Posted on 03/24/2004 10:05:58 AM PST by Pikamax
'German Thatcher' tipped to depose Schröder By Allan Hall, Evening Standard, in Berlin 23 March 2004 A woman known as Germany's "Margaret Thatcher" is set to replace embattled leader Gerhard Schröder .
She is Angela Merkel, 49-year-old head of the recently reunited conservative opposition.
Schröder has quit as head of his Social Democrats party as the conservatives close in on him and he faces sweeping defeats in the upcoming regional elections.
Public tears from his wife - and fought back by him - when he offered his resignation from the party's top role on Sunday betray the gravity of the crisis surrounding the "Teflon Chancellor".
He wants to put distance between himself and his unpopular reforms intended to begin the dismantling of Germany's lavish welfare state.
But the Chancellor - a close friend of Tony Blair - has a long way to go to both placate the Left-wing of his social democratic party and a recently-reunified conservative opposition led by Ms Merkel.
She heads a revived opposition that would win a general election by a landslide if a vote was called today.
Ms Merkel is now poised to succeed where Edmund Stoiber failed in the 2002 "Iraq War" election, which saw the pacifist Schrˆder returned to power with the slimmest of majorities.
That would make her Germany's first female chancellor - a double coup since she hails from the former East and was unknown to the German public before 1989. Few German female politicians have made it to jobs at the highest levels, let alone the chancellorship.
With her curious haircut and provincial accent to match, she has cut a swathe through the torpid and often misogynist ranks of the Christian Democratic Union opposition, outwitting many sharp-elbowed men who had plotted her downfall.
Her straight-talking - she was a supporter of the war in Iraq against the run of public opinion in Germany - has won her admiration for remaining principled. This weekend Roland Koch, her bitter rival for power, conceded she was "the woman for the job".
On her side is universal disaffection with the failed policies of the red-green coalition that has ruled Germany since
1998. Powerful left-wing radicals of the SPD have formed an unlikely alliance with the BMW-driving conservative middle class who want to see the back of Schrˆder for different reasons.
While he is no longer the public face of the party, Schröder , 59, continues as head of government, in which role he hopes to continue to massage painful cuts through a divided parliament while calming leftist dissent in the SPD.
But with his personal and party ratings in the cellar, and the statistics piling up - 33,000 households in the world's second largest economy filed for bankruptcy last year - it is hard to see how he can
hold on to the chancellorship. Last month voters handed him a massive defeat in a regional election in Hamburg, regarded as a litmus test of Schrˆder. The defeat was led by middleclass, middle-income families allied to disgruntled pensioners.
Schröder has borne the brunt of unpopular reform without harvesting the results. Tax relief on mortgages has been slashed, subsidies for working mothers are gone and tax relief for commuters has also been cut.
Profits on house sales are now taxed. The middle class is also squeezed on pensions as company schemes implode. Cash-strapped relatives are being forced to pay health care for elderly parents in nursing homes.
Worse still, the elections to come this year threaten Schröder's razor-thin majority in the upper house of parliament in Berlin. But although badly bruised, he will keep fighting.
Only months ago it seemed unthinkable that the CDU - a traditional party with its roots in Catholicism - could chose an East German, female, Protestant as leader.
Now members of the party elite, like the former General Secretary Peter Hintze, are queuing up to show allegiance:
"She is a really intelligent and bright woman" he says.
"That she comes from the East is a sign that the reunified Germany is coming back together".
New Thatcher?
Her rapid rise on the back of the scandal has been noted by the satirists.
But jibes about her casual appearance have failed to dent her new-found popularity with the party.
CDU people-power effectively turned a series of mood-testing conferences into US-style primary elections...and she swept the board.
But commentators and politicians alike are at a loss to define what she stands for.
Ulrich Klinkert, her deputy when she headed the Environment Ministry in the mid-1990s, says she is a highly competent professional, but says comparisons to Britain's Margaret Thatcher are wide of the mark:
"Its too easy to say she is Germany's Margaret Thatcher - she is a little bit Margaret Thatcher and a little bit Tony Blair."
Actually, Hillary's handling of Health Care Reform appeared to indicate a sort of dictatorial tendency, IMHO...
< sarcasm>This isn't biased reporting.< /sarcasm>
Typical of the press to mention things like haircuts when talking about a future world leader. Do they ever mention Schoeder's haircut.
Er...never mind...he has no hair.
Especially a Conservative... and of course the media is always relentless to the looks of a female politician.
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