Sigmar Gabriel

Gabriel was born in Goslar, West Germany, son of Walter Gabriel (1921–2012), a municipal civil servant, and Antonie Gabriel (1922–2014), a nurse.

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.

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 and was an enthusiastic supporter of the national socialist ideology "until his dying breath;" However, Walter Gabriel never saw active service during the war due to suffering from polio.

His mother was involved in relief and solidarity work for Poland during the period of martial law in Poland.

Gabriel joined the SPD in 1977 and soon held a number of positions in local politics.

Sigmar Gabriel attended school in Goslar, and served as a soldier in the German Air Force from 1979 to 1981.

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.

In 1990, he was first elected to the State Parliament of Lower Saxony, where he led the SPD parliamentary group from 1998 until 1999.

From 1999 to 2003 Gabriel was Minister-President of Lower Saxony.

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.

On 15 December 1999, after the resignation of Gerhard Glogowski, who had succeeded Gerhard Schröder in office, Gabriel became Minister-President of Lower Saxony.

He had previously won an internal party vote against Wolfgang Jüttner and Thomas Oppermann.

He served until 4 March 2003.

During these years, he was widely presented as a protégé of Schröder, and even as a possible successor as chancellor.

After being voted out of office in 2003, Gabriel became the SPD's "Representative for Pop Culture and Pop Discourse" from 2003 to 2005, for which he was bestowed the nickname Siggi Pop.

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.

He was elected in Salzgitter – Wolfenbüttel in the 2005 federal election.

From 2005 to 2009 Gabriel was the Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the first cabinet of Angela Merkel (CDU).

During his time in office, Gabriel promoted the International Renewable Energy Agency.

He also led the German delegation to the 2006 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi.

In 2007, when Germany held the presidency of the Council of the European Union, he led the negotiations between European Union environment ministers on an ambitious effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels.

That same year, he accompanied Merkel on a two-day visit to Greenland to see the Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO world heritage site, and the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier in order to get a firsthand look at the effects of global warming.

He was Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 2009 to 2017, which made him the party's longest-serving leader since Willy Brandt.

Following the SPD's defeat in the federal election of 2009, Franz Müntefering resigned from the position of party chairman of the Social Democratic Party.

Gabriel was nominated as his successor and was elected on 13 November 2009.

He 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.

During his early years as chairman, Gabriel pushed through internal party reforms.

He abolished the party steering committee in favor of an expanded executive committee and led the regular party conventions, the most important meetings for the party.

He also played a critical role in founding the Progressive Alliance in 2013 by canceling the SPD payment of its £100,000 yearly membership fee to the Socialist International in January 2012.

Gabriel had been critical of the Socialist International's admittance and continuing inclusion of undemocratic "despotic" political movements into the organization.

For the 2013 federal election, Gabriel was considered a possible candidate to challenge incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel but deemed too “unpopular and undisciplined” at the time.

As a consequence, he and the other members of the party's leadership agreed to nominate Peer Steinbrück after Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the party's parliamentary leader, withdrew from the contest.

During the election campaign, Gabriel became the first SPD leader to address a party convention of Alliance '90/The Greens; in his speech, he called for a red–green alliance to defeat Merkel in the elections.

In 2013, 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.

At the time, he was widely considered to have negotiated skillfully, particularly considering the relative weakness of his party, which had received just over 25 percent of the vote in the elections, against more than 41 percent for Merkel's conservative bloc.