Gerhard Schröder: A small politician struggling at the helm of a big nation

Show me a politician campaigning from a state-of-the-art website, and I will show you a politician in trouble. Gerhard Schröder, whose all-singing, all-dancing site – www.gerhard-schroeder.de – was launched last week, is in deep, deep trouble. Up for re-election as Chancellor of Germany on 22 September, the man who sold himself to his countrymen four years ago as their home-grown version of Tony Blair lags more than six points in the polls behind his centre-right rival, Edmund Stoiber.

Mr Stoiber is everything today's Germans might be expected to eschew – stiff, formal, conservative and southern – everything that the north-German Mr Schröder set himself to oppose when he successfully challenged Helmut Kohl for the Chancellorship. Now, though, none of this seems to be helping Mr Schröder. Last week, he became so worried about his prospects that he made the panicked decision to bring forward the formal start of his re-election campaign by three weeks. He will announce his manifesto on Monday in Hanover, the centre of his Lower Saxony power base, before setting off in a new-politics style battle bus "the length and breadth of Germany".

Mr Schröder's "hot" campaign tour – another cheaply trendy adjective the Chancellor might have been well advised to avoid – is intended to snatch the initiative from his plodding opponent. Whether German voters will be receptive to Mr Schröder's 40-stop whirlwind, however, is questionable. Germany is on holiday until the second half of this month, its energies concentrated on long forest walks and pool-side sunbeds. Mr Schröder's earnest campaign pitch may not be the first choice of summer entertainment.

Germans are in one of their periodically sullen and truculent moods, which is one reason why Mr Schröder has been having such a bad time of it. Having sacrificed the token of their wealth and statehood, the deutschmark, at the start of the year, they feel hard done by. Productivity has been falling; unemployment remains stubbornly high, and industrial workers have staged the first strikes for decades. The Socialist Party leader, who rode to power on visionary talk about the wonders of the Blairite Third Way (translated as the New Centre), promises of pain-free economic reform and a media-friendly personal style, now seems almost bewildered that he has presided over so much disappointment.

Worse, nothing in his character or his career has equipped him to jolly the voters along. A lamentable humour-deficit was the one message the German public received loud and clear from the single headline-grabbing Schröder story of this election year. The 58-year-old Chancellor sued the DPP news agency for reporting that his mop of dark brown hair was dyed.

Mr Schröder won his case, but not before Germans had had a good laugh, and his image-makers a good cry. A claim that could have been laughed off featured on tabloid front pages for weeks. Mr Stoiber, meanwhile, was gently stomping the country with his splendid silver mane exuding quiet authority.

Even after a lifetime in politics and four years as Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder still seems a curiously unfinished politician. In his previous campaign, that amateurish quality was part of his charm. It contrasted with the laid-back confidence and professionalism of Mr Kohl. Mr Schröder photographs well; then and now, he comes across well on television. Still, he seems only partially to have grown into the job. The aura of gravitas that quickly attends most new national leaders, however young and untried, has largely eluded Mr Schröder.

Political capital can be made of innocence in a neophyte Chancellor, but not in one seeking re-election. Voters expect experience and authority to show; they expect polish and presence – at home, but more particularly abroad. Mr Schröder fails to deliver. He is affable, dresses stylishly in Italian suits and likes a good cigar. But he is not socially accomplished in the public arena and he does not project himself as a natural leader. His recent dismissal of his defence minister, Rudolf Scharping, was seen not – as he might have hoped – as evidence of his strength, but of weakness.

Mr Schröder's public diffidence sits ill with his years of experience; he does not set people at their ease. Some say that these failings reflect a liability of the German system: that its regionally based politics is more likely to produce small-time wheeler-dealers and managers than big-picture leaders. Others turn pop-psychologist and blame Mr Schröder's humble origins and his constant striving for self-betterment. He does not conceal this aspect of his character, describing himself as a "climber". He had to be one to attain the heights he occupies today.

Born in 1944, Gerhard Schröder was the first post-war German Chancellor not to remember the war. This does not mean, however, that it did not mark him. He never knew his father, who was killed in Romania soon after his son was born – his grave was identified only two years ago. He still refers to his widowed mother today as "the lioness" – for the way she protected and provided for her children in the grim postwar years. She earned money by cleaning houses but, Mr Schröder says, he was never going to be able to stay on at school. He left at 14, combining low-paying jobs, initially as an iron-monger, with evening classes, first to earn his school-leaving certificate (Abitur) and eventually, at the age of 32, a law degree from Göttingen, one of Germany's most respected old universities.

Mr Schröder's mother had married again, but her new husband died of TB and for many of these years, Gerhard was his four brothers' only source of financial support. His hardships came to an end with his law qualification, and he joined a Hanover law firm in 1976. However, he practised full time for only two years. His long-standing commitment to the Socialist Party, which he had joined at 19, started to take over, and he became head of the Young Socialists. From there, his career followed a relatively steady course.

He was elected a member of the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, in 1980, and made his mark not only with the subject of his maiden speech on the place of "youth protest in a democratic state", but by becoming the first MP not to wear a tie at the dispatch box "to show how far the politicians ... have become removed from the real lives of young people".

When the centre-right coalition took power in 1982, Mr Schröder decided to concentrate on local and state-level politics in his native Lower Saxony. Eight years later, he had risen to be premier of Lower Saxony, leading a coalition of the Socialist and Liberal (FDP) parties. He was twice re-elected with absolute majorities in his own right. It was his swingeing victory in 1998 that provided the springboard from which he was able to take on Helmut Kohl six months later, and win.

Mr Schröder has never revelled in the deprivations of his childhood or crowed about "realising his dream", as a rags-to-riches American politician might. But his poverty-stricken start has not been a liability either. He has cultivated the image of an ordinary German who understands ordinary people and shares their hopes and fears. His language is not the clipped German of Hanover – which provides the model for German pronunciation the world over – but a more proletarian, half-swallowed version, closer to the inflections of the football crowd.

From his lowly roots, Mr Schröder has preserved a gift for communicating with "ordinary" people. And he cites his early experiences as the reason why family benefits and a public health service have always commanded so high a place in his priorities. At the same time, he has not fought shy of what some of his erstwhile political rivals call his overweening ambition. A story is told, which he does not deny, that as a young politician (and somewhat the worse for wear), he lumbered up to the Chancellery with a group of his mates, and rammed on the gates, crying "I want to get in there!"

Nor have his years of penury prevented him from acquiring a taste for the finer things of life, including glamorous wives. The alimony payments to wives one to three are one reason why he is still not well off. Fortunately for his political career, German voters show a more forgiving attitude than British voters to the private foibles of their politicians. Mr Schröder's very public divorce from his popular third wife, Hiltrud, and his marriage just one month later to Doris Koepf, who is 20 years his junior, damaged him not at all in his campaign for the Chancellorship.

Ms Koepf, a former journalist on the tabloid Bild newspaper, says her husband-to-be warned her that he changed wives every 12 years. She says she quipped back that her successor would have to know how to push a wheelchair. Now to be found campaigning regularly at his side, Doris Schröder-Koepf, as she is known, seems to have something of her husband's "lioness" mother. She is penning a column for her husband's campaign website, and this week took on her old employer, Bild, claiming that its coverage of a recent political scandal had been biased against her husband's party.

The scandal is instructive. Germans may forgive sexual indiscretions and family break-up, but financial oversights are another matter. Several of Mr Schröder's political allies have resigned after admitting making private use of Airmiles earned from official flights. It may seem a petty matter, but it is seen in Germany as a misuse of taxpayer's money and a betrayal of the public's trust. Ms Schröder-Koepf claimed that Bild was turning a blind eye to similar indiscretions among centre-right politicians.

Clearly, Doris and Gerhard are fighting this election as a team. Clearly, her political instincts are as sharp as his. The Airmiles affair may be a small scandal, but small scandals have a knack of undercutting small politicians. And win or lose in September, Gerhard Schröder has so far shown himself to be a small politician for what is, since unification, a big country.

Life story

Born

7 April, 1944, in Mossenberg, Lower Saxony. His father, Fritz Schröder, died fighting with the German army in Romania in 1944.

Married

1. Eva Schubach, librarian

2. Anna Taschenmacher, schoolteacher

3. Hiltrud Hampel

4. Doris Köpf, journalist (pictured)

Children

None of his own, but he but helped to bring up five children of his wives, including Doris Köpf's daughter Klara.

Education

1958: left school at 14; 1966: Abitur (A level equivalent) at evening classes; 1970: Law degree at the University of Göttingen

Political career

1963: joined Socialist Party: 1976: lawyer in Hanover; 1978: chairman of the German Young Socialists; 1980-82: member of the Bundestag: 1983-3: member of the SPD executive in Hanover;

1990-98: premier of Lower Saxony; 27 September, 1998: defeated Helmut Kohl to be elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

He says

"I'm a climber. The label doesn't bother me. It's the truth."

They say

"Schröder's will for power is certainly impressive. But the question is, what does he actually want to do with that power?"
(Hans-Jochen Vogel, former Socialist Party chairman)

"After four years, an apocalyptic mood is spreading around Schröder as it did after 16 years of Kohl."
(Berliner Zeitung)