Centre-left Frank-Walter Steinmeier elected German president

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a centre-left politician who once described Donald Trump as a “hate preacher” has been elected German president. The former foreign minister, 61, won  931 out of 1,260 votes in the parliamentary assembly composed of MPs and representatives of Germany’s 16 states.

In his acceptance speech, Steinmeier said that Germany should be an “anchor of hope”  at a time when democratic institutions were under threat across the world.

“As the foundations are shaking elsewhere, we have to prop up those foundations even more strongly,” he said.

Although the post is largely ceremonial, past German presidents have used the role to act as a moral authority in debates of national and international importance. Steinmeier succeeds Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and civil rights activist in the former East Germany. Gauck decided against bidding for a second five year term due to his age – 77.  

In contrast to Gauck, Steinmeier is a career politician who served as chief of staff to former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and later as foreign minister in Angela Merkel’s first coalition government between 2005 and 2009. In 2010, when he was Germany’s main Opposition leader, Steinmeier decided to take a break from politics to donate a kidney to his wife, Elke Budenbender, a judge at Berlin’s administrative court.

He was reinstated as foreign minister in 2013 as part of Germany’s ‘grand coalition’ between the CDU and the SPD, where he enjoyed consistently high popularity ratings.

In the run-up to the US election last year, he had warned that Donald Trump had a lot in common with “fearmongers” in the right-wing AfD party and with advocates of Brexit.

After Trump’s victory in November, Steinmeier predicted that “American foreign policy will be less predictable for us in the future” and that “America will be more inclined to make unilateral decisions”.