Gerhard Schroder turned up at a press conference two weeks ago in a cheerful, joking mood. The display was usual for Schroder but perhaps inappropriate for a leader who was presenting his new agriculture minister, the seventh cabinet replacement in two years.

A journalist took a devious swipe at the ever-changing cast of cabinet characters by asking Schroder if he had ever played "Ten Little Indians" as a child. In a flash, the trademark Schroder grin vanished. "I'm not going to take part in your childhood reminiscing," he snapped.

It is still only January, but already Schroder has had a very unhappy new year. Two of his ministers have resigned, the rest are under attack on a daily basis, and nobody is taking any notice of how well he is managing the economy.

His finance minister came under attack for using government jets for allegedly personal travel and the labour minister is getting nowhere fast with the nebulous reform of Germany's creaking pensions system.

The defence minister cannot explain why the German army ignored warnings over the use of depleted uranium weapons. The three-month-old BSE crisis in Germany has claimed the heads of the health and agriculture ministers.

Already their replacements have come under attack. The new health minister has defended her days working as a waitress in a brothel in the 1970s, saying she needed the money.

Meanwhile, the new Green Party agriculture minister, a Berlin-born lawyer, is under pressure to disprove opposition claims that the average Sunday roast knows more about agriculture than she does.

The grey world of German politics has been brightened up considerably by these daily revelations, none more so than the revolutionary past-lives that have come back to haunt the two other Green Party cabinet members.

Environment minister Jurgen Trittin came under attack this week for not distancing himself from an anonymous obituary which appeared to gloat over the 1977 killing of a federal prosecutor by the Red Army Faction. Trittin was a student leader at Goettingen University when the article was published in a student magazine.

But the minister most under pressure is the one Mr Schroder can least afford to lose, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. Mr Fischer's days as an anarchist are no secret, but still he found himself mired in controversy when pictures emerged of him punching a policeman.

The plot thickened last week when Mr Fischer couldn't decide whether or not he had let a member of the paramilitary Red Army Faction stay in his Frankfurt apartment in the 1970s.

Mr Fischer was Germany's most popular politician until he was overtaken by Chancellor Schroder last week.

Regardless of his slight slump in popularity, though, he remains the Green Party's biggest asset: a man who not only connects with voters but who ensures that the Green Party stays in power with the Social Democrats.

Mr Fischer is Europe's most energetic federalist, something he made clear in a speech last year and which he elaborated on in London earlier this week, and Mr Schroder is more than happy to go along with his foreign minister's vision.

In the last two weeks he has made a point of publicly backing Fischer. He said a campaign was under way by the conservative Springer newspaper group to attack and destroy Mr Fischer and environment minister Trittin.

"I personally don't believe [the campaign] will be successful," he told the newspaper Die Zeit.

Meanwhile, the most energetic attacks on the government in the parliament chamber have come, not from the main opposition, the Christian Democrats, but from the liberal Free Democrats.

They are hoping to replace the Green Party in government with the Social Democrats after the 2002 election. If they can weaken Mr Fischer they would vastly improve their chances.

Mr Schroder can count himself lucky that the attacks in the last weeks from the conservative opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) have been fairly toothless.

The CDU are still in disarray after last year's slush fund scandal surrounding former Chancellor Dr Helmut Kohl. Even with the government experiencing the closest it has come to a crisis, the CDU cannot seem to get it together and dent the government's popularity.

Earlier this week their attack on the government's controversial pension reforms backfired. A campaign poster bearing a mock-up mugshot of the Chancellor caused such offence that it had to be withdrawn with profuse apologies from party leader Angela Merkel.

The latest opinion polls show that Schroder's Social Democrats (SPD) have maintained their lead over the CDU. The SPD would score 41 per cent in a general election held now against 38 per cent for CDU, the same as for the last two months, according to a poll for ZDF state television.

Barring new revelations, the government is likely to survive the current scrutiny and Schroder is likely to remain Chancellor after the next election.

"People have the feeling that Mr Schroder is a master of crises. The opposition hasn't yet managed to develop an effective concept against him," said Renate Koecher of the Allensbach Institute.

"No affair, no scandal, no crisis sticks to the government chief. Gerhard Schroder - the Teflon Chancellor," wrote the mass circulation newspaper Bild am Sonntag.