GERMANY:If Brian Cowen is looking for any tips for his new job, he would do well to watch Angela Merkel when she visits Ireland today, writes Derek Scally.
AFTER JUST 2½ years in office, the German chancellor has become Europe's most influential leader with a long list of admirers stretching from the White House to the Knesset.
"It's interesting that a German politician and a woman should, in such a relatively short time, have built up such international popularity," says Alexander Skiba of the German Foreign Policy Institute (DGAP).
"Politicians value her practical approach and low-key charm, particularly how she pursues a consensus without putting herself in the spotlight."
Born in Hamburg in 1954 but raised in East Germany, Merkel learned early on how to meet the high expectations of her pastor father and of teachers who preached the motto: "Success is duty".
Turning her love of maths into physics studies, she kept her head down at a research institute in late 1980s East Berlin as the mood on the streets turned against the regime. Apolitical and diligent, she was probably the only person who showed up for work as usual the day after the Berlin Wall fell.
In the following months, she developed a taste for politics and, by a circuitous route, arrived at the Bonn cabinet table as Helmut Kohl's "Mädchen" (girl).
A decade on, the Christian Democrat (CDU) fundraising scandal provided her with a chance to topple the Kohl monument and secure the party leadership in 2000. Behind the modest "Mädchen" exterior, Merkel's finally showed her taste for power.
"Earlier I wanted to have power over molecules," said Merkel on her 50th birthday in 2004. "Now I have power in a different field."
Ideologically, Merkel could be described as a free radical, pragmatically attaching and detaching herself as conditions and circumstances dictate.
At heart she is a social and economic liberal, her core beliefs of individual freedom and responsibility a consequence of personal restrictions in East Germany.
Her views, however, do not always chime with all CDU members, nor with voters.
She misjudged the 2005 election campaign, promising reform-weary voters further belt-tightening - with disastrous results. Her sizeable poll lead evaporated and she was forced into a loveless political marriage with her political foes, the Social Democrats (SPD).
Merkel has since abandoned her neo-liberalism leanings for now: the long-awaited economic upswing has weakened German appetite for further reform, as has the political deadlock of the grand coalition.
At home, Merkel faces little political challenge, allowing her to focus her energies on reordering foreign policy. She quickly downgraded German relations with Moscow to a "strategic partnership" and warmed up relations with Washington, on ice since the Iraq war. Less than a year after she took office, a grinning President George Bush was barbecuing wild boar in her constituency.
"She found the right tone and was accepted in Washington as a pragmatic partner," says Alexander Skiba, "but someone who could exercise criticism, too, as she did on Guantanamo Bay".
Franco-German relations have proven tricky since the hyperactive President Nicolas Sarkozy took office in Paris.
Merkel had to move quickly to check his proposal for greater political influence over the euro and to fence in his Mediterranean Union plans.
The Franco-German deal to advance the "Club Med" plan, but with its doors open to all 27 EU members, was a classic face- saving Merkel compromise, as was her "yes, but" in Bucharest to further Nato enlargement.
"It always takes a year for new French and German leaders to get on," says Dr Wolfgang Vogel of the German-French Institute (DFI) in Paris, "but you can be sure the Elysée has taken note of last week's International Herald Tribune poll calling Angela Merkel the most influential Europe leader. Even 38 per cent of French people agreed."
She worked hard to gain the trust of Poland's prickly Kaczynski twins with a reminder that growing up on the same side of the Iron Curtain had given her a differentiated, non-patronising perspective on Polish history.
Alongside her talent for rational problem-solving, Merkel has proven she understands the power of political symbols.
The Berlin Declaration signed during the German EU presidency was purely aspirational, but it boosted the confidence of leaders after rejection of the constitution and bound them into doing the deal finally agreed in Lisbon.
Last December, pictures of Merkel greeting the Dalai Lama in her office went around the world, causing huge displeasure in China. Merkel scored at home with her clear message to Beijing: deal with it.
She deflected SPD criticism of the meeting by cheekily calling it "value-driven foreign policy" in the tradition of SPD chancellor Willy Brandt.
Dr Gerd Langguth, Merkel's biographer, suggests that one of her greatest political skills is the lesson learned early on, like all East Germans, never to express personal opinions in public because of who might be listening.
Today only Merkel's scientist husband and office manager have her full trust; her political thinking remains a mystery, her private life remains incredibly private, her circle of friends modest.
But this strength could also be a potential weakness, he predicts.
"If she fails in the future it will be here. She hasn't a real network of good friends. Merkel's rational understanding is based on the logic of mutual interest. But authority . . . also comes from personal charisma."
On that front, Angela Merkel may be classed as the world's first post-charismatic politician, an anomaly in an era of slick political performers, coached to the gills and dressed to impress.
Yet she is consistently voted the most popular politician in Germany, suggesting that Germans like what they see.
"I see Angela Merkel on the news and I think, that's probably how I would appear on television, too," says Thomas Pilke, a jurist from Berlin.
"We all know she pulls the strings behind the scenes, but in public she presents a reserved face - that's refreshing."