Joachim Gauck

Joachim Wilhelm Gauck (German: [joˈʔaxɪm ˈɡaʊk] ; born 24 January 1940) is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. A former Lutheran pastor, he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.

During the Peaceful Revolution in 1989, Gauck was a co-founder of the New Forum opposition movement in East Germany, which contributed to the downfall of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and later with two other movements formed the electoral list Alliance 90. In 1990, he was a member of the only freely elected East German People's Chamber in the Alliance 90/The Greens faction. Following German reunification, he was elected as a member of the Bundestag by the People's Chamber in 1990 but resigned after a single day having been chosen by the Bundestag to be the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. This made him the Bundestag member with the shortest tenure. He also served as Federal Commissioner from 1990 to 2000, earning recognition as a "Stasi hunter" and "tireless pro-democracy advocate" for exposing the crimes of the communist secret police.

He was nominated as the candidate of the SPD and the Greens in the 2010 presidential election but lost in the third ballot to Christian Wulff, the candidate of the government coalition. His candidacy was met by significant approval of the population and the media; Der Spiegel described him as "the better President", while the Bild called him "the president of hearts". Later, after Wulff stepped down, Gauck was elected as president with 991 of 1,228 votes in the Federal Convention in the 2012 German presidential election, as a nonpartisan consensus candidate of the CDU, the CSU, the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens.

A son of a survivor of a Soviet Gulag, Gauck's political life was formed by his own family's experiences with totalitarianism. Gauck was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, together with Václav Havel and other statesmen, and of the Declaration on Crimes of Communism. He has called for increased awareness of Communist crimes in Europe, and for the necessity of delegitimizing the Communist era. As president, he was a proponent of "an enlightened anti-communism", and he has underlined the illegitimacy of Communist rule in East Germany. He is the author and co-author of several books, including The Black Book of Communism. His 2012 book Freedom: A Plea calls for the defense of freedom and human rights around the globe. He has been described by Angela Merkel as a "true teacher of democracy" and a "tireless advocate of freedom, democracy, and justice". The Wall Street Journal has described him as "the last of a breed: the leaders of protest movements behind the Iron Curtain who went on to lead their countries after 1989." He has received numerous honours, including the 1997 Hannah Arendt Prize. In 2022, he criticized Germany's policies towards Russia in the period after the Cold War, and said that "we should have listened to the voices of our eastern neighbours – Poles and the Baltic states as well as our Atlantic friends" when they warned about Russian aggression.