West German President Wins 2nd Term

Richard von Weizsaecker, West Germany’s widely admired senior statesman, was elected Tuesday to a second term as president of the nation that was founded 40 years ago today.

A special federal convention made up of members of the Bundestag, the lower house of the Parliament, and delegates from the 11 states voted, 881 to 108, to award the 69-year-old president another five-year term.

He was the first of West Germany’s six presidents to run unopposed and had been endorsed by four of the five political parties represented in the Bundestag. Only the far-left Greens party opposed him, but it declined to nominate a candidate as each of the parties in Parliament were entitled to do.

Most of the negative votes were cast by right-wing political figures who have disagreed with some of Von Weizsaecker’s recent decisions that they regarded as too liberal.

Von Weizsaecker, a member of the Christian Democratic Union, the senior partner in the government coalition headed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, declared after the vote that he tries to be above party politics without being blandly neutral.

“My office is open to everyone,” he said.

A recent public opinion poll indicated that Von Weizsaecker has the support of 94% of the West German voters. According to political analysts, he is widely perceived as West Germany’s senior statesman.

Rita Suessmuth, president of the Bundestag, said Tuesday at ceremonies in Bonn’s Beethoven Hall: “The president represents our country to other people in the world. But most of all, he makes it possible for citizens to identify with our state. We citizens need more than symbols in the form of offices, anthems and flags. Such symbols only work with personalities that pretend to be democrats.”

Wounded in WWII

Von Weizsaecker served in the army in World War II, was wounded three times and decorated. He won international acclaim in 1985 when, amid the controversy over then President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to the Bitburg military cemetery--where members of Hitler’s elite fighting force, the Waffen SS, are buried--he urged Germans to accept responsibility for the Adolf Hitler era and the Holocaust.

His visit to the Soviet Union in 1987 was credited with helping repair the damage caused by Kohl’s comparison of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev with Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

Earlier this year, he incurred the wrath of right-wingers by pardoning repentant German urban terrorists.

Von Weizsaecker’s father, Ernst, a professional diplomat, was Hitler’s deputy foreign minister. The elder Von Weizsaecker was sentenced to five years in prison at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, but he was later pardoned by then-U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy. Richard von Weizsaecker had helped defend his father at the trial.

Von Weizsaecker was the Christian Democratic mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984. On assuming the presidency, he withdrew from active politics.

Yet he has made the presidency, largely a ceremonial post with governmental power centered in the chancellorship, something more than it had been by traveling widely on official visits and speaking out on humanistic issues.

He will give the keynote speech today at ceremonies marking the formation of West Germany on May 24, 1949, under the guidance of the victorious Western allies, the United States, Britain and France.