Former IMF head Horst Koehler was elected Germany's ninth post-war president by a special federal assembly on Sunday in a ballot marred by a row over a Nazi-era judge who sentenced World War Two deserters to death.
Koehler, who quit as managing director of the International Monetary Fund in March to run for the largely ceremonial office, won narrowly with 604 votes from the 1,204-member assembly.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's candidate Gesine Schwan, who got 589 votes and at least seven from Koehler's side, was beaten in what the opposition hope will be a harbinger for ousting the Social Democrat-Greens government in a 2006 general election.
The vote was tarnished by controversy over the participation of Christian Democrat delegate Hans Filbinger, a Third Reich naval judge who ordered the 1945 execution of a German sailor who tried to flee from German-occupied Norway. He also issued death sentences in absentia for two others who fled to Sweden.
Filbinger, 90, ignored pleas from Schroeder's government and Jewish leaders to bow out. In 1978 Filbinger was forced to quit as Baden-Wuerttemberg state premier when his Nazi past surfaced.
Koehler, who headed the IMF in Washington for four years and led the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London before that, was the nominated by the opposition Christian Democrats and their Free Democrats allies.
Koehler, 61, succeeds Johannes Rau in the office with little executive power but as head of state is as close as Germany gets to royalty since its monarchy was abolished. Rau did not seek a second term after the SPD and Greens lost the majority in the federal assembly that meets every five years in the Reichstag.
"I return home to Germany after living abroad for six years with joy and gratitude," said Koehler, whose decision to leave the IMF for the job with little power was surprising. "Germany has given me a lot and I want to give some of that back now."
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