For students of German politics, Mr Gerhard Schroder earned himself a footnote in the history of the Bundestag in 1981. The angry socialist lawyer, then 37, caused howls of outrage by not wearing a tie. Two years later sartorial standards tumbled further with the arrival of the woolly jumpers of the Greens. but Mr Schroder long ago discarded the scruffy option in favour of elegant Italian suits, striking ties and polished shoes.
And last night he earned himself a bigger place in German history by becoming the first challenger in a post-war election to unseat a chancellor. Gerhard Schroder has been waiting 18 years for this day. Just before his tieless debut in the Bundestag, he rattled the gates of the chancellor's office in a drunken prank one night, shouting: "I want in here." Since March, when he won the chance to take on Dr Helmut Kohl, he has focused on becoming chancellor with frightening intensity. He tapped skillfully into the public mood by running a conciliatory campaign: "Not that different from Helmut Kohl, just younger and better."
Mr Schroder has little time for manifestoes or articles of political faith. He is open, flexible, driven not by a vision but by ambition to be top dog. In his native state of Lower Saxony, where he has been prime minister for eight years, there is an annual showdown over nuclear waste transport between the police and protesters. A senior police official tells how it is normal to discuss the organisation with political leaders and retinues of aides and civil servants. Last year the police delegation was met by Mr Schroder alone. Mr Jurgen Trittin, a left-wing Green who served in the Schroder cabinet in Hannover, also talks of how smoothly Schroder managed government sessions, using charm and persuasion to get his way. Yet Mr Schroder has a long record as a maverick and a loner who relishes getting up the noses of the establishment and he has as many enemies on his own side as in his political opposition. "You can save yourself from your enemies, less so from your friends," he once said.
As for the political party which has been his vehicle to power since he joined it in 1963, he once witheringly compared it to a cattle shed: "Smells a bit as you come close but once you're inside it's nice and warm." Such remarks do not, of course, make Mr Schroder popular at the party grass roots. Like Dr Kohl's, Mr Schroder's background is steeped in regional German politics. Barring a few years in the 1980s as a deputy in Bonn, his career has been limited to the northern state of Lower Saxony, where he has been prime minister since 1990.
Mr Schroder was born into crushing poverty to a war widow in a Westphalian village in April, 1944, the younger of two children. He never knew his father, a conscript killed in Romania on the retreat from Russia, a few days after the birth of Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schroder. His mother, a cleaning woman for 40 years, kept the family going by, among other things, tidying British army barracks. She later remarried and Mr Schroder has two step-sisters and a step-brother as well as an older sister.
Although it is notoriously difficult to discern his core political values, his humble origins have left him with a burning resentment of privilege and perhaps a chip on his shoulder. "I sometimes get the feeling when I'm speaking in parliament that they really hate me," he told his biographers, Bela Anda and Rolf Kleine. His campaign speeches were dotted with references to his lowly upbringing. He would put down his lack of facility with foreign languages to lack of educational opportunity, stress his support for decent pensions for war widows' and lament the fact that fewer working-class youths are getting into German universities than 15 years ago.
Gerhard Schroder left school at 14 to sell crockery. He went to night-school as a teenager and went on to study law in Gottingen. It was here, at the age of 19, that he joined the SPD. It was also here that he married the first of four wives, Eva Schubach, a librarian. That marriage lasted three years; a second, to schoolteacher Anne Taschenmacher, lasted nine years.
The third, most famous marriage, to Hiltrud Hampel, lasted 12 years and broke up in acrimony two years ago, with his wife characterising him as "a coward, an opportunist and an egotist".
He married Bavarian journalist Doris Koepf, 19 years his junior, last year. Mr Schroder helped raise Hiltrud's two daughters and is now step-father to Doris's daughter Karla.
His student days in Gottingen coincided with the student unrest of 1968 but the middle-class campus contempt for Germany's education system was anathema to a working-class youth whose advancement hinged on his hardwon entry to that process.
However, he won a reputation as a radical in the late 1970s when he gained the leadership of the Jusos, the SDP's youth wing.
After entering the Bonn parliament in 1980, he won the SPD nomination for Lower Saxony prime minister in 1984, secured that office in 1990 and on March 1st won his third term as state prime minister, the result that also secured him the chancellorship nomination.
On policy specifics, Mr Schroder has been notoriously vague, wary of leaving himself hostage to promises that cannot be kept. Welfare, pension, and sickpay cuts enacted by the Kohl government will be reversed, he pledged, and tax reform will cut top rates from 53 to 49 per cent, although he would like to make bigger cuts.
The buzz-words of the Schroder campaign have been The New Centre, Modernisation, Social Justice and Innovation. It is far from clear what they mean in terms of policy detail.
In his memoirs, the former party chairman and the man who failed to depose Dr Kohl in 1983, Mr Hans-Jochen Vogel, delivered the following assessment of the new chancellor: "Schroder's will for power is certainly impressive. But the question is what does he actually want to do with that power?"
The rest of Germany and Europe is about to find out.