German government nominates Wulff as next president; lawmakers to vote on June 30

German gov’t nominates Wulff as next president

BERLIN — Germany’s government on Thursday nominated the 50-year-old governor of Lower Saxony for the nation’s presidency, days after the previous head of state’s suprise resignation.

Chancellor Angela Merkel tapped Christian Wulff as her party’s candidate to replace President Horst Koehler, who stepped down Monday after appearing to link military deployments abroad with the country’s economic interests.

Standing next to a smiling Wulff at a press conference at the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, Merkel said he would make “a wonderful future president.”

“I’m happy that he is willing to go this way with the people during these difficult times, during a big global financial crisis, when the future of Europe is at stake,” Merkel said.

Wulff is a deputy leader of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and is widely expected to be elected June 30 by an assembly of 1,244 state and federal lawmakers, where Merkel’s coalition has a majority. The opposition Social Democrats and Green Party said they would nominate a candidate Friday.

The German president has a largely ceremonial job, but traditionally functions as the nation’s moral voice.

After the announcement of his nomination, Wulff thanked Merkel and her government coalition partners for their confidence in him and called the presidency “a big challenge that requires great responsibility.”

Wulff said he was looking forward to his new job and that he wants to reassure Germans and bring “optimism to the office during these difficult times.”

Wulff, 50, has been governor of Lower Saxony — a region of some 8 million people that occupies a large swath of Germany’s northwest — since 2003.

A trained lawyer and career politician with a clean-cut, inoffensive image, Wulff lost state elections in 1994 and 1998 to center-left rival Gerhard Schroeder, who went on to become chancellor.

One of a generation of conservative politicians who rose to influence after the party lost power nationally in 1998, he won on the third attempt.

He was long considered a potential rival to Merkel as party leader, but has talked down his chances of ever becoming chancellor in 2008, when he said that “I lack the absolute will to power and the readiness to subordinate everything to it.”

Wulff is married and has two children.

Koehler stepped down over what he said was unduly harsh criticism over comments on the sensitive issue of German military’s role in the world. In an interview, he argued that for a country with Germany’s dependency on exports, military deployments could be “necessary … in order to defend our interests, for example free trade routes.”

That was taken by many as relating to Germany’s unpopular mission in Afghanistan, although his office later said he was referring to anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia.

Merkel had declined to comment on the resignation, which came on top of a much-criticized start for her second-term government, an embarrassing state election loss in May, the euro debt crisis — complete with two unpopular rescue packages — and a prominent conservative state governor’s resignation.