GERMANY’S first female Chancellor looked like a nervous schoolgirl yesterday, chewing her nails and typing out text messages before announcing that, yes, she had carried off the prize. “I’m fine, in a good mood,” she said in a voice drained of enthusiasm.

There has never been a German Chancellor so hemmed in, so weak. Half her Cabinet will be made up of Social Democrats who have shown her nothing but contempt. Other key ministries will be occupied by old rivals, such as Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian premier.

Everything hinges on her ability to persuade ordinary people of the need for reform. Yet nothing in her career so far indicates a populist touch.

Frau Merkel is a physicist, and her dearest wish is to lead a government of technocrats. “She would like to remove the sting from politics,” said a Social Democrat close to Gerhard Schröder, the outgoing Chancellor, “which goes to show that she has missed the point. We are in it for the sting.” Frau Merkel has no regional powerbase. She is disliked in her native eastern Germany and not completely understood in the west of the country. As a Protestant divorcée, she still has problems of acceptance by the conservative wing of her Christian Democrats.

Unlike her male counterparts in the party, she did not rise through its youth wing and create a network. Her political training was in the communist Free German Youth, where she was an enthusiastic organiser. All her tactical skills, her ability to freeze out challengers, derive from that.

She is remarkably friendless. Her closest ally remains her second husband, Joachim Sauer, a misanthropic scientist with a distaste for journalists and even politicians. Many of the men she will be appointing to her Cabinet bear grudges against her. She needs them now; they do not need her.

As a girl, Angela Merkel learnt to be cautious. Her father, as a pastor in East Germany, was under close scrutiny and so she became a chameleon at school, a conformist. She avoids open confrontation and waits her chance. Together with her circle of women advisers, she plots out moves in advance. The real skill needed to head a grand coalition, however, is the ability to improvise.

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