Magdalena Andersson is the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.
She was the Prime Minister of Sweden from 2021-2022, and from 2014 until 2021 she was the Minister of Finance. Her previously held positions include Deputy Director General at the Swedish Tax Agency, State Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, Director of Planning and Political Advisor, both at the Prime Minister's Office.
Andersson has also been a Visiting Researcher in Economics at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies and at Harvard University. Magdalena Andersson holds a M.Sc. in Business Administration and Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics.
Dr. Katarina Barley has been Vice-President of the European Parliament since July 2019. From March 2018 to June 2019 she was Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection. Barley previously held the office of Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. Between 2015 and 2017 she was General Secretary of the SPD, after which she has been a member of the party executive since December 2017. Before her activities at federal and EU level, Katarina Barley worked for several years in Rhineland-Palatinate - here she was a member of the Schweich city council, from 2005 to 2016 a member of the SPD district executive in Trier-Saarburg and since 2010 district chairwoman.
Tina Blohm works on peace and security issues in the Global and European Policy Department of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Previously, she held assignments for FES in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Between 2011 and 2017, she worked for the UN and NATO missions in Afghanistan and as an integrated expert at the Afghan Ministry of Interior in Kabul. She was an Executive Manager at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she also focused her research on interventions in fragile contexts.
Tina Blohm studied International Relations, Human Rights and Conflict Studies at TU Dresden, Harvard University and LSE. She is currently completing her MBA at the University of Tampere.
Sabine Fandrych studied Political Science, Ethnology and Portuguese Linguistics at LMU Munich. She received her PhD from the Institute for Political Sciences at the University of Hamburg in 2000. Between 2000 and 2007 she was among others head of the office of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in Angola as well as a consultant for organizational development and reintegration policy at giz. From 2007 to 2010 Ms. Fandrych headed the FES office in Ethiopia and at the African Union. In 2010 she joined the field of FES’s activities in Germany as the head of the FES office in Baden-Wuerttemberg. From 2017 to 2021 she headed FES’s Division of the Political Academy in Bonn. Since July 2021 she has been a member of the Executive Board and Secretary General of FES.
Dr. Pia Fuhrhop is currently Deputy Head of the Division International Security at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).
Prior to her engagement at SWP has served as the Berlin Buearau Chief of the Institute for Peace and Security Reserach and has served as senior foreign policy advisor to Omid Nouripour, a Green MP in the Bundestag. Her research focuses on German security policy, arms procurement, arms cooperation within NATO and the EU.
Benjamin Haddad is the spokesperson of the "Renaissance" group in the French National Assembly and a member of the European Affairs Committee.
Haddad is co-rapporteur of the information report "The European Union Facing the Challenge of Migration" and chair of the French-Ukrainian Friendship Group of the National Assembly. He also chaired the committee of enquiry into the Uber file revelations.
Benjamin Haddad studied International Affairs at Sciences Po and Financial Economics at HEC. In other positions, he worked at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. and as Senior Director at the Atlantic Council. Haddad's main research interests are transatlantic relations and European security policy.
Martin Schulz, who is a Member of the 19th German Bundestag, has been President of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V. since 14 December 2020. He was previously the Party Chairman of the SPD, the chancellorship candidate and a long-time Member of the European Parliament, where he served as President for two terms from 2012 to 2017. Martin Schulz is also a Charlemagne Prize laureate, which was conferred to him in recognition of his outstanding contribution to strengthening the European Parliament and democratic legitimacy in the EU.
Dr. Johannes Lindner is Co-Director of the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School, Berlin (and the first Henrik Enderlein Fellow there, 2022-23). At the Jacques Delors Centre, he leads the think tank activities and works mainly on economic and financial policy topics. From 2012-2022 he was Head of the EU Institutions and Fora Division, coordinating the relations of the ECB with EU institutions, in particular the Council and the European Parliament. Previously, he worked in several policy areas of the European Central Bank (since 2003) – including as Counsellor to one of the Executive Board Members and as Advisor in the area of Market Infrastructure and Payments. He studied economics and politics with master’s degrees from the London School of Economics (MSc Public Administration and Public Policy, 1998) and University of Cologne (Diplom-Volkswirt, 1999), and a doctorate degree in politics from the University of Oxford (2003) focusing on EU budgetary decision-making. Dr. Lindner has published research on EU topics, has been speaker on policy panels at various institutions/conferences and is an Honorary Professor at Aston University in Birmingham, UK (since 2018).
Lars Klingbeil has been co-leader of the SPD since December 2021. Previously, he was Secretary General of his party from 2017 to 2021. During this time, Klingbeil organized the coalition negotiations and initiated all renewal processes. He has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2009 and is a deputy member of the Defense Committee. From 2014 to 2018, Lars Klingbeil was chairman of all Lower Saxony and Bremen MPs in the SPD parliamentary group. Before that, he was shaped by a long and intensive period in local politics.
Lars Klingbeil studied political science, sociology and history in Hanover.
Dr. Nils Schmid is member of the German Bundestag and the spokesperson on foreign affairs for the SPD parliamentary group. He serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and as the German co-chair of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly.
From 1997 to 2017, Nils Schmid was member of the Baden-Württemberg State Parliament. He worked as Baden-Württemberg’s Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs and as Deputy Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg. Until 2016 he was chairman of the Baden-Württemberg state branch of the SPD.
Nils Schmid studied law at the University of Tübingen and passed the second state examination in law in 2001. In 2006, he completed his doctoral thesis on “Public Facility Management, Public Debt, and Public Property”.
Prof. Dr. Daniela Schwarzer is a member of the Bertelsmann Stiftung Executive Board and Honorary Professor of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin.
Previously, Schwarzer was Executive Director of the Open Society Foundations in Europe and Central Asia and Director of the German Council on Foreign Relations from 2016 to 2021. She taught at Harvard University as a visiting professor, was head of the Europe Research Group at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and a board member of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
In 2020-2022 Schwarzer was Special Advisor to the High Representative of the European Commission Josep Borrell and advised France and Poland during their respective EU Presidencies. In 2023 she was Co-Rapporteur of the Franco-German Working Group on EU Reform.
Dr. Maria Skóra is a Research Associate at Institut für Europäische Politik and a Policy Fellow at Das Progressive Zentrum, where previously she led the International Dialogue Programme. She holds a master’s degree in sociology and a PhD in economics. 2018 Alumna of the Young Leaders Program of the Aspen Institute Central Europe in Prague. 2019 Visiting Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and AICGS, Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. She previously worked for the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform in Berlin as well as an expert for the All-Poland Federation of Trade Unions and the UNDP office in Warsaw.
Dr. Michael Werz is a senior fellow at American Progress in Washington D.C. and a senior adviser for North America and multilateral affairs to the Munich Security Conference.
Previously, Werz was a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C.. He is a former professor at Leibniz Universität Hannover, a former and adjunct professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, and a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard.
His work is focused on the nexus of climate change, migration, and security and emerging countries, especially Turkey, Mexico, and Brazil.
Prof. Dr. Matthias Quent is Professor of Sociology at Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal.
In his research Matthias Quent focuses on democracy, civil society, social justice and right-wing extremism, among other things in connection with the ecological transformation. He is currently researching the social and political consequences of digitalisation and the metaverse as the future of the internet and is a member of the expert commission for the preparation of the Fourth Engagement Report of the Federal Government.
He is active as an expert and consultant for various institutions. In his current book "Klimarassismus" (Piper 2022, together with C. Richter & A. Salheiser) he deals with the question of how and why right-wing actors instrumentalise climate change and the ecological turn. Quent was the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society Jena and is co-founder of the nationwide Research Institute for Social Cohesion and Institute for Democratic Culture at the Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal.
Dr. Cédric Koch is policy advisor for European and International Economic Policy at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin.
Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Global Governance Research Unit at the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB), taught at the Free University of Berlin and advised the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on issues of public financial management in Africa.
His dissertation on the relationship between international institutions and the rise of varieties of populism in democracies was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Political Science Association (DVPW) and the Albert Ballin Prize for Globalisation Research in 2022.
Prof. Tom Krebs is Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Mannheim and member of the Minimum Wage Commission.
Previously, Krebs has conducted research in the US and taught on the faculties of Brown University, Columbia University and the University of Illinois. He studied physics at the Universität Hamburg and holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University. He was the coordinator of a priority programme of the German Research Foundation on financial market issues from 2012 to 2019 and the first visiting professor at the Federal Ministry of Finance from 2019 to 2020. He has also worked as an economic policy advisor at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US Federal Reserve in Minneapolis.
Matthias Jobelius heads the European Union and North America Department of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. He was previously posted to the FES Offices in Romania, Georgia and India and served as Head of the Department for Central and Eastern Europe. He studied Political Science and Development Studies in Berlin and London.
Tanja Fajon is the Slovenian Minister for Foreign and European Affairs and leader of the Social Democrats in Slovenia.
Previously, she was Member of the European Parliament. Fajon was first elected to the European Parliament for the Social Democrats in 2009 and re-elected in 2014 and 2019. Fajon was Vice-President of the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament and played a key role as the European Parliament's rapporteur on visa liberalisation for the countries of the Western Balkans. Fajon's policy priorities include transatlantic relations, asylum and migration policy, climate protection and the protection of workers' rights.
Fajon studied journalism and completed further studies in international politics in Paris and Brussels and in management in Bled.
Catrina Schläger is Head of the Analysis and Planning Unit at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung since 2021. Previously, she held various other positions within the Foundation, including Head of the International Policy Analysis Unit in the International Dialogue Department and Project Manager of the FES Office in Shanghai, China. Catrina Schläger is a political scientist and completed the training course at the German Development Institute.