January 17-2014
. . . major German pol
Germany’s second largest party has tapped a German-Iranian woman to be its second-ranking official.
The chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Sigmar Gabriel, last week named 45-year-old Yasmin Fahimi to serve as secretary general of the party, the number two post just behind Gabriel.
Rahimi will succeed Andrea Nahles, who just became Germany’s labor minister.
The SPD is Germany’s oldest political party, having been founded in 1863. Suppressed under the Nazis, it rose again after the war and has been one of the two top parties, along with the Christian Democrats, throughout the post-war era. In the elections last fall, it came in second to the Christian Democrats with 25.7 percent of the vote.
As the Christian Democrats, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, did not win a majority of the seats in the Bundestag, the two parties have formed a grand coalition to rule Germany.
Fahimi will not be the government but will run the party’s day-to-day activities from its headquarters in the Willy Brandt Building in Berlin,
Fahimi was born in Hannover. Her father is Iranian and her mother is German.
Fahimi joined the SPD at 17 and became one of its trade union activists.
She is a chemist by education and her partner, Michael Vassiliadis, of Greek extraction, is the president of the German labor union that covers chemical workers.
She speaks fluent English and some Spanish and French, but does not list any Persian on her resume.