As Germany takes the EU presidency, chancellor Angela Merkel must use her analytical scientist's mind to pull a fractured EU back into shape . The key is to exercise member states' minds on the best way forward for the constitutional treaty, she tells Derek Scally
Angela Merkel has full confidence in herself, just don't ever expect to hear her admit it.
In her 17-year rise to the top, she has collected, but rarely commented on, countless labels that others have pinned on her along the way.
In 1990 Helmut Kohl christened his new minister his "Mädchen". In 2005 the press dubbed her the "Iron Mädchen", after she seized general election victory from the jaws of defeat and sent Gerhard Schröder into political retirement.
After just over a year in office, she has earned herself the title of "most powerful woman in the world" after assuming a double-header presidency of the EU and the G8 group of industrialised nations.
But if the new "power" label worries her, she's not saying.
"I always say that angst is not a good political adviser, but I know that Germany has a responsibility and we want to live up that," she says, giving a clever yet abstract answer to a personal question. "I know too that without the others we cannot do anything and so I cannot allow myself to be led by angst. That is not my task." She has no time for irrational angst, so the current responsibility and weight of expectation doesn't keep her awake at night? "No, not on that account," she says with a rare chuckle, suggesting that if she does have the occasional bout of insomnia, it's not because she cares what other people think or expect of her.
She enters with a nervous smile, giving the distinct impression of someone who still has to egg herself on when dealing with strangers. While talking she plays with her coffee spoon, suggesting she is battling shyness, that she is not at ease but nonetheless game. It's an appealing characteristic in an age of politicians schooled in an easy charm that sooner or later tips into smarminess.
Purists may argue whether Angela Merkel is actually the most powerful woman in the world, but she has at least learned the art of power dressing.
After unkind but justified criticism of her hair and dress sense, she has adopted suits and a hairstyle that are smart enough to end the discussion.
THOUGH SHE IS no fan of "what if" parlour games, Merkel knows that her life could easily have turned out completely differently.
Just weeks after she was born in Hamburg in 1954, Angela Dorothea Kasner's parents packed her up and crossed over the border from West Germany into the communist East.
Her Lutheran pastor father Horst had a mission to minister the church in the atheist socialist state, a mission made all the more permanent when, seven years later in 1961, the East Berlin politburo sealed the border with the west.
Young Angela, nicknamed Kasi, was by all accounts a brilliant student, so good at Russian that she won a "friendship" visit to Moscow.
She studied physics first in Leipzig and then Berlin and her surname is the only public trace of her first marriage, which lasted four years and of which Merkel never speaks.
The Stasi secret police allegedly approached her to become an informer and when she refused she was instead informed upon.
A flick through her file reveals one prescient observation: "political engagement."
Like all leaders, Merkel is a political animal. But while her current political colleagues who grew up in West Germany joined party youth organisations, she hid in the school toilets to listen to crucial speeches in the Bonn parliament on her transistor radio.
Naturally cautious, Merkel has told of how, during a swimming class when she was 12, she stood shivering at the end of the diving board for the entire 45-minute class before taking a last-minute plunge into the pool below.
"I am courageous at the right moment but I need considerable start-up time," she said. "I try to think ahead as much as possible. I am not spontaneously courageous." That natural caution and an East German trait of keeping opinions private sits well with Merkel's analytical scientist's mind.
She keeps a small circle and, along with her academic husband, only two women enjoy her confidence: her office manager and her closest political adviser.
Merkel rarely acts unless she has full overview of a situation and can assess all likely outcomes.
Now the woman German commentators have dubbed the "physicist of power" faces her greatest experiment: reviving the European project.
After decades of success, the EU reached a standstill in 2005 when voters in France and The Netherlands rejected the constitutional treaty its authors said would simplify and future-proof the union in a globalised world.
Berlin's task is not to try to save the treaty in six months, but to provide a road map detailing if and how it can be adopted before the 2009 European elections.
Before then, Chancellor Merkel hopes to concentrate minds on the "why" of the EU by getting each member state to sign up to a "Berlin Declaration" in March. It's an interesting attempt to formalise what Europe means to its citizens.
So what does Europe mean to the German leader, who has only been an EU citizen for 17 years? "Europe means common values," she says. "Europe has learned the right lessons from the difficult European history. Europe is, in today's globalised world, a chance to represent our interests together to the outside world and be stronger as a result." She trips off a statistic to prove her point: Europe had 20 per cent of the world's population in 1900, has 12 per cent today and will have just 4 per cent of the world's population in 100 years.
"We would be well advised to bundle our interests and not everyone plough their own furrow," she says.
Bundling interests means balancing the interests of 27 countries, a delicate and perhaps impossible tightrope walk. But Angela Merkel's daily political life is three balancing acts in one: with her grand coalition partner the Social Democrats, with the Bavarian sister party of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and with the leaders of Germany's federal states.
To get European leaders to give a firm commitment to the constitutional project, Merkel has sent out two officials - dubbed "Sherpas" in Berlin - to visit all EU capitals in the next six months and come back with a list of what governments can and cannot live with in the treaty.
"Everyone should become concrete. Everyone who has worries or problems has to say now what they are, but we cannot begin the discussion again from zero," says Merkel.
"We have to strive to get a compromise but we will not approach (the constitutional treaty) in a minimalistic way. That is the German starting point."
The latter remark reveals an interesting conundrum for Germany: how to chair negotiations on an agreement as the country with the most to gain and lose.
It coincides, too, with a change of tone in German domestic politics, six decades after the end of the second World War, where it is no longer taboo to put the term "national interest" in official documents.
That national interest has guided her changes to German foreign policy: she has cooled down Schröder-era pally relations with Russia to the level of "strategic partner", meanwhile she has warmed up Schröder's previously chilly relations with the US at a time when Washington is looking for a European partner.
ANGELA MERKEL LEARNED her most valuable lesson in maths class. Her proud teacher tells how she learned long before her classmates to solve a problem by identifying the solution and working backwards.
It's a strategy that has served her well.
Seven years ago, when other leading CDU members were paralysed by a political fundraising scandal surrounding former chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel spotted her chance at the top job. She penned a newspaper opinion piece attacking Kohl, her political mentor, as well as the then party leader, and completed a high risk but brilliant power grab.
In 2005, despite a disastrous general election result - the CDU ended up having to form a coalition with the SPD despite holding a 21 per cent lead over the SPD in pre-election national opinion polls - she held her nerve and kept her eye on the goal, eventually taking the chancellery.
Now Merkel has her gaze fixed on the goal of the constitutional treaty and what it means for Germany: enhanced influence in the European Union.
What sounds like grist to the mill of the hardened British Eurosceptic or excitable French nationalist is, on analysis, the simple conclusion arising from the treaty.
The new voting system will end the traditional equality of influence of France and Germany in EU decision-making, which existed despite Germany's larger population size and greater financial contribution to the budget.
But, like any German leader, Chancellor Merkel is well aware of Germany's responsibility to the past and to its European neighbours.
For Berlin politicians, she says, the EU is and remains Germany's number one national interest.
"I believe that responsible politicians in Germany have every reason to muster up passion for Europe," says Merkel.
But while another, older generation of EU hands tend to keep newer members at a friendly but firm distance, Merkel's approach is different, arising from her different understanding of Europe.
"The very fact that I come from the former GDR is, for me, very important biographically," she says.
"Naturally it is bound up with another perspective, because until my 35th year I only knew central and eastern Europe. I was never in France, never in Britain."
Her understanding of Europe could add an interesting new facet to Germany's traditionally good relations with smaller EU member states and her approach may help placate their fears about a loss of influence in the EU if the constitutional treaty is adopted.
"In the course of German unification I often spoke about how we East Germans didn't just profit from West Germans. The West Germans were able to gain a lot from the East Germans too," she says. "The notion that we can give each other something and that it's not just a want from one side. This is the thinking that I want to bring to the European Union."
Angela Merkel is a uniquely private public figure. But, for anyone trying to understand her, she dangles before our noses a clue so obvious it is easy to overlook. It is her mantra: "In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft", which loosely translates as "in calm lies strength".
It has served her well in her unprecedented political career, not least because it leads others to underestimate her drive and determination. Her maxim will be the leitmotif of her EU presidency and beyond.
Interview over, Angela Merkel departs with a casual "see you later". She wanders off on her own down the corridor of her glass and concrete chancellery, a woman who knows exactly where she's going.
Merkel moments
How she is seen and how she sees it.
George Bush (January 4th):"I listen to Angela Merkel a lot. She has got a lot of wisdom. I don't know if this helps her or hurts her for me to say this, but nevertheless my consultations with Angela are very productive and very important.
Gerhard Schröder (election night, 2005):"Do you really think that, with this (result), my party will respond to an offer of coalition talks from Frau Merkel when she says she wants to be chancellor? I mean, let's not get carried away here . . . there will be no coalition under her leadership with my Social Democratic Party. That is clear. Don't fool yourself."
Satirical magazine Eulenspiegel (July 2005):"Until now only men were chancellor in Germany and it is questionable if the country is ready for a woman in this position. With this in mind, the choice of Angela Merkel would be a good compromise."
Merkel facts:She lives in a flat in Berlin-Mitte with her second husband, Joachim Sauer.
She keeps a picture of Catherine the Great in her office.
The title of her 1978 thesis in physics was On the Influence of Spatial Correlations on the Rate of Chemical Reactions in Dense Gases.
She once said: "The state has to be the gardener, not the fence."
When asked what she thought of when she heard the word "Germany": "I think of sealed windows. No other country can make such nice, sealed windows."