Merkel’s rise. An iron-curtain lady

Skill as well as luck have propelled a meteoric career

TO ANGLOPHONES, German first names can often be false friends. They look easy to pronounce, but are hard to get just right. So world leaders should start practising now. After having learned to say Gerhard (GAIR-heart) they had better brush up on Angela (AHNG-eh-la, with a hard “g”).

If Angela Merkel, the 50-year-old boss of the Christian Democrats (CDU), becomes the opposition's official candidate for chancellor on May 30th (a near certainty) and wins the elections in September (a likely outcome), it will crown possibly the fastest political career in post-war Germany. Only 15 years ago, this pastor's daughter was still a professor of physics in communist East Berlin. But she was a politics buff, and ambitious; her entire household took a keen interest in events on the western side of the wall.

When the barrier came down, that proved a winning combination. She joined the East German CDU and became deputy spokesperson of the communist state's last (democratic) government. In 1991, the then chancellor Helmut Kohl, eager to promote an eastern woman, picked her out of obscurity, to make her first minister for women, and then environment minister. She was quickly dubbed “Kohl's girl”.

After his defeat in 1998, she became the CDU's general secretary and two years later, in the wake of a party financing scandal, the party's first chairwoman. In 2002, after another Schroder victory, she became head of the CDU's parliamentary group as well - and Germany's most powerful woman.

Has Ms Merkel simply been lucky in her choice of place and time? That would be unfair. Using her gift for long-term thinking, she has foiled many challengers. With a certain ruthlessness, she hastened her mentor's exit by writing a letter urging her party to jettison Mr Kohl because of his involvement in the CDU scandal. Within the ranks of the party, such tactics have gained her respect, but not much affection; that would have been hard anyway for an eastern, Protestant, childless woman - so very different from the Catholic family men who have usually dominated the German centre-right.

Ms Merkel has little sense of the touchy-feely side of politics, but she is not inhuman; in private she can be quite funny. Oddly, she sometimes sounds like Mr Schroder's partner in third-way thinking, Tony Blair. (That is despite the fact she speaks only passable English, while her Russian is fluent.)

But she is more than a clever manipulator of the centre: witness her long list of planned reforms, which are quite radical in the German context: simplifying tax, overhauling pensions, reducing job protection and curbing the trade unions. In some ways, she resembles another single-minded lady, who rose from modest low-church origins and a scientific training to take her country by the horns and shift it in a rightward direction - Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps that explains why she also prefers the current British prime minister to Nicolas Sarkozy, who may well be her opposite number in Paris if he becomes president of France.

Profile of Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU) in Germany.