Her fame rests largely on the fact that following the election loss in 1998 and revelations of shady dealings in the CDU's election financing, she was the first of the CDU bigwigs to make it brutally clear that Helmut Kohl's time had passed, which took some courage at the time.
She is from East Germany, where the CDU is weak. An important concept in German politics is Hausmacht, the notion that a politician needs to have a powerful base in her home state in order to be influential on the national stage.
Her home state is Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the SPD (Social Democratic Party; "Red") has held power since reunification.
She does occasionally talk rational economic sense, but in the UK - to use a European comparison - she would not be considered a conservative.
Certainly she isn't a union buster like Margaret Thatcher, and she seems to lack the fire in the belly to put Gerhard Schroeder's putrid head in a vise and turn up the pressure until it explodes.
Nor is there anyone else in German politics of the caliber of Thatcher.