Jean Asselborn: The Steelworker's Son Who Became Europe's Longest-Serving Foreign Minister

For 19 years, whenever Luxembourg sat down at Europe's diplomatic tables, it was Jean Asselborn who spoke for it. Between 2004 and 2023 he was the Grand Duchy's foreign minister under two prime ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker and Xavier Bettel, and by the time he left office he was the longest-serving foreign minister in the European Union. Yet the man who became one of the continent's most recognisable diplomats began his working life not in a chancellery but on a factory floor.

Asselborn built a reputation as the conscience of the EU's foreign affairs council: plain-spoken, occasionally undiplomatic, and unwavering on questions of asylum, press freedom and judicial independence. At home, that candour made him a fixture at the top of popularity surveys for years, regularly drawing approval ratings around 80 per cent and ranking as Luxembourg's most liked and most trusted politician.

From the factory floor to the town hall

Jean Asselborn was born on 27 April 1949 in Steinfort, a small town in western Luxembourg near the Belgian border, the son of a steelworker who was himself active in local politics. He left school at 18 in 1967 and went to work at a Uniroyal plant, where he quickly became involved in the labour movement, elected as youth representative of the Luxembourg workers' federation that would later become the OGBL trade union. In 1968 he took a post as a municipal civil servant in Luxembourg City, returning the following year to work for the administration in Steinfort.

His was a path of self-improvement. Asselborn resumed his schooling in evening classes and passed his secondary-school leaving exam at the Athenee de Luxembourg in 1976. He then studied law at the University of Nancy II in France, earning a degree in civil procedure law in October 1981. From 1976 until he entered government in 2004 he ran the intercommunal hospital of Steinfort as its administrator.

A long climb through Luxembourg politics

A member of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP) since 1972, Asselborn became mayor of Steinfort in 1982, a post he held until 2004. He was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1984 on the LSAP list in the southern constituency. He led the party's parliamentary group from 1989 to 1997, served as vice-president of the Chamber from 1999, and was national president of the LSAP from 1997 to 2004.

The decisive turn came after the 2004 general election, when Asselborn joined Jean-Claude Juncker's coalition government on 31 July 2004 as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and immigration. He held the foreign affairs portfolio continuously until 17 November 2023, adding responsibility for immigration and asylum, and remaining deputy prime minister until 2013. In 2005 he helped steer Luxembourg's presidency of the Council of the European Union, and on his initiative the country won its first-ever non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, for 2013 and 2014.

What he is best known for

Asselborn made his name as one of the EU's most outspoken voices on migration and the rule of law. In September 2016 he provoked a continental storm by declaring that Hungary was treating refugees "worse than wild animals" and arguing that a member state building fences and undermining press freedom should be suspended or, if necessary, expelled from the Union. He returned again and again to the defence of asylum seekers, framing human rights as the core purpose of democratic societies rather than an optional extra.

"Anyone who, like Hungary, builds fences against war refugees or who violates press freedom and the independence of the judiciary should be excluded temporarily, or if necessary forever, from the EU."

His most viral moment came in September 2018, at a meeting of EU interior ministers in Vienna, when Italy's Matteo Salvini needled him over migration. Asselborn threw down his headphones and burst out "Merde alors!" - a clip Salvini's camp filmed and posted online, and which Asselborn later described as a deliberate, calculated reaction to rhetoric he said echoed the 1930s. The outburst gave the title to a 2019 political biography of him by the Austrian journalist Margaretha Kopeinig.

Honours and recognition

His long service and his work to deepen ties with Luxembourg's neighbours brought some of Europe's highest distinctions.

• Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (December 2010)
• Commander of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour (October 2013)
• Repeatedly ranked as Luxembourg's most popular and most competent politician in the TNS Ilres Politmonitor surveys, with approval around 80 per cent

Life after the ministry

Asselborn left the foreign ministry in November 2023 after the LSAP went into opposition following that year's general election; the post passed to Xavier Bettel. In retirement he has remained a sought-after voice on the future of Europe, giving lectures across the Greater Region and Germany, and the subject of a book recounting a 1,000-kilometre cycling tour through France. After nearly two decades as Luxembourg's face in the world, he has stayed exactly what he was in office: a passionate, undiplomatic European.