Profile: Gerhard Schroeder

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is running for re-election in the September 22 election under the banner of his Social Democratic Party.

Gerhard Fritz Schroeder was born on April 7, 1944, in Mossenburg, Germany, the second child of Fritz Schroeder, an unskilled worker and lance corporal.

Schroeder's father died soon after, during World War II in Romania, without ever having seen his son. Schroeder's mother remarried in 1947 to Paul Vosseler, an unskilled worker, who died in 1964. That marriage produced Schroeder's three half-siblings.

Education

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After elementary school, Schroeder worked as a commercial apprentice at an ironmonger's hardware shop until 1961, and as an unskilled construction worker and commercial employee until 1964.

That year, he completed his intermediate high school certificate in Goettingen. Two years later, he took his school-leaving exam. From 1966 until 1971, Schroeder studied law and took the state law examinations in 1971 and 1976.

Career in politics

In 1963, Schroeder joined Germany's SPD and became involved in organizing the party's Young Socialists. In 1971 he became head of the Young Socialists in SPD's Hanover district, and was elected federal chairman of the Young Socialists in 1978.

Schroeder was a member of the German Bundestag from 1980 to 1986, when he withdrew and ran unsuccessfully for minister-president of Lower Saxony against the incumbent from the CDU, Ernst Albrecht.

Schroeder ran again four years later, in 1990, and was successful, with the SPD overtaking the CDU as the strongest party in Lower Saxony with 44.2 percent of the vote.

In the mid-1990s, Schroeder became more involved in federal politics. He was a member of Rudolf Scharping's shadow cabinet with responsibility for economic, traffic and energy policies.

Scharping, Schroeder and Oskar Lafontaine became the leading "troika" of the SPD, and opinion polls in 1997 showed Schroeder having a better chance than Lafontaine of defeating incumbent Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Schroeder's name soon entered conversations as a possible candidate for chancellor.

State elections in Lower Saxony in March 1998 were expected to determine who would face Kohl in national elections, and Schroeder won convincingly with 47.9 percent of the vote. Federal SPD Chairman Franz Muentefering then announced that Schroeder would be the party's candidate for chancellor.

In federal parliamentary elections on September 27, 1998, the SPD received the largest share of votes, 40.9 percent, and a month later Schroeder was elected as Germany's new chancellor.