Former IMF head elected new German president

Horst Koehler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund who has called for bolder economic reforms in Germany, was elected today as the country’s ninth postwar president.

Koehler, nominated by opposition conservatives, defeated Gesine Schwan, a university professor backed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s government who wanted to become Germany’s first female head of state.

Koehler, a 61-year-old finance expert, won by 604 votes to 589 in the ballot by a special assembly of lawmakers and state delegates in Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building.

He replaces Johannes Rau, a member of Schroeder’s Social Democrats who is stepping down after a single five-year term. Rau made history in 2000 as the first German to give a speech in the Israeli parliament.

Germany’s presidency is largely ceremonial and nominally above politics, but incumbents have often influenced national policy debates and are considered a voice of moral authority.

Koehler held a series of finance posts in the German government, headed the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, then spent the last four years in Washington as the IMF’s managing director.

He quit the post when the centre-right Christian Democrats and Free Democrats nominated him in March.

Though he helped former Chancellor Helmut Kohl negotiate German reunification in 1990, Koehler was largely unknown to the general public before his nomination.

He has said that he wants to bring his experience in national and international affairs to the post.

He has called on Germans to accept the need for economic change, cut bureaucracy more boldly and rely less on government as a way out of three years of economic stagnation.

The Christian Democrats, the main party backing him, are using the same themes to hammer Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in opinion polls and have portrayed his election as part of their campaign to unseat Schroeder in 2006 elections.

Koehler has echoed a widespread sentiment in Germany by criticising US policy in Iraq during the low-key presidential campaign.

He was quoted as telling a closed meeting of his political backers that the United States was “arrogant,” a remark he has not denied. He has criticised Washington for lacking a concept for “winning the peace” in Iraq.

Schwan, a longtime Social Democrat who heads a German-Polish university in the border town of Frankfurt an der Oder, has urged politicians cutting social programmes – including Schroeder – to protect the most vulnerable members of society.