Guido Westerwelle - Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany

Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany

In the federal elections of 2009, Westerwelle committed his party to a coalition with Dr Merkel's CDU/CSU, ruling out a coalition with Social Democrats and Greens, and led his party to unprecedented 14.6%. In accordance with earlier announcements, he formed a coalition government with CDU/CSU. On October 28, he was sworn in as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor, becoming the head of the Foreign Office. In 2010 he announced he wouldn't be taking his male partner to hostile countries.

His deputies at the Foreign Office are Werner Hoyer and Cornelia Pieper as Ministers of State. Hoyer previously held the same office in the Cabinet Kohl V.

By May 2011 however 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. Westerwelle then 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.

In July 2011 Westerwelle was the President of the United Nations Security Council as he headed the German delegation to the United Nations.

Read more about this topic:  Guido Westerwelle

Famous quotes containing the words foreign minister, foreign, minister, vice, chancellor and/or germany:

    A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Insurrection—by means of guerrilla bands—is the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke ... It is invincible, indestructible.
    Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)

    Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
    Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
    Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
    And with some sweet oblivious antidote
    Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff
    Which weighs upon the heart?
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation. For all of being a lawyer or a financier, we must not ignore the knavery there is in such callings. An honest man is not accountable for the vice or stupidity of his trade, and should not therefore refuse to practice it.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.
    Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)

    We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny. Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.
    Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)