Gerhard Schröder

Born in 1944, Schröder worked as a lawyer before climbing the Social Democratic Party ladder to become Minister President of Lower Saxony in 1990. Eight years later he ended Helmut Kohl's sixteen-year run as chancellor, leading a coalition with the Greens and pushing through Agenda 2010, a controversial overhaul of Germany's welfare system meant to cut unemployment. In 2003, alongside French president Jacques Chirac, he refused to join the Iraq invasion and openly criticized Washington. He lost the 2005 election to Angela Merkel and left office, but didn't leave the spotlight: he took board positions at Nord Stream, Rosneft, and nearly Gazprom, all Russian state enterprises. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the backlash came fast - accusations of complicity in crimes against humanity, calls for EU sanctions, pressure from his own party. He resigned some posts but stayed on the Rosneft board. An SPD tribunal ruled he'd broken no party rules, so he remains a member, unrepentant and deeply estranged from the political class that once followed him.