GMF - The German Marshall Fund of the United States - Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation

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You're a woman: that's nice, it does make a cabinet meeting look better these days. You have the brains, experience and b... er, guts for a top-echelon political job? Good, good. And you're - German. Oh dear. In politics (make that: in the workplace), German women remain about a decade behind their American, French or British counterparts. America, Sweden, Spain, Norway and Turkey, to name a few, have all had or currently have women as national security advisers, foreign ministers, defence ministers. Germany has had none of the above. You grew up in East Germany? (Pregnant pause.) You do realise that very few of you have made it into top politics at all since 1989, and most have disappeared again without a trace?

Indeed, where other countries have glass ceilings for women, Germany has triple-reinforced concrete and it gets thicker the farther east you go. Or it used to. Then Angela Merkel, daughter of an East German Protestant pastor, became Germany's first female chancellor on 22 November 2005. Surveys give her a good chance for re-election in the federal vote on 27 September. She's just been named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes magazine for the third time in a row. She's even had a Barbie doll named after her, a distinction which puts her in super-heroine orbit with Oprah Winfrey (and which still eludes Hillary Clinton).

Perhaps the 55-year-old chancellor would be the first to admit that she was a long shot for the part. Said to be witty and warm in private, her public persona ranges the gamut from dry to ultra-dry. The silky eloquence of an Obama is alien to Merkel. Not for her the steely, gym-trained chic of a Condi Rice, either. Merkel grimly submitted to an executive fashion makeover after the media sneered at her frumpy look; now she clearly relishes shining out in jewel-toned jackets from a forest of dark suits at G20 meetings.

 And, just once, she stunned the nation by wearing a deep blue evening dress with a fjord-like cleavage and pearls to an opera in Oslo. Quite possibly that was when a lot of Germans first woke up to the fact that their head of government was female. But, ordinarily, Merkel still wears less make-up and hairspray on the job than Silvio Berlusconi on vacation.

 Certainly her origins would appear to make Angela Merkel an unlikely successor to a line of titans in German postwar history: Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl. Few would accord the same status to her immediate predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, yet his raw charisma was beyond doubt. Merkel, a 35-year-old physicist when the Wall came down in 1989, was hand-picked by Kohl for the most patronising job in his post-reunification cabinet: minister for women and youth. She was palely unmemorable in this post and in the next cabinet, as minister for climate and environment. Kohl, busy burnishing his historical legacy and weeding out male rivals, called her "the girl".

Yet when Kohl found himself embroiled in a party financing scandal in 1999, it was Merkel, not one of the half-dozen remaining young conservative "warlords", who acted decisively. She rose from the depths of her patron's capacious shadow and felled him with one lethal bite to the jugular: a signed piece on the front page of Germany's most respected conservative daily, calling for his resignation. It made her the unquestioned leader of the pack - and head of the party.

Where did she find the strength for this audacious patricide? A decade earlier, the clever grocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher had devastated Tory toffs with a gale-force combination of vicious class resentment and sexy ankles. The Angela Merkel who entered politics in 1989, in contrast, must have been bemused by a generation of West German peers who had grown up thinking of themselves as "grandsons". They were heirs, not founders; tacticians, not strategists, trained to trot complacently within the narrow rails of limited sovereignty. The new post-cold war world was confusing and disorienting for them.

For her, it was liberation. Her secret eastern weapon was the blandness with which the purposeful learn to cloak themselves in authoritarian systems. To it she added the physicist's appreciation of the simple elegance with which a lever may be applied to a hidden weak spot in a complex structure and, with a minimum of force, bring it all crashing down. This is a woman, after all, who on her desk in the chancellor's office keeps a framed picture of Catherine the Great: a princess from Saxony who travelled far from home to subdue a court teeming with dark and dangerous tribal rivalries, and from there to rule an alien empire.

Six years after subduing the conservative party, Angela Merkel was elected leader of the country. For most of the ensuing four years, she has been the best-regarded politician in Germany; in fact, her popularity ratings clearly exceed those of her party. Voters like her level-headedness and the fact that she is still occasionally seen doing her own shopping. Officials are impressed by her fiercely retentive memory for the details of her ministers' portfolios.

 With few exceptions, she has kept potential rivals to heel; the ones who tried to break away, such as Roland Koch, minister-president of the state of Hesse, came to grief over their own ambition, ruefully licking their wounds. Koch's Bavarian counterpart, Horst Seehofer, Merkel's main internal challenger, insists on being a maverick. Yet if you enter his name together with the word "popularity" on Der Spiegel magazine's website, you get the entry for Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the 37-year-old economics minister and shooting star who is his most serious rival and has recently surpassed even Merkel's ratings.

As for the coming election, polls have given Merkel's Christian Democratic Union a stable 35-36% of the vote for the last eight months. With about 16% for the liberal Free Democrats, this would enable her to end her much-disliked grand coalition and form a centre-right government for the first time since 1998.

 Victory is by no means guaranteed, as a third of the voters remain undecided. But the likelihood of the rival Social Democrats catching up dramatically (as they did in 2005) and forcing a rerun of the grand coalition is much reduced. Merkel's challenger this time around, foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is a far less effective campaigner than was Schröder. Moreover, Merkel has cannily moved her party to the left, thereby preempting the accusations of neoliberalism that nearly lost her the election four years ago - and squeezing the Social Democrats against the Left party, a motley grouping of former East German communists, renegade Social Democrats and fossilised holdovers from the old West Germany's extreme left. Germany's unexpectedly swift recovery from the economic crisis also helps.

This prospect raises a fascinating question: would an Angela Merkel at the helm of a centre-right government find herself liberated once more, this time to pursue genuine economic and social reform? Currently, the conservatives and the liberals enjoy a comfortable majority in the Bundesrat, the federal legislature's second chamber, which has extensive co-decision-making powers capable of producing gridlock when majorities in both chambers are not aligned. This may give a second Merkel government a rare window for change. It could, however, lead to a new polarisation and fragmentation of the German political landscape.

But which is the real Merkel? The fighter who wrested power from her political father and her rivals? Who held a flaming reform speech at a convention in Leipzig in 2003? Who rebalanced Germany's friendships and alliances, assured the central Europeans of her government's support, told off the Russians and the Americans as needed, met the Dalai Lama, and pointed out the drawbacks of retreating from nuclear power? Who oversaw the modernisation of family and migration policies?

Or the one who opportunistically, even ruthlessly, dropped old allies before the last elections and backtracked when it became clear that her reformist zeal could cost her the chancellorship? Who gritted her teeth and resigned herself to moderating lowest-common denominator policies in order to shepherd the grand coalition through a full term? Who let the big gas companies run energy policy and dithered through the first months of the economic crisis? And who, after fostering a near-motherly relationship with George W Bush, seems oddly diminished next to Barack Obama?

Looking back on Merkel's mixed record, it's impossible to say what history's judgment of a second tenure will be: is she a strategist or a tactician? A she-wolf in sheep's clothing - or a sheepdog? It does matter, given the dearth of leadership elsewhere in Europe, and the many problems that await energetic action: from Afghanistan to banking regulation to climate change, from tax, health and pension reform, to repairing the EU and Nato. Not to mention the equality of women.

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