Frank-Walter Steinmeier still gets an opposing candidate. The Left nominated the social medicine specialist Gerhard Trabert for the office of Federal President. According to SZ information, this personality will be presented to the public on Tuesday.
Trabert has no prospect of a majority in the February 13 election. Steinmeier’s second term in office is considered to have been secured after both the parties of the Ampel coalition and the Union have pledged their support. But with Trabert’s candidacy, the election of the Federal President at least gets the touch of a democratic competition. According to media reports, the AfD also wants to put up its own candidate.
The doctor and book author Gerhard Trabert, 65, is the founder of the association “Poverty and Health in Germany”, he has a professorship for social medicine and social psychiatry at the Rhein-Main University of Applied Sciences. But primarily he sees himself as a social worker. For many years he has been traveling in the Mainz area with his so-called “homeless mobile”, in which he provides free medical care for homeless people. He worked as a doctor in crisis areas and refugee camps on almost every continent, most recently he was on duty immediately after the fire in Moria on Lesbos. He is also involved in the civilian sea rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean.
“My candidacy is not directed against someone, but for something”
Trabert makes no secret of the fact that his candidacy is primarily symbolic, but he sees nothing reprehensible in it. “Of course I will not be elected head of state, but I see a bit of an opportunity to initiate a discussion,” he says in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “I would like to use the candidacy to draw attention to the poverty and social injustice in this country, and to appear as an advocate for people who are not heard enough. That is one of the most fundamental tasks of a Federal President.”
Trabert does not want this to be understood as a general criticism of Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “My candidacy is not directed against someone, but for something,” he says. However, Trabert is of the opinion that the social question has not played a major role in the Federal President’s term in office so far. “He could have spoken a little more often,” says Trabert.
In the past, the Left has regularly nominated its own candidates for the election of the Federal President. Five years ago, when Steinmeier was first chosen, it was poverty researcher Christoph Butterwegge. The anti-fascist Beate Klarsfeld, the television journalist and former member of the Bundestag Luc Jochimsen and the actor Peter Sodann have already applied for the highest office in the state on the ticket of the Left – none of them, of course, with a chance. Then, as now, the party was primarily concerned with a little attention in the political discourse. After her heavy losses in the Bundestag election in September, in which she almost flew out of parliament, the left is now more than ever trying to keep talking about its core issues.
Trabert’s candidacy is a joint proposal by the two party leaders Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow and the parliamentary group chairmen Amira Mohamed Ali and Dietmar Bartsch. The party executive, the parliamentary group executive in the Bundestag as well as the party and parliamentary groups of the federal states should discuss this on Monday. A press conference with the presidential candidate is planned for Tuesday.
Whoever was hoping for an opponent to Steinmeier will be disappointed
Gerhard Trabert says that he was very surprised when the request came about three weeks ago whether he wanted to take the candidacy. “Then I said to myself: I can’t turn down an opportunity like this to stand up for socially disadvantaged people.” For his work as a doctor and social worker, he received, among other things, the Paracelsus Medal of the German medical profession and the Federal Cross of Merit.
Although Trabert is not a party member, he is known in the party. In the federal election in September he ran as a direct candidate for the left in the Mainz constituency. Of the 12.7 percent of the first votes that he received, he was “rather disappointed”, although the left can only dream of such a result in large parts of the republic.
All those who had hoped for an opponent to Steinmeier are likely to be a little disappointed. “Of course everyone is right who say it is time to have a Federal President too,” says Trabert. “In my candidacy, however, the focus is on content that I believe a man can embody.”