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Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
TEMPLIN, Germany - Little more than a decade ago, in the clubby, male-dominated backrooms of Germany's Christian Democratic Union, people assumed Angela Merkel was one of the secretaries.
Her political mentor, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, used to refer to her as mein maedchen - my girl - in a way that many an ambitious woman would have found chauvinistic or patronizing. Merkel just smiled.
When she began her political ascent, rivals and critics mocked her frumpy outfits and utilitarian hairstyle. Newspapers seemed to take cruel delight in running the least flattering photos of her. But she turned the mockery to her advantage. She forced them to deal with her as a politician of substance, not a "female politician." Her ideas, not her hairstyle, would be the subject of the conversation.
Merkel, 51, always kept her eye on the prize. Next month she is expected to claim it. If the polls hold, she will become Germany's first female chancellor, and the first to have come of age in the former communist East Germany.
But she is not quite home free.
Although it's unlikely, Germany's highest court could cancel or postpone the Sept. 18 vote if it finds that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder violated the law by calling for early elections. So far, Schroeder's gamble on early elections has backfired. The race has tightened, but his Social Democratic Party, or SPD, still trails the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, by a nearly hopeless 42 percent to 29 percent, thus virtually assuring Merkel the chancellorship. The problem for Merkel is that Schroeder remains the more popular politician by 48 percent to 39 percent.
Even within the CDU, Merkel is an awkward fit. The party's roots are in Germany's prosperous west; its conservative values are shaped by the Roman Catholic Church, and it has never before been led by a woman. Merkel, a former physicist from East Germany, is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Her first marriage ended in divorce and she remarried in 1998; she has no children.
Because she is a female leader of Germany's conservatives, comparisons with Britain's Margaret Thatcher are inviting but misleading.
"In some ways they are similar. Both are women, of course. Both started their careers in science, and that probably influences their way of thinking," said Jacqueline Boysen, who has written a biography of Merkel. "But the main thing about Merkel is that she grew up in a dictatorship. She was 35 years old when the (Berlin) Wall came down."
Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954, but when she was 8 weeks old her father, a Lutheran minister named Horst Kasner, moved his family to Templin, a resort town on a lake in East Germany.
It was still seven years before the Berlin Wall went up, but even then it was unusual for families to be moving from West to East.
"There were a few young ministers who did their studies in the West and then went to the East to take part in building the socialist society. He (Kasner) was not forced to go. It was his own decision. He was convinced by socialism," Boysen said.
Merkel grew up in a large, comfortable house on a leafy campus called the Waldhof that served as both a seminary for Lutheran pastors and a church-run school for the mentally handicapped. Her father was the head of the seminary, and part of the family house was used as a dormitory for the seminarians.
In many ways, it was a privileged upbringing in what was fast becoming one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive dictatorships. Because of her father's position, the family had access to books that otherwise were forbidden. The association with the church also meant that the family was isolated from most of the regime's worst excesses.
Jobst Reifenstein, a Lutheran deacon who has been head of the school for the handicapped since 1982 and knew the Kasner family well, described the Waldhof as a kind of refuge from the totalitarian state. But he said the families living there always were viewed with suspicion by others in the town.
As a teen, Merkel joined the Free German Youth, the communist youth organization. Membership in the group was regarded as essential for anyone interested in gaining admission to an elite university, but some still consider it a troublesome blot on her resume.
"My father was also a pastor," said Ulrich Schoeneich, the present mayor of Templin, "and the Schoeneich children were not members of the communist youth organization.
"It's up to parents to decide how best to raise their children, but for us - no youth organization, no high school, no university. My father was clearly oppositional (to the regime)."
Schoeneich, who worked as a maintenance man at the Waldhof, said he had to postpone his education until adulthood.
Merkel, meanwhile, excelled as a student at the University of Leipzig and later at the prestigious Academy of Sciences in East Berlin.
Both Merkel and her family have been tight-lipped about the past, and it is hard to place them on the political spectrum. She was not available for an interview for this article.
"To describe them as `oppositional' would be too strong a word," said Boysen. "I think they tried to find a place in the system - not too deeply involved, but not completely detached."
When the Berlin Wall came down, Merkel's interest in politics was kindled. After serving briefly as deputy spokeswoman for the first (and last) democratically elected government of East Germany, she joined the CDU, and within months of reunification, at age 36, became minister for women and youth in Kohl's Cabinet. Later she was named environmental minister.
Under Kohl's wing, her rise through the ranks of the CDU was swift. But in 1999, when Kohl became mired in an embarrassing scandal involving secret donors and illegal party slush funds, she was one of the first to turn on him.
As she continued to make her way up the CDU's ladder, the ease with which she vanquished male rivals, moving decisively at the moment when they seemed most vulnerable, led some critics to refer to her as "the black widow."
Although Merkel has twice held Cabinet posts and three times been elected party chairwoman, she has never faced ordinary voters, nor has she ever served as governor of one of Germany's states, the usual springboard to the chancellorship. She is a "master craftsman" of party politics, but the chancellorship will be the first real test of her governing skills, said Gero Neugebauer, an elections expert at the Berlin Free University.
Thus far her performance on the campaign trail has tended toward the lackluster and error-prone.
Faced with Schroeder's formidable television skills, Merkel's advisers insisted on limiting her exposure to a single 90-minute television debate early next month instead of the usual two one-hour encounters.
The likely subject will be the economy. Unemployment hovers at 11.6 percent, and Germany is in the throes of an unpopular and painful reform of its welfare state, which is the main reason Schroeder appears to be about to lose his job. But unlike Britain's Thatcher, a conservative leader who was champing at the bit to take on the trade unions and reinvent the economy, Merkel has been vague about her plans for Germany.
Those who have known her the longest are the most puzzled.
"If I watch TV or the debates in parliament, you hear a lot of criticism from her about what the others are doing wrong, but she doesn't specify how she would make it better," said Reifenstein, the school director in Templin.
"Her ideology? I don't know," shrugged Schoeneich, the mayor. "What I do know is that she knows how to get power. She's a woman who can adapt."
Even though Merkel is an Ossie, an Easterner, few people from the former East Germany seem to regard her as one of their own. To lure Eastern voters, Merkel's political handlers considered fashioning a separate campaign emphasizing her roots, but they quickly scrapped the idea.
"No one would believe it," said Neugebauer, the election analyst.
On the international stage, Merkel is an "uncritical friend" of President Bush, according to Neugebauer, but she has nevertheless avoided recent photo opportunities with the U.S. president because he remains deeply unpopular in Germany. She has characterized the Iraq war as "unavoidable," but the prospect of Merkel committing German troops to the cause is considered remote.
If Merkel's commanding lead continues to slip, the CDU may have to consider a "grand coalition" with the SPD, but for now the CDU has closed ranks.
"Their thinking is this: `We don't love her, but as long as she's winning, we will support her,'" said Neugebauer.
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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
