So why did the mass rag BILD and then all the others jump on him? My very personal suspicion is because Wulff, though otherwise a typically conservative politician, was decent enough to publically reject discrimination against immigrant groups, even saying, very courageously, that Islam had now become part of the German scene as legitimately as Christianity or Judaism. This view is anathema to right-wingers generally, and BILD is a main purveyor of hate-the-Muslims propaganda. Indeed, BILD printed installments of the book by a major proponent of such hatred, the politician and banker Thilo Sarrazin. In my view this is one likely possibility for the philippic campaign against the otherwise relatively harmless Christian Wulff. . . . One possible candidate is the man whom Wulff just barely beat two years ago: the East German pastor and Red-hunter who administered the archives about the Stasi (State Security apparatus of the East German Democratic Republic) and made a name for himself as a conservative, extremely anti-Left, whose Stasi files were used in ways reminiscent of FBI files during the McCarthy period to criminalize thousands, including many only because of unavoidable and often totally innocuous contacts of one kind or another with the Stasi, totally destroying their careers and often their lives. Joachim Gauck smiles in a friendly way; he even cries when discussing supposed terrors in the bad old days (although he was treated in a very benign manner considering that he was a very pro-western pastor -- some claim he himself had Stasi ties). But he is only one of a series of candidates now being discussed. Perhaps, by the time you read this, one of them will have been chosen. I hope it is not Gauck.

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