37 Facts About Guido Westerwelle

Guido Westerwelle led the liberal Free Democratic Party from 2001 until he stepped down in 2011.

Guido Westerwelle was born in Bad Honnef in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Guido Westerwelle graduated from Ernst Moritz Arndt Gymnasium in 1980 after academic struggles resulted in his departure from previous institutions where he was considered an average student at best, but substandard otherwise.

Guido Westerwelle studied law at the University of Bonn from 1980 to 1987.

Guido Westerwelle was a founding member of the Junge Liberale, which became the party's official youth organization in 1983, and he was its chairman from 1983 to 1988.

Guido Westerwelle was a member of the executive board of the FDP from 1988, and in 1994, he was appointed secretary general of the party.

In 1996, Westerwelle was first elected a member of the Bundestag, filling in for Heinz Lanfermann, who had resigned from his seat after entering the Ministry of Justice.

Guido Westerwelle was named the FDP's candidate for the office of chancellor.

When neither Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's Social Democrats and Greens nor a coalition of Christian and Free Democrats, favored by Angela Merkel and Guido Westerwelle, managed to gain a majority of seats, Guido Westerwelle rejected overtures by Chancellor Schroder to save his chancellorship by entering his coalition, preferring to become one of the leaders of the disparate opposition of the subsequently formed "Grand Coalition" of Christian and Social Democrats, with Merkel as chancellor.

In 2006, according to an internal agreement, Guido Westerwelle succeeded Wolfgang Gerhardt as chairman of the parliamentary group.

On 3 December 2010, Guido Westerwelle dismissed his personal assistant Helmut Metzner following a WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release which led to Metzner admitting that he regularly spied for the US By May 2011, opinion polls ranked Guido Westerwelle as one of the most unpopular and ineffective foreign ministers since the late 1940s.

Analysts said one of the main reasons Guido Westerwelle had become so unpopular was that he had been unable to fulfill the expectations of his voters, the majority of whom were middle-class professionals or entrepreneurs.

Amid efforts by the United States and European nations to isolate Iran's then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Guido Westerwelle traveled to Tehran in February 2011 to bring home two journalists for the weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag who were released after being arrested in October 2010.

In November 2010, Guido Westerwelle became the first German minister to visit Gaza since the territory was sealed off by the Israeli army at the end of 2007.

In September 2012, Guido Westerwelle joined his Jordanian counterpart Nasser Judeh in visiting the Zaatari refugee camp to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.

At a UN Security Council meeting in March 2011, Guido Westerwelle abstained in the vote on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 to establish a no-fly zone, along with veto powers Russia and China as well as Brazil and India.

Amid the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Guido Westerwelle visited the country six times between February 2011 and November 2012.

In September 2012, Guido Westerwelle summoned the Sudanese ambassador in Berlin after violent attacks on Germany's embassy in Khartoum, and called on the Sudanese government to guarantee the security of the embassy; thousands of protesters had previously vandalized the embassies of Germany and Britain, outraged by Innocence of Muslims, a film which has been described as denigrating to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad.

In coordination with his foundation and The ATOM Project, Guido Westerwelle continued to advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons testing.

Shortly after, Guido Westerwelle publicly condemned the judgments against President Alexander Lukashenko's main political opponent Andrei Sannikov and other opposition supporters.

Guido Westerwelle supported the policy of "change through trade" with Russia, but was widely criticized for not having a clear foreign policy doctrine.

Guido Westerwelle called for more inclusion of Russia in the international community, but criticized Moscow, for example, for supporting President Assad's government in Syria.

Guido Westerwelle was a staunch supporter of the free market and proposed reforms to curtail the German welfare state and deregulate German labor-law.

Guido Westerwelle called for substantial tax cuts and smaller government, in line with the general direction of his party.

Guido Westerwelle long criticized German law's not giving complete adoption rights to gay couples.

In 2001, Guido Westerwelle was one of the first politicians to push for a biometric passport.

Guido Westerwelle opposed Google Street View's automated photography of streetscapes, and stated "I will do all I can to prevent it".

In 2006, former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder won a court order against Guido Westerwelle who had criticized Schroder for accepting a lucrative job at Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company, soon after losing the parliamentary election to Angela Merkel.

On 27 September 2009, at a press conference after the election, Guido Westerwelle refused to answer a question in English from a BBC reporter, stating that "it is normal to speak German in Germany".

Guido Westerwelle earned the epithet "Westerwave" as a consequence of these remarks.

Guido Westerwelle made public statements in 2010 about the "welfare state", saying that promising the people effortless prosperity may lead to "late Roman decadence", in reference to a verdict in the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany regarding Hartz IV.

In 2010, Guido Westerwelle announced he would not be taking his civil partner Michael Mronz to anti-gay countries.

Guido Westerwelle retorted that it was normal for foreign ministers to take industry representatives on their trips, calling himself a victim of "a left-wing zeitgeist that considers making business questionable".

On 20 July 2004, Guido Westerwelle attended Angela Merkel's 50th birthday party accompanied by his partner, Michael Mronz.

On 20 June 2014, it was reported that Guido Westerwelle was suffering from acute myeloid leukemia.

Guido Westerwelle last appeared in public in November 2015, presenting a book on his battle with blood cancer called Between Two Lives.

Guido Westerwelle died of the disease in Cologne on 18 March 2016, at the age of 54.