Germany's next president

ALMOST everyone looks like a winner after the hurried decision to name Joachim Gauck, a former East German dissident, as Germany's next president. Mr Gauck, an unsuccessful candidate in 2010, was chosen in a flurry of weekend meetings by five of the six parties in the Bundestag. Christian Wulff, the man who defeated him, had quit last week after a string of scandals relating to his previous job, premier of the state of Lower Saxony, came to light.

Now Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a protestant pastor who was raised in communist East Germany, will be joined at the summit of the German state by a man who is himself an East German protestant cleric. Her job is to govern, his will be to exhort and inspire. Approval by the Bundesversammlung, a body called to elect the president, is a formality.

The opposition Social Democratic and Green parties, who pushed Mr Gauck for the presidency in 2010, backed him again. On the surface, at least, his election at the second attempt is a victory for them. It is a bigger coup for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the ailing junior partner in Mrs Merkel’s coalition government. Its newish chairman, Philipp Rösler, risked a clash with Mrs Merkel—even the breakup of the coalition, according to some reports—by taking a stand in favour of Mr Gauck, the candidate she had opposed less than two years ago.

That is partly because Mr Gauck's unabashed defence of freedom, of the economic as well as the political sort, fits well with the FDP’s liberal principles (it is more surprising that the Social Democrats and Greens support him). Other candidates under consideration, like the former environment minister Klaus Töpfer, would have sent a signal that Mrs Merkel is eager to prepare for a coalition with one of the opposition parties after the next federal election in 2013. Dr Rösler has seen off that danger, a rare victory for the relatively callow liberal leader.

Less obviously, Mrs Merkel has also come out ahead. That is not a universal interpretation. “She had to absorb the bitterest defeat of her time in office,” opined Spiegel Online on Monday. Everyone thought that her Christian Democratic Union (and its Bavarian wing, the Christian Social Union) would reject Mr Gauck to spare the chancellor the embarrassment of admitting she was mistaken to reject him last time around. On this view, she was too weak to stand up to a menacing throng of liberals and leftists.

Maybe so, but Mrs Merkel is probably not too worried. She has a president (the first who is not a member of a party) that almost all the parties in the Bundestag can live with. If presidential elections are partly about signalling future political alliances, the signal is that Mrs Merkel can govern with almost any other party. Not for the first time, what some see as a setback could end up strengthening her.

Most important, the German people also look like winners. Unlike his predecessor, Mr Gauck is a charismatic and inspiring figure. He had a leading role in the protests that toppled the East German regime in 1989. As head of the Stasi archive after unification he pushed to open the files to victims of the East German secret police as well as researchers. He is a forthright patriot (he wants Germans to realise that they “live in a good country that they can love”) but is also willing to say less emollient things when required.

In a new book he calls freedom his highest political value and defends capitalism as a system capable of correcting its mistakes. He has offended anti-capitalists by mocking them as romantics and some civil libertarians by seeming to make light of the danger to privacy from keeping telecoms data available for the police. He criticises Germans for honoring a 'secret constitution', in which the status quo (rather than human dignity) is held to be inviolable. Mr Gauck is the people’s choice: in one poll 54% of the electorate backed him for the presidency. President Gauck may prove a more bracing leader than most Germans imagine.