A slap in the face for the chancellor

German presidential elections have been delayed for a long time

Yesterday in Berlin, the extremely dramatic procedure for early elections of a new head of state - the tenth federal president of Germany - dragged on until late evening. By the time this issue of the newspaper was signed for publication, the name of the new president remained unknown.

In the Reichstag, all 1,244 members of the body convened solely for this purpose - the Federal Assembly - gathered for the voting procedure. Half of it is made up of Bundestag deputies, the other half are electors from 16 state parliaments - Landtags - delegated to Berlin. In the current Federal Assembly, 644 deputies are members or supporters of parties in the ruling coalition (496 from the CDU/CSU and 148 from the FDP). Representatives of the SPD have 333 votes, the Greens - 129, the Left Party - 124. Another 14 votes belong to electors representing the country's small parties.

Neither in the first nor in the second round of voting, none of the four candidates managed to obtain the absolute majority of votes required to win. The candidate from the bloc of ruling parties, 51-year-old Christian Wulff, received 600 votes in the first round, and 615 in the second. His opponent, 70-year-old Joachim Gauck, nominated by the Social Democrats and the Greens, received 499 and 490 votes, respectively, and the candidate from Left party TV journalist Luke Jochimsen - 126 and 123 votes. The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party candidate Frank Rennicke received three votes both times.

The third round of voting was decisive in this situation. Before it began, all the hopes of the Social Democrats, the Greens, as well as representatives of the parties of the ruling coalition, who cast their votes for the non-partisan Joachim Gauck, were turned to the Left Party. It was her votes that were supposed to ensure the superiority of this candidate. True, the delegates from the Left Party, not only on the eve of the vote, but even immediately after the second round, resolutely declared their reluctance to support Gauck. During the election campaign, they stated that he “enjoyed the privileges of the regime” in the GDR. In addition, Gauk stated in election speeches that the Left Party was incapable of governing the state.

The ruling coalition, it seems, did not count on such a scenario. After all, it was not only the left that did not want to give up their principles and enter into at least a temporary alliance with other opposition parties. The failure of the CDU/CSU and Free Democratic Party candidate Christian Wulff in the first and second rounds is described by most observers as a personal slap in the face for the leaders of the ruling coalition parties to Chancellor Angela Merkel and Vice-Chancellor Guido Westerwelle. After all, it was the votes of representatives of the parties “subordinate” to them in the first and second rounds that were not enough for Christian Wulff to win.

Yuri Shpakov, Berlin