Today he served as the Senior President (the Alterspräsident) at the inaugural meeting of the twenty-first Bundestag — a role awarded to the parliamentary representative with the greatest seniority.
Since the nineteenth century, the Senior President was simply the oldest member of parliament, but in 2017 the cartel parties of Germany changed the rules, awarding the Senior Presidency instead to whomever has the most parliamentary experience. They did this to prevent the office of Senior President from accruing to anyone from Alternative fur Deutschland.
According to the traditional, pre-2017 rules, the 84 year-old AfD representative Alexander Gauland would have acted as Senior President today. The reforms have happily spared us that profoundly undemocratic fate and granted us the eminently democratic Senior President Gysi instead. We should all be very grateful and also relieved, because the Senior President gets to chair the Bundestag until the election of a proper President, and he also gets to give a speech. You can only imagine how a cryptofascist like the elderly ex-CDU politician Gauland might use these prerogatives to abolish democracy and establish the Fourth Reich all within the space of a few hours. This is literally how democracies die.