One of the things leaders need to do in their first 100 days beside come up with a vision and game plan is to look for openings to make an immediate difference that will help build political capital. It’s one thing if you are someone like FDR who came into office during the Great Depression, or Barack Obama who came into office during a global financial meltdown, or a CEO who takes over a company like GM on the verge of bankruptcy, but what do you do if you are taking over in a relatively healthy political and economic situation? One great example is Angela Merkel, current Chancellor of Germany. Her first 100 days story goes like this.
The fall of the Berlin Wall opened the door for Angela Merkel to start a ‘second life.’ Being 35 years old, working as a laboratory physicist and living with her partner in Berlin, she decided to become politically active and joined the “Democratic Awakening” in August 1990. When Helmut Kohl appointed the first cabinet of a reunified Germany, he wanted it to represent all parts of Germany. He discovered Merkel, who later became the youngest Federal Minister in German history.
In 2007, Federal Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, was up for re-election. Angela Merkel decided to take him on and won by a wafer-thin majority. She found herself head of a grand coalition in a reform-needy Germany without much ‘political capital’ to bring about change in the country. Merkel looked for openings to make a difference and decided to focus on foreign policy during the first 100 days of her chancellorship.
Almost immediately she began the task of repairing an American-German relationship that had been shattered by Schroeder’s outright opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. Merkel also ended the cozy relationship Schroeder had enjoyed with the then Russian President, Vladimir Putin, by daring to criticize human rights abuses in Russia.
This won her tremendous popularity, which created the opening in her second 100 days to begin carrying out real domestic reforms, which included universal healthcare insurance and appealing to Germany’s ecologically conscious voters to limit carbon emissions.
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