Gerd Schuchardt

Gerd Schuchardt (born March 11, 1942 in Erfurt ) is a Thuringian politician ( SPD ), former Thuringian member of the state parliament and state minister .

education and profession

Schuchardt attended elementary school in Greiz and Erfurt from 1948 to 1956 . He then completed an apprenticeship as a radio mechanic and worked at the Erfurt radio works. 1960 to 1962 followed the military service with the NVA . After visiting the ABF Halle from 1962 to 1964, Schuchardt passed his Abitur there. From 1964 to 1969 he studied theoretical electrical engineering and control engineering at the Technical University of Ilmenau . Then he became a Dr.-Ing. and was a research associate at the Carl Zeiss Research Center in Jena until 1989 . He has written numerous publications on precision measurement technology.

In 1985 Schuchardt received the National Prize for Science and Technology 2nd class in a collective for his work in the field of high-precision technology.

politics

In 1990 he joined the Social Democratic Party in the GDR . This became in the course of the change to the SPD. In the first state election in October 1990, Schuchardt was elected to the Thuringian state parliament, where he was parliamentary group leader of the SPD.

After the resignation of Prime Minister Josef Duchač ( CDU ) in 1992, Schuchardt ran for the office of Prime Minister. He was defeated by the CDU candidate Bernhard Vogel with 27 to 50 votes .

In the election for the second Thuringian state parliament in 1994 , Schuchardt ran as the top candidate of the SPD. With a gain of 6.8 percent and a result of 29.6 percent of the votes, the SPD achieved its best result to date in Thuringia since reunification, but was unable to replace the CDU as the strongest party.

In the newly formed grand coalition under Prime Minister Bernhard Vogel, he became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Science, Research and Culture .

From 1994 to 1996 he was also state chairman of the Thuringian SPD.

After the CDU had gained an absolute majority in the 1999 election and the SPD, whose top candidate was Richard Dewes instead of Schuchardt, only became the third-strongest party (18.5%), the SPD, and with it Schuchardt, left the state government. Gerd Schuchardt then withdrew from political life. He did not run for the 2004 state elections .

Other offices

Schuchardt holds honorary positions in the MDR Board of Directors , in the Ernst Abbe Foundation , in the Kuratorium Deutsche Einheit Point Alpha and in the Forum-Ost of the SPD .

Awards

• National Prize of the GDR 1985
• Thuringian Order of Merit 2005
• Honorary citizen of the city of Jena in 2008
• Honorary citizen of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena 2015

family

Schuchardt has been married to the doctor Karin Schuchardt since 1964. He has two children and four grandchildren (as of 2010).

literature

• Holger Zürch : With free people on free land. 15 years of the Thuringian Parliament in retrospect, former MPs from the founding years in the Free State of Thuringia . Leipzig 2006, ISBN 978-3-939404-01-9 , pp. 195–203 (self-portrait). - Gerd Schuchardt's statements can also be found online at Qucosa from page 81 in the free e-book version of this book.
• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Schuchardt, Gerd . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

• After the Thuringia election 2014: Open letter from Gerd Schuchardt against the red-red option - “SPD now at the crossroads” ( memento from October 26, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) - September 2014, source: Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk
• Plenary minutes on the election defeat by Bernhard Vogel in the 1992 Prime Minister election
• Biography data