Christian Wulff named new President of Germany Special

Berlin - On June 30, after an exhausting day and three rounds of voting, Christian Wulff has been elected as the tenth President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Although the large majority of the Schwarz-Gelbe (Black-Yellow, FDP/CDU-CSU) coalition has been ruling the country since the last 2009 election, the candidate of Chancellor Angela Merkel failed to secure a quick victory. In fact, Wulff didn’t obtain the 623 votes needed to win after the first two rounds. A simple majority sufficed in the third round in order to secure a victory against the opposition rival Joachim Gauck, a former East German human rights activist. Gauck was sustained by the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Alliance '90/The Greens). The other two candidates were Luc Jochimsen, a sociologist, television journalist and politician of Die Linke (Left party), and Frank Rennicke (born 1964), a neo-Nazi singer-songwriter nominated by the NPD, the National Democratic Party of Germany. Although at the end the majority was able to elect its represented official, the presidential election has showed many weakness inside the governing coalition and some doubts about the capacity of this government to bring to an end its mandate. Christian Wilhelm Walter Wulff (born 19 June 1959) is a lawyer and he has served as Prime Minister of the state of Lower Saxony since 2003. He is a politician of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. He succeeded Horst Köhler who announced his resignation as President of Germany on 31 May 2010 after German politicians criticised comments made by him in relation to overseas military deployments. The German president, in practice, holds a representative position and he acts in accordance with the advice and directives of the Federal Government. Unlike many constitutions, the Basic Law does not designate the head of state as the commander-in-chief of the military, which, in period of peace, is detained by the Minister of Defence and during a period of war, by the Chancellor.