Germany was to learn the name of its next president yesterday in a two-way battle between a former international finance chief and an academic hoping to become the country's first female head of state.
If the 1,205 members of a special federal assembly vote according to party lines, the successful candidate will be Horst Koehler, a conservative who led the International Monetary Fund until a few months ago.
Standing against him is Gesine Schwan, the choice of the ruling center-left coalition but with little chance of overturning the opposition conservatives' inbuilt majority on the assembly.
Koehler said Saturday that he was "excited but confident." Schwan told her supporters, including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, that there was everything still to play for.
The vote was taking place at the Reichstag, the seat of parliament, and was to be screened live on television. The winner will take office on June 30.
Although the trappings of head of state are largely ceremonial, the post is prestigious. The president of 82 million Germans meets world leaders, travels the globe representing the country and enjoys a stately residence in the heart of Berlin.
Politically he has virtually no power, although the incumbent is seen as a kind of moral arbiter.
Certainly that was the role outgoing President Johannes Rau fulfilled, his latest comments in a radio interview Saturday reminding Germans that they have no reason to grumble despite their economic woes.
The Christian Union alliance and their liberal FDP allies have an absolute majority on the assembly, and the result may be known after just one round of voting.
The build-up to the vote was marred by a fuss over one of the conservative delegates, a 90-year-old former military judge, Hans Filbinger, who is accused of helping hand out death penalties in the last year of World War II.
Schroeder's Social Democrats all but called for his resignation, while the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said his participation "would be a stain on Germany's democratic record."
But the Christian Union stuck firm, pointing out that he had taken part in six previous federal assemblies without any row.
As for the candidates, they were virtually unknown before their nominations and have had to introduce themselves to the general public.
Koehler, who has worked all his life in national and international finance, is 61, married with two children, and was born in Skierbieszow, Poland, which at the time was under German rule.
In his campaign, he irked some conservatives by branding the US as "arrogant" over Iraq and by supporting tough economic policies.
Schwan, who celebrated her 61st birthday on Saturday, runs the elite Viadrina European University on Germany's border with Poland.
A mother of two, she has pressed Polish-German reconciliation and European relations as well as the key Franco-German axis.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS