Sigmar Hartmut Gabriel was born on 12 September 1959 and is a German politician who was the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2017 to 2018 and the vice-chancellor of Germany from 2013 to 2018.
34 Facts About Sigmar Gabriel
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Sigmar Gabriel was Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 2009 to 2017, which made him the party's longest-serving leader since Willy Brandt.
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Sigmar Gabriel was the Federal Minister of the Environment from 2005 to 2009 and the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy from 2013 to 2017.
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From 1999 to 2003 Gabriel was Minister-President of Lower Saxony.
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Sigmar Gabriel's parents divorced in 1962, and for the next six years he lived with his father and grandmother Lina Sigmar Gabriel, while his sister lived with their mother.
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Sigmar Gabriel attended school in Goslar, and served as a soldier in the German Air Force from 1979 to 1981.
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Sigmar Gabriel studied politics, sociology and German at the University of Gottingen from 1982 and passed the first state examination as a grammar school teacher in 1987 and the second state examination in 1989.
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Sigmar Gabriel joined the SPD in 1977 and soon held a number of positions in local politics.
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On 15 December 1999, after the resignation of Gerhard Glogowski, who had succeeded Gerhard Schroder in office, Sigmar Gabriel became Minister-President of Lower Saxony.
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From 2005 to 2009 Sigmar Gabriel was the Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the first cabinet of Angela Merkel.
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Sigmar Gabriel led the German delegation to the 2006 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi.
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Sigmar Gabriel was nominated as his successor and was elected on 13 November 2009.
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Sigmar Gabriel was re-elected as party chairman for a further two years at the SPD party conference in Berlin on 5 December 2011, receiving 91.6 percent of the vote.
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In 2013, Sigmar Gabriel turned the Social Democrats' third successive defeat to Angela Merkel in the federal election into a share of government, after successfully navigating the three-month process of coalition negotiations and a ballot of about 475,000 party members, who endorsed the accord.
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On 24 January 2017 Sigmar Gabriel announced that we will not run as candidate for chancellor in 2017; instead, he proposed that Martin Schulz become candidate and replace him as party chairman.
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Sigmar Gabriel took office on 27 January 2017, the previous Parliamentary State Secretary Brigitte Zypries followed Gabriel as Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy.
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At the Munich Security Conference in February 2017 Sigmar Gabriel called on NATO members, rather than focus mainly on traditional defense, to focus more on the "root causes of conflict" such as "poverty and climate".
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In 2018, Sigmar Gabriel was among six of 11 candidates nominated by Siemens to join the board of directors of Siemens Alstom, a planned merger of two railway companies; he ended up not taking the office when the merger was prohibited by the European Commission amid competition concerns.
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Sigmar Gabriel has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group since May 2018 and since March 2019 the advisory board of Deloitte.
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On 20 May 2020, Sigmar Gabriel was elected as a member of the Integrity Committee of Deutsche Bank to the supervisory board of the same company.
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In one of the strongest comments by Germany to push for a federal solution for Ukraine, Sigmar Gabriel told German weekly Welt am Sonntag in August 2014 that a federal structure was the only option to resolve pro-Russian unrest in the country.
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In September 2015, amid the European migrant crisis, Sigmar Gabriel visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.
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In January 2016, Sigmar Gabriel participated in the first joint cabinet meeting of the governments of Germany and Turkey in Berlin.
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In February 2018, Sigmar Gabriel accused Russia and China of trying to "undermine" the liberal Western world order.
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In March 2018, after his departure as German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel published an opinion piece about the future of the relations between Turkey and the West, where he advocated for an inclusive stance towards Turkey and criticized the policy of the United States in that regard.
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In September 2014, Sigmar Gabriel rejected the inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement clause in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union, prompting a renegotiation that delayed the entry into force of the agreement.
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Together with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, Sigmar Gabriel presented a joint proposal in 2015 to set up a common eurozone budget.
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In 2015, Sigmar Gabriel opposed a European Commission proposal for regional power-capacity markets, according to which utilities are paid for providing backup electricity at times when power generated by renewable sources, such as the sun and wind, cannot supply the grid.
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Sigmar Gabriel later warned against a hasty exit from coal-fired power generation, concerned that such a move could pile more pressure on producers still wrestling with the planned shutdown of nuclear plants by 2022.
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In 2016, during a series of Chinese bids for German engineering firms, Sigmar Gabriel publicly called for a European-wide safeguard clause which could stop foreign takeovers of firms whose technology is deemed strategic for the future economic success of the region.
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Sigmar Gabriel has a daughter, Saskia, born in 1989, with his former girlfriend, who is of Jewish origin and whose grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.
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Sigmar Gabriel was married to his former high school student Munise Demirel, who is of Turkish origin, from 1989 to 1998, and they had no children.
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Sigmar Gabriel's daughter Thea was born on 4 March 2017.
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In December 2016, Sigmar Gabriel underwent bariatric surgery in Offenbach to shrink his stomach and help manage his diabetes.