Christian Wulff

Not to be confused with Christian Wolff (disambiguation).

Christian Wulff
President of Germany
In office 2 July 2010 – 17 February 2012
Chancellor	Angela Merkel
Preceded by	Horst Köhler
Succeeded by	Joachim Gauck
Prime Minister of Lower Saxony
In office 4 March 2003 – 30 June 2010
Preceded by	Sigmar Gabriel
Succeeded by	David McAllister
Personal details
Born	(1959-06-19) 19 June 1959 Osnabrück, West Germany (now Germany)
Political party	Christian Democratic Union
Spouse(s)	Christiane Wulff (m. 1988–2006) Bettina Körner (m. 2008–present)
Children	Annalena Linus
Alma mater	University of Osnabrück
Religion	Roman Catholic
Signature
Website	Official website

Christian Wilhelm Walter Wulff (German pronunciation: [ˈkʁɪstjan ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈvaltɐ vʊlf]; born 19 June 1959) is a German politician and lawyer. He served as the President of Germany from 2010 to 2012. A member of the Christian Democratic Union, he served as Prime Minister of the state of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2010. He was elected President in the 30 June 2010 presidential election, defeating opposition candidate Joachim Gauck and taking office immediately, although he was not sworn in until 2 July.

On 17 February 2012, Wulff resigned as President of Germany, facing the prospect of prosecution for allegations of corruption relating to his prior service as Prime Minister of Lower Saxony.

Early life and education

Wulff was born in Osnabrück and is Roman Catholic. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold the post of President of Germany since Heinrich Lübke (1959–1969). His father left the family, and he grew up with his mother. As a teenager, he took responsibility for the care of his younger sister, after his mother developed multiple sclerosis. After completing his Abitur at the Ernst Moritz Arndt Gymnasium in Osnabrück, Wulff studied law with a specialisation in economics at the University of Osnabrück. He joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in 1975. In 1987 and 1990, he passed the first and second state examinations in law, and has since worked as an attorney.

Political career

Since 1975, Wulff has been a member of the CDU. From 1978 to 1980, he served as federal chairman of the Schülerunion, a political high school student organization affiliated with the Christian Democrats. From 1979 to 1983, he was on the executive board of the Junge Union and became its regional chairman in Lower Saxony in 1983. However, he decided to resign from the board in order to pursue his law degree, which he completed in 1986. The same year, he was elected a city councillor in his hometown. Since 1984, he has sat on the CDU's regional party council of Lower Saxony, serving as its chairman since 1994.

The Christian Democrats made Wulff candidate for Premier in the run-up of the 1994 Legislative Assembly elections. However, the popular incumbent Gerhard Schröder won and secured an absolute majority in the Lower Saxony legislature, leading some observers to doubt the wisdom of the provincial party nominating a young and neophyte candidate for Premier. After four years in opposition, the 1998 legislative assembly election brought another opportunity for Wulff to become Premier. Indeed, the federal Christian Democrat party, led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, pinned their hopes on Wulff – a Wulff victory would have stopped the inevitable rise of Schröder to the Social Democrat nomination for Chancellor. However, supported by a wave of sympathy for his candidacy for chancellor in the 1998 federal election, Schröder was returned to power by an enhanced majority – leaving Wulff to serve five more years as provincial leader of the opposition.

Schröder won the 1998 federal election, leaving the post of Premier to his anointed successor, Interior minister Gerhard Glogowski. The latter soon stumbled over a scandal involving free travel paid by TUI and was succeeded by Sigmar Gabriel. In the wake of the 1999 scandal, as well as rising discontent with Schröder's federal cabinet, the Christian Democrats rose in the opinion polls and became a serious contender for power in the 2003 assembly election.

Wulff has been one of the four deputy chairmen of the CDU party at the federal level since 7 November 1998, and has been a board member of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation since 2003.

2003 state election

With Lower Saxony announcing deeper cuts of education and municipal services, the stage was set for the 2003 election campaign. Wulff entered the race as the favourite to win the election and essentially campaigned on a platform of fiscal restraint and clear-cut reforms in the areas of law enforcement and education. Both issues were decisive in the assembly elections that led to a change in fortunes for the two major parties. The Christian Democrats, in the political wilderness since the 1990 Schröder victory, were returned to power in the Legislative Assembly, gaining 48.3% of the vote. Wulff was sworn in as Premier on 4 March 2003, as the head of a coalition between centre-right Christian Democrats and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

Policies

With President of Argentina Cristina Fernández.

As Premier, Wulff pursued a multitude of reforms, including a restructuring of the primary education system in Lower Saxony, as well as an increase of police officers on the beat. When Wulff took office, Lower Saxony faced a severe budget crisis, resulting from years of public deficits. Painful cuts to public expenditure were enacted and implemented against considerable political resistance. The measures included cuts in university funding and in benefits for the blind. Other policies concern the reform of the administration (especially the abolition of certain district authorities). Budgetary problems have continued to overshadow Wulff's policies, albeit with somewhat less pressure. Many measures have remained controversial.

Prior to the 2005 Federal Election, Wulff had been mentioned as a potential candidate for the German chancellorship. Surprisingly, in a spring 2005 poll, 28 percent of all respondents named Wulff as their preferred candidate for the Christian Democrat nomination for Chancellor in the 2006 election. As Wulff only began his first term as Premier in early 2003, he is likely to dismiss such speculations. Speculation had particularly increased since the December 2004 Christian Democrat federal convention in Düsseldorf, when Wulff was re-elected deputy leader of the federal party with roughly 86 per cent of all delegates supporting him. However, the premature dissolution of the Bundestag in 2005 and the subsequent election of Chancellor Angela Merkel has largely put an end to further speculation about Wulff's future.

A Wulff candidacy for the CDU nomination for Chancellor was seen to appeal to northerners and liberals within the Christian Democrats. Outside the mold of a typical conservative, he may have been able to attract swing voters disillusioned with the slowness of reforms, as well as the rather high rates of unemployment in Germany. Indeed, the Premier worked on increasing his visibility beyond Lower Saxony's confines, particularly by appearing frequently on TV shows and giving interviews to the national newspapers. Moreover, Wulff is also acquiring a profile on a broad range of issues, including the reform of the German language, Medicare and social security reform, as well as a modernisation of Germany's federal constitution, the Grundgesetz. In fact, the Premier recently criticised the consensus reached between the Christian Democrat and Social Democrat parties on the modernisation of Germany's constitution, stating that he felt that the provinces had not been given sufficient powers to deal with their own affairs. Wulff has also taken a conservative stand on nuclear energy, advocating an extension of the deadlines for the decommissioning of Germany's nuclear reactors.

In a speech, Wulff also expressed his opposition to euthanasia and warned of a retreat of moral values. This can be seen as the first attempt to formulate a value-based agenda for the 2008 legislative assembly, and more importantly, the 2009 federal elections. In this context, it is important to note that Chancellor Angela Merkel had been severely criticized for a lack of emotional warmth during the 2005 federal election campaign, leading to a worse-than-expected result for the Christian Democrats.

Wulff announced on 8 January 2006 that Lower Saxony would become the first province to approve a new model according to which the government will temporarily pay part of the salaries for low-salary jobs, if the employers concerned are willing to employ an employee concerned on a long-term basis. This pilot is supposed to make new jobs more affordable in Germany's notoriously high-wages environment.

Wulff and the 2005 federal elections

Due to his popularity in Lower Saxony, and in federal opinion polls, Wulff was considered to be a contender for the office of Chancellor.

After the 23 May announcement that federal elections were to be advanced to September 2005, Wulff announced that he was not a candidate for the Christian Democrat nomination for Chancellor, particularly as he had not completed his first term as Premier of Lower Saxony. Instead, Wulff declared his support for Angela Merkel, the CDU leader in the Bundestag. Although there was speculation that Wulff would be given a position in the new government, entering federal politics, he remained Premier of Lower Saxony.

President of Germany

Wulff was elected President of Germany on 30 June 2010 to follow Horst Köhler, who had resigned on 31 May 2010. He won 625 of 1242 votes on the third ballot of the Federal Convention. He became Germany's youngest president at the age of 51 and was sworn in on 2 July 2010 in front of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat.

His main contender in the election was Joachim Gauck, a civil rights activist from East Germany and a former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives. Not a member of any party himself, Gauck was nominated by the opposition SPD and Greens as their presidential candidate on 3 June.

Wulff was succeeded as Premier of Lower Saxony by David McAllister. Wulff's candidacy for President of Germany in the 2010 presidential election was formally confirmed by Angela Merkel, Guido Westerwelle and Horst Seehofer, the heads of the CDU, FDP and CSU parties, during the evening of 3 June 2010.

In August 2011, President Wulff opened an economists' conference on with a speech on the euro. He criticized the European Central Bank (ECB), which had entered a second round of bond buy-ups from heavily indebted euro-zone nations, calling the plan to stabilize the euro "legally and politically questionable".

See List of presidential trips made by Christian Wulff for more information about his presidency.

Scandals and resignation

In December 2011, news of Wulff’s alleged former ties with affluent businessmen emerged. During his tenure as Premier of Lower Saxony, the state parliament inquired whether he had any business ties with friend and millionaire entrepreneur Egon Geerkens. He denied that he had, concealing a private loan of some €500,000 from Geerkens' wife Edith in 2008 to purchase a house. Geerkens, however, admitted to managing the deal. On 22 December 2011, Wulff made a public statement apologizing for his handling of the loan affair and conceded that he should have made his personal records available more quickly, "that was not straightforward and I am sorry," he said.

Wulff applied undue pressure on Springer Press to delay or even prevent initial revelations on the loan scandal until his return from a visit abroad. Upon being made aware that the BILD tabloid was going to publish the story, he called editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann, leaving a message in which he threatened legal action and a "final break" in relations with the Springer publishing house. By January 2012, Wulff had lost a substantial amount of public support with commentators called for his resignation and increased pressure from the opposition; his party began to distance themselves from him for his attempted censorship of freedom of the press.

On the evening of 4 January 2012, Wulff gave an interview in a joint broadcast by ARD and ZDF. He expressed his desire to remain in office and admitted the call to Diekmann was a "serious mistake...unworthy" of a president and for which he apologised. For the sake of transparency, he promised to have his office publish the responses to some 400 recent press inquiries online and initially posted a summary, but reneged on his promise a few days later, citing confidentiality and organizational difficulties. Within a week several newspapers began making use of their right to publish their own enquiries with the respective responses. On 18 January, Wulff’s lawyer announced and presented online transcripts of legally released interviews by journalists.

As more allegations of possible corruption emerged, the prosecutors in Hanover, the capital city of the state of Lower Saxony, sought the Bundestag to lift Wulff’s immunity as President to investigate possible granting and/or accepting of undue advantages. Pre-empting this, Wulff resigned on 17 February 2012. As a reason for his resignation, Wulff stated that "(the German people's) trust and thus his effectiveness have been seriously damaged" and that "for this reason it is no longer possible for him to exercise the office of president at home and abroad as required." The media reaction stressed that Wulff's resignation was inevitable and that it presented another challenge for Merkel, who had to find another candidate amidst the Eurozone crisis.

A new presidential election was required within a month to elect his successor. Until the new President was elected, Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union (CSU) was acting president. The new president, Joachim Gauck, was elected on 18 March by a Federal Convention.

Family

Christian Wulff met his first wife, lawyer Christiane Vogt (born 1961), when they were both law students in Osnabrück in 1983. They married in March 1988, and have a daughter, Annalena (born 1993). In June 2006, Wulff announced that he would divorce his wife. Wulff subsequently married Bettina Körner (born 1973 in Hanover), on 21 March 2008 at a ceremony in Castle Herrenhausen, near Hannover. She has a son from a previous relationship, and on 12 May 2008, gave birth to their first child together, also a boy named Linus. Wulff and his wife announced their separation in January 2013, with him moving out of their Hanover home.

External links

• Personal website
• Curriculum vitae of Prime Minister Christian Wulff

Party political offices
Preceded by Jürgen Gansäuer	Leader of the Christian Democratic Union of Lower Saxony 1994–2008	Succeeded by David McAllister
Political offices
Preceded by Sigmar Gabriel	Prime Minister of Lower Saxony 2003–2010	Succeeded by David McAllister
Preceded by Horst Köhler	President of Germany 2010–2012	Succeeded by Joachim Gauck