Analyzing the German Elections: What Comes Next?

Join the ACG and the Pacific Council for a virtual event analyzing the implications of Germany’s federal election on February 23, 2025. This election, prompted by the collapse of Chancellor Scholz’s coalition government, is poised to reshape German politics. Our expert speakers, Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director of the Center on the United States at Brookings, and Peter S. Rashish, Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at the American-German Institute will examine what the election means for Germany, the United States, and the global community. ACG President Dr. Steven E. Sokol will moderate the discussion.

Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller is an expert on German, European, and transatlantic foreign and security policy and strategy. She is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the inaugural holder of the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Transatlantic Relations at Brookings. She held the Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress from October 2019 to March 2020, and served as the inaugural Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at Brookings from 2014 to 2019.

Dr. Stelzenmüller is the former director of GMF’s Berlin office. From 1994 to 2005, she was defense and international security editor in the political section of the German weekly DIE ZEIT; previously, she had covered human rights issues, war crimes tribunals, and humanitarian crises. From 1988 to 1989, she was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School. She has also been a GMF campus fellow at Grinnell College in Iowa, a Woodrow Wilson Center public policy scholar in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Remarque Forum — a conference series of the Remarque Institute at New York University.

She has worked in Germany and the United States, and speaks English, French, German, and Spanish. Dr. Stelzenmüller holds a doctorate in law from the University of Bonn (1992), a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1988), and a law degree from the University of Bonn (1985).
Peter S. Rashish is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AGI. He also is the author of The Wider Atlantic blog. Before joining AGI, Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.

Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, and NPR.

He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Dr. Steven E. Sokol (moderator) has been the President and CEO of the American Council on Germany since 2015. Previously, he served as President and CEO of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and prior to that he was the Vice President and Director of Programs at the American Council on Germany. Prior to this, Dr. Sokol served as the Deputy Director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, was the Head of the Project Management Department at the Bonn International Center for Conversion GmbH (BICC), and a Program Officer in the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Earlier in his career, he also was a Program Manager at the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and was a paralegal at Fulbright & Jaworski.

He holds a Doctorate in Law and Policy from Northeastern University as well as an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. He has also studied at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg and as a Fulbright Scholar at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Dr. Sokol serves on several non-profit boards and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was awarded a Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit) for his work to strengthen German-American relations.