BERLIN, May 28 - The pictures in the German papers these days show the contrast. One is of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany in a pose of grim fortitude. In the other Angela Merkel, often shown against a blue backdrop printed with the word "Better," smiles confidently. She looks like the relaxed beneficiary of a political gift - not just a chance to become chancellor of Germany but to do so a year before anyone thought it would be possible.
Since Mr. Schröder declared after his party's drubbing in local elections on May 22 that he wanted to move up national elections, Mrs. Merkel has been in the spotlight. That is not all that unusual: as leader of the main opposition party in Germany, the Christian Democratic Union, she has been a familiar figure here for years, seen on television being interviewed, giving speeches.
Germans can be pretty sure that she is to the right of Mr. Schröder, more free-market oriented than he is, more likely to chip away at Germany's elaborate social protections. But exactly what kind of chancellor Mrs. Merkel might be is less clear. Many Germans, asked to describe her, fall back on vague notions: she is smart and tough, a shrewd politician - as well as almost lacking in charisma.
But, as the Berliner Zeitung newspaper put it recently, "Merkel is not easy to identify; it's hard to find out what she wants." She has never laid out a detailed alternative program to that of the leftist coalition that, under Mr. Schröder, has governed Germany since 1998. She says she knows how to revitalize the stagnant German economy, but she has offered no plan. She has criticized Mr. Schröder for isolating Germany in foreign policy by, in her view, alienating the United States and half of Europe before the Iraq war, but has not said what she would do differently.
So what does she want? Is she a German Margaret Thatcher - as the sobriquet Maggie Merkel suggests - a radical free market proponent, ready to strip away social protections, deregulate the labor market and battle with the unions? And, in foreign policy, would she turn Germany into a loyal ally of the United States again, perhaps even sending German troops to Iraq? Mrs. Merkel is outside the usual political mold. Most conspicuously, she offers the prospect of becoming the first woman to be chancellor of Germany.
She did not rise through party ranks, unlike most prominent German politicians, including Mr. Schröder. She was a physicist in East Germany. Despite the political turmoil and demands for freedom in the former German Democratic Republic, she showed almost no interest in politics until reunification.
She is so-so as an orator, better at fine-tuning a complicated program than at announcing grand principles or enunciating a vision. At the same time, in what still seems to surprise many Germans, she has demonstrated the toughness and the shrewdness to get to the top in Germany's male-dominated political game.
"In the recent past, her numerous critics within the party have belittled her, but today nobody is laughing anymore," the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper wrote. "Because Merkel during the last years has been able to gain respect, both with delicate and less delicate means, showing tenacity, strong nerves and an ability to get her way politically. Not for nothing she carries the reputation of a political man-eater."
But Mrs. Merkel is for many Germans also a refreshing contrast to more standard politicians, respected for her intelligence and her avoidance of histrionics. She also benefits from the lack of popularity of the Social Democrats, whose economic policies have, in the view of many, caused social pain without improving the issue of greatest concern, the 12 percent unemployment rate.
Mrs. Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954, but was taken as an infant to Brandenburg, in East Germany, where her father, Hörst Kasner, had become a minister in a Protestant church. Butwas no dissident, no East German Vaclav Havel, trying to escape over the Berlin Wall or risking prison by signing political statements. She worked hard, getting a Ph.D. in physics in 1986 and laboring for years at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin.
After reunification, she won a seat in Parliament in 1991 and became a cabinet minister the next year under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who became her political mentor, referring to her as "my girl." In 1999, when he and others in the Christian Democratic Union were caught in a financial scandal, Mrs. Merkel, in part because she was seen as an outsider, was elected, almost unanimously, as the party's chairwoman.
Like Mr. Schröder, Mrs. Merkel operates within the confines of her party and, in her case, with its more centrist partner, the Christian Social Union, which have always accepted keeping unrestricted capitalism in check by regulation and social welfare. Some Germans, therefore, expect little change. "She is not surrounded by reformers," said Klaus F. Zimmermann, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.
But many Germans who yearn for radical economic change would welcome a Merkel chancellorship; they say she would push harder to reduce extremely high labor costs and eliminate political impediments to high-tech competitiveness. For evidence, they point to a national meeting of her party in 2003 where she embraced a number of changes that went well beyond the measures in Mr. Schröder's program to help the economy, known as Agenda 2010.
Norbert Walter, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank, said: "She's certainly no Maggie Thatcher."
Her upbringing and education in East Germany tend to color her stands, even if she probably shares some of Mrs. Thatcher's goals, Mr. Walter said. "It's difficult to read someone like her," he said. "Her gut feelings are clear: she wants real reforms, not incremental moves."
The conventional wisdom is that a Chancellor Merkel would be reflexively more pro-American than Mr. Schröder, someone who would not have brought Germany into outright opposition to the United States in the months before the Iraq war.
Or, as some analysts sympathetic to Mrs. Merkel put it, she would bring Germany back to the tradition that Mr. Schröder abandoned: a balanced policy of close friendship with the United States, very good relations with France and a strong commitment to the European Union.
"No German chancellor would have agreed to send troops to Iraq," said Margarita Mathiopoulos, a professor of American foreign policy at the University of Potsdam and a supporter of Mrs. Merkel. "But unlike Schröder, she would have gone to Washington and said, 'Mr. President, we can't support you with troops, but let's find a way together with Blair and Chirac to find a consensus."
What Mrs. Merkel would have, and Mr. Schröder never had, is control of both houses of Parliament. The changes she would decide to push might not inspire the kind of political gridlock that hampered him. And some political specialists contend that most Germans, after four years of economic stagnation, accept the inevitability of fundamental changes to the social welfare state.
"If the C.D.U. were to be elected," said Holger Schmieding, a German economist at the Bank of America in London, "I don't think a lot of people would be surprised that there would be some pain to come."