Monday, December 6th, 2021
First Federal Minister of the Interior
Nancy Faeser had no one on the bill
In addition to Karl Lauterbach, the name Nancy Faeser is on everyone’s lips after the announcement of the SPD ministerial list. The 51-year-old Hessin is hardly known nationwide. And yet her appointment for the interior department is a logical step.
Her name is one of the really big surprises on Olaf Scholz’s cabinet list: 51-year-old Nancy Faeser, a so far little known SPD state politician from Hesse, is said to be the first woman to head the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Faeser is head of one of the largest and most important federal ministries, whose area of responsibility ranges from internal security to integration and civil protection to the promotion of sport – a mammoth task.
In Hessian state politics, Faeser, as opposition leader in the current legislative period, has shown an increased interest in domestic politics – but above all as a sharp critic. She worked intensively again and again on the Hessian Interior Minister Peter Beuth from the CDU, whose resignation Faeser repeatedly demanded – unsuccessfully. She accused Beuth of insufficiently tackling the police scandals that had occurred in Hesse.
Faeser was born on July 13, 1970 in Bad Soden im Taunus. The roots of her social democratic family, however, lie in the Ruhr area in Duisburg. Her father Horst Faeser was a municipal official. He moved with the family to Schwalbach and made it to the mayor’s position there. When he died unexpectedly in 2003, the conservative Prime Minister Roland Koch found respectful words for the communal politicians who unite “foresight and pragmatism”.
Nancy Faeser had made it into professional politics a few months before her father’s death, and in the spring of 2003 she moved into the state parliament. She joined the SPD at the age of 18. Her father advised against it, she later recalled. Possibly an educational gimmick for the rebellious daughter, because she disregarded the advice and stepped in anyway.
Twice shadow minister
Faeser, who is still living in Schwalbach with her husband and son today, studied law in Frankfurt am Main after graduating from high school, passed the second state examination there in 2000 and after a semester in the USA joined an international law firm before she – then in 2007 as a member of parliament – joined a Frankfurt commercial law firm.
It was expected early on that Faeser would take on higher political tasks – but not least the weakness of the Social Democrats in recent years prevented this. So her name is hardly known outside of Hessen. There she went through a classic party career from chairing the local association to general secretary of the Hesse SPD.
Hessian SPD top candidates twice named Faeser as shadow minister before state elections – under Andrea Ypsilanti she was chosen as minister of justice, under Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel as minister of the interior. But Ypsilanti and Schäfer-Gümbel failed because of the CDU. Schäfer-Gümbel was so cracking that Faeser became his successor as state and parliamentary group leader in 2019.
Your own reputation never suffered from the SPD bankruptcies. And the fact that she is counted more on the right wing of the SPD did not slow her down in the more left-wing Hessian state association. Faeser developed this status primarily as an interior expert. She was convincing as chairwoman of the Hessian committee of inquiry into the terror series of the right-wing extremist NSU. When she was introduced to the SPD headquarters in Berlin on Monday, Faeser immediately said that she wanted to make the fight against right-wing extremism one of her priorities as Minister of the Interior.