Ruthless Schroeder not gracious in victory

Gerhard Schroeder, elected German chancellor for a second time, did not get where he is by being gracious to his rivals.

Even the day after eking out a narrow victory over his conservative rival Edmund Stoiber in Sunday's general election, Schroeder was not in the mood for preaching reconciliation or healing wounds.

It was Stoiber who had rashly claimed victory on election night, and Schroeder was not about to let him forget it.

"I'd like to put to rest a legend the other side started last night that they won," Schroeder told a news conference on Monday.

"The truth is they wanted to be the biggest party and form a government. They didn't make either target. We set out our goals and we achieved them."

It was a crowning moment for Schroeder, who completed one of Germany's most remarkable political comebacks by overturning a 10-point opinion poll lead in the space of two months to get his centre-left Social Democrat-Greens coalition back into government.

A man with formidable personal charisma, Schroeder learned to defy the odds as a boy fending off bill collectors trying to repossess his family's belongings while his mother was out working as a cleaning woman.

He left school at 14 to earn money for the family, having to go to night school to get his qualifications on the way to eventually becoming a lawyer.

Ever since he rattled the chancellery gates as a young member of parliament after a drinking binge in 1982 and shouted "I want to get in here", Schroeder had an eye on the top office - and he had to show resilience bordering on ruthlessness to get there.

His political rivals have often accused him of selling out the party's centre-left principles to pragmatism, or seen his loyalties as subservient to his ambition.

As state premier of Lower Saxony, he made a bold bid in 1994 for the SPD's nomination to challenge then-chancellor Helmut Kohl.

He at first backed his successful rival, Rudolf Scharping - but was later fired by him for disloyalty.

A year later he helped to engineer Scharping's ouster as SPD chairman, supporting Oskar Lafontaine.

Lafontaine stepped aside to let Schroeder be the SPD's challenger to Kohl in 1998 - but once Schroeder was in power with Lafontaine as his finance minister, Lafontaine soon found himself outmanoeuvred and quit politics bitterly.

Schroeder the strategist has also outmanoeuvred the opposition conservatives in parliament, getting opposition-run states to defy their own party line and approve tax reform in exchange for lavish public spending.

But his most masterful act may have been to win re-election despite having made himself a hostage to fortune in 1998 by promising to cut unemployment or "not deserve a second term".

He failed, but without blushing blamed the global economy - and won re-election.