Tough campaigning

This is 65-year-old Gesine Schwan's second attempt at clinching the country's top job. She has the backing of the Social Democrats and the Greens and may pick up additional votes from the Left party. Their candidate, Peter Sodann, is expected to drop out after the first round of voting.

Schwan has been campaigning hard for the largely ceremonial office while her opponent, Horst Koehler, remains silent. With her trademark mop of blond curls, Schwan has been giving interviews, appearing on television talk shows and giving campaign speeches across the country in recent months.

She managed to grab headlines in April when she came out warning of the risk of social unrest at this time of global economic crisis, arguing that the mood in Germany could turn explosive later this year when hundreds of thousands of people currently surviving on short-time work become unemployed.

This led Horst Koehler, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to break his silence and criticize his challenger indirectly for counter-productively spreading doom and gloom.

Neighborly ties

Born in Berlin on May 22, 1943, Schwan grew up in a socially-committed family that was part of the resistance movement against the Nazis and later became involved in Polish-German reconciliation after the war.

Schwan studied Romance languages, history, philosophy and political science in Berlin and Freiburg. As a student, she spent much time in Warsaw and Krakow and developed contacts to several Polish dissidents who today work as high-ranking politicians.

She joined the Social Democratic Party in 1972 and proved to be a passionate debater who propagated detente towards communist regimes as a means of working towards democratization. She was director of the Viadrina European University on the German-Polish border from 1999 to 2008, having been selected because of her contribution to German-Polish relations.

The gender factor

A widowed mother of two, she has shrewdly played her card as a tough female politician.

"I have a lot of experience as a woman caught between a job and a family. I understand power as a grouping of different interests," Schwan said last time she ran for the presidential post in 2004.

This time it seems she has been trying to attract support from different quarters of the political spectrum. A recent opinion poll conducted by Germany's leading mass-circulation newspaper, Bild Zeitung, said only 10 percent of all Germans would vote for Schwan this year, if the German president were elected in a popular vote.

Author: Rina Goldenberg

Editor: Kate Bowen