Joachim Gauck (born 24 January 1940; pronounced [ˈɡaʊ̯k]) is a German politician, Protestant pastor, and former anti-communist human rights activist in East Germany. On 19 February 2012, he was nominated as the joint candidate for President of Germany by the government parties CDU, CSU and FDP, and the opposition SPD and the Alliance ’90/The Greens.[1]
During the Revolutions of 1989, he was a co-founder of the New Forum opposition movement in East Germany, which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet-backed dictatorship of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany; he served as a member of the only freely elected People’s Chamber for the Alliance 90 in 1990. Following the Reunification of Germany, he served as the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives from 1990 to 2000. As Federal Commissioner, he earned recognition as a “Stasi hunter”, exposing the crimes of the former communist political police.[2]
He was nominated as the candidate of the SPD and the Greens for President of Germany in the 2010 election, but narrowly lost to Christian Wulff, the candidate of the government coalition. However, his candidacy found strong resonance in the population, and Der Spiegel described him as “the better President.”[3] The German media dubbed him the candidate of the hearts.[4][5] Following Wulff’s 2012 resignation, Joachim Gauck was agreed on as a nonpartisan consensus candidate of all parties except the former East German communist party in the 2012 presidential election.[6][7][8]
A son of a survivor of a Soviet Gulag,[9][10][11][12] Gauck’s political life was heavily influenced by the suffering of his own family and his upbringing in the totalitarian communist regime of East Germany. A founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, together with Václav Havel and other statesmen, and the Declaration on Crimes of Communism, Gauck has called for increased awareness of communist crimes in Europe and the prosecution of communist criminals. He has criticized the political left of ignoring communist crimes.[13] The Independent has described him as “Germany’s answer to Nelson Mandela.”[14] He has been described by Chancellor Angela Merkel as a “true teacher of democracy” and a “tireless advocate of freedom, democracy and justice.”[15]
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
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