Bland, ruthless iron lady maintains her grip

BERLIN - You're a woman: that's nice, it does make a Cabinet meeting look better these days. You have the brains, experience and ... er, guts for a top-echelon political job?

Good, good. And you're - German. Oh dear. In politics (make that: in the workplace), German women remain about a decade behind their American, French or British counterparts.

America, Sweden, Spain, Norway and Turkey, to name a few, have all had or currently have women as national security advisers, foreign ministers, defence ministers.

Germany has had none of the above. You grew up in East Germany? You do realise that few of you have made it into top politics at all since 1989, and most have disappeared again without a trace?

Indeed, where other countries have glass ceilings for women, Germany has triple-reinforced concrete and it gets thicker the farther east you go. Or it used to.

Then Angela Merkel, daughter of an East German Protestant pastor, became Germany's first female Chancellor on November 22, 2005.

Surveys give her a good chance for re-election in the federal vote on September 27. She's just been named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes magazine for the third time in a row.

Perhaps the 55-year-old Chancellor would be the first to admit that she was a long shot for the part. Said to be witty and warm in private, her public persona ranges the gamut from dry to ultra-dry. The silky eloquence of an Obama is alien to Merkel. Not for her the gym-trained chic of a Condi Rice, either.

Merkel grimly submitted to an executive fashion makeover after the media sneered at her frumpy look; now she clearly relishes shining out in jewel-toned jackets from a forest of dark suits at G20 meetings.

And, just once, she stunned the nation by wearing a deep blue evening dress with a fjord-like cleavage and pearls to an opera in Oslo. Quite possibly that was when a lot of Germans first woke up to the fact that their head of government was female. But, ordinarily, Merkel still wears less make-up and hairspray than Silvio Berlusconi on vacation.

Certainly her origins would appear to make Angela Merkel an unlikely successor to a line of titans in German postwar history: Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl.

Few would accord the same status to her immediate predecessor, Gerhard Schroder, yet his raw charisma was beyond doubt. Merkel, a 35-year-old physicist when the Wall came down in 1989, was hand-picked by Kohl for the most patronising job in his post-reunification cabinet: Minister for Women and Youth.

Kohl, busy burnishing his historical legacy and weeding out male rivals, called her "the girl".

Yet when Kohl found himself embroiled in a party financing scandal in 1999, it was Merkel, not one of the half-dozen remaining young conservative "warlords", who acted decisively.

She rose from the depths of her patron's capacious shadow and felled him with one lethal bite to the jugular: a signed piece on the front page of Germany's most respected conservative daily, calling for his resignation. It made her the unquestioned leader of the pack - and head of the party.

Where did she find the strength for this audacious patricide? The Angela Merkel who entered politics in 1989, in contrast, must have been bemused by a generation of West German peers who had grown up thinking of themselves as "grandsons".

They were heirs, not founders; tacticians, not strategists, trained to trot complacently within the narrow rails of limited sovereignty. The new post-cold war world was confusing for them.

For her, it was liberation. Her secret eastern weapon was the blandness with which the purposeful learn to cloak themselves in authoritarian systems.

To it she added the physicist's appreciation of the simple elegance with which a lever may be applied to a hidden weak spot in a complex structure and, with a minimum of force, bring it all down.

Six years after subduing the conservative party, Angela Merkel was elected leader of the country.

For most of the ensuing four years, she has been the best-regarded politician in Germany; in fact, her popularity ratings clearly exceed those of her party. Voters like her level-headedness and the fact that she is still seen doing her own shopping.

Officials are impressed by her fiercely retentive memory.

With few exceptions, she has kept potential rivals to heel.

As for the coming election, polls have given Merkel's Christian Democratic Union a stable 35-36 per cent of the vote for the last eight months.

With about 16 per cent for the liberal Free Democrats, this would enable her to end her much-disliked grand coalition and form a centre-right government for the first time since 1998.

Victory is by no means guaranteed, as a third of the voters remain undecided.

But Merkel has cannily moved her party to the left, thereby pre-empting the accusations of neoliberalism that nearly lost her the election four years ago - and squeezing the Social Democrats against the Left Party, a motley grouping of former East German communists, renegade Social Democrats and fossilised holdovers from the old West Germany's left.

Germany's unexpectedly swift recovery from the economic crisis also helps.

This prospect raises a fascinating question: would an Angela Merkel at the helm of a centre-right government find herself liberated once more, this time to pursue genuine economic and social reform?

But which is the real Merkel? The fighter who wrested power from her political father? Who held a flaming reform speech at a convention in Leipzig in 2003? Who rebalanced Germany's alliances, assured the central Europeans of her Government's support, told off the Russians and the Americans as needed, met the Dalai Lama, and pointed out the drawbacks of retreating from nuclear power?

Or the one who ruthlessly dropped old allies before the last elections and backtracked when it became clear her reformist zeal could cost her the chancellorship?

Looking back on Merkel's mixed record, it's impossible to say what history's judgment of a second tenure will be: is she a strategist or a tactician? A she-wolf in sheep's clothing - or a sheepdog?

It does matter, given the dearth of leadership elsewhere in Europe, and the many problems that await energetic action.

Constanze Stelzenmuller is a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

THE MERKEL LOWDOWN

BORN

17 July 1954, Hamburg. Her father, a pastor, moved the family to Quitzow in East Germany the year Angela was born. She studied physics in Leipzig, and joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990. Helmut Kohl made her Germany's youngest-ever cabinet minister when she was 36. In 1998, she married quantum chemist Joachim Sauer, and became Chancellor in 2005.

BEST OF TIMES

Now. Germany seems to be pulling out of its worst recession since World War II. During a nightmare year for most European politicians, the CDU is polling well and Merkel's approval ratings stand at 60 per cent .

WORST OF TIMES

The 1999 exposure of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's secret bank accounts. Yet after initially defending Kohl, Merkel distanced herself, and the situation was ultimately the political making of her.

WHAT SHE SAYS

"I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well."

WHAT OTHERS SAY

"She works harder than any other chancellor ... she wants to be better than the people around her, including when she's speaking to Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy." - Biographer Gerd Langguth.

- OBSERVER