30 Facts About Hannelore Kraft

Hannelore Kraft served as the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2010 until 2017.

Hannelore Kraft is the former leader of the SPD North Rhine-Westphalia and served on the SPD's federal executive from November 2009 until May 2017, and was one of the four federal deputy chairs.

The daughter of a streetcar driver and a ticket collector, Hannelore Kraft graduated in 1980, and first trained as a bank clerk with Dresdner Bank.

Hannelore Kraft commenced her studies in economics at Comprehensive University of Duisburg in 1982, and studied at King's College London in 1986 and 1987.

From 1989 until 2001, Hannelore Kraft was a consultant and project manager at ZENIT GmbH in Mulheim an der Ruhr, and was head of the local European Info Centre.

Hannelore Kraft was drawn to politics after becoming head of a works council and struggling to find a place for her son in a nursery.

Hannelore Kraft was a SPD delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2004,2009,2010 and 2012.

On 13 November 2009, Hannelore Kraft was elected as one of the four vice chairs of the federal SPD under chairman Sigmar Gabriel, receiving the highest overall vote.

The state election on 9 May 2010 resulted in a near-tie with the governing CDU at 67 seats, and with Hannelore Kraft's preferred red-green coalition one seat short of an overall majority; at the time, the federal government under Chancellor Angela Merkel blamed the result on voter anger at the first aid package for Greece.

Hannelore Kraft formed a minority government with ministers of Social Democrats and Greens.

For nearly two years, Hannelore Kraft ruled the state without a regular majority, pulling votes for each initiative from opposition parties on the right or the left.

Together with the deputy governor, Sylvia Lohrmann from the Green Party, Hannelore Kraft dubbed her government the "invitation coalition".

Hannelore Kraft got attention for a eulogy she gave after a stampede killed 21 people at the Love Parade music festival in July 2010, less than two weeks after she became state premier.

In October 2010, Hannelore Kraft was elected President of the Bundesrat, according to the customary rotation of the presidency between the Bundeslander.

Hannelore Kraft assumed office on 1 November 2010, becoming the first female office holder, remaining in office until 31 October 2011.

At an SPD convention in Berlin in December 2011, Hannelore Kraft was confirmed in her vice-chairmanship by 97 percent of party members, the best result for a board member.

Hannelore Kraft had hoped to win backing from the opposition FDP for the budget but their long-standing objections were not overcome in time for the vote.

The resulting election saw the SPD-Green coalition win a nine-seat majority and allowed Hannelore Kraft to remain in office.

In 2013, Hannelore Kraft initially opposed national SPD leaders who opted to join Merkel as junior partner for the second time.

In March 2014, Hannelore Kraft hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Duisburg as he visited the last stop on the Yuxinou Railway between Europe and Asia.

In 2012, Hannelore Kraft placed investment in renewable energy at the center of her second term's agenda, stating that more than 30 per cent of electricity in NRW should be coming from renewable sources by 2025.

In 2013, Hannelore Kraft called on Angela Merkel to use tax revenue to cut electricity costs for consumers by 25 percent.

Early in her time in office, Hannelore Kraft focused on tax evasion, which is a policy that is not exclusively the reserve of the federal government and thus allowed to her to both exercise her power in her state as well as in the Bundesrat, the upper house of the federal parliament, where the states are presented and the opposition had a majority at the time.

In 2013, Hannelore Kraft led the Bundesrat opposition to a tax agreement with Switzerland, eventually blocking it as too easy on tax dodgers.

In 2013, the heir of a prominent Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who fled Nazi Germany, urged the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to relinquish paintings by Paul Klee and Juan Gris that he says were lost due to Nazi persecution; Hannelore Kraft declined to comment.

In 2014, Hannelore Kraft rejected demands made by museum directors in North Rhine-Westphalia who sought to prevent the sale of two Andy Warhol paintings, Triple Elvis and Four Marlons, by the former West LB at Christie's New York; in a letter in response to the museum directors, she held that she could not stop the sale because the paintings were not considered items of national cultural importance.

In summer 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed tens of thousands of asylum seekers camped out in Hungary to travel to Germany, Hannelore Kraft asserted that this had sent a signal to thousands of migrants to head straight for Germany; at the time, North Rhine-Westphalia was taking in around a fifth of the new arrivals.

Alongside Senator Catherine Troendle, Hannelore Kraft served as co-chairwoman of the German-French Friendship Group set up by the German Bundesrat and the French Senate.

On 26 March 2015, Hannelore Kraft joined Merkel, Hollande and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain at the crash site of Germanwings Flight 9525 in the Massif des Trois-Eveches for a memorial; North Rhine-Westphalia was the state where the plane was headed and many of the 144 passengers lived.

Hannelore Kraft was formerly a Catholic but later converted to Protestantism, joining the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, a member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany.