in Hanover.

Frank-Walter 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 Schroder's election victory.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier replaced Bodo Hombach as the head of the office of the chancellor in 1999, after the later entered European Union politics.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier 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.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was crucial in securing a red-green majority in parliament for Schroder's contentious "Agenda 2010" of economic reforms.

In 2004, Frank-Walter Steinmeier participated in diplomatic negotiations settling on compensation payments with Libya for victims of the 1986 terrorist bombing of the LaBelle disco in Berlin.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier denied during a parliamentary inquiry in March 2007 that he had blocked Kurnaz's release.

On 22 November 2005, after the 2005 federal elections, Frank-Walter Steinmeier became Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Grand coalition cabinet led by Angela Merkel.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was the first SPD Foreign Minister since Willy Brandt.

In one significant foreign-policy disagreement, Frank-Walter 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.

Also, Frank-Walter 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.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier 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, Frank-Walter Steinmeier initiated Germany's so-called Partnership for Modernization with Russia, which became an official EU policy in 2010.

Oleg Petrovich Orlov, head of the Memorial human rights group, said that Frank-Walter Steinmeier had prolonged Schroder'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, Frank-Walter Steinmeier became the first member of Merkel's cabinet to be received by the incoming Obama administration.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier served as acting chairman of the SPD from 7 September 2008 to 18 October 2008.

On 7 September 2008, following the resignation of SPD chairman Kurt Beck, Frank-Walter Steinmeier was chosen as the SPD candidate for chancellor for the 2009 federal elections and designated as acting SPD Chairman, pending the return of Muntefering to that position.

In 2011, Frank-Walter Steinmeier argued that Merkel's decision to appoint her economics adviser, Jens Weidmann, to be the next head of Bundesbank undermined the political independence and public trust in the German central bank.

In late 2012, Frank-Walter Steinmeier was considered a possible candidate to challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2013 general election, but soon withdrew from the contest.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier replaced Guido Westerwelle, who had signed the P5+1 accord with Iran in November 2013.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier's deputies are Michael Roth and Maria Bohmer.

In light of criticism from the United States, Frank-Walter Steinmeier stood firm on Germany's approach in the Ukraine conflict, where it was balancing support for European economic sanctions on Russia with leaving the door open to a revived partnership.

Between 2015 and 2016, Frank-Walter Steinmeier hosted a series of Normandy format meetings in Berlin to negotiate a solution of the situation in the East of Ukraine.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier has repeatedly ruled out arms shipments to resolve the conflict, and that was German policy until two days after the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, at which time Chancellor Olaf Scholz put an end to it.

In 2015, Frank-Walter Steinmeier hosted a meeting of the delegations from Libya's two rival governments, who were battling for control of the country, and United Nations Special Representative Bernardino Leon to discuss a UN-sponsored peace and power-sharing proposal despite splits among some of the parties.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier later was instrumental in convening the International Syria Support Group and the Syria peace talks in Vienna in October 2015, drawing together Saudi Arabia; its main regional rival, Iran; as well as Russia, the United States and other Western powers and regional actors including Turkey and Iraq.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier personally called for the abolition of the death penalty in Uzbekistan; capital punishment in Uzbekistan has been abolished since 2008.

In February 2011, Frank-Walter Steinmeier proposed Steinbruck as a candidate to lead the European Central Bank.

In 2007, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he opposes European Commission proposals on unbundling the ownership of energy networks in the European Union, as it was proposed in the Third Energy Package.

On 14 May 2014, Frank-Walter Steinmeier became the first German foreign minister to attend a meeting of the French cabinet.

In May 2007, the daily Financial Times Deutschland reported that Frank-Walter Steinmeier had served as mediator in the so-called Bronze Night controversy, an Estonia-Russia dispute over the removal of a Red Army memorial in Tallinn.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to suggest not only that Kaljurand take a holiday, but that Russia drop the dispute for the time being.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier voiced his support for Barack Obama when Obama was still a presidential candidate, and supported Obama's wish to deliver a speech before the iconic Brandenburg Gate during the 2008 US presidential campaign.

In 2016 Frank-Walter Steinmeier described then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump as a "hate preacher".

Frank-Walter Steinmeier has been described as "the German government's most strident detractor" of Trump.

In September 2008, Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for an international probe into the conflict over Georgia's breakaway provinces.

In October 2014, Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited both Armenia and Azerbaijan to facilitate a negotiated solution to the long-standing conflict over Nagorny Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan controlled by ethnic Armenians.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 and said the Israeli settlements on occupied territory form an obstacle to peace and a two-state solution.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier further said that "a democratic Israel is achievable only through a two-state-solution".

Frank-Walter Steinmeier is a staunch proponent of the Iran nuclear deal framework, and has called the agreement "an opening for further diplomatic endeavors".

Frank-Walter Steinmeier has visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan twice to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011, first in his capacity as chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in May 2013 and later as foreign minister in May 2015.

In March 2015, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he "can understand" Saudi Arabia's decision to mount a military intervention in Yemen and acknowledged the operation had "support from the region".

In 2015 Frank-Walter Steinmeier rejected claims for war reparations from the Greek Syriza party in response to Germany's position on the Greek government-debt crisis.

When incoming Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, in his first major speech to parliament in early 2015, pledged to seek war reparations from Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier replied to Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias that Germany was fully aware of its political and moral responsibility for the "terrible events" in Greece between 1941 and 1944 when German troops occupied the country.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier openly attacked Merkel over her 2007 meeting with the Dalai Lama, accusing the chancellor of "playing to public opinion" without regard for the effectiveness of the meeting in improving political or religious rights on the ground in China.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was widely criticized for his position and accused of Armenian genocide denial.

In May 2013, a university committee for safeguarding academic practices found that Frank-Walter Steinmeier had no fraudulent intent and had not committed academic misconduct in his dissertation.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier took office as President of Germany on 19 March 2017, after the expiration of his predecessor's term in office, and on 22 March 2017 he took the oath that newly invested presidents must take before a joint session of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, according to the Basic Law.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier declared he would not consider a dissolution of the Bundestag as a preferable solution, and managed to persuade Schulz to meet with Angela Merkel and start preliminary talks.

Shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed regret for his earlier stance on Russia, saying his years of support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline had been a clear mistake.

On 25 October 2022, Frank-Walter Steinmeier made an official visit to Ukraine, after a scheduled visit on 20 October was cancelled for security reasons due to a wave of cruise missile and drone attacks across Ukraine.

On 29 November 2022 Frank-Walter Steinmeier was interviewed in his palace again on this subject by a journalist from Deutsche Welle.