DORIS SCHRÖDER-KOPF, the 41-year-old fourth wife of the German Chancellor, was behind the leader’s high-risk decision to call a snap election and prompt the biggest shake-up in national politics for almost a decade.

The revelation confirms the view in Berlin that Frau Schröder-Kopf has become the most powerful political wife in Europe. It was she who gave her husband the decisive nudge during a crisis meeting in March at the family villa in Hanover.

The Schröders had been joined by Franz Müntefering, the chairman of the Social Democrats, and both men agreed that the situation looked dismal. “Suddenly Doris drew into the conversation concepts like ‘vote of confidence’ and ‘early elections’,” Ulrike Posche, one of Germany’s best-informed political insiders, said in yesterday ’s Stern magazine. “She reminded them about the humiliating fall of Helmut Schmidt in 1982; she was 21 at the time and Schmidt was the Chancellor of her youth.”

Doris told Gerhard that she did not want him to end the same way. Within days the Chancellor had taken up the theme as his own and was trying to persuade his colleagues that a snap election — an unusual constitutional device in Germany — was the way forward.

Doris Schröder-Kopf’s influence on the Chancellor, always big, has been growing. “Doris. Chooses the portraits and pictures of her husband. Every manuscript, every newspaper interview, every speech of the Chancellor passes first through her fax machine in Hanover,” the magazine reports.

Sources in the Government say that this is an exaggeration. If so, it is only a slight one. Frau Schröder-Kopf — a diminutive blonde — is a political player. She visits the Putins without her husband.

No other wife of a German leader has developed such an intimate relationship with the Kremlin. At a critical moment in the row between America and Germany over the Iraq war, Frau Schröder was watching her husband on television. Seizing the moment she rang the Chancellor on his secret mobile phone number and asked to speak to Jacques Chirac, the French President, who was standing nearby. While they were conducting an apparently flirtatious conversation, Herr Schröder was left with nowhere to turn apart from to his other neighbour, President Bush. Doris had successfully engineered the first tentative conversation between the two estranged leaders.

It was at Doris’s initiative that the Chancellor’s market reform programme was packaged as “Agenda 2010”. As early as 1997 — just after their marriage and before her husband had even been elected Chancellor, she was urging him to lobby for Turkish membership of the European Union.

Since then her confidence has grown and the kitchen cabinet has become a crucial part of Herr Schröder’s decision- making apparatus. Doris is the first wife of a German leader to have an office in the Chancellery, theoretically for her charity work. Increasingly,though, it has become a political powerbase. Her chief concern has been to protect the public image of her husband: she urged him to take out injunctions against magazines claiming that he dyed his hair and hinting at a romance with one of his female bodyguards.

For a while the influence of Doris was channelled through Bela Anda, the government spokesman. Both Herr Anda and Frau Schröder-Kopf had worked for Bild newspaper. Now she has moved beyond image projection and is set to become, from next month, a key member of the re-election team. First the Chancellor has to go through the procedure, next Friday, of submitting himself to a vote of no confidence. He has to lose before he can declare a general election.

Doris is said to be urging her husband to personalise the campaign against Angela Merkel. The Chancellor has a stepdaughter — Doris’s child by a previous relationship — a recently adopted Russian child, a dog and a cat. Frau Merkel is childless, rarely seen with her husband and has no pets. Frau Schröder-Kopf in some ways kicked off the election campaign last year by creating her own brand of dog products, using the Chancellor’s terrier as its centrepiece. The subtext of the campaign — profits were to go to a dog charity — is to show the Chancellor as warm compared with his Christian Democratic rival.

POLITICAL MASTERMIND

• Born 1963 in Bavaria, southern Germany
  
• Educated Catholic convent school
  
• Journalist for Bild, Focus magazine, freelance in New York
  
• Daughter Klara born 1991 (father Sven Kuntze, TV journalist)
  
• Married Gerhard Schröder (“it was love at the 50th fight”)
  
• Gerhard Schröder becomes Chancellor in 1998
  
• The Schröders adopted a three-year-old Russian girl, Viktoria, in 2004
  
• Doris declared “Woman of the Year” by Bunte magazine

  KITCHEN CABINETS

• Julia Agrippina The ambitious wife and niece of Claudius (Roman Emperor AD41-54) assumed high ceremonial powers and was rumoured to have poisoned her husband to enable her son, Nero, to take power
  
• Mary Bright The wife of the 18th-century British Whig Prime Minister Charles Wentworth was also his secretary and political adviser. Lord Newcastle said: “The little woman has her influence”
  
• Eleanor Roosevelt As well as tending to Franklin Delano Roosevelt after he was struck by polio, the US First Lady from 1933 to 1945 set a precedent by giving press conferences, lectures, radio broadcasts and writing a daily newspaper column called My Day
  
• Lucy Kibaki Wife of President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. In April she announced that her husband would stand for re-election in 2007

Times Recommends

• The lives of the Lehman ladies
• The training school for teenage Taleban