Gerd Schuchardt

Gerd Schuchardt is an electrical engineer who built his career and reputation in East Germany before 1990 in microprocessor technology and related forward-looking branches of science. He was interested in politics, but had avoided involvement in the country's ruling SED (party) or any of the various the various so-called "bloc parties" which it controlled. In January 1990, with the winds of political change - somewhat implausibly, as many still thought at the time - blowing across from the Kremlin in Moscow, the party leaders in East Berlin no longer felt able to stand against domestic pressures for a return to democratic politics after more than half a century of one-party dictatorship. Gerd Schuchardt became an activist member of the re-awakening Social Democratic Party. After reunification in October 1990 state-level democratic politics returned to Thuringia: Schuchardt became a leading figure in Thuringian state politics, selected by party members as the Social Democratic Party's lead candidate in the 1994 Thuringian state election. He led his party to what turned out to be its best electoral result in Thuringia to date. In the resulting "Grand coalition" government that ensued he served as vice-minister-president until 1999 under the leadership of Bernhard Vogel (CDU) and as Minister for the Sciences, Research and the Arts.