Vocal Donald Trump critic says he wants Germany to be an ‘anchor of hope’ after he was voted in by parliamentary assembly

A centre-left politician who once characterised Donald Trump as a “hate preacher” has been elected president of Germany. The former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was voted in on Sunday by a parliamentary assembly made up of 1,260 MPs and representatives of Germany’s 16 states.

Steinmeier, a member of the Social Democratic party, had guaranteed the support both of his own centre-left bloc and Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic party, who between them hold a majority of 923 seats in the assembly.

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In his acceptance speech, Steinmeier, 61, said Germany should be an “anchor of hope” while democratic institutions were under threat across the globe. “As the foundations are shaking elsewhere, we have to prop up those foundations even more strongly,” he said

Gaining 75% of votes in the first round, he beat four outsider candidates fielded by the smaller parties, including Christoph Butterwegge, a political scientist and poverty researcher; Albrecht Glaser, a former Christian Democrat running for the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany party (AfD); and Engelbert Sonneborn, the father of the leader of the satirical organisation the Party.



Despite the role being largely ceremonial, past German presidents have aspired to act as a moral authority in debates of national and international importance. Steinmeier succeeds Joachim Gauck, 77, a former Protestant pastor and East German civil rights activist who told the Guardian this month that Germany would “staunchly stand by the European project”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Merkel congratulates Steinmeier. Photograph: Carsten Koall/EPA

In contrast to Gauck, Steinmeier will enter the presidential residency at Bellevue Palace in Berlin’s Tiergarten district as a career politician. A former chief of staff to Gerhard Schröder, Steinmeier was one of the architects behind the “Agenda 2010” labour market reforms of the early 2000s.

After serving as foreign minister in Merkel’s first coalition government between 2005 and 2009, Steinmeier presided over his party’s worst performance at a general election. In 2010, when he was the country’s main opposition leader, Steinmeier took a break from politics to donate a kidney to his wife, Elke Büdenbender, a judge at Berlin’s administrative court.

However, in a second stint in the foreign ministry as part of Germany’s “grand coalition” between the SPD and CDU, he enjoyed consistently high popularity ratings.

In the run-up to the US election, he said Trump had much in common with “fearmongers” in the AfD and with advocates of Britain’s exit from the EU.



After Trump’s shock victory in November, he 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”.

Some in Germany have criticised Steinmeier for adhering to his party’s Ostpolitik philosophy – a more diplomatic and conciliatory approach to Russian power than that pursued by Merkel. Last June the foreign minister raised eyebrows when he appeared to criticise a large-scale Nato manoeuvre in Poland as “sabre rattling”. But his commitment to trying to solve the long-running crisis in Ukraine has also gained Steinmeier respect in the international community.

Relations with his British counterpart were visibly frosty during their first bilateral meeting in November, with Steinmeier failing to reciprocate Boris Johnson’s offer of a fist bump during their joint press conference, and there were reports that the Vote Leave campaigner greeted the German politician as “Frank-Markus”. Steinmeier had openly criticised the methods of the leave camp in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Steinmeier will reportedly focus on visiting “left-behind” communities around Germany in the coming weeks.