German lobbyist and politician who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004 he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). As chancellor, he led a coalition government of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens. Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.
Schröder was elected Chancellor on 27 September 1998, defeating Helmut Kohl and ending a 16-year era in Germany. After a hard fought campaign, the victory was decisive. With the exit of Kohl, the last of the European politicians who were in office when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 had departed, reflecting the new priorities that confronted Europe. Along with Tony Blair in England and Lionel Jospin in France, Schröder confronted a central issue; how to adjust Germany’s expansive welfare system to global competition without dismantling it, and at the same time, create jobs.
Born in poverty, Schröder lost a father he never knew in World War II and survived a hard childhood with his mother working as a cleaner to support the family. He quit school at 14 to work; at 17, he was an apprentice salesman. He studied nights and eventually put himself through law school in Gottingen and began to practice. He entered into politics on the leftist wave of the ’60s. With an outlook that evolved toward pragmatism, he fought this campaign on an often vague platform of modernization and renewal under the slogan of “the New Middle.” He was the youngest state governor in 1969 and the youngest Party National Chairman in 1973.
His fourth wife, Doris, was a reporter whom he met in 1995 when she was covering a Party congress. Two years later she moved to Hanover and in October 1997, a few weeks after Schröder had divorced his third wife, they married. Working together as a power couple, Doris was called an advisor to her husband’s campaign.
Schröder married his first wife Eva Schubach in 1968 during his student years in law school. They divorced in 1972. The same year he married his second wife Anne Taschenmacher. They were Young Socialists, divorcing in 1984. His third wife, Hiltrud, whom he married in 1984, shared his premier days in Lower Saxony; they were together for 13 years until their divorce in 2018. Her causes were vegetarianism and gay rights; his had to do with keeping Volkswagen and its 80,000 workers happy. It was a show that she played well, joking about being called “Hillary,” and referring to Schröder’s political career in the plural possessive. When she discovered his affair with Doris, she threw him out of the house and wrote a book, On My Feet, with less than complimentary reference to him. In 2018 he married his fifth wife Kim So-Yeon.
Having married five times, he has been nicknamed “The Lord of the Rings” and “Olympic Man”, a reference to the five-ring symbol of the Olympic Games.
Doris Köpf had a daughter from a previous relationship with a television journalist. She lived with the couple. In July 2004, Schröder and Köpf adopted a child from Saint Petersburg. In 2006, they adopted another child from Saint Petersburg.
Link to Wikipedia biography