Former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was elected president on Sunday, February 12, taking on the prestigious but largely ceremonial position months before rival Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a big election test, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Lawmakers and regional representatives voted for Steinmeier at the capital’s Reichstag building, after Merkel’s conservative parties and their junior coalition partner, Steinmeier’s Social Democrats, agreed to nominate him in November. He will assume office after the term of President Joachim Gauck expires on March 18.

Steinmeier’s election was widely expected because of the coalition’s broad majority. He received 931 of the 1,253 votes.

The role of president is formally Germany’s highest political office, though it has little impact on everyday politics.

Steinmeier’s nomination was a setback for Merkel, who had failed to find a suitable candidate in her own party. Despite being coalition partners, the rivalry between Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the left-leaning Social Democrats is heating up ahead of September’s election.

In a speech following Sunday’s vote, Steinmeier noted the first election of a German president after World War II, when the country was building “a democracy which could at the time find stability only on the foundations of the West,” he said. Referring to the present, he added, “If these foundations shake elsewhere, we have to stand by them even more strongly.”

Steinmeier’s party trailed the Christian Democrats and Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union in national elections for years. But since the Social Democrats in January nominated Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament, as candidate for chancellor, the party has caught up in opinion polls.