With the chairmanship of the Afghanistan investigative committee, you will get to know a new Ralf Stegner: the foreign politician.

Since he was elected to the Bundestag, he has been cultivating this field, in the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on European Affairs, after years of being an integral part of domestic politics, at least in Schleswig-Holstein.

Jasper von Altenbockum

Responsible editor for domestic politics.

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However, Stegner has always had an interest in foreign policy ever since he studied in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s and completed his master's degree at Harvard.

His doctorate on the "theatrical" in America's democracy proved to be far-sighted during Donald Trump's tenure.

However, Stegner did not completely say goodbye to domestic politics in the Afghanistan Committee.

After all, it's all about the hasty and therefore disastrous end of the mission and the treatment of the local staff.

Both had and still have a domestic political dimension, not only because one of the most important protagonists, former Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, is a friend of Stegner's party.

Horst Seehofer, the former interior minister, and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the last defense minister of the Merkel era, will also have to ask themselves questions.

Angela Merkel herself is likely to sit across from Stegner.

Ascent and descent in Kiel

Stegner will have to curb the sharpness he has trained in domestic politics.

It contributed significantly to his rise in Kiel, but also to his descent.

First state secretary, then minister (first finances, then interior affairs), finally SPD state and parliamentary group chairman, Stegner did not make it all the way to the top of the office of prime minister.

In the federal party, too, he tried to jump to the top as a representative of the party left, and who knows, if Kevin Kühnert and the Jusos had not supported the Esken/Borjans team in the primary election in 2019, but Schwan/Stegner, he would now be party chairman.

But the two ended up in last place.

Stegner then gave way to Kühnert in the party leadership, but also failed as an assessor on the board.

The end of his career in Kiel and the move to the Bundestag may have taught Stegner to be calm, but not restraint.

Stegner, although not a pacifist, initially refused arms deliveries to the Ukraine.

He campaigned all the more clearly for the special fund for the Bundeswehr and thus kept Scholz's back free on the left side of the parliamentary group.

Stegner, who was born in the Palatinate in 1959, is now able to convey such points of view without the coolness of the Kiel coast, but in a tidy Palatine manner.