Does Germany need a President?

[MadImmortalMan]

He should have just had a big orgy. Go out in a blaze of Khan-like glory.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't care if Germany has a President, a Premier, a PM, a Pope, or the Lord Protector Easter Bunny of Death.
Whatever it takes to keep them from their nasty habit of getting together for torch-lit rallies and lock-step marches over other countries' borders.

[Zanza]

I don't care if Germany has a President, a Premier, a PM, a Pope, or the Lord Protector Easter Bunny of Death.
Whatever it takes to keep them from their nasty habit of getting together for torch-lit rallies and lock-step marches over other countries' borders.

This is what our army does to bid farewell to a former president ... a torch-lit rally and lock-step marches. But at home.

[Viking]

I agree, the German president is nothing more than somebody to greet the politicans while Merkel is busy on the phone telling the greeks to shape up.

This is not, however, an inditement of Presidential Parliamentary systems. The President is irrellevant because he has no legitimacy. He is elected by the Bundestag and therefore has no legitimate reason to say anything. Germany needs a President to curb an overmighty chancellor. You should possibly look to Finland or Iceland for a model. There the President is elected independently and has the veto but no Bully Pulpit. It's a cultural thing, I think germany could do as well. Typically the President in Iceland is either a retired and respected politician or a cultural figure (Imagine President Günther Grass or Wim Wenders).

Don't give up on it yet...

[Zanza]

I agree, the German president is nothing more than somebody to greet the politicans while Merkel is busy on the phone telling the greeks to shape up.

This is not, however, an inditement of Presidential Parliamentary systems. The President is irrellevant because he has no legitimacy. He is elected by the Bundestag and therefore has no legitimate reason to say anything. Germany needs a President to curb an overmighty chancellor. You should possibly look to Finland or Iceland for a model. There the President is elected independently and has the veto but no Bully Pulpit. It's a cultural thing, I think germany could do as well. Typically the President in Iceland is either a retired and respected politician or a cultural figure (Imagine President Günther Grass or Wim Wenders).

Don't give up on it yet...

The next president looks quite promising actually.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/02/germanys-next-president

Germany's next president

A good choice

Feb 20th 2012, 16:39 by B.U.

ALMOST everyone looks like a winner after the hurried decision to name Joachim Gauck, a former East German dissident, as Germany's next president. Mr Gauck, an unsuccessful candidate in 2010, was chosen in a flurry of weekend meetings by five of the six parties in the Bundestag. Christian Wulff, the man who defeated him, had quit last week after a string of scandals relating to his previous job, premier of the state of Lower Saxony, came to light.

Now Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a protestant pastor who was raised in communist East Germany, will be joined at the summit of the German state by a man who is himself an East German protestant cleric. Her job is to govern, his will be to exhort and inspire. Approval by the Bundesversammlung, a body called to elect the president, is a formality.

The opposition Social Democratic and Green parties, who pushed Mr Gauck for the presidency in 2010, backed him again. On the surface, at least, his election at the second attempt is a victory for them. It is a bigger coup for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the ailing junior partner in Mrs Merkel's coalition government. Its newish chairman, Philipp Rösler, risked a clash with Mrs Merkel—even the breakup of the coalition, according to some reports—by taking a stand in favour of Mr Gauck, the candidate she had opposed less than two years ago.

That is partly because Mr Gauck's unabashed defence of freedom, of the economic as well as the political sort, fits well with the FDP's liberal principles (it is more surprising that the Social Democrats and Greens support him). Other candidates under consideration, like the former environment minister Klaus Töpfer, would have sent a signal that Mrs Merkel is eager to prepare for a coalition with one of the opposition parties after the next federal election in 2013. Dr Rösler has seen off that danger, a rare victory for the relatively callow liberal leader.

Less obviously, Mrs Merkel has also come out ahead. That is not a universal interpretation. "She had to absorb the bitterest defeat of her time in office," opined Spiegel Online on Monday. Everyone thought that her Christian Democratic Union (and its Bavarian wing, the Christian Social Union) would reject Mr Gauck to spare the chancellor the embarrassment of admitting she was mistaken to reject him last time around. On this view, she was too weak to stand up to a menacing throng of liberals and leftists.

Maybe so, but Mrs Merkel is probably not too worried. She has a president (the first who is not a member of a party) that almost all the parties in the Bundestag can live with. If presidential elections are partly about signalling future political alliances, the signal is that Mrs Merkel can govern with almost any other party. Not for the first time, what some see as a setback could end up strengthening her.

Most important, the German people also look like winners. Unlike his predecessor, Mr Gauck is a charismatic and inspiring figure. He had a leading role in the protests that toppled the East German regime in 1989. As head of the Stasi archive after unification he pushed to open the files to victims of the East German secret police as well as researchers. He is a forthright patriot (he wants Germans to realise that they "live in a good country that they can love") but is also willing to say less emollient things when required.

In a new book he calls freedom his highest political value and defends capitalism as a system capable of correcting its mistakes. He has offended anti-capitalists by mocking them as romantics and some civil libertarians by seeming to make light of the danger to privacy from keeping telecoms data available for the police. He criticises Germans for honoring a 'secret constitution', in which the status quo (rather than human dignity) is held to be inviolable. Mr Gauck is the people's choice: in one poll 54% of the electorate backed him for the presidency. President Gauck may prove a more bracing leader than most Germans imagine.

[jimmy olsen]

I didn't know they still had Pastors in post-humanist Europe.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577289292871304940.html

Former Dissident Is Elected as German President

By WILLIAM BOSTON And DAVID CRAWFORD

BERLIN—Joachim Gauck, a pastor-turned-dissident in the former East Germany, was elected Germany's head of state on Sunday, ending a political drama that nearly split Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition government.

The 72-year-old Mr. Gauck, an outspoken advocate of civil rights and personal liberty, was elected as Germany's federal president by an overwhelming majority in the Federal Convention, a special assembly of German lawmakers and representatives of the country's 16 states.

His rise to the presidency, a mostly ceremonial role whose influence depends on the moral authority of the incumbent, followed the resignation of predecessor Christian Wulff amid corruption allegations.

Filling the presidency had become a source of embarrassment for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who pushed her party colleague Mr. Wulff into the job only in 2010, even though most Germans thought the charismatic and eloquent Mr. Gauck was the better candidate. Mr. Wulff's rapid downfall gave Mr. Gauck a second run at the job.

Mr. Wulff resigned in March after public prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into allegations that he accepted favors from businessmen in his previous job as governor of the state of Lower Saxony. Mr. Wulff was the second German president to step down in less than two years, following the resignation in 2010 of Horst Köhler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, who had also been hand-picked for the presidency by Ms. Merkel.

The chancellor initially tried to block Mr. Gauck's bid last month, partly because of opposition from conservatives in her Christian Democratic Union party. But her junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats, sided with Germany's center-left opposition and backed Mr. Gauck, causing a major rift in the coalition. Ms. Merkel could only hold her government together by joining the bandwagon in favor of Mr. Gauck.

In his brief acceptance speech, Mr. Gauck spoke of the great responsibility he would bear as advocate of German democracy, hard-won after two dictatorships, to help Germans exercise their rights as citizens and feel they participate fully in the country. It is a message that will likely form the soundtrack to Mr. Gauck's five-year term.

With Mr. Gauck's election, Germany's two top political posts are now held by former democracy activists from the country's ex-Communist East. Ms. Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, wasn't a dissident under Communism, but became involved in the democracy movement in the heady days that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Mr. Gauck, whose father was persecuted by the Soviets, rebelled against East Germany's Communist rulers early in life and sought refuge under the wings of the Lutheran Church. He became a pastor and leader in the church's youth wing. His potential influence on East German youth put him in the crosshairs of the Stasi secret police.

Mr. Gauck's Stasi file, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that the Stasi classified him as an enemy of the state in 1983, and began a secret campaign—dubbed Operation Larva—aimed at pushing him to a nervous breakdown, a ploy often used against dissidents. To disrupt Mr. Gauck's private life, the Stasi visited him in 1985 and then leaked details from the meeting to his friends and co-workers. The Stasi also spread rumors that Mr. Gauck, who was married, had an affair with a theology student.

In 1988, the Stasi tried to recruit Mr. Gauck as an informer, by promising to allow his children, who had emigrated to West Germany, to visit him in the East. Mr. Gauck refused to cooperate and said he would inform his friends and colleagues about the Stasi's advances. A few months later, the Stasi closed Operation Larva.

When popular demonstrations for democracy swelled in 1989, Mr. Gauck turned his church in the port city of Rostock into a center of nonviolent resistance to the regime, organizing weekly protest marches and preaching for freedom.

"Sometimes we warned him to be a bit more careful in his choice of words, but he was unimpressed. He had no fear," recalls Arvid Schnauer, a fellow pastor from Rostock.

After Germany unified, Mr. Gauck was appointed to head the agency tasked with organizing, preserving and documenting the millions of files that the Stasi had collected on East Germans through its vast network of spies. As head of the archive, which became known as the Gauck Agency, Mr. Gauck made sure that every East German victim of the Stasi obtained the right to read the contents of his or her own file.

[HisMajestyBOB]

An elected figurehead President seems pretty pointless to me. Figurehead monarchs at least have significant symbolism and provide a form of continuance and stability, as they rule for life and represent a dynasty that has ruled for generations. A figurehead President has none of that, and is not notable in any way. If Germany disbanded the office of the President, no one would notice.

[Richard Hakluyt]

An elected figurehead President seems pretty pointless to me. Figurehead monarchs at least have significant symbolism and provide a form of continuance and stability, as they rule for life and represent a dynasty that has ruled for generations. A figurehead President has none of that, and is not notable in any way. If Germany disbanded the office of the President, no one would notice.

They can still go to pointless parties and banquets, thus reducing the workload of the Chancellor, enabling her to concentrate more on the actual work.

But, apart from that, I agree with your point.

[Zanza]

We could make the president of our either of our chambers of parliament the head of state.

The upper chamber presidenty is rotating between the state premiers so we would get a new head of state each year. The lower chamber presidency is usually from the party of the chancellor and only changes with each legislative period of the parliament (usually four years), so I would prefer the former.

That person could then meet foreign dignitaries, do the formal appointments of ministers and judges etc., and sign laws. We could probably delegate a lot of the "meet dignitaries" tasks to the foreign minister too as that job has lost a lot of weight with the chancellor doing most foreign policy herself.

[Neil]

You could always bring back the Imperial family, and in such a way become legitimate again.

[Syt]

You could always bring back the Imperial family, and in such a way become legitimate again.

Let's just skip that.

[Admiral Yi]

Speaking of Germany, how's that whole thing going with the Ossi assimilation project?  Unemployment and incomes still bad in the east?

[Zanza]

You could always bring back the Imperial family, and in such a way become legitimate again.

Das Alte und Morsche, die Monarchie ist zusammengebrochen. Es lebe das Neue; es lebe die deutsche Republik!

[Zanza]

Speaking of Germany, how's that whole thing going with the Ossi assimilation project?  Unemployment and incomes still bad in the east?

Incomes are still lower, but then so is cost of living (at least slightly). Unemployment in the best regions of Eastern Germany is lower than in the worst regions of Western Germany, but in general it's still higher.

Here is a picture from February. To make it comparable with the figures Eurostat publishes, you have to substract maybe a percent or even one-and-a-half percent of each value.

[Admiral Yi]

Dankeschoen, darling dankeschoen.