BERLIN (MNI) – In the first round of voting for the German
Presidency none of the candidates received the necessary absolute
majority.
A second round of voting is scheduled for 13:15 GMT today.
The German President, who has a principally ceremonial role, is
elected by parliamentarians from the federal and the state governments
in the so-called Federal Convention. In the first two rounds of voting
an absolute majority is required, in the third round a plurality
suffices.
The candidate of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right
CDU/CSU-FDP coalition, Christian Wulff, the state premier of Lower
Saxony, scored 600 out of the 1244 votes in the Convention. That means
not all of the 644 members from the ruling coalition voted for Wulff.
The candidate of the center-left SPD and the ecologist Greens,
Joachim Gauck, got 499 votes. The opposition had named the prominent
conservative in the hope of winning some votes from the CDU/CSU-FDP
coalition. Luc Jochimsen, the candidate of the post-communist Left
party, got 126 votes.
Leading members of the Left party reaffirmed this morning that
their delegates likely won’t support Gauck even in the third round,
meaning that Wulff has still the best chance to become the next
President.
–Berlin bureau: +49-30-22 62 05 80; email: twidder@marketnews.com
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