Gerhard Schröder

Gerhard Schröder grew up in a poor family in Lippe, earned his school qualifications at evening classes and became a lawyer in Hanover. He led the Young Socialists, sat in the Bundestag from 1980 and governed Lower Saxony from 1990. In 1998 he defeated Helmut Kohl and formed a coalition with the Greens, with Joschka Fischer as foreign minister. After losing his majority in the Bundesrat he sought early elections in 2005 and was succeeded by Angela Merkel. He holds no public office today and remains an SPD member after a party arbitration ruling in 2023.

Supporters see Schröder as a modernizer who pushed his party toward the political centre and whose Agenda 2010 restructured an expensive welfare system, and many Germans backed his refusal to join the Iraq war. Critics on the left argued that the reforms cut benefits for the unemployed and split the SPD. His later business career is his most serious controversy. Weeks after leaving office he became head of the shareholders' committee of Nord Stream AG, a project his government had backed, and he later chaired the board of Russia's state oil company Rosneft. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he gave up the Rosneft chairmanship and did not join Gazprom's board, but he did not distance himself from Putin. The Bundestag budget committee withdrew funding for his former chancellor's office, and he gave up his honorary citizenship of Hanover while proceedings to revoke it were under way.