The head of the German state is the federal president of Germany. He is elected by the Federal Assembly, which is convened precisely for this purpose. The functions of the federal president, however, are mostly representative: he accredits diplomatic representatives and represents the country on the world stage. Since 2012, this high government position has been held by Joachim Gauck.
Future head of state
Joachim Gauck was born on January 24, 1940. His hometown is Rostock, a port in northeastern Germany. The father of the future president served as a naval officer, and his mother was an employee of the office. Since the beginning of the 30s of the last century, Gauck's parents were in the Nazi party, and his father did not manage to avoid Anglo-American captivity, although he later returned home.
A few years after the end of the war, Joachim's father was arrested by the Soviet counterintelligence: he was suspected of espionage and anti-Soviet activities, as a result of which he was sentenced to long imprisonment and ended up in one of the Siberian camps. Subsequently, Joachim Gauck admitted that his father's arrest greatly influenced his political views. From a young age, the future president of Germany felt hatred for socialism and communist ideas.
Having become an adult and an independent member of society, Gauck refused to receive a philological education, which he had been striving for since childhood, and devoted himself entirely to religious and human rights activities. In the 1960s, he was the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Mecklenburg. He was called one of the most ardent dissidents in East Germany. In the late 1980s, Gauck took an active part in mass demonstrations, the participants of which sought to unite the two German states at any cost.
Gauck quickly began to advance into the leaders of the opposition movement "New Forum", one of the slogans of which was the implementation of democratic reforms in the GDR.
The path to the heights of power
In 1990, the future leader of Germany became a member of the People's Chamber of East Germany, where he headed a special committee that was involved in the disbandment of the state security organs. After the unification of the FRG and the GDR, one of his tasks was to preserve the integrity of the archives of the Ministry of Security, which his former employees sought to destroy.
Gauck was in charge of the Department for the Study of the Secret Archives until October 2000.
Then there was an active journalistic and human rights activity. As a presenter of one of the public television channels in Germany, Gauck conducted propaganda aimed at combating extremism of any kind.
At the end of 2011, a scandal began to flare up in Germany around the federal president of the country, Wolfe. Due to allegations of corruption, he was forced to resign. Almost all the main political parties in the country supported Joachim Gauck as a candidate for the presidency, who by that time enjoyed extremely wide popular support. At the end of March 2012, the former pastor Gauck was elected to the post of the head of the German state.
