Sebastian Stietzel, previously deputy president of the chamber, wants to stand as a candidate in the new election scheduled for June 28th. He wanted to present himself as a team to the delegates at the newly elected General Assembly with two deputies, he told the Tagesspiegel on Thursday. Stietzel, who had already founded his first companies as a schoolboy, was involved with the Wirtschaftsjunioren, an association of young entrepreneurs, and has been working on a voluntary basis in the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for many years. The business graduate is the founder and managing director of the medium-sized investment companies Marktflagge and German Future Ventures. He was a candidate in the IHK election on list 11 (banks, insurance companies, financial services).

“It is important to me that we put together a team that reflects the newly elected assembly,” he said. You need experienced and new members, representatives of large and small companies, female and male representatives. Stietzel wants to propose Lana Wittig, managing director of the media company Edition F, and Sonja Jost, co-founder of the chemical start-up Dexlechem, as deputies. Robert Rückel from the German Spy Museum should also represent him.

“If you are serious about voluntary work, you have to take this step and take responsibility,” said Stietzel about the motivation for wanting to become IHK President. “We also want to do something for the city and promote the economy. It wouldn’t be right to say that we don’t do that either.” When asked about the focal points of his work in the event of an election, Stietzel named “pragmatic urban development, a functioning administration and effective education. These three pillars must stand on the way to becoming an economic metropolis”.

Stietzel receives support from the previous incumbent, Daniel-Jan Girl, who was only elected President by the General Assembly in September last year, but did not receive the required number of votes to be re-elected to the General Assembly. Without question, he was initially disappointed, Girl told the Tagesspiegel. Presumably, many of the new voters would have mistakenly thought that the incumbent president would not need support.

“I was able to get a lot of new things off the ground. I always had the goal of making the future General Assembly as diverse as possible and further enlivening it with many new candidatures. And that has obviously been successful”. He supports the candidacy of Sebastian Stietzel from hearts.

So far, all the presidents and Beatrice Kramm, the only female president of the chamber, had themselves immortalized in a work of art for the ancestral gallery of the IHK. He left it open whether, when and how Girl wants to frame herself in oil or as a photo. “First of all, it’s important to me that our work of the last few months continues,” Girl told the Tagesspiegel.