Major chick Angela Merkel could change Germany, Europe, the world: decisive election this Sunday

I still get terribly excited when a chick runs for a big office. I swear, it almost makes my dick hard. Well, here's a major chick who might end up running Germany, and here's my hoped-for exciting erectile-functioning scenario: if she beats Schroder, and Hillary makes prez in 2008, well then, the Western world will basically be run by chicks, and fuck-me-with-a-royal-twat, it'll be like living in the time of Elizabeth 1 -- we'll be elevated into a Major Chick World, and chicks everywhere will realize they can do anything they want, and guys will finally get that it may be a good thing to live in a world run by Major Chicks. Anyway, that's what I'm hoping for, me and my Major Chick-desiring dick. Personally, I'd be happier living in a world whose leaders inspire sexual fantasies in me. That's just me, I guess, Major Chick groupie that I am. After all, the one way to alleviate world poverty, and improve the world the most overall, is to make sure that all the girls in the world go to school and get educated. Then any chick can become a Major Chick.


1. Can this woman save Germany?

For too long, Germany has faced the ignominy of being the sick man of Europe. Angela Merkel says she can make it number one again. But do Germans want her medicine? Christine Toomey reports:

The choreography is slick. As police outriders rev their motorbikes and supporters wave huge banners, Mick Jagger’s voice crackles from the loudspeakers strung above the crowd outside Cologne’s gothic cathedral: “Oh Angie, Oh Angie, when will those clouds all disappear? Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here?”

But the razzmatazz doesn’t sit easily on Angela Merkel’s shoulders. The 51-year-old former physicist — ungallantly described by those who knew her in her school days as “a grey mouse” and “a wallflower” — looks unsure how to respond. Glancing from side to side she sees everyone on the stage looking at her and applauding. So she goes for it. She punches both fists in the air. The Angie banners bob up and down in furious approval.

Merkel, the great hope of the conservative Christian Democratic Union to seize power from the Social Democrats in the general election on September 18, is at last showing a bit of showbiz spirit.

But the pastor’s daughter in the bulky pinstriped trouser suit seems to think better of her brief triumphal gesture. She quickly brings her arms stiffly to her sides and flashes a lopsided smile, her heavy jaw clenched. Then, with a last awkward wave, she steps away from the podium, leaving Jagger’s lyrics hanging in the air.

“With no loving in our souls and no money in our coats, you can’t say we’re satisfied . . .”

The Rolling Stones’ ambiguous words, penned in 1973 when Merkel was an East German student, are the theme tune for one of the most remarkable, if uncharismatic, personalities ever to rock the staid “men’s club” of German politics. The trajectory that has propelled her from a quiet academic life in the communist former East to the brink of power as the first woman to run Europe’s largest nation has been meteoric.

Comparisons with Margaret Thatcher are unavoidable, although Merkel dislikes them. Both worked as scientists before entering politics and, like Thatcher at the start of her reign, Merkel is not only challenging the male old guard but is also bent on introducing economic reforms to shake her country out of its lethargy. Compared with Thatcher, who readily struck the populist poses recommended by her media advisers, Merkel is hard to sell, however. She is a deadly serious straight-talker who has put Germany’s malaise — record unemployment, rising debt and sluggish growth — under her microscope.

The CDU’s attempt to soften the electorate’s impression of her as a scientific cold fish is one of the few amusing spectacles in a grim political landscape. The physical makeover has replaced her pudding-basin haircut with soft layers and highlights, and her make-up is now professionally applied.

Merkel clearly sets little store by such tactics. “If all people have to worry about is the way I look then their lives must be very fortunate,” she once noted icily. She refuses to play traditional political games, whether kissing babies for the cameras, making strategic alliances with those she dislikes or telling voters what they want to hear. She speaks her mind and appears to care little what others think of her.

Much of the old West Germany seems ready for her. Her Achilles heel, ironically, is in the east, where she grew up. To understand why, I travelled back to Templin, 50 miles north of Berlin, where the young Angela endured a complex, some say troubled, childhood.

HORST KASNER was a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, the West German port, when his first daughter, Angela Dorothea, was born there in 1954. That year he decided to take his new family to the Russian-controlled East, where his origins lay. His move would not only raise awkward questions many years later but also gave his newborn daughter a cross to bear.

While church attendance was not banned in East Germany, churchgoers were routinely discriminated against. The children of clergy stood little chance of completing their school studies, let alone going on to university. From an early age Merkel and her younger brother and sister had it drummed into them by their domineering father that they always had to do better than their peers.

Merkel seems to have taken this as the leitmotif for her life. At school she was an outstanding student. Former classmates recall how she used to study while waiting for the school bus each morning. A former classmate, Harald Loeschke, says he can never remember her having a boyfriend. “Even then she was a member of the CDU — the Club der Ungeküssten [Club of the Unkissed],” he joked.

“I wouldn’t say she was a nerd,” says her former maths teacher Hans Ulrich Beestow more diplomatically. "She always let other kids copy her homework.”

Her father’s advice paid off. She went on to higher education, even though her ambition to become a teacher was thwarted by her family’s association with the church. Despite her background she joined the communist Young Pioneers, as most children did, and went on to become local secretary for the communist Free German Youth organisation in her teens. This has led to raised eyebrows. Some have also questioned why, at the time tens of thousands of Germans were fleeing from the East when she was a baby, Angela’s father had chosen to take his family there. There have been suggestions he was uncomfortably close to the communist authorities. Stasi secret police files contain no evidence of collusion, however. The records show that both Merkel and her father were approached to become Stasi informants and refused. Merkel was recorded as claiming that she was an “uncontrollable chatterbox” who wouldn’t be able to keep secrets.

Her file reveals that, like most East Germans who refused to collaborate, she was herself spied on by supposed friends. One snitch was a colleague at Berlin’s Academy of Sciences, where Merkel became a researcher after writing her PhD dissertation on “The Calculations of Speed Constants of Elementary Reactions in Simple Carbohydrates”. This scientist passed on tittle-tattle about her private life to the authorities. After her separation from her first husband in 1982, the informant reported that she was seen off to work at the door of her apartment by a series of different men wearing her dressing gown. Clearly she was no longer a member of “club of the unkissed”.

Merkel, it was also noted, wore western-style jeans, which were frowned on by communist bureaucrats, and listened to banned western pop music.

It was not until the communist regime was on the verge of collapse that Merkel showed any interest in politics. First she joined the Democratic Awakening movement then, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, switched to the CDU.

Helmut Kohl, the all-powerful German chancellor, took her under his wing after reunification. At the time he was heralded as a saviour in the former communist state. But when his promise of creating a “blooming landscape” in the east failed to materialise, deep disillusionment set in, contributing to the defeat of the CDU by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrat/Green coalition in 1998.

Even though Schröder has failed to turn the east’s fortunes around over the past seven years, the CDU is still blamed by many there for their woes. Kohl’s populist decision to give virtually valueless East German Ostmarks parity with western Deutschmarks was politically shrewd in the short term, because it protected East Germans’ savings, but it wrecked any chance eastern industries had of being competitive. Numerous factories closed. More than 3m East Germans moved west in search of work. Many communities were devastated. Templin survived by transforming itself into a spa resort.

In her hometown today, Merkel is no longer regarded as an Ossie, as former East Germans are known, but a Wessie, or West German, for hitching her fortune to the CDU. “We don’t see her back here that often,” said Ulrich Schoeneich, the mayor of Templin. “She’s not that popular in these parts. It might be good for the town if she becomes chancellor. We could start up some ‘Angela Merkel lived here tours’. But the truth is most people here don’t want to see her elected. They don’t think she’ll do much for them.”

As a Social Democrat, Schoeneich may be less than objective, but others in the town and the neighbouring village of Hoheswerde — where Merkel and her second husband keep a weekend home — echo his sentiments. There were hoots of derision in Hoheswerde after the mass-circulation Bild newspaper published a piece on “Angela Merkel’s private world” in which she talked about tending the asters, marigolds and kohlrabi in her village garden. “You rarely see her out in the garden. Her husband seems to do most of that work as far as we can tell,” said one neighbour.

“Even though they’ve had this house for many years they keep to themselves. Occasionally you see them out jogging. But I wouldn’t say they are that popular here,” said another, his wife nodding agreement by his side. “I won’t be voting for Merkel, that’s for sure.”

Her parents, who still live in Templin, have remained tight-lipped about her political ambitions. Her mother became a local councillor for the Social Democrats after reunification, and some see this as evidence of ideological tension within the family. Schoeneich dismissed this and said the family is close — though he then related how Merkel failed to tell her parents she was getting married for a second time. “As Frau Kasner tells it, her daughter was standing in the kitchen the day after the wedding and simply turned around and said, ‘By the way I got married yesterday’,” he confided, shaking his head.

If this is hardly the behaviour of a Margaret Thatcher then neither of her husbands has been a Denis. The first, Ulrich Merkel, was a physicist she met at university. He claims to be bemused that when she left him she kept both their washing machine and his surname. Her second husband, Joachim Sauer, is a world-renowned chemistry professor and even less of a Denis Thatcher. His surname means “sour” or “angry” in German and he has made it clear he has no interest in being a good-natured consort. He repeatedly asks the press to leave him alone. Some conservative voters are perturbed that the couple, married in 1998, appear to lead separate lives. Merkel relaxes with a circle of politically minded women friends in Berlin while Sauer gets on with his chemistry. Their annual outing to the Bayreuth festival to listen to Wagner is one of the rare occasions they are seen out together.
 
IT IS against this backdrop of voter suspicion that Merkel has suffered a distinct narrowing of her lead in the election race. When the poll was called she was immediately dubbed the chancellor-in-waiting. Tony Blair snubbed Schröder to see Merkel first on a visit to Berlin. Now Schröder is on the up — his SPD is at 28% in the latest polls with the CDU down to 41% — and Merkel’s mettle is being tested.

Unlike Britain’s first-past-the-post system, designed to produce an outright winner, Germany’s complicated electoral arithmetic tends towards coalitions. Even if Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), garner more than 40% of the vote they will be forced to rely on support from the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) to form a majority.

Political parties are referred to by their colours in Germany: the SPD (red), the FDP (yellow), the CDU/CSU (black) and the Greens (green, of course). This turns the political landscape into a kaleidoscope of traffic light analogies. The ruling coalition is invariably referred to as “red-green”. But since the emergence of a new left-wing alliance, the Left party, there is now another “red” on the scene. Some commentators speculate that the SPD can cling onto power with a red-red-green coalition.

The Left party was set up to discomfort Schröder. Made up of rebels from the SPD and East Germany’s former Communist party, it is led by his temperamental former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine. But it has turned out to be a big headache for Merkel, too.

The alliance was formed only in mid-July, yet polls show it gaining 33% support in the east, where disaffection with both the CDU/CSU and SPD is at its greatest and voters are notoriously fickle.

Merkel’s hopes of wooing the east were damaged by a Christian Democrat state minister who, in the light of a sensational child murder, seemed to suggest that killing babies was typical eastern behaviour. And then her senior ally, the CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, appeared to brand easterners as too stupid to decide Germany’s future. Some have accused Stoiber of deliberately trying to sabotage Merkel in a fit of pique at her rapid rise. Certainly she has few reliable friends at the top.

While Stoiber has spent his life building a political power base, Merkel elbowed her way to the pinnacle of her party in record time. She was first talent-spotted by Kohl after she was elected to parliament in 1990. Despite referring to her condescendingly as “das Mädchen” (the girl) — supposedly because of her tendency to blush — he quickly made her minister for youth and women and then for the environment. When Kohl became embroiled in a party funding scandal, however, “the girl” showed her steel by penning a withering newspaper condemnation of him. A new political star was born. It was a move that smacked of Margaret Thatcher’s 1975 leadership challenge to Ted Heath, the man who first promoted her to the cabinet. Merkel’s chances of winning power may well depend on whether Germany feels as much in need of her brisk medicine as economically battered Britain did of Thatcher’s in 1979.

Merkel’s prescription for economic recovery has been dubbed a form of parental “tough love”, centring on a shake-up of Germany’s stifling labour and pension laws and a Vat increase to finance cuts in non-wage labour costs. Sympathetic economists say that, like Thatcher’s initial reforms, this restructuring would hurt at first and might even hold back growth in the short term, but would improve Germany’s competitiveness in the longer term.

At first glance Germany’s economy looks deeply gloomy. Unemployment, although starting to fall slowly, stands at almost 5m. This is an average of 11.6% nationally but reaches 30% in the east. The jobless level coupled with a rigid and expensive labour market, stagnant growth and an ageing population (19% of Germans are 65 and over) has pushed social security payments to levels exceeding worker contributions. As a result Germany’s budget deficit has exceeded the European Union limit of 3% for four years, and the accumulated public debt now amounts to 66% of gross domestic product.

Schröder introduced his own economic reform programme, Agenda 2010, after his re-election in 2002; but it has been a failure. The most radical measure — the restructuring of unemployment benefits and social security —  was hugely costly. One of the effects of cutting unemployment benefits has been to make workers more fearful of losing their jobs. This, in turn, has led to a slump in consumer spending, which has further dragged the economy down.

On the other hand, pro-reform economists say it is not all bad news. The fear of unemployment has strengthened the hand of employers brokering new wage deals and weakened the power of the trade unions. Some workers have been prepared to accept wage cuts, longer hours and more flexible working practices. This has slowly led to a reduction in the cost of German labour, long considered the most expensive in Europe. With competitiveness improving, Germany last year regained its position as the world’s biggest exporter.

The signs of improving economic health are probably too little, too late for the ailing Schröder, however. While economists cautiously predict that Germany could be heading for a new Wirtschaftswunder — economic miracle — few in this country of 80m feel much optimism after being condemned as the sick man of Europe for so long. Merkel exploits this angst mercilessly as she tours the country seeking votes. Again and again she tells her audience that Britain has outstripped Germany in economic growth — as if this is an indignity too far. “We can do better than this. Germany can be number one. But if we do nothing, things are going to get worse and worse,” she says, raising both hands in the air in supplication.

Apart from raising Vat — hardly a vote-winner — Merkel has been imprecise about her reforms. But those she recently named as members of her shadow cabinet were taken by many as an indication that she could be planning to be radical. Her choice of the controversial Paul Kirchhof to take charge of financial policy has been seized on by Schröder as a sign that she would favour the rich if she came to power. Kirchhof, a tax law professor and former judge, is an outspoken champion of a flat rate of income tax, which he argues would boost consumer spending. Two years ago he proposed a 25% flat tax on all forms of income for individuals and businesses alike, coupled with the abolition of Germany’s myriad tax exemptions.

Merkel has denied that she would introduce a flat tax if elected. But Kirchhof continues to insist that a conservative government would support a simplification of Germany’s complex tax code, “shortening the time it takes to fill out an income tax form to 10 minutes from 12 Saturdays a year”.

Another hint of the possible way ahead lay in an attack on the trade unions last week by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats and a potential partner for Merkel in a coalition. He accused union officials of obstructing economic reform and of “blocking the the reduction in mass unemployment” by clinging to rigid labour market rules. “I won’t be looking for conflict, but I won’t avoid it if it’s necessary to create a new beginning for Germany,” he said.

Merkel has not been so outspoken. But pollsters say that the key to her success lies less with how the electorate react to her vague policy proposals than with their faith in her personally. Many complain that compared with Schröder, a supreme media charmer, she is “too technocratic” and doesn’t “tell stories” that the electorate can identify with.

How she performs in a 90-minute televised debate with the chancellor next Sunday could be critical. Some polls predict almost half the country’s voters will make up their minds in the final two weeks before the election. But even if Merkel fails to sparkle, this could be to her advantage. Many voters have grown weary of Schröder’s slickness, superficiality and broken promises.

Merkel frequently stumbles, lisps slightly and often wags her finger like a stern headmistress — traits that have made her the butt of late-night talk show jokes and satirical send-ups. She also tends to talk in a way that many west Germans perceive as old-fashioned, even “Prussian”, speaking of her desire “to serve” her country and stressing the need for “hard work” and “humility”.

But with Germany mired in such a psychological malaise, these are values her countrymen know they need to nurture if they are to turn the corner.

There are two potential epitaphs to this extraordinary woman’s political career. Will it be Mick Jagger singing: “Angie, Angie, you can’t say we never tried. Angie, you’re beautiful, but ain’t it time we said goodbye?”

Or will it be the words of St Francis of Assisi painted on a wall in her home town of Templin? “If you do first what is necessary, then what is possible, suddenly you will find you are achieving the impossible.”

Margaret Thatcher might have said that.

MERKEL’S METEORIC RISE

1954 Born in West Germany; family moves to the East
1977 While studying physics, marries Ulrich Merkel
1978 Researcher, East Berlin academy
1982 Marriage ends
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall
1990 Joins CDU, elected to parliament after reunification
1991 Minister for youth and women
1994 Environment minister
1998 Marries Joachim Sauer
2000 CDU chairwoman
2002 Opposition leader in parliament


2. From the German press:

A Madam Chancellor for Germany?

After years of working toward her goal, Angela Merkel is just a technicality away from running for Germany's highest office. Which begs the question: Is Germany ready for a woman chancellor?

A reporter recently asked Angela Merkel, "Are you tough?" The 50-year-old politician replied, "Let's just say I'm persistent."

And her persistence has paid off. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), just won a glaring victory in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which was widely seen as a plebiscite on the current national Social Democrat government. Now, few doubts remain that she will be put forward as the candidate for chancellor, in snap elections to be held as soon as this fall.

As the question of her candidacy becomes more immediate, pundits have begun wondering if Merkel is Germany's answer to Margaret Thatcher. Known as the Iron Lady, Thatcher was England's first female head of state, and a decidedly conservative one at that.

Rocky times:
Merkel is basically a careful person -- sometimes even skeptical or distrustful. That isn't likely to change. While she may be at the height of her powers right now, the past five months have proved that her caution was indeed called for. As recently as February, prior to the surprise victory of her party in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, she had her back pinned tightly against the wall.

At the time, many of those in the CDU leadership took a typical "bystander" attitude, waiting to see what would happen to "Madame Chairwoman." And Merkel herself felt left in the lurch, having wasted the entire second half of 2004 in internal fighting with the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the CSU (Christian Socialists), over plans for a much disputed health-care reform package.

Her response? To prove her full dedication to the party. She upended her appointment calendar and increased her stumping appearances in the north. "I don't want to leave myself open to reproach," she explained, even as some were predicting Merkel would soon be singing a swan song.

Dedication paid off:
In the end, the CDU leader was graced with the most important quality a politician can have, after competence and persistence: luck. The Social Democrat Prime Minister of Schleswig Holstein, Heide Simonis, was unseated by local CDU leader Peter Harry Carstensen in an upset decision. The public was stunned by new jobless figures of five million. The "visa affair" that rocked Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer added to the uncertainty of SPD voters. The CDU won in the north, against all prognoses, thus effectively ending the discussion over Merkel's ability to lead her party.

Merkel now looks set to be Germany's first-ever female candidate for chancellor. But then, she is no stranger to "firsts." Since 2000, she has been the first female CDU chairwoman, as well as the first woman at the head of the parliamentary party.

Not your typical CDU member:
Merkel's biography -- she is a divorced Protestant, from eastern Germany, with no children -- isn't one typically associated with the CDU. Rather, the party is known for its conservative Catholic roots, and for being dominated by men from the western part of Germany.

Yet she was elected to the party chairmanship in 2000, amid a donation scandal. And in at the next party congress in 2004, in Düsseldorf, she tried to bring her history into harmony with that of the party, and succeeded.

From the beginning, the grass roots CDU members were more in favor than the party functionaries, of taking a chance on the PhD physicist from the east. Merkel had to defend herself against numerous opponents. It was often difficult and time-consuming, but one by one, she found her supporters and close aides. Her image suffered as a result. But after she ousted Friedrich Merz (photo) as parliamentary party chairman in 2002, she went on the offensive.

Unified vision needed:
During the Iraq conflict, Merkel separated herself from the red-green leadership in favor of a pro-American course. Domestically, she wants to take a leading role in reforms. Thus far, she has waged a bitter battle with the CSU over health care reform. She survived it, but her plan came out severely weakened.

Ahead of the snap elections that everyone professes to support, there is one thing Merkel and other CDU-CSU leaders, will not say. At least not out loud. And that is, due to the rushed election, the CDU and CSU have a platform dilemma. The need to settle certain political issues and platforms prior to an election, so that they will not become problems during a CDU-CSU reign, has not been solved. Small signs of reform can be seen on questions of taxes and nursing care insurance.

But a definitive political platform is still lacking for the woman who may just become the first female chancellor of Germany.


3. No-Frills Candidate Aims For Germany's Top Spot -- by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post

The woman who wants to rule Germany stepped to a microphone on the packed main square of this industrial city and reminded the crowd of the nation's woes. The jobless rate is the highest since the end of World War II, she noted bleakly, economic growth is the weakest in Europe, the national mood gripped by doubt.

So what would Angela Merkel do about it? "Now, I don't expect to hear loud applause," she warned at the recent campaign event, before describing how she would raise the national sales tax -- already 16 percent for most items -- to pay for her party's job-creation program.

Moans and grumbles rose from the audience of about 8,000 people. But Merkel didn't back down. "You can decide," she said. "We can continue as we have been, with promises of blue skies. But promises already have been made and promises have been broken. That needs to change."

Unsmiling, unstylish and uncharismatic, Merkel, 51, is bidding to become Germany's first female chancellor, as well as the first to have grown up behind the Iron Curtain, in the former East Germany. Polls show that her party, the Christian Democratic Union, holds a lead, albeit a narrowing one, in a national election scheduled for Sunday and that she stands a very good chance of sitting at the chancellor's desk in Berlin.

The vote comes at a pivotal moment for Germany, the biggest country in Europe and the world's third-largest economy. Despite spending more than $1.5 trillion over the past 15 years to reunify the nation, Germany has failed to heal many divisions between east and west. It is also grappling with the competitive challenges of globalization, as German companies move jobs to lower-wage countries.

Although Merkel's party leads in the polls, for many Germans she remains a remote figure. The former physicist rarely talks about her personal life, her upbringing under communism or how she became involved in politics. She often appears dour and uncomfortable. On her latest campaign poster, she looks like she's clenching her teeth as she forces a grin.

"Typical German," said Kai Sausmikat, 41, a voter who came to hear Merkel at the Osnabrueck rally, pulling down the corners of his mouth into a clown-like frown.

Merkel's rivals, inside and outside her party, show little regard for her political skills. In July, when the Parliament voted to hold early elections, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told Merkel to her face that her campaign would collapse. "Mrs. Merkel, at this moment with your opinion polls, you appear like a magnificent-looking souffle in the oven," Fischer said. "We'll see what's really left after the voters prick into it. I can't wait."

If the election were a personality contest, surveys suggest Merkel would lose by a wide margin to the telegenic incumbent, Gerhard Schroeder. But in Germany's political system, national leaders are chosen by party, and the Christian Democrats lead the polls.

Merkel has run a simple campaign that makes no attempt to capitalize on her sex. She has focused on a plan to generate jobs by cutting payroll taxes and making it easier for companies to hire or fire workers. She has also called for an overhaul of Germany's notoriously complicated tax code.

A victory for her party would likely mean closer relations with Washington. Merkel has strongly criticized Schroeder for alienating the United States, Germany's closest postwar ally, in disputes over Iraq, although she does not support sending troops to that country.

Merkel was born in 1954 in Hamburg, a port city in West Germany, the first child of a Protestant pastor and an English teacher. When she was an infant, her father moved the family to the East German state of Brandenburg, crossing a border that had not yet hardened but was already marked by an exodus of Germans heading in the opposite direction.

Her father, Horst Kasner, sympathized with the utopian goals of the Communist government there. But his precise relationship with it is difficult to untangle. As a preacher in a society that discouraged religion, Kasner was considered politically suspect. His wife, Herlind, was not allowed to teach school because of her husband's profession. But the family was granted privileges not afforded to most citizens, including two cars and permission to travel to the West. When Angela entered elementary school in Templin, a town of about 11,000 people north of Berlin, her parents decided not to enroll her in the Young Pioneers, a Communist Party youth group. They changed their minds a year later after her teachers made clear she would suffer academically if she didn't join, according to interviews in her home town.

"Her parents, especially her mother, were very interested in making sure Angela wasn't stuck in the corner as a pastor's daughter," said Hans-Ulrich Beeskow, a middle-school math teacher who recalled Merkel as an especially gifted student. "It wasn't political engagement by any means. It was important to her mother to make sure no stones were thrown in her path."

Merkel excelled at math, Russian and English, and was rewarded with a coveted university slot in Leipzig. She studied physics and remained active in Communist youth groups, a prerequisite for university students.

In 1977, she married a fellow physics student, Ulrich Merkel. They divorced five years later.

In an interview with Evelyn Roll, a German journalist and biographer, Merkel said she was vigilant about suppressing any political opinions that might have attracted attention. "It was a real advantage from those times that you learned to keep quiet," she said. "That was one of the survival strategies."

In the late 1970s, she has said, she was approached by two men who asked her to serve as an informant for the East German intelligence agency, the Stasi. Merkel said she balked, arguing that she would be a poor spy because she was bad at keeping secrets.

She ended up in East Berlin, where she earned a doctorate in physics and worked as a researcher at the Academy of Science.

As a politician on the stump, Merkel has shied away from discussing life under communism, even when addressing East German audiences.

On Sunday, she visited her home town of Templin for the first time during the campaign. About 600 people, including her mother, heard her speak outside a beer garden. Rather than wax nostalgic, Merkel merely acknowledged that the region "is what you call home" and recited her standard speech. Such detachment has alienated many eastern Germans, who had hoped she would stand up for a region some westerners view as backward. In Templin, for instance, there are no visible reminders that the hometown girl is running for chancellor, aside from a few stock campaign posters. "If you walk through Templin and ask ordinary citizens, they don't want her to be chancellor," said Ulrich Schoeneich, the Templin mayor, a Social Democrat who is friends with Merkel's mother. "In part, she has forgotten where she came from."

Merkel was late to the East German political revolution in 1989. She avoided early public protests against the Communists, focusing instead on her job. On the chaotic evening when the Berlin Wall was breached, she joined thousands of others in crossing to the other side, biographers have recounted, but returned home a few hours later because she had to get up early the next morning to go to work.

Gradually, she lost some of her caution and became involved in politics. Six weeks after the fall of the wall, she joined a new party, Democratic Awakening, and found a fresh calling as a press secretary. "She had a chance to get involved and make a change, and she took advantage of the situation," said Rainer Eppelmann, a former leader of Democratic Awakening and now a member of Parliament.

In 1990, she was named deputy spokeswoman for the first -- and last -- democratically elected government in East Germany. After unification that year, she joined the Christian Democrats, who promptly named her as a candidate for Parliament. She won the spot and attracted the interest of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was looking for easterners to fill leadership jobs in his government. All of a sudden she found herself a member of Kohl's cabinet, with the title of minister for family and women. At the time, Merkel was unmarried but living with a former academic adviser, Joachim Sauer. The couple married in 1998, but only after the archbishop of Cologne chided Merkel to formalize the relationship.

Merkel continued her climb into the upper ranks of the Christian Democrats through a combination of good timing and political savvy, political analysts say. In 1998, she took over as head of the party after Kohl, her mentor, became ensnared in a campaign finance scandal. Since then, she has eased out rivals and pressured competitors to stand aside so she could seek the chancellorship.

Merkel, who is childless, has built a wall around her private life and rarely appears with her husband in public. But that hasn't stopped opponents from taking personal shots. In an interview published last month, Schroeder's wife, Doris Schroeder-Koepf, highlighted Merkel's lack of children by calling her insensitive to the needs of working mothers. The German mass media have also made sport of her personal appearance. After ignoring such critiques, she began a gradual makeover two years ago, visiting a celebrity hairstylist in Berlin who also counts Schroeder as a client. The commentary has generated sympathy for Merkel, especially among women who see the attacks as sexist. "She grew up in East Germany and is a natural scientist -- that means she was exposed to less pressure for so-called 'female' behavior than we western women were," said Alice Schwarzer, Germany's best-known feminist, in an e-mailed response to questions. "My advice: Stay true to herself. Stay authentic! Everything else would seem false."


4. Wikipedia Profile:
Angela Dorothea Merkel (born July 17, 1954 in Hamburg) is a German politician and the opposition's candidate to become Chancellor of Germany in the upcoming German federal election, 2005.
Merkel is president of the Christian Democratic Union/CDU since 2000. She is a Member of the German Parliament, representing a constituency which includes the districts of Nordvorpommern and Rügen, as well as the city of Stralsund, in the province of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
In the English language press, Merkel has been compared by many to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher because both are/were female politicans from centre-right parties, as well as former scientists. Some have referred to her as "Iron Lady" or "Iron Girl" (alluding to Thatcher); despite the name, some political commentators see little similarity with Thatcher's radical agenda and Merkel's in comparison. [1] "Angie" is another popular nickname for Merkel, used by the German press.
Married to Joachim Sauer.
She was born Angela Dorothea Kasner, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and a teacher. In 1954 her father received a pastorship at a church in the east and moved his family to Templin. Merkel grew up in the countryside only 80km north of Berlin in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). She was educated in Templin and at the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics (1973-1978). Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences (1978-1990). After graduating with a doctorate in physics she worked in quantum chemistry.
In 1989 she got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party, "Demokratischer Aufbruch". Following the first democratic election in the GDR, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new government under Lothar de Maizière. Following the first post-reunification general election in December 1990, she became Minister for Women and Youth in Helmut Kohl's cabinet. In 1994, she was made Minister for the Environment and Reactor Safety. Angela Merkel's political career was nurtured by the then Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, who referred to her as das Mädchen (the girl).
Her background from the former GDR has served her well in politics. For the first 36 years of her life, she honed her skills at disguising her inner thoughts and feelings -- essential for survival in a society where every room had the potential to contain a State Security Police (Stasi) informer, especially true for a pastor's daughter. Speaking near perfect English and remarking on her background as an "Ossi" she says, "Anyone who really has something to say doesn't need make-up."
Leader of the Opposition:
When the Kohl government was defeated in the 1998 general election, Merkel was named Secretary-General of the CDU. In this position, Merkel oversaw a string of Christian Democrat election victories in six out of seven provincial elections in 1999 alone, breaking the Social Democrat/Green coalition's hold on the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament. As a result of a party financing scandal, which compromised many leading figures of the CDU (most notably Kohl himself and then-party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl's hand-picked successor), Merkel gained further. She criticized her former mentor, Kohl, advocated a fresh start for the party without him, and was subsequently rewarded with replacing Schäuble to become the first female chairperson of her party. In November of 2001, despite her pledge to clean up the party, she refused to hold further inquiries into the financing scandal. Merkel's election on April 10, 2000 was surprising, as her personality offered a contrast to the party she had been chosen to lead; Merkel is a Protestant woman, originating from the eastern part of reunified Germany - the Christian Democrats have Catholic roots, are a male-dominated party and can find their strongholds in the southern part of the former West Germany.
Following Merkel's selection as CDU leader, she enjoyed considerable popularity among the German population and was favoured by Germans to become Gerhard Schröder's challenger in the 2002 election. However, she was unpopular in her own party and most particularly its sister party (the Bavarian Christian Social Union, or CSU) and was subsequently out-maneuvered politically by the CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, who had the privilege to challenge Schröder but squandered a large lead in the opinion polls to lose narrowly.
After Stoiber's defeat in 2002, in addition to her role as CDU chairwoman, she became leader of the conservative opposition in the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag - her rival, Friedrich Merz, who had held the post of legislative leader prior to the 2002 election, was eased out to make way for Merkel.
Political views:
Merkel supports a substantial reform agenda concerning Germany's economic and social system. Merkel is considered to be more pro-free market (and pro-deregulation) than her own party (the CDU); she has advocated changes to German labour law, specifically, removing barriers to firing employees and increasing the allowed number of work hours in a week, arguing that current laws make the country less competitive because companies cannot easily control labour costs at times when business is slow.
Merkel believes there should be a strong transatlantic partnership and German-American friendship. In the spring of 2003, defying strong public opposition, Merkel came out in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, describing it as "unavoidable" and accusing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of reactionary anti-Americanism. This led some critics to characterize her as an American lackey.
She opposes Turkish EU membership and favours a "privileged partnership", instead. In doing so, she is seen as being in unison with an overwhelming majority of Germans who reject Turkish membership in the European Union, particularly due to fears that large waves of immigration may impose an unbearable burden on Germany and that there would be too much Islamist influence within the EU.
She believes that the existing nuclear power stations should be phased out less quickly than advocated by the current government.
Candidacy for Chancellor:
On May 30, 2005 she won the CDU/CSU nomination as challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the SPD in the 2005 national elections. Currently, her party is significantly ahead in national opinion polls; however, her personal popularity lags behind that of the incumbent. However, her candidacy has gained some momentum since she announced that she would appoint Paul Kirchhof, a former judge at the German Constitutional Court and leading fiscal policy expert as Minister of Finance. If her party is elected, she will be Germany's first female chancellor, the first woman to lead Germany since Empress Theophania (956-991), and the first former East German to become chancellor of a united Germany.
Quotes:
Merkel is of the opinion that the EU has failed to define its common interests "for the (commercial) battles of the future" now that Europe's Cold War priorities of keeping "peace and freedom" have been achieved. "This is where I think Europe needs to learn a lot, not to concentrate too much on whether bicycle paths are built the same way in Portugal and north-west Germany."
Domestically, Merkel has advocated change in the country's consensual model: "In Germany, we are always facing the danger that we are a little bit too slow. We have to speed up our changes."
Published works:
Angela Merkel, Lutz Zuelicke, Molecular Physics, 1987, 60(6), 1379-1393, Nonempirical parameter estimate for the statistical adiabatic theory of unimolecular fragmentation carbon-hydrogen bond breaking in methyl.
Angela Merkel, Zdenek Havlas, Rudolf Zahradnik, Journal of American Chemical Society, 1988, 110(25), 8355-8359, Evaluation of the rate constant for the SN2 reaction flouromethane + hydride: methane + flouride in the gas phase.


5. Here's a report on how Merkel did in a televised debate with Schroder:

Merkel shines in Schröder showdown -- by Kate Connolly

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his conservative challenger Angela Merkel brought the election campaign into German living rooms in dramatic fashion last night, facing off in a hefty television duel which could prove pivotal to the country's most arresting political contest for decades.

Around 15 million households tuned into the 90-minute confrontation which was broadcast on four channels at prime time, and offered the increasingly-isolated Mr Schröder one of his last chances, two weeks before the election, to sell himself to voters.

Between a third and a half of German voters remain undecided as to how they will vote on Sept 18. Mr Schröder's Social Democrats are trailing the opposition Christian Democrats by around 11 per cent in the polls. While the clash is not expected to turn Mr Schröder's fortunes around, it could earn crucial points for either side, determining whether or not Mrs Merkel can form her desired coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) or if she is forced into a grand coalition with the SPD.

Despite media analysts' predictions that the quick-witted and telegenic Mr Schröder, 61, would outshine the more shy, serious Mrs Merkel, 51, the conservative leader delivered a surprisingly feisty performance, repeatedly attacking the chancellor on his unemployment record and Germany's chronically-low growth rate. She had been trained for the encounter by a television presenter who taught her to smile more and to bring more light and shade into her sometimes monotone voice. It showed.

The duellers sparred in style, throwing statistics at each other like bullets, as they were questioned by a team of four presenters on topics ranging from the price of petrol to the US government's handling of the hurricane and Germany's post-war unemployment high. They even found the odd opportunity to laugh together.

While Mr Schröder accused his opponent of bad mouthing Germany which he claimed was economically much stronger than she suggested, Mrs Merkel said the chancellor had failed to tackle the country's problems. "You think just from one day to the next, and mostly in a zig-zag fashion," she said. You can't be satisfied with the situation in this country," she later added, saying that only an economically-strong Germany could play a convincing role on the world stage.

Mr Schröder said: "You present Germany as a land of obstacles, but it is much much more able than you give it credit for." He also focused on Iraq and his success in keeping Germany out of the war.

Mr Schröder, rather than the slip-up prone Mrs Merkel, was the only one to stumble badly at any point as he attempted to tackle a question on Germany's tax system, which Mrs Merkel has pledged to simplify. Uncharacteristically Mrs Merkel smiled her way through much of the debate, pursing her lips when she disagreed with Mr Schröder. Sometimes she turned swiftly on the spot to confront him with an angry stare.

Mr Schröder was forced to defend his wife, Doris Schröder-Köpf for comments she made in an interview last week in which she said Mrs Merkel was unable to further the cause of women, because having no children of her own she was "of another world".

"My wife who is a political journalist...and intelligent...you're telling me she can't get involved in the debate?...I'm proud of her involvement. My wife says what she thinks and she lives by what she says."

On another personal note, Mrs Merkel, the daughter of an east German clergyman, was asked if she agreed with the sentiment that only because of the more liberal attitude that the SPD had injected in Germany during its seven years in office was it possible for her as a woman to contemplate becoming chancellor of Germany. "I am a German product, I am proud to say...I am a product of a united Germany, and a product of my parents, and I am proud of that." At the close of the tense encounter, Mr Schröder asked voters to place "new trust" in his government whose policies, characterised by social justice, he said were to serve "our children and their children".

Mrs Merkel stared into the camera and said voters should decide to vote based on the following question: "Ask yourselves: is this country better than it was in the years before the SPD-Green government? Is growth higher...and unemployment lower?"


6. Here are two pieces on Germany and France on the eve of big changes for both.

The gathering storm:
Historic change is looming in the heart of Europe. At stake is far more than a mere change of leaders - Germany and France face economic and cultural upheavals of a kind that comes once in a generation. With Daniel Johnson on Germany, and David Lawday on France

a) Schroder's 1968ers reach the end of the line -- by Daniel Johnson

As the campaign nears its climax, voters hesitate. They are edgy about "Angelanomics", the prescription of flat tax and pension privatisation that Angela Merkel says is necessary to treat their ills, and they have a lingering fondness for Gerhard Schroder, despite his broken promise to cut the worst unemployment since the Weimar Republic.

In their hearts and stomachs, however, they want change. They are fed up with being the sick man of Europe and they sense that regaining their dynamism of old means electing Merkel rather than Schroder. The Japanese, who have a similar role in Asia, endorsed Junichiro Koizumi's reform agenda decisively on 11 September. Barring an upset, Germans will follow suit.

If they do, their choice will have an importance far beyond the normal alternation of democratic politics, because this election is a watershed for Germany and for Europe. By voting for Merkel or her allies, Germans will be choosing to sweep an entire political generation off the stage - the former radicals of 1968, those rebellious children of the Nazis who, in their middle age, came to shape their country's self-image and its outlook.

This generation spent three decades criticising the old men who ran the country, until the very last of these, Helmut Kohl, belatedly vacated the stage in 1998. But their reign since then, with Schroder at their head, has been most unhappy; their long march through the institutions has ended in disillusionment. Tired, fragmented and short of ideas, they seem poised to take their last bow on Sunday, and their departure promises to unlock dramatic possibilities, delivering a different sort of Germany.

The 1968 generation was born angry and rejected everything about the country in which it grew up. The postwar period of the economic miracle valued hard work and efficiency, discipline and uncomplaining resilience. Former Nazis and ethnic Germans from the east were reintegrated into West Germany, the slate was wiped clean, and when the cold war forced Germans to take sides, they chose capitalism.

It was an unashamedly materialistic society. When I visited West Germany as a sixth-former in 1974, the big event of the time for the family with which I stayed was not the sensational resignation of the chancellor, Willy Brandt, over a spy scandal, but a trip to the Mercedes-Benz factory in Stuttgart to buy a new car.

The students of the 1960s identified all this with the Nazis, and by the 1980s, under their growing influence, the "don't mention the war" syndrome of Konrad Adenauer's Germany was reversed, so that the process of "overcoming the past" became a national obsession. The symbol of German rehabilitation was no longer the Mercedes, but the memorial.

If they were right to reject the suffocating silence about the Nazi past, their response did not make Germany more whole, or a healthier place. From having been the hardest-working nation in Europe, it became one of the laziest. In the land of Luther, Kant and Bach, the churches stand empty, the universities are mediocre, and there are few writers, artists or composers of international repute. At the same time the postwar identification with the American victors - Kohl's idea of fun was and is listening to the United States Air Force Band - has turned into a visceral anti-Americanism that Schroder is happy to exploit and legitimise.

As for the radicals themselves, as they reached middle age they proved far more sybaritic and self-indulgent than their elders. Many drifted through life, fuelled by drugs or drink and living off wealth accumulated by their parents. Now that the birth rate has fallen, they will have to be supported in old age on state pensions funded by a dwindling number of younger taxpayers (one reason why Merkel is thinking of privatising the pension system).

Above all, the 1968ers have aborted the older generation's attempt to rebuild national pride on the foundations of economic success. The last straw was the abolition of the greatest achievement of the economic miracle: the Deutschmark. The result is a void: present-day Germans do not suffer from excessive self-esteem, but its opposite. Younger Germans - not to mention the survivors of the wartime generation - instinctively know this, and in Angela Merkel they have found an improbable heroine.

Merkel is the antithesis of the 1968 generation of Schroder and Joschka Fischer, the Green leader and foreign minister, and not just because she was only 13 in the spring of 1968. For one thing, she is an east German. For her and her friends, 1968 had nothing to do with Paris and everything to do with Prague, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the crushing of the last hope that communism might be reformed.

In German terms she is a nonconformist. Unlike her mainly Catholic predecessors in the Christian Democrats, she is the child of a Lutheran pastor. She studied natural rather than social sciences and gravitated to the right rather than the left, America rather than France. Only in her private life is she typical of her contemporaries: divorced and childless, she is a feminist in the unostentatiously German manner.

Her rivals, mostly men, resent her and can be expected to knife her at the first sign of trouble; her response has been to make her closest advisers female. Even her admirers would not call her glamorous; nor is she maternal. Yet her very dowdiness has worked to her advantage: she has been underestimated by rivals and opponents, and as she approaches the threshold of power her deliberate indifference to the vanity of celebrity makes her seem all the more formidable. It is Schroder, not Merkel, who sues newspapers for claiming that he dyes his hair.

Her genius is to have realised that Germany is suffering from a bad case of wounded pride. The euphoria of reunification has long since been dissipated and any lingering hopes vested in the Red/Green coalition have been dashed in the three years since Schroder was re-elected by the skin of his teeth. This is a nation still nursing a hangover from the 20th century, confused by its plummeting prestige and impatient to move on. Merkel is the brisk, no-nonsense scientist who can show her people the way.

It is particularly the "unpolitical German" (a phrase of Thomas Mann's) who is readiest to give her a chance. Despite their innate caution and angst about radical measures such as a flat tax or privatisation of pensions, such people see that Merkel at least has a clear idea of the gravity of the problems that agitate them.

Her inspiration is not so much Margaret Thatcher - she shudders at the comparison - as Ludwig Erhard, the thoroughly patriarchal, cigar-chomping sugar daddy of the postwar economic miracle, who defied the gloom-mongers of the 1940s with his bonfire of controls. The choice now before Germany seems reminiscent of that era: between the Social Democrats' dreary prospect of austerity for most and the Christian Democrats' alluring promise of prosperity for all. For most Germans, that is no choice at all.

As for unemployment, which was always the big test in a country where folk memories of the Depression and its consequences are still vivid, Merkel is gambling that Germans are ready to swallow a dose of Thatcherite medicine. They want an end with horror rather than a horror without end.

As the two front-runners' crucial television duel on 12 September demonstrated, the Social Democrats and their Green partners have no big ideas left and so have been reduced to defending the indefensible. "You cannot seriously believe that five million unemployed is satisfactory," Merkel said to Schroder, and he had no adequate reply. Schroder is fighting a negative campaign against Merkel, whom he depicts as a mere "neoliberal" stooge of the Americans. But it is obvious even to his own supporters that he has run out of steam. Fischer, the only star in his team, is visibly itching to leave office.

There is more to this election than Merkel v Schroder, however. Germans can opt for a combination of nationalism and socialism, as they have done in the past after military defeats or economic depression. This is what Oskar Lafontaine's new Left Party is offering: a "popular front" combining disgruntled Social Democrats in western Germany and former communists in the east.

His alternative narrative tells of how a wealthy, cosmopolitan elite is destroying the "community" (Gemeinschaft) of the German Volk. He denounces "foreign workers", who are allegedly taking jobs from Germans, and he demands that only those who speak German and pay their taxes should be allowed to live in Germany. He even rants about the extinction of the "white peoples" of Europe. Little wonder that polls show the far-right vote, which had been rising in the east, shifting to the Left Party.

Lafontaine will fail, but the re-emergence of his brand of demagoguery tells us that something is stirring deep in die Heimat. Germany is paying the price for Schroder's shameless anti-Americanism, which has reactivated the anti-western forces that wrecked the Weimar Republic, wreaked havoc under the Third Reich, and paralysed the former East Germany.

Where Schroder has flirted with Moscow and Beijing, Merkel would look firmly towards Washington and London. She knows that Germany has always fared best when aligned with the west, and especially with the Anglosphere; yet she has cultivated not only Bush and Blair but also the New Europe, particularly Poland and the Baltic states. Even since 1945, Germans have not always treated their smaller neighbours to the east with respect, and it is part of Merkel's appeal that she acknowledges this.

The odds are against any leader turning Germany around quickly. As Tony Blair put it with British understatement, after seven years "Gerhard has proven his courage by starting important reforms", implying that somebody else will have to complete them. If Merkel can survive the envy of her own colleagues, overcome the extreme conservatism of the political system and enthuse a more than usually cynical electorate, she might just succeed where Schroder has manifestly failed.

b) Lost in the squabbling: the "French model" -- by David Lawday

Much may be made by cartoonists of Jacques Chirac's blurred vision, but a minor stroke suffered by the 72-year-old president has sharpened the political focus: the Chirac age - an age rooted in the paternalist legacy of Charles de Gaulle - is over, and a shift in France's political identity is at hand. The difficulty lies in disengaging from the "French model", put in place from the 1960s, without losing its social blessings.

The Chirac age stretches back much further than the ten years of his presidency: he has been at or near the pinnacle of power since first becoming prime minister in 1974, and has learned in those years that the way to stay at the top is to alter as little as possible a system built on economic regulation and generous welfare.

That was all right as long as the French model was working, which it did pretty satisfactorily for a long time. But if Chirac has not dared change anything, globalisation, high unemployment, a stagnating economy, the lure of Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism and a political phenomenon named Nicolas Sarkozy have changed things for him. There is little surface evidence that France has fallen from economic grace, but the figures are depressing. It is ordinary people on average wages, and the young in particular, who are most unnerved. These are the voters who killed the European constitution, not out of marked disaffection with Europe, but out of fear of losing their jobs and frustration at their government's failure to reduce unemployment.

For many "little people" life feels precarious. Immigration does not help, though immigrants are plainly needed. Besides shock and pity, the commonest reaction to this year's fires that destroyed three central Paris hotels and hostels used by African immigrants seemed to be resentment that they were there at all. Dozens died.

The way out for increasing numbers, it seems, is to get out. Estimates that 400,000 French citizens have elected to improve things for themselves in Britain may prove exaggerated, but the prospect of paying roughly half the tax demanded of them in France is tempting. As they now say, the British go to France to relax, and the French go to Britain to work. It is a matter of particular chagrin that the standard around which debate on policy in Europe now turns is Blairism, which Chirac protests he abhors.

Chirac's stroke, while apparently not disabling, abruptly alters the landscape: his supporters can no longer promote the myth that he will stand again for president in just over 18 months' time to defend the French model. It was, besides, a myth maintained to save him from becoming a lamer duck than he already is.

It won't be events in Germany that decide which way France turns; it will be how the home political debate evolves on economic liberalism - or, to twist the knife, on Blairism. Angela Merkel gets no ecstatic reviews in Paris. To begin with, France's rejection of the EU constitution puts the incoming German chancellor in the front saddle of the Franco-German tandem that customarily leads Europe, and it is hard for the French to envisage Merkel at the handlebars. The trouble is that those who are up for the task of remodelling the French system are engaged in a furious round of ego-politics that takes precedence over reform.

Whatever the next president of France lacks, it will not be self-esteem. The man who prizes himself most is Sarkozy, the interior minister and unofficial co-head of government, but Chirac's stroke has encouraged a whole host of factional chiefs on both right and left to jump forward. Forget party unity, for- get party discipline. This is each for himself.

Across Chirac's sickbed, as it were, "Sarko" and his supposed partner at the head of government, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, have been flailing at each other as if the presidential election set for 2007 were due next week. The president hadn't spent his first day in hospital before Sarkozy was demanding a "rupture" with the economic policies pursued by the government he co-directs. Twice he proposed a shift to Blairite liberalism to the UMP, the conservative majority party in parliament which he also leads. Sarkozy's blows seem aimed less at Chirac than at Villepin, who continues to insist on preserving the French model as the basis for any economic initiative.

Villepin it was who amused globalisers by demanding "economic patriotism" from French business. His pledge to improve the turgid economy during his first hundred days as premier - which ended on 8 September - turned out to be as inconclusive as it was rash, though unemployment has edged down a shade and his popularity has risen. Predictably, the results are rubbished by the Sarkozy camp as designed only to underpin Villepin's personal standing. If anyone throws himself around with quite the vigour of Sarkozy, it is the prime minister.

That neither Villepin nor Sarkozy, still king of the opinion polls, had an inkling of Chirac's hospitalisation until the day after it occurred has only made them crosser with each other. It did not look good, but at least the prime minister had the satisfaction of replacing Chirac at the summit-level UN General Assembly in New York, where he was aiming to face off with the bully he had latterly confronted over the Iraq war, President Bush.

Things are little better on the left. It is Socialist Party tradition, particularly in opposition, to split into "currents", each led by a chief with an eye on the presidency. Some room might have remained for harmony if they hadn't skewered themselves in the EU referendum. Having opted formally for Yes, the party made a spectacle of itself by providing the winning votes for No.

The Socialist ego-trippers begin with Laurent Fabius, architect of his party's collapse on Europe. Fabius, a former prime minister no less patrician than Villepin, pins his personal hopes on taking the party hard left, untainted by the "coldness" of Blairism. This allows him, incongruously, to paint his rivals as rightists or cheerleaders for job-stealing globalisation. Lined up against him are Francois Hollande, the party's uninspiring presi- dent, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, its economic brain, Jack Lang, the faded culture icon, and Martine Aubry, mother of the left's crowning achievement in recent years, the 35-hour week. They are heading for a showdown at a party congress in November.

Fabius has painted himself into an awkward corner from which he seems unlikely to escape. Sarko, who has Tony Blair's persuasive way with words, knows where he wants to go but carries a potential for self-destruction. Villepin, like the remaining Socialist contenders, avoids straight commitment on changing the French model. It is a safe bet, though, that all three men will now gravitate, however quietly or broodingly, towards a break with French tradition. Farewell the 35-hour week.