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Klingbeil’s position in the SPD hierarchy was under threat after the party’s historic election loss but he managed to secure more than 85% of the votes from party colleagues when they confirmed him as SPD caucus chief in late February.
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Economy and Energy – Katherina Reiche, CDU
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Reiche, 51, is a former deputy minister for both environment and transport who has been chief executive officer of EON SE’s Westenergie AG unit since 2020.
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She was a member of the Bundestag for the CDU from 1998 to 2015, during which time she was also a deputy leader of the combined CDU/CSU parliamentary caucus.
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After Merz announced he was tapping Reiche for the economy job, he was criticized by some opposition lawmakers over her ties to corporate Germany and lobbying work.
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Reiche confirmed last month that she’s in a relationship with Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a former minister of both economy and defense under Angela Merkel who resigned after it emerged he had plagiarized chunks of his doctoral thesis.
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Foreign – Johann Wadephul, CDU
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Wadephul’s appointment was something of a surprise as Armin Laschet, the CDU’s former leader and 2021 chancellor candidate, was widely expected to resurrect his political career as Merz’s foreign minister.
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A trained lawyer who has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009, Wadephul hails from the northwestern region of Schleswig-Holstein near Germany’s border with Denmark.
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The 62-year-old is a committed European with strong links to Germany’s international partners in the EU and NATO and a firm backer of support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion. He is also close to the armed forces, having served as a volunteer soldier in the 1980s.
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Even before taking office, Wadephul has been doing the diplomatic rounds, visiting his British and Italian counterparts and holding talks in Brussels with European Commission President — and CDU party colleague — Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
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Defense – Boris Pistorius, SPD
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With his unusually blunt rhetoric and down-to-earth manner, Pistorius has quickly emerged from relative obscurity in regional government to become by far Germany’s most popular politician.
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Tapped by Scholz as defense minister in 2023, the 65-year-old — like the outgoing chancellor a native of Osnabrueck — is the only SPD minister to keep his current job.
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After the two coalition partners joined with the Greens to effectively end restrictions on borrowing to finance defense spending, Pistorius is poised to oversee military procurement of unprecedented scale in coming years.
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He is also widely seen as the most likely SPD chancellor candidate for the next election — after rejecting calls to take over from Scholz before the most-recent ballot.
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Interior – Alexander Dobrindt, CSU
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Dobrindt, a member of the conservative bloc’s Bavarian Christian Social Union, will assume responsibility for home affairs at a time when immigration policy has become one of the most contentious domestic issues.
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Voter concern around irregular migration is seen as having helped fuel the rise of the Alternative for Germany, the anti-iimigrant party that is the strongest force in some opinion polls ahead of Merz’s CDU/CSU alliance and was formally classified last week as a right-wing extremist movement.
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The conservatives ran their election campaign on a promise of radically reducing the number of migrants entering the country and ending the country’s open-door policy for asylum seekers, seen as a remnant of Merkel’s 16 years in power. The 54-year-old Dobrindt will be charged with following through on that pledge without violating German asylum law and European Union rules on freedom of movement.
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