Gerhard Schroder
(born April 7, 1944, Mossenberg, near Detmold, Germany) is a German politician who was the
chancellor
of
Germany
from 1998 to 2005.
Having practiced law in
Hannover
, Schroder was elected to the
Bundestag
(lower house of parliament) in 1980 and served there until 1986, when he lost an election for premier of the state of
Lower Saxony
. He led the
Social Democratic Party
(SPD) opposition in the state parliament until he was elected to the premiership in 1990. The SPD joined with the Greens, a left-leaning environmentalist party, in a “Red-Green”
coalition government
until 1994, when the SPD won a clear majority. Schroder’s strong showing in the March 1998 state elections clinched his nomination as the party’s candidate for federal chancellor, and in the fall of 1998 he led the SPD to electoral victory and formed a coalition government with the Greens.
As chancellor, Schroder was concerned with promoting European
integration
, reducing Germany’s high rate of unemployment, limiting the use of
nuclear power
in energy production (a goal that was important to his coalition partners, the Greens), and furthering the economic reconstruction of eastern Germany. His government liberalized German laws on citizenship, allowing children of foreign parents to assume dual nationality and to choose their preferred nationality on entering adulthood, and
deployed
German troops in
Kosovo
(1999) and
Afghanistan
(2001). Despite economic stagnation and continuing high unemployment, Schroder was reelected as chancellor in 2002.
The early part of his second term was dominated by a diplomatic confrontation between members of the
United Nations
(UN) Security Council, which then included Germany, over UN efforts to ensure that
Iraq
did not continue to possess biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. In November 2002 Germany supported a Security Council resolution requiring the return to
Iraq
of weapons inspectors, who had been withdrawn in 1998. In December, U.S. President
George W. Bush
charged that Iraq had failed to cooperate fully with the weapons inspectors; two months later, the United Kingdom, the
United States
, and Spain introduced a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. Schroder, along with French President
Jacques Chirac
and Russian President
Vladimir Putin
, publicly opposed the resolution, proposing instead a toughened inspections
regime
. The disagreement led to a major rift in German-American relations. When the United States and the United Kingdom led an attack on Iraq in March 2003, Schroder expressed his
country’s
strong opposition to the campaign.
On the domestic front, Germany’s economy continued to worsen, and in 2003 Schroder announced a major reform program, which included cuts to the country’s generous welfare system. The proposed changes proved unpopular, especially with Germany’s powerful unions, and in 2004 Schroder stepped down as party leader. After the SPD’s poor showing in the 2005 regional elections, Schroder engineered an early general election, in which the
Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) and its sister party, the
Christian Social Union
, won a narrow victory but failed to capture a majority. Following weeks of negotiations, a
coalition
government was created with
Angela Merkel
of the CDU as chancellor. Schroder declined a cabinet position in the new administration.