Consensus Candidate Gauck Elected Germany President

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pictured here with Joachim Gauck at a news conference in the Chancellery after a meeting with representatives from her centre-right government and the opposition. Photo by Spiegel

Joachim Gauck has been elected to be Germany's next President by the Federal Convention with a grat majority, report agencies.

The 72-year-old pastor and human rights activists has received 991 out of 1,232 votes in the Convention, which includes the Bundestag and an equal numbers of representatives of Germany's federal states.

Gauck is the first East German which will be the head of state of the Federal Republic. His rival in the vote was 73-year-old Beate Klarsfeld, candidate of communist party Die Linke.

Joachim Gauck was negotiated as a consensus candidate of the ruling coalition between German's Christian Democratic Union and the liberal Free Democratic Party, on the one side, and the Social Democrats and Greens, on the other.

Gauck was the Social Democrats's option for presidential elections in 2010, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel preferred Christian Wulff.

Wulff however resigned February 17, after being discredited by a months long controversy about allegedly illegaly benefiting from his position in power in the past.

The 72-year-old Joachim Gauck is well known for his work as a dissident in East Germany and for running the archives on the Stasi secret police after the Berlin Wall came down, exposing its crimes.