Birthday

Steffen Saebisch turns 50!

The chief executive officer of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, Steffen Saebisch, today completes his 50th birthday. Since it will not be possible to organize a birthday party due to corona-related restrictions, the Chairman of the Board of the Foundation, Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Paqué, honors him in this way:

Wolfgang Gerhardt had many good ideas during his time as Chairman of the Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, which have advanced and improved the Foundation. One of his best ideas was the inquiry with Steffen Saebisch in the summer of 2014 as to whether he would like to succeed Rolf Berndt, who is retiring as Executive Board Member. Saebisch, who at the time had just resigned from his position as State Secretary in the Hessian Ministry of Economics, Transport and Regional Development in Wiesbaden, took an appropriate but also appropriately short time to think things over and then agreed - albeit with mixed feelings and expectations, as he admitted afterwards, in view of the great tasks he saw before him.

Steffen Saebisch learned the political business "from scratch". After studying law in Hamburg and completing his legal clerkship in Berlin, he first worked as a research assistant in the Bundestag office of Dr. Heinrich Kolb, and then as a consultant for social policy in the FDP parliamentary group. From 2004 to 2008 he was managing director of the FDP parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives and then from 2008 to 2009 head of the planning staff of the FDP parliamentary group. The Hessian Minister of Economics Dieter Posch brought him to Wiesbaden as State Secretary in 2009, where he remained in office under his successor Florian Rentsch until the black-yellow state government was replaced by a black-green one in 2014.

From October 2014, Saebisch set out with zeal and vigor to make the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Organizational Structure, Decision-making Processes and Service Formats fit for the requirements of modern political education and political communication. Everything was reviewed, time-honored procedures and measures were questioned and, where necessary, modernized. A mission statement was formulated, concrete goals for the foundation's work were set - and achieved. And, of course, he immediately had new goals in mind, which the foundation is now working on.

The commitment of Steffen Saebisch is a stroke of luck for our foundation. Fortunately, he is only 50 years old, so that we all have the hope that we as the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom will be able to profit from his wealth of ideas, his determination and his assertiveness for a long time to come. Ad multos annos!