A Bittersweet Departure for Germany

A leader of sporadic ambition and unfulfilled promise, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder appears to be on his way to a political afterlife of memoir writing and high-priced speeches.

Schroeder is set to leave office this month after seven years of leadership that failed to reinvent the welfare state but restored Germans’ confidence in their country’s handling of world affairs, most notably through his vigorous opposition to the Iraq war. He has governed in a caretaker limbo since an inconclusive election in September led to skirmishing over a new government between his Social Democrats and conservative Christian Democrats.

Charismatic and sometimes brash, Schroeder often seemed to navigate without a vision. He announced with fanfare his plan for economic and social reforms, known as Agenda 2010, but failed to articulate why Germans should endure cutbacks to their generous social welfare state. He promised to end persistent unemployment but had few solutions as joblessness last year rose to its highest level since the 1930s.

Yet he motored on, unflappable on the campaign trail and in the halls of Parliament. Germans may not have liked the policies, but they liked the man. Born at the end of World War II, the 61-year-old Schroeder was a postwar chancellor who possessed an air of entitlement that urged new generations of Germans to move beyond the stains of the Nazi era and the Cold War.

He was the first chancellor to bring Germany to the world stage as “a normal country able to define its own interests without being considered nationalistic,” said Matthias Machnig, a consultant who ran one of Schroeder’s campaigns. “He clearly brought a new approach to foreign policy.”

A tactical fighter with bobbing eyebrows, Schroeder performed best at the brink of defeat. In 2002, down in the polls by almost 20 percentage points, he led the Social Democrats to a startling reelection victory against the Christian Democrats. The turnaround was credited to Schroeder’s shrewd exploitation of German opposition to the Iraq war, and his everyman ability to connect with and provide assistance for families who lost homes in a spate of summer floods.

That same magic nearly worked in September, when Schroeder trailed again by double digits to come to within 1 percentage point of the Christian Democrats. Political chaos ensued as the two mainstream rival parties were forced into a coalition. A new government has been delayed by policy negotiations, but Parliament is expected in coming weeks to name conservative Angela Merkel as Germany’s first female chancellor.

Schroeder will most likely head home to Hanover to write and possibly resume his law practice. The son of a cleaning woman widowed by the war, Schroeder grew up a poor outsider in Lower Saxony. As a child he promised his mother, Erika, often hounded by bill collectors, that he would one day park a Mercedes in front of her house. After he was elected governor of Lower Saxony in 1990, he pulled up in a limo.

Eight years later, Schroeder and the Social Democrats defeated Chancellor Helmut Kohl to lead this country of 82 million.

The political landscape will lose a bit of feisty, and sometimes poignant, color: Schroeder once successfully sued to stop publication of a news story that suggested he dyed his hair -- an assertion he vehemently denied for years. He enjoyed lighting cigars and debating policy in the nation’s beer-scented anterooms, and many Germans empathized with him when he visited Romania in 2004 and paused at the grave of a German soldier he never met: his father.

A photographer caught the moment. “This was a postwar image from another world: a son crying at the grave of his father,” wrote the magazine Der Spiegel. “But the photo from Romania doesn’t mirror any particular political program. Instead it offers a tiny glimpse of a gaping European wound caused by a world war of Germany’s making that still bleeds from time to time today.”

Schroeder’s nemesis was not the past, but a bloated welfare state that saddled Europe’s largest economy with near-zero growth and 11.6% unemployment. These pressures grew amid the troubling and expensive backdrop of German reunification. Stitching the nation together has cost more than $1 trillion, and the slumping mill towns of the east have showed little signs of revival.

In what began as a bold quest for reform, Schroeder urged the nation to accept cuts to healthcare and other entitlements that account for 48% of the budget. He had minor successes, including trims to benefits for long-term unemployed. But he failed to appease industry calls for significantly reduced social spending and to chasten the ultra-liberals in his own party, leaving him powerless to push a more ambitious agenda through Parliament.

“He was a very pragmatic politician without a vision. But he was the chancellor who finally broke the gridlock we have had in regard to reforms,” said Peter Loesche, a political scientist at Goettingen University. “Agenda 2010 is a milestone in German politics. He was courageous to try and impose it on his own [constituency], and obviously he had to give in.”

The fractures within the Social Democrats forced the chancellor to call early elections. For all his media savvy, analysts say, Schroeder was unable to convince voters that shrinking the welfare state would make it stronger against globalization.

The chancellor’s attempts to remake Germany coaxed the nation toward a wider international role. His foreign policy attempted to position Germany as a “middle power” that could act a bridge in transatlantic and European relations.

In one of its most passionate debates in decades, Parliament in 1999 voted to send peacekeeping troops to Kosovo. The decision broke the post-World War II psychological barrier against dispatching German troops to other countries. Schroeder argued that Germany had to accept its responsibility in a new Europe.

The chancellor agreed to send soldiers to help U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but Schroeder’s refusal to deploy German troops to Iraq revealed Berlin’s evolving independent streak.

“During my leadership, Germany won’t take part in any attack on Iraq,” Schroeder said. The policy damaged relations with the Bush administration and reminded both countries that Cold War alliances were being recalibrated.

Germany under Schroeder became a “counterpoint to U.S. politics in the last three or four years,” said Lothar Probst, a political analyst at Bremen University. “People in Europe said he was courageous.”

Schroeder also irritated Washington with his friendship with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who helped him and his fourth wife, Doris Schroeder-Koepf, adopt a Russian child in 2004. Schroeder was often criticized in the German media for not condemning Moscow’s harsh military action in Chechnya. His warm relationship with Putin and strained one with Bush “was one of the weaker points of his chancellorship,” Probst said.

“There’s a certain shadow over his exit,” said Probst, citing Schroeder’s efforts at reforming the welfare state. “He didn’t get all his social and economic programs through, but I think his chancellorship will be viewed better by historians than he is today.”