Helmut Schmidt turns 90 as Germany's most popular leader

Helmut Schmidt, a chain-smoking former German Chancellor, celebrates his 90th birthday tomorrow amid an improbable revival in popularity for a prickly man with no-nonsense views that contrast sharply to many current leaders.

Mr Schmidt may not have scaled the heights of popularity while Chancellor of West Germany for eight turbulent years. Critics say his dismissal of leftist views spawned the Greens Party and cost his Social Democrats (SPD) a power base it has yet to win back.

But in retirement, he has attained the broad acclaim he lacked during his years in office from 1974-82.

According to a survey by the Forsa polling institute, Mr Schmidt ranks as the "coolest guy in Germany" and he tops several other polls as the country's most popular leader.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck, a fellow Hamburg native and a determined opponent of government spending to stimulate growth in the current crisis, regularly seeks Schmidt's counsel. Mr Steinbrueck admits borrowing recent ideas from Mr Schmidt, like suggestions to strengthen the International Monetary Fund and demanding new "traffic rules" for financial markets.

"He's a role model for me," Mr Steinbrueck, like Mr Schmidt a member of the centre-left SPD, told Der Spiegel magazine in a recent cover story on Mr Schmidt.

The SPD, locked in a coalition government with conservatives, is currently running low in popularity polls. An erosion that began with the Greens has, in the opinion of some, continued with the formation of a breakaway Left Party.

Mr Schmidt did not fade away like other former Chancellors. As publisher and columnist at Die Zeit weekly, a regular talk show guest and public speaker, he does not hesitate to air his unambiguous or brash opinions about the economic crisis and other issues, hurling barbs in a blunt north German style.

"It was clear that the financial crisis was brewing by the summer of 2007," Schmidt told Hamburg high school students. "It should not surprise you that I myself saw it all coming sooner than that and, in fact, I wrote about that in Die Zeit."

Mr Schmidt, married to his high school sweetheart for 66 years, made his mark as a local crisis manager in 1962 Hamburg floods. That reputation he burnished as Chancellor with his handling of economic crises and his mastery of a 1970s leftwing urban guerilla campaign of bombing and assassination - a test of fire for a still relatively young German democracy.

"Schmidt is the star of German politics, its icon," Der Spiegel wrote. "No one is admired as much as he is."