Free Republic

Outgoing President Joachim Gauck criticized US President Donald Trump in an interview on Friday, saying the American leader is calling into question what the US and Europe have worked towards together. In an interview with Spiegel published on Friday, Gauck — who will be replaced by Frank-Walter Steinmeier this month — voiced his concerns about the Republican President. “It worries me a lot that the American President is putting some things into questions that generations of other Americans have achieved with Europeans,” said Gauck. The German President further condemned Trump’s fraught relationship with the media as he has referred to...

Outgoing President Joachim Gauck warned in a talk on Wednesday that his country’s democracy is at risk amid major international shifts, including Donald Trump becoming US President on Friday. Gauck gave a speech to about 200 guests at the presidential residence of Bellevue Palace, looking back at his five years of serving as Germany’s head of state. “Now, after five years, I am more strongly affected by the awareness that democratic and stable Germany is also in danger,” he said. […] Gauck specifically named the crisis in the European Union with the United Kingdom’s impending departure, as well as conflicts...

In his annual Christmas address to the nation, German President Joachim Gauck has said that anger and rage at terrorism must not turn into hatred and violence. He called instead for good judgment and attention. […] Gauck warned that these emotions should not be allowed to dominate, adding that anger must not turn into hate and violence. Instead, it is about being united and defending compassion. Anyone who is “sensitive, responsive and helpful” can “transform anger and rage into forces that resist the hatred, violence and contempt of others,” Gauck said in his last Christmas speech as the German President....

German President Joachim Gauck said he was worried about the prospect of Donald Trump winning the race for the White House, citing the US Republican hopeful’s “unpredictability” as a cause for concern, according to a magazine interview published on Sunday. […] The German president, whose role is largely ceremonial, said he hoped “that American democracy, which does not allow the president to act as an autocrat, that the system of checks and balances, of mutual control” of power would be maintained. …

Germans resoundingly elected Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and human rights activist from communist East Germany, as president of the European Union's largest country on Sunday, posing a potential political headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

BERLIN (AP) – Germany's government and the two major opposition parties said Sunday they would jointly nominate former East German human rights activist Joachim Gauck to be the country's next president. Chancellor Angela Merkel said her center-right coalition government, and the center-left opposition rallied behind the Gauck, who was initially proposed by the opposition Social Democrats and Greens.