Word: merkel
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...tell that to Holger Peters, 24, who was cheering the Chancellor on in Magdeburg. "Schr?der has achieved a lot for Germany," he says. "[CDU candidate] Angela Merkel and the others don't have any arguments for improving the situation." Peters even likes the "one-euro jobs" that Schr?der introduced last year as part of his controversial economic reforms. Intended to reintegrate long-term unemployed into the labor market, the jobs are structured so that employers pay only ?1 per hour, with the rest of the employee's income covered by unemployment benefits. Skeptics say the system encourages wage dumping...
...Schr?der's campaign team hope things will pick up in the final weeks of the campaign, too. Nearly 30% of German voters still say they are undecided, and a televised debate scheduled for Sunday between Merkel and Schr?der could help the telegenic Chancellor. Team Schr?der also intends to step up its attacks on Merkel, in part by focusing on the CDU's plans for tax and health-care reform, which it says will benefit more affluent Germans and disadvantage poorer ones. "We have to make it clear to voters how unjust the CDU's program is," says Andrea Nahles...
...Merkel's manner belies a quiet revolution in European politics. If elected, she will become Germany's first female Chancellor, a big accomplishment in a political culture in which women still struggle against a glass ceiling. And she'd be the first Chancellor in a unified Germany to have grown up in the communist east. "Ten years ago, the idea that we'd have a female Chancellor from East Germany would have raised nothing but laughs," says political analyst Alfons Söllner. "Today it will make people proud...
...daughter of a Protestant minister, Merkel was born in Hamburg and grew up in the East German resort town of Templin. She joined the Young Pioneers, a communist youth group, but focused mainly on her studies. At home, her family talked politics nonstop, but, she said in her autobiography, "it was completely theoretical because we could not change anything." After studying physics at Leipzig University, she began looking for work. Applying for a job at a technical institute, she was approached by the secret police to spy on colleagues. She says she begged off, telling them she couldn't keep...
...Merkel received her introduction to Western politics when Helmut Kohl, Germany's larger-than-life Chancellor, tapped her as Minister for Women and Youth for his Cabinet in 1991. She established herself as both ambitious and willing to learn, outmaneuvering a succession of male colleagues to take the party leadership in 2000. "She's criticized for being timid," says political scientist Gerd Langguth, her biographer, "but she's a political panther...