Gerhard Schröder
Gerhard Schröder was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, pushed through the reforms that revived its economy and split his party, and afterwards took paid positions with Russian state energy companies. Born in Mossenberg in 1944, his father was killed in Romania weeks later; he was raised in poverty by a cleaner, left school at fourteen, and worked in retail while taking evening classes to qualify for university. He studied law at Göttingen, became a lawyer, and led the Young Socialists. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1980, became minister-president of Lower Saxony in 1990, and served on Volkswagen's supervisory board. He won in 1998 in coalition with the Greens, ending sixteen years of Helmut Kohl. The government legislated the nuclear phase-out, the renewable energy law that drove Germany's solar and wind expansion, and citizenship reform easing naturalisation. He committed German forces to combat for the first time since 1945, in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001, and then refused to join the Iraq war in 2003, campaigning on that refusal. Agenda 2010, announced in 2003, cut unemployment benefits and merged them with social assistance in the Hartz IV reforms, loosened dismissal protection and expanded low-wage work. Unemployment fell over the following decade and German competitiveness rose sharply; the party lost hundreds of thousands of members, and its left split away to form what became Die Linke. He called an early election in 2005 and narrowly lost to Angela Merkel. Weeks after leaving office he took the chairmanship of the Nord Stream shareholders' committee, and later roles with Rosneft and Gazprom. He refused to condemn Vladimir Putin after the 2022 invasion and lost his parliamentary privileges.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: German
- Roles: Chancellor of Germany (1998–2005)
