Guido Westerwelle (German: [ˈɡiːdo ˈvɛstɐˌvɛlə]; 27 December 1961 – 18 March 2016) was a German politician who served as foreign minister in the second cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Vice-Chancellor of Germany from 2009 to 2011, being the first openly gay person to hold any of these positions. He also led the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) from 2001 until he stepped down in 2011. A lawyer by profession, he was a member of the Bundestag from 1996 to 2013.
Guido Westerwelle was born in Bad Honnef in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. His parents were lawyers. He graduated from Ernst Moritz Arndt Gymnasium in 1980 after academic struggles resulted in his departure from previous institutions where he was considered an average student at best, but substandard otherwise. He studied law at the University of Bonn from 1980 to 1987. Following the First and Second State Law Examinations in 1987 and 1991 respectively, he began practising as an attorney in Bonn in 1991. In 1994, he earned a doctoral degree in law from the University of Hagen.
Westerwelle joined the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 1980. He was a founding member of the Junge Liberale (Young Liberals), which became the party's official youth organization in 1983, and he was its chairman from 1983 to 1988. In a 1988 newspaper interview, he singled out the FDP's rejection of an amnesty for tax offenders and its diminished enthusiasm for nuclear power as fruits of the youth wing's labors.
He was a member of the executive board of the FDP from 1988, and in 1994, he was appointed secretary general of the party.
In 1996, Westerwelle was first elected a member of the Bundestag, filling in for Heinz Lanfermann, who had resigned from his seat after entering the Ministry of Justice. In the 1998 national elections, he was re-elected to parliament. As his parliamentary group's home affairs spokesman, he was instrumental in swinging the FDP behind a 1999 government bill to make German citizenship available to children born in Germany of non-German parents.
In 2001, Westerwelle succeeded Wolfgang Gerhardt as party chairman. Gerhardt, however, remained chairman of the FDP's parliamentary group. Westerwelle, the youngest party chairman at the time, emphasized economics and education, and espoused a strategy initiated by his deputy Jürgen Möllemann, who, as chairman of the North Rhine-Westphalia branch of the FDP, had led his party back into the state parliament, gaining 9.8% of the vote. This strategy, transferred to the federal level, was dubbed Project 18, referring both to the envisioned percentage and the German age of majority. Leading up to the 2002 elections, he positioned his party equidistantly from the major parties and refused to commit his party to a coalition with either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats. He was also named the FDP's candidate for the office of chancellor. Since the FDP had never claimed such a candidacy (and hasn't done since) and had no chance of attaining it against the two major parties, this move was widely seen as political marketing alongside other ploys, such as driving around in a campaign van dubbed the Guidomobile, wearing the figure 18 on the soles of his shoes or appearing in the Big Brother TV show. Eventually, the federal elections yielded a slight increase of the FDP's vote from 6.2% to 7.4%. Despite this setback, he was reelected as party chairman in 2003.
In the federal elections of 2005, Westerwelle was his party's front-runner. When neither Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats and Greens nor a coalition of Christian and Free Democrats, favored by Angela Merkel and Westerwelle, managed to gain a majority of seats, Westerwelle rejected overtures by Chancellor Schröder to save his chancellorship by entering his coalition, preferring to become one of the leaders of the disparate opposition of the subsequently formed "Grand Coalition" of Christian and Social Democrats, with Merkel as chancellor. Westerwelle became a vocal critic of the new government. In 2006, according to an internal agreement, Westerwelle succeeded Wolfgang Gerhardt as chairman of the parliamentary group.
Over the following years, in an effort to broaden the party's appeal, Westerwelle embraced its left wing under former justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and focused his campaign messages on tax cuts, education and civil rights.
Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor of Germany
In the federal elections of 2009, Westerwelle committed his party to a coalition with Merkel's CDU/CSU, ruling out a coalition with Social Democrats and Greens, and led his party to an unprecedented 14.6% share of the vote. In accordance with earlier announcements, he formed a coalition government with the CDU/CSU.
On 28 October, Westerwelle was sworn in as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor, becoming the head of the Foreign Office. His deputies at the Foreign Office were his close political ally Cornelia Pieper and foreign policy expert Werner Hoyer as Ministers of State. Hoyer had previously held the same office in the fifth Kohl cabinet. In a much-discussed move, Westerwelle travelled to Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium before visiting France.
On 19 November 2009, Westerwelle joined around 800 dignitaries from around the world – including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband – to witness Afghan president Hamid Karzai's swearing in for a second term in office.
WikiLeaks controversy and election defeats
In late November 2010, leaked U.S. diplomatic cables revealed that American diplomats considered Westerwelle an obstacle to deeper transatlantic relations and were skeptical of his abilities, with one cable comparing him unfavorably to former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. On 3 December 2010, Westerwelle dismissed his personal assistant Helmut Metzner following a WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release which led to Metzner admitting that he regularly spied for the U.S. By May 2011, opinion polls ranked Westerwelle as one of the most unpopular and ineffective foreign ministers since the late 1940s. At the time, his party had collapsed in several states, including Rhineland-Palatinate and Bremen where they failed to secure the 5% threshold necessary for a seat in parliament. Analysts said one of the main reasons Westerwelle had become so unpopular was that he had been unable to fulfill the expectations of his voters, the majority of whom were middle-class professionals or entrepreneurs. Westerwelle subsequently stepped down as party leader. By July the party was only receiving 3% support in opinion polls, a record low, reflecting what political insiders had called his "last stand" in January, comparing Westerwelle and his party to Captain Ahab and the Pequod.
During his tenure as foreign minister, Westerwelle prevailed over lawmakers in his party who opposed bailing out Greece during the European debt crisis. Amid efforts by the United States and European nations to isolate Iran's then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Westerwelle traveled to Tehran in February 2011 to bring home two journalists for the weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag who were released after being arrested in October 2010. After weeks of negotiations, the Iranians reached out to discuss the release of the pair, the reporter Marcus Hellwig and the photographer Jens Koch. The two reporters had been arrested while interviewing the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a woman sentenced to death for adultery. A condition of their release was that Westerwelle meet with Ahmadinejad, causing Iranian exile groups in Europe to condemn the visit and to argue that Germany was bowing to the Tehran government at a time when security forces were cracking down on pro-democracy demonstrators. When Iran briefly refused to allow a plane carrying German Chancellor Angela Merkel to India to cross its air space in May 2013, Westerwelle summoned Iran's ambassador to Germany, Alireza Sheikhattar, complaining about "a disrespect for Germany that we will not accept." He later temporarily recalled Germany's ambassador to Iran for consultation after an attack on the British Embassy in Tehran in November 2013. In November 2010, Westerwelle became the first German minister to visit Gaza since the territory was sealed off by the Israeli army at the end of 2007.