In the United States, Bill Clinton's brief dalliance with intern Monica Lewinsky came close to costing him his office. In Germany, the populace elected a man to lead their country who had left his wife for a woman 19 years his junior.

It happened in 1997, when Gerhard Schröder, then premier of the state of Lower Saxony, was thrown out of the house by wife number three, Hilu. He had just admitted to her that he had been having an affair for eight weeks with a journalist in Munich. That woman, Doris Köpf, became wife number four.

Schröder's private life has been remarkable, or as some might see it, remarkably messy.

His childhood was poor and he had to go to work at an early age, only finishing his secondary education at night. Still, his determination and drive helped him climb steadily up the ranks of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), finally winning the chancellorship in 1998.

But on the way, he divorced three times, alienated many in his own party, and gained the reputation of a man driven by polls and popularity rather than by principle.

Man of the media

He learned early on about the power of print and broadcast media and how to use it to package himself in a way appealing to voters, to test ideas and push national debates in the direction he wanted. He works tirelessly on his image, according to Jürgen Hogrefe, who has written a biography of the German leader.

Always the political animal, Schröder even consulted Manfred Güllner of the Forsa polling institute about whether the separation from his third wife Hilu would hurt him politically. Only after Güllner said it wouldn't did he go ahead and file for divorce.

Early in his career Schröder realized that the way to break through and get to the top of the SPD was to cause a commotion and get his name on the evening news. In 1981, he became the first member of parliament to deliver a speech without wearing a tie. It caused a sensation.

"In a media democracy, it is not necessarily an insult to be called a 'media chancellor'," Schröder said in Hogrefe's book.

But his media splashes aren't always positive ones. In 2002, Schröder was outraged when the ddp news agency reported that he dyed his hair. His lawyer demanded the agency retract the statement and ended up taking ddp to court. In the end, Schröder won, but in doing so he revealed that his skin wasn't quite as thick as most thought it to be.

He tussled with the media later that year when a provincial newspaper reported that the marriage to Dorris was going through some tough times. The Märkische Oderzeitung reported that the chancellor and his wife were increasingly estranged and sleeping apart, despite their close political relationship. Schröder again went to court, claiming the paper was intruding into his private life.

Man of the people

Despite his penchant for cigars and Italian-made suits, Schröder likes to cultivate the image of being a down-to-earth, hard-working man. And, weighed down as he is with alimony payments to three ex-wives on a salary of €250,000 ($300,000) a year, in fact Schröder doesn't have the money to play the high roller.

He spends his weekend driving around in an aging Volkswagen, lives in an unspectacular townhouse in Hanover when he's not in the modest apartment in the chancellery in Berlin, and puts Doris on low-cost flights when they go on vacation.

If he doesn't get elected for a third term in 2006, then Schröder might just see himself forced to become an ordinary citizen again.