Gerhard Schröder

I

Introduction

Gerhard Schröder, born in 1944, German politician and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1998-2005). In federal elections in September 1998 a center-left coalition led by Schröder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) defeated the center-right coalition government of Helmut Kohl, the longest serving German chancellor of the 20th century.

Gerhard Schröder was born in Mossenberg, a small town in Germany’s northern state of Lower Saxony. His father, a German soldier during World War II (1939-1945), was killed shortly after his son’s birth, and Schröder was raised by his mother, who worked as a cleaning woman. At the age of 14 Schröder dropped out of school to work. He later attended night school and graduated with a high school degree at the age of 22. Schröder earned a law degree from the University of Göttingen in 1976, and he began to practice law in Hannover in 1978.

II

Early Political Career

As a student at Göttingen, Schröder took an interest in socialism and the ideas of German political philosopher Karl Marx, and he also became active in Germany’s growing antinuclear movement. In 1978 he became president of the Jusos, the youth wing of the SPD. Two years later, in 1980, he won a seat in the Bundestag (Federal Assembly), the lower house of the German parliament.

In 1986 Schröder left his post in the Bundestag to run as the SPD’s candidate for minister-president (prime minister) of Lower Saxony. However, the SPD failed to win a majority in the state elections, and Schröder spent the next four years as opposition leader in the state parliament. In the 1990 elections the SPD was victorious, and Schröder became minister-president, leaving his legal career to focus on politics. Schröder easily won a second term in 1994. In March 1998 Schröder won a third term by a landslide, a triumph that helped him secure the SPD’s nomination for chancellor in the federal elections in September 1998.

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During the campaign, Schröder attempted to win over moderate voters to the SPD, a party with strong left-wing roots. He cultivated an image as a centrist who would moderate some of the SPD’s traditional leftist postures and pursue policies friendly to business. At the same time, Schröder’s comparative youth and reputation as a forward-looking figure had a strong appeal.

Schröder’s SPD emerged from the elections with 40.9 percent of the vote compared to 35.1 percent for Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU). Shortly after the elections, the SPD formed a coalition with the environmentalist Green Party (see Green Parties), which had emerged from the voting as the third strongest party. The Green Party’s 6.7 percent share of the vote gave Schröder a working majority. This Red-Green coalition, as it came to be called, marked the first time that the Green Party had won representation in Germany’s national government.

Although Schröder and the SPD were obliged to rely on the Green Party to make up their coalition platform, the key economic ministries and policy planks remained broadly in the hands of pragmatists. The new government’s legislative program called for reducing taxes for low-income families, restructuring the military, easing barriers to German citizenship for immigrants, and, perhaps most controversially, closing nuclear power plants in Germany. Schröder said his top priority would be to reduce Germany’s high unemployment, which reached a high of 12.6 percent nationally in February 1998.

III

First Term as Chancellor

The new coalition’s first six months in office were marked by a power struggle between Chancellor Schröder and his finance minister, SPD chairman Oskar Lafontaine, known for his traditional socialist views. Lafontaine caused concern in Germany and throughout the European Union (EU) for his tax-reform proposals and efforts to influence the setting of interest rates at the European Central Bank (ECB). The power struggle culminated with Lafontaine’s sudden resignation in March 1999, giving Schröder greater control over his government as well as the leadership of the SPD as party chairman.

Also in March 1999 Schröder backed military strikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) over the actions of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY, see Serbia and Montenegro) in Kosovo. In so doing, the German air force flew in conflict for the first time since World War II. In August 1999 Schröder became the first chancellor of the postwar period to govern a united Germany from Berlin, the historic German capital. In December of that year Schröder signed a much-heralded agreement to establish a $5.2 billion compensation fund for people who worked as slave laborers and forced laborers during Germany’s Nazi era.

In July 2000 Schröder secured the passage of legislation that reduced taxes by $25 billion—the largest tax cut in Germany’s postwar history. Two months later Schröder began legal moves to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a right-wing, anti-immigrant party blamed for a spate of racist attacks. Germany’s constitution allows the state to outlaw parties deemed undemocratic. However, in March 2003 Germany’s constitutional court ruled that the ban could not be upheld because government informants planted in the NPD may have acted to discredit it.

After the September 11 attacks on the United States by terrorists in 2001, Schröder backed a bill to provide 3,900 German troops for the U.S.-led war against terrorism. To win approval for the measure, opposed by many members of the Green Party, Schröder declared that failure to pass the bill would amount to a vote of no confidence in his government. Schröder’s gamble succeeded, and the troops were deployed in Afghanistan.

IV

Second Term as Chancellor

Schröder and his SPD-led coalition retained power by a narrow margin in the national elections of September 2002, defeating a CDU/CSU challenge led by Bavarian minister-president Edmund Stoiber. The SPD won about 38.5 percent of the vote, a showing matched by the CDU/CSU. However, the Green Party achieved its best showing ever, about 8.6 percent of the vote, giving Schröder’s government a slender majority in the Bundestag. During the campaign, Schröder attempted to rally support for his coalition with a pledge to keep Germany out of a U.S.-led war against Iraq. Schröder’s antiwar message met with approval among many German voters, but it drew a sharp rebuke from the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush.

The top domestic priority of Schröder’s new government was reducing unemployment, which had persistently hovered at about 10 percent. Schröder announced that his government would move to adopt a series of economic reforms, labeled Agenda 2010, intended to promote economic growth. These included measures to reform the labor market and cut unemployment benefits and other social welfare expenditures.

Following the election Schröder initially sought to mend the diplomatic rift in German-U.S. relations that had opened over his opposition to possible U.S. military action against Iraq. In November 2002 Schröder’s cabinet endorsed a one-year extension of the deployment of 3,900 German troops in Afghanistan. However, Schröder’s continued opposition to a U.S.-led war in Iraq further distanced Germany from the United States. In March 2003 Schröder, joined by the governments of France and Russia, vowed to oppose a United Nations (UN) resolution sought by the Bush administration to authorize a war against Iraq; the war began later that month without UN approval (see U.S.-Iraq War).

Schröder won parliamentary approval for his economic reform program in December 2003, despite the program’s unpopularity among factions within the SPD, including Germany’s trade unions, and across the country as a whole. In February 2004 Schröder surrendered the leadership of the SPD, a position he had occupied since 1999, saying he wanted to concentrate on his responsibilities as chancellor. Franz Muentefering succeeded Schröder as SPD leader.

In May 2005 Schröder’s party lost a key regional election. Facing resistance to his reforms, Schröder called for and then deliberately lost a confidence vote in the German Bundestag to force new elections in September. In a close election the SPD lost to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and Schröder was replaced as chancellor by CDU leader Angela Merkel.