German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer, the charismatic left-wing revolutionary who became an international statesman, is embroiled in the most serious crisis of his career.
A scandal over relaxing the requirements for visas allowed tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans, allegedly including women forced into prostitution and criminals, to flood into Germany from 2000 to 2003.
Germans like Fischer, often pointing to his honesty as a rare quality among politicians, but there is a suspicion that his formidable intellect goes hand in hand with a sometimes arrogant approach to colleagues and the media.
The weekly newspaper Die Zeit captured the feeling with a recent front-page headline that read ”The only man who can bother Joschka Fischer” — the accompanying photograph was of Fischer himself.
And his standing as Germany’s most popular politician has slipped as a result of the visa scandal.
Fischer (57) has shrugged off other crises, such as when photographs came to light in 2001 of him beating up a police officer during a demonstration in the 1970s.
On that occasion, he was able to argue he had made a clean break with his past and he emerged unscathed.
There is no doubt of his value to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder — Fischer is credited with securing his re-election in 2002.
Fischer is the best-known member of the Greens, the junior partner in Schröder’s Social Democrat-led government.
It is thanks to his personality that the Greens, once seen as little more than a flower-waving anti-nuclear group, gradually assumed a key role in German politics.
Born to a butcher of Hungarian origin in the south-west German town of Gerabronn on April 12 1948, Joseph Martin Fischer dropped out of school and at 19 eloped to marry his first wife.
He is now divorced from his fourth and is dating Minu Barati, a woman more than 25 years his junior and the daughter of an Iranian opposition figure.
Fischer became involved in left-wing groups in the 1960s and 1970s while doing casual jobs.
But he eschewed the violence of that scene and joined a burgeoning ecology movement that grew into the Greens.
In 1983, he entered the German Parliament for the first time, and in 1985 he was the first Green to take up a government post, as environment minister in the west German state of Hesse, although that was short-lived.
Fischer built up a reputation on the realo or realist wing of the party, which slowly gained the upper hand over the fundamentalist fundis.
Their reward was their best result yet in the 1998 election, 6,7%, and seats round the Cabinet table, a position they cemented in the 2002 elections.
Following the 1998 election, Fischer — who had once stood up in Parliament and said: ”With respect, Mr Speaker, you are an asshole” — became minister of foreign affairs.
”In Fischer, Germany has become reconciled with itself: the former rebels with the system, the system with the old rebels,” according to his biographers, Matthias Geis and Bernd Ulrich.
Fischer stood the traditional Greens approach on its head, facing down the pacifists to agree to German airmen taking part in the 1999 Nato-led air war over Kosovo.
At one point, he was hit by a bag of red paint thrown by an angry opponent, but he won the day, insisting that pacifism had to be discarded in the face of genocide.
”I was like you … until the Srebrenica massacre” during the Bosnian war, he told his opponents.
Germany’s refusal to contribute troops to the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has tested Fischer’s diplomatic skills to the limit, but the icy relations with Washington appear to be thawing.
He has won plaudits for his efforts in the Middle East peace process, is trusted by both sides and makes frequent visits to the region.
Physically, Fischer has changed over the years too. The jeans and T-shirts have been replaced by suits and ties, and after losing so much weight that he was able to run marathons he has now regained most of it. — Sapa-AFP