Germany's 'Iron Lady' to challenge Schröder

She has been compared to Margaret Thatcher and now Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative leader, is poised to follow the "Iron Lady" by becoming the first woman to run for Chancellor in elections this autumn.

Two conservative politicians, regarded as Mrs Merkel's main competitors, cleared the way for the 50-year-old east German after publicly endorsing her as the party's front-runner. The Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, took the high-risk decision to call a general election a year early after his ruling Social Democrats suffered devastating losses in the former stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia in a state election on Sunday.

Roland Koch, the Christian Democrat (CDU) prime minister of Hesse state, one of the conservatives who had been hotly tipped to run for the job, said: "The Chancellor candidate will be Angela Merkel of course. I don't know anyone in the party who thinks otherwise."

His views were echoed by Christian Wulff, the CDU prime minister of Lower Saxony. The twin endorsement meant that a conservative party meeting expected to declare Mrs Merkel's candidacy next Monday is likely to be little more than a formality.

Mrs Merkel declined to acknowledge that she was in line for the post yesterday. "Our job is to take notice of the fears and worries of voters and I am optimistic that we will be in a better position to solve Germany's problems," she said.

Opinion polls suggested that her party was poised to seize power from Mr Schröder's ailing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in the election. A survey for German television gave the Christian Democrats 46 per cent, compared with 29 per cent for the SPD.

Mr Schröder's failure to tackle Germany's deepening unemployment problem, with five million out of work, despite unpopular reforms designed to kick-start the economy, was cited as the main reason.

The Chancellor's surprise decision to call an early election came as a political bombshell to the opposition conservatives and grassroots members of his own party. Mr Schröder proposed 1 July as the date for a vote of confidence yesterday. He will instruct his party to vote against him, paving the way for the President to dissolve parliament and call an election.

Several commentators speculated that Mr Schröder's gamble was aimed at presenting voters with a choice between himself and the untried and less charismatic figure of Mrs Merkel. Despite comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Merkel has earned the less flattering nickname of "Iron Girl".

As an east German and a Protestant, many conservatives regard her as being out of step with the party's largely Catholic, middle-class west German mainstream. A protégé of Germany's "unification" chancellor, Helmut Kohl, Mrs Merkel was catapulted to the position of conservative leader five years ago, at the height of a slush-fund scandal engulfing the party.

Her appointment was designed to show that the conservatives had made a clean break with a corrupt past. Yet despite being party leader, Mrs Merkel was forced out of the running to be candidate for Chancellor in the 2002 election when the job was given to Edmund Stoiber, the charismatic right-wing Bavarian prime minister.

Despite Mr Schröder's troubles, some commentators doubted Mrs Merkel would be prepared for a snap election. "Mrs Merkel's programme has hardly been prepared," said Franz Walter, a political analyst at Göttingen University.

"Half of the people who are likely to vote for her don't want radical market reforms at all. They just want stability. The remainder do want substantial deregulation. The differences are so great that the party is certain to run into big problems."