Time for a Change

The scene was east germany in 1990, a chaotic moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall when an interim government was trying to steer the country from communism to democracy. Lothar de Maizire, the last East German leader before reunification, was shuttling almost daily between Washington, London and Moscow. A crisis arose behind the scenes: de Maizire's press spokesman turned out to have a crippling fear of flying. In desperation, the East German leader asked an unfamiliar assistant in his office named Angela Merkel to join him before the television cameras as history unfolded.

A decade later, events have placed the unflappable Merkel at the center of yet another political firestorm. Last week, overcoming opposition from conservatives, the 45-year-old Merkel was nominated unopposed to be the next chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany's scandal-plagued opposition party, when the party meets to choose a new leader in April. Not only is Merkel the first woman to lead the CDU, but she is one of the few politicians from the former East Germany to reach the top of the ladder of German party politics. Party leaders clearly hoped that choosing a pastor's daughter who is also a scientist with a specialty in quantum physics would demonstrate the CDU's desire for a clean break with its besmirched past. The most serious taint came in November when former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who ruled Germany for 16 years, admitted operating an illegal slush fund to aid CDU candidates. Kohl's successor as party chairman, Wolfgang Schuble, was forced to resign in February when the party was fined $20 million and brought to the brink of bankruptcy. The scandal left the CDU badly trailing Chancellor Gerhard Schrder's Social Democratic Party in the polls.

Although Merkel was considered Kohl's protege--he affectionately referred to her as das Mdchen or "the girl"--she showed pluck and political shrewdness by becoming the first person in the CDU leadership to publicly break with Kohl following his refusal to name donors who made illegal contributions. "To put your word above the law might be understandable in a legal situation but not when it is illegal," she wrote in an article in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in December.

Even more than most successful politicians, Merkel has benefited by being in the right place at the right time. According to de Maizire, Kohl had a different person in mind when he phoned the East German leader in 1990 looking for a young woman whom he could bring into his cabinet as a sign of his solidarity with the newly reunited east. De Maizire said he persuaded Kohl that Merkel "had the intellectual capability, was good at organizing and capable of leading an administration." Kohl finally acquiesced and appointed Merkel his Minister for Women, Family and Youth, later elevating her to run government policy on the environment.

Merkel was born in Hamburg in West Germany, but her pastor father soon moved to the communist East, apparently more out of missionary zeal than affection for socialism. Seven years later, the Berlin Wall went up and the family was trapped. After attending university in Leipzig, Merkel became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, an institution known for standing aloof from politics. In 1989, as the Wall was collapsing, she joined the political movement Democratic Awakening. Yet in spite of her vivid personal history, Merkel expresses few strong political views, particularly for someone who has just been anointed leader of Europe's largest conservative party. Comparing Merkel to Margaret Thatcher, the weekly Rheinischer Merkur jokingly referred to her as Maggie Merkel and noted that unlike Britain's Iron Lady, "she has no clear political profile."

Her lack of experience and the fact that she is not the party leader in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, raise doubts that Merkel will be the party's candidate for Chancellor at the time of the next election in 2002. Edmund Stoiber, head of the CDU's sister party in Bavaria, may have supported Merkel in hopes of running for Chancellor himself.

A poll published by Die Welt last week showed that CDU supporters preferred Stoiber to Merkel as Chancellor candidate.

In a country where women politicians are rare, Merkel shows contempt for feminine fashion, even to the point of appearing on television without makeup. Yet she has also displayed an uncanny ability to gauge the public mood. Perhaps in the aftermath of the scandals, voters prefer their politicians to be unadorned, if not unfashionable. In a ZDF television network poll last week Chancellor Schrder, with his Havana cigars and Italian suits, had been dramatically overtaken by the frumpy Mdchen from East Germany.

With reporting by Regine Wosnitza/Berlin