The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, and his centre-left government took up office yesterday vowing to fight unemployment and warning against unrealistic expectations of a rapid eastward expansion of the EU.
Limousines glided through Bonn's sedate government quarter bringing Mr Schroder's Social Democrat and Green cabinet members to the ministries from which they will exercise their new offices.
Mr Schroder did not spend his first full day settling in to Dr Helmut Kohl's chair in the Rhineside chancellery.
The 54-year-old former lawyer was in Hanover delivering a farewell speech to the state assembly of Lower Saxony where he has been governor for the past eight years.
Schroder felt relaxed and composed for the first time since the election campaign that led to his breaking Dr Kohl's 16-year grip on power on September 27th.
He held Mr Schroder held his first cabinet meeting late on Tuesday after being sworn in as post-war Germany's seventh chancellor at the head of an SPD-Green coalition that has a comfortable 21-seat parliamentary majority.
In Bonn, Mr Oskar Lafontaine, the chairman of the SDP, took the symbolic key to the treasury from the outgoing finance minister, Mr Theo Waigel, at a hand-over ceremony.
Mr Waigel warned him not to put pressure on the independent Bundesbank or the new European Central Bank to cut interest rates.
Mr Lafontaine has repeatedly called for an easing of monetary policy to boost growth and employment.
Mr Lafontaine promised to fight for Germany's four million out of work and to restore order to turbulent global financial markets.
Mr Lafontaine, who has added important new powers to the Finance Ministry, vowed to push through a DM10 billion tax cut and reforms to boost employment that economists have criticised as inadequate.
The Bonn hand-overs provided a glimpse of the government's new foreign policy under Mr Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Greens, a party with roots in the pacifist and anti-NATO movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr Fischer said before setting off on a trip to Paris, London and Warsaw that he would strive for continuity in foreign policy. But he injected a note of caution into plans to expand the EU eastwards.
Enlarging the 15-member EU to take in five former eastern bloc countries and Cyprus was "essential", Mr Fischer said, at a hand-over ceremony with the outgoing Foreign Minister, Mr Klaus Kinkel. But he called for "realism".
"There are difficult issues, particularly in the economic realm . . . which you simply cannot get away from," he said. "Illusory time restrictions are of no use at all."