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Former Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Prime Minister Harald Ringstorff (SPD) died last Thursday at age 81, as announced by the State Chancellery in Schwerin on Monday. His wife Dagmar Ringstorff personally briefed Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) on Monday. Ringstorff suffered from a progressive nervous disease in the last years of his life.
For ten years, from 1998 to 2008, he was head of government in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, longer than any other head of government in the state’s history. The SPD politician attracted nationwide attention in 1998 when he formed the first Red-Red government alliance in a federal state with what was then the PDS, today’s Die Linke party. Ringstorff ruled with her for eight years, from 1998 to 2006, initially against opposition from the federal SPD.
Ringstorff was born in Wittenburg in western Mecklenburg in 1939. The doctor of chemistry did not become politically active until the end of the GDR. He co-founded the SPD in the Northeast and served as its state president until 2003.
“We are in mourning for a great prime minister and a great person,” Schwesig explained. “With his strong ties to his homeland, his simple, calm and at the same time practical manners and his love of the Low German language, he excellently filled the post of Prime Minister. We owe a considerable amount to Harald Ringstorff because Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has developed very well in the thirty years since German reunification. “
