Frank-Walter Steinmeier will probably be given a second term as Federal President. His wife Elke Büdenbender not only wants to take on tasks as First Lady, but also wants to go back to her actual job.
She holds an office that doesn’t officially exist. Elke Büdenbender herself once said that there is still no description of the role to this day. When she boards a government plane with her husband and flies abroad, the greeting from the cockpit is: “Hello, Mr. Federal President, hello, Mrs. Büdenbender!” In the absence of a German word for her post, only a change to English helps: “First Lady”. With the re-election of her husband Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Federal President, she also gets a second term, so to speak.
Steinmeier’s wife Elke Büdenbender will be half first lady and half judge
It is already clear that this will look different than the first. Because the lawyer wants to go back to her job. For the 60-year-old, this is pretty much the last opportunity to do so. In the future, she will therefore continue to be half the First Lady of the Republic, but the other half will be a judge at the Berlin Administrative Court, where she is currently on leave.
That doesn’t come as a surprise. “I love my job and I miss it too,” she once said in an interview with the German Press Agency (dpa). But her job at the side of the Federal President is also very important to her, as she recently reported in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. “I can now do one thing and not have to give up the other, and it will certainly be a contrasting program. But a lot is possible if you want it.”
Anyone who knows her CV understands the desire to return to the courtroom. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a housekeeper. Büdenbender first trained as an industrial clerk, worked in her profession for a while, then got her high school diploma and studied law. Anyone who manages to climb the educational ladder like she does is particularly attached to what has been achieved.
Büdenbender campaigns for education and against hate online
Education, and in particular equal educational opportunities for all children, also became a central theme in the first five years at Bellevue Palace – a “real life theme”, as she once called it. She not only campaigns for educational equality in Germany, but also abroad when she accompanies her husband or travels alone as the patron of Unicef, as was the case recently in Nepal.
In contrast to some of her predecessors, Büdenbender is a woman who thinks and acts very politically. She uses interviews and speeches to take a stand against hate on the Internet, to urge a larger proportion of women in management positions, or to promote respectful cooperation in the debate on the right way out of the corona pandemic. Her agenda is very similar to that of her husband on these points.
Büdenbender and Steinmeier met while studying in Giessen. They married in 1995 and have a grown daughter. When Büdenbender needed a new kidney in 2010, one of her husband’s was transplanted to her.
She once called the task at her husband’s side a “special privilege” and an “exotic activity” at another time. The next five years, with the constant alternation between Bellevue Palace and the courtroom, promise to be even more exotic than the first.
Source: Stern
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