The man who would be president

News analysis

Newsbook

Joachim Gauck

The man who would be president

by The Economist | BERLIN

MANY Germans are asking, rather plaintively: why can’t Joachim Gauck be the next president? The short answer is that if he is elected then Angela Merkel, the chancellor, might have to leave office. (That’s also the long answer.) Mrs Merkel's allies have a majority in the Federal Assembly that will elect the president on June 30th, so she’s probably safe. But many of those allies—maybe most of them—would secretly prefer the avuncular human-rights hero from the former East Germany to the candidate Mrs Merkel picked, career politician Christian Wulff, now premier of Lower Saxony.

They are right to. Germany is in a bad mood at the moment. It is not that things are objectively bad: the economy is doing as well as anyone has the right to expect and there is talk of unemployment dropping to pre-crisis levels. But Germans are fed up with their bickering government and disenchanted with party politics. The banks have fleeced them. The currency is wobbly and Germany’s neighbours are demanding handouts. Even the churches are in bad shape.

Now comes Mr Gauck, exuding outsidery charm and moral authority (he was a leader of East Germany’s “peaceful revolution” and opened the Stasi archives to public scrutiny). He wants to “restore trust” and lift the “wall of silence between the governors and the governed”. Although put up for the presidency by two left-leaning opposition parties, the Greens and the Social Democrats (who are revelling in the discomfiture they are causing the chancellor), Mr Gauck is keener to defuse discontent than to exploit it. He heads an educational group called “Against Forgetting, For Democracy”. He warns Germans against demonising markets: you don’t give up on football when players break the rules, he points out, you enforce them better. He aligns himself with the “minority of Germans who have a visceral love of freedom”, the sort of thing Mrs Merkel used to say before she moved to the mushy security-loving middle of the political spectrum.

It’s hard to tell with Mr Gauck where the saintliness ends and the media savvy begins. He talks about himself in the third person, a giveaway that an ego hovers behind the homilies. The former pastor is getting a divorce, after a long separation, and might marry his girlfriend if he gets the job, which sounds neither romantic nor chivalrous. But if these are faults, they are minor ones. A victim of communism, Mr Gauck knows how lucky Germans are to have political and economic freedom. They need reminding and Mr Gauck can do that. The worthy Mr Wulff cannot.