Sigmar Gabriel
Sigmar Hartmut Gabriel (born 12 September 1959) 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. He was Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 2009 to 2017,[2] which made him the party's longest-serving leader since Willy Brandt.[2] He was the Federal Minister of the Environment from 2005 to 2009 and the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy from 2013 to 2017. From 1999 to 2003 Gabriel was Minister-President of Lower Saxony.
Sigmar Gabriel
Philipp Rösler (Economics and Technology)
Heidrun Merk
Renate Jürgens-Pieper
Axel Plaue
Heinrich Aller
Axel Plaue
Wilhelm Schmidt
Jürgen Sikora
Petra Emmerich-Kopatsch
3
1979–1981
He represented Salzgitter – Wolfenbüttel in the Bundestag.
Gabriel is a member of the Seeheimer Kreis, an official internal grouping of the party with liberal economic positions.
Early life and education[edit]
Gabriel was born in Goslar, West Germany, son of Walter Gabriel (1921–2012), a municipal civil servant, and Antonie Gabriel (1922–2014), a nurse. Gabriel's parents divorced in 1962, and for the next six years he lived with his father and grandmother Lina Gabriel, while his sister lived with their mother. After a lengthy custody battle his mother was awarded custody for both children in 1969.
Gabriel's father was a Lutheran originally from Hirschberg im Riesengebirge in Silesia (now Poland), while his mother was a Catholic originally from Heilsberg in the Ermland (Warmia) region of East Prussia who had most recently lived in Königsberg; both parents came as refugees to West Germany during the flight and expulsion of Germans at the end of the Second World War.
Sigmar Gabriel has described his family history as a "wild story of flight and expulsion" and noted that his parents dealt with the trauma of expulsion in different ways. According to Gabriel, his father was physically and emotionally abusive to him[3] and was an enthusiastic supporter of the national socialist ideology "until his dying breath;"[4] However, Walter Gabriel never saw active service during the war due to suffering from polio.[5] His mother was involved in relief and solidarity work for Poland during the period of martial law in Poland.[6]
Sigmar Gabriel attended school in Goslar, and served as a soldier in the German Air Force from 1979 to 1981.[7] He studied politics, sociology and German at the University of Göttingen from 1982 and passed the first state examination as a grammar school teacher in 1987 and the second state examination in 1989.[8]
Life after politics[edit]
Since leaving public office, Gabriel has taken on various paid and unpaid positions.
In 2018, 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;[39] he ended up not taking the office when the merger was prohibited by the European Commission amid competition concerns. Also in 2018, the German government's ethics committee rejected his request to join the supervisory board of Kulczyk Investments, citing potential conflict of interest.[40][41] In 2019, he rejected an offer to become the head of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) after media reports that he was in line for the post caused a public outcry and prompted accusations of nepotism.[42]
In June 2019 he said Donald Trump is right to criticize China and to negotiate with North Korea.[43]
Gabriel has been chairman of the Atlantic Bridge[44] and member of the Trilateral Commission[45] as well as the European Council on Foreign Relations.[46] He has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group since May 2018[47] and since March 2019 the advisory board of Deloitte.[48] In the summer semester of 2018, he was a lecturer at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn[49] and for three weeks in the fall of 2018 a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.[50] Since November 2019, he has been working at Eurasia Group as a political consultant.[51]
On 24 January 2020, Deutsche Bank nominated him for a seat on the supervisory board of its financial institution.[52][53][54] This announcement caused partly critical reactions. For example, Abgeordnetenwatch demanded a grace period of three years for such a change, arguing that it would harm the understanding of democracy if Gabriel less than two years after his departure as vice chancellor "now silvering his address book to Deutsche Bank, which he could fill so bulging only as a representative of the people". On 20 May 2020, Gabriel was elected as a member of the Integrity Committee of Deutsche Bank to the supervisory board of the same company.
By his own account, Gabriel worked as a consultant for Tönnies Holding from March to the end of May 2020. According to Gabriel, he was to find out what trade restrictions were planned for meat products when exporting to Asia in the wake of African swine fever and how export permits could still be obtained.
Since 2020, the German-Israeli Future Forum Foundation has run the Sylke Tempel Fellowship program under Gabriel's auspices.[55] From 2021 to 2022, he was a member of the Trilateral Commission’s Task Force on Global Capitalism in Transition, chaired by Carl Bildt, Kelly Grier and Takeshi Niinami.[56]
Controversy[edit]
Thilo Sarrazin[edit]
In 2010, Gabriel called the speeches of Thilo Sarrazin, his party colleague who wrote critically about immigration by accusing Muslims of refusing to integrate and of “dumbing down” German society,[129] "verbal violence". He stated that although Sarrazin described many things that were accurate, his conclusions did not fit into the egalitarian “ideals” of Social Democracy anymore.[129]
Kaiser’s takeover[edit]
In 2016, a German court nullified Gabriel's controversial decision to grant a special permission for the country's biggest supermarket chain Edeka to buy grocery store chain Kaiser's, owned by Tengelmann Group. The judges raised questions about the minister's "bias and a lack of neutrality" in the case, saying he had held secret discussion during the decision making process.[29][130]
Personal life[edit]
Gabriel has a daughter, Saskia, born in 1989, with his former girlfriend, who is of Jewish origin and whose grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.[131][132] Gabriel was subsequently married to his former high school student Munise Demirel, who is of Turkish origin, from 1989 to 1998, and they had no children.[133] In 2012 he married dentist Anke Stadler, with whom he has been in a relationship since 2008; their daughter Marie was born in 2012.[134] His daughter Thea was born on 4 March 2017.[135]
In December 2016, Gabriel underwent bariatric surgery in Offenbach to shrink his stomach and help manage his diabetes.[2]
Media related to Sigmar Gabriel at Wikimedia Commons