Former German president dies at 82

FORMER GERMAN president Roman Herzog has died aged 82.

Mr Herzog pressed Germany to embrace economic reform in the 1990s during his presidency and also stressed the importance of remembering the Holocaust.

Current President Joachim Gauck paid tribute yesterday to Mr Herzog, whom he described as “a distinctive personality”.

Mr Herzog served as the chief justice of Germany’s highest court before winning the presidency in 1994, four years after reunification.

He was one of the first leaders to address Germany’s resistance to reform and its growing economic stagnation at a time when then chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 16year tenure was coming to a close.

Germany was struggling with double-digit unemployment, amid worries that its labour market was too inflexible. Mr Herzog drew an unfavourable comparison between the dynamism of Asia and the stagnation in Germany, pointing to bureaucracy and regulation, and a resistance to change.

“Germany must feel a jolt,” Mr Herzog said in a 1997 speech, urging Germans to set aside greed and pull together to overcome “a sense of paralysis.” “Pessimism has become a normal mindset in our country,” he said.

However, the president, while seen as the nation’s moral conscience, has a largely ceremonial job and reform was slow to come.

The following year, centre-left Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder came to power saying that one of his government’s tasks would be to modernise the country and deal with a “reform backlog”.

But it would still be several more years before Germany embarked in earnest on painful reform of the welfare state.