Herzog, Roman

▪ 1995

      When the time came to choose a candidate for Germany's first postunification presidential election, Chancellor Helmut Kohl (q.v.) and his ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) sought out an easterner as a gesture to promote harmony within the country. The CDU was trailing in the polls, and a general election loomed on the horizon in October. While the post of president was largely ceremonial, Kohl's ability to replace the outgoing president, Richard von Weizsäcker, with his own candidate was seen as a test of the chancellor's political muscle. His choice—Steffen Heitmann, the justice minister for the state of Saxony—had proved a poor one. Heitmann, an inexperienced politician, came under intense criticism in 1993 when he voiced some extreme and unpopular opinions on subjects that included Naziism and immigrants. He then withdrew from the race. Kohl fared better with his replacement nominee, old crony Roman Herzog, the president of Germany's Federal Constitutional Court.

      A few weeks before the May 1994 presidential election, Herzog created his own bit of controversy. A magazine quoted him as saying that foreigners living in Germany who turned down the opportunity for citizenship should return to their own countries. Herzog claimed that his comment had been interpreted incorrectly, but the damage was done. When a special 1,324-member electoral college assembled in the Reichstag in Berlin on May 23 to choose a new president, it took three rounds of voting before Herzog received the required majority for the victory. The narrow margin by which he was elected—Herzog received 696 votes, while his nearest rival had 605—proved to be prophetic; the CDU-led coalition squeaked through the October election with a 10-seat majority in the federal legislature.

      Herzog was born April 5, 1934, in Landshut, Bavaria. He began his career in law in 1966 as a professor at the Free University in Berlin. He moved on to the College of Administration in Speyer, where he met Kohl, who was then the premier of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1973 he became Kohl's permanent representative in Bonn and then served in a series of government posts, ultimately becoming the minister of the interior of Baden-Württemberg. Kohl appointed him to the Federal Constitutional Court in 1983, and in 1987 he became its president.

      While Herzog was generally considered to be a conservative, his court had a history of returning some surprisingly liberal decisions. Attacked even before the start of his five-year term by Social Democrats, who said that he had failed to denounce right-wing extremism in his acceptance speech, Herzog pledged to speak for all of Germany. But many others felt that a man who could modestly ask the Polish people "for forgiveness for what Germans did to you"—as Herzog did in a speech at the monument to the World War II Warsaw Uprising in the Polish capital on August 1—might be just the kind of president they needed to represent the newly reunited Germany in the newly uniting Europe. (ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

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