Germany’s former president Christian Wulff was set to be honoured at a torchlit military ceremony later Thursday after leaving office early under the cloud of a political favours probe. Nearly three weeks after resigning, Wulff, 52, will be officially waved off from the largely ceremonial job at a nationally televised evening “Ceremonial Tattoo” in the garden of the president’s sumptuous Bellevue Palace. Wulff, for less than two years Germany’s youngest head of state, became embroiled in a quick-fire series of scandals played out in the media, culminating in prosecutors asking parliament to lift his immunity. Even the ceremony itself has proved controversial, with opposition politicians calling on Wulff to forego the tradition due to the circumstances of his departure. “Somebody who failed in office is having a farewell ceremony as if he did great things for Germany,” the head of the Social Democratic Party, Sigmar Gabriel, told Wednesday’s Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper. None of Wulff’s predecessors — Walter Scheel, Richard von Weizsaecker, Roman Herzog and Horst Koehler — will attend, according to media reports. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chose Wulff as her candidate for president, and many of her ministers, will be present at the event called a “Grosser Zapfenstreich” (“strike the tap”) in German.
