He learned early on about the power of print and broadcast media and how to use it to package himself in a way appealing to voters, to test ideas and push national debates in the direction he wanted. Still, his determination and drive helped him climb steadily up the ranks of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), finally winning the chancellorship in 1998.īut on the way, he divorced three times, alienated many in his own party, and gained the reputation of a man driven by polls and popularity rather than by principle. His childhood was poor and he had to go to work at an early age, only finishing his secondary education at night. Schröder's private life has been remarkable, or as some might see it, remarkably messy. That woman, Doris Köpf, became wife number four. He had just admitted to her that he had been having an affair for eight weeks with a journalist in Munich. It happened in 1997, when Gerhard Schröder, then premier of the state of Lower Saxony, was thrown out of the house by wife number three, Hilu.
In Germany, the populace elected a man to lead their country who had left his wife for a woman 19 years his junior. In the United States, Bill Clinton's brief dalliance with intern Monica Lewinsky came close to costing him his office.
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