Joachim Gauck, 72, already came close to becoming Germany's president once before. Back then, in the early summer of 2010, a veritable Gauck hysteria broke out in the country after the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party presented him as their candidate for the country's highest office.

Some even called him a German Obama. The more desperately Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and her coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, clung to their candidate Christian Wulff, the greater the sympathy grew among the public for Gauck, a Protestant pastor from the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

In the end, it took a full three rounds of voting in the Federal Assembly before Wulff was elected as president.

Between votes two and three, Gauck started to think for the first time that he might actually succeed in becoming president. When he ultimately lost, the pain was apparently far greater than he was ready to admit.