  We present a state-of-the-art determination of the complex valued static
quark-antiquark potential at phenomenologically relevant temperatures around
the deconfinement phase transition. Its values are obtained from
non-perturbative lattice QCD simulations using spectral functions extracted via
a novel Bayesian inference prescription. We find that the real part, both in a
gluonic medium as well as in realistic QCD with light $u$, $d$ and $s$ quarks,
lies close to the color singlet free energies in Coulomb gauge and shows Debye
screening above the (pseudo) critical temperature $T_c$. The imaginary part is
estimated in the gluonic medium, where we find that it is of the same order of
magnitude as in hard-thermal loop resummed perturbation theory in the
deconfined phase.
