BERLIN: His enemies denounce him as a spineless opportunist who sold his soul to stay in power and a weak-willed chameleon isolating Germany with his pacifist blather.

But admirers portray German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a peace crusader who has so far helped prevent war in Iraq, and praise him as a courageous man whose uncompromising anti-war position has widespread public backing and may even lead to a Nobel Peace Prize.

So who is the real Gerhard Schroeder, the 58-year-old career politician who has greatly irritated Germany’s long-time patron, the United States and its President George W. Bush, with his firm “nein” to an attack on Iraq?

What are the motives of this man who was among the first to stand up to Bush with an anti-war re-election campaign last year and whose recent vow that Germany will not vote to endorse an Iraq war in the UN Security Council under any circumstances has caused tensions in the European Union and NATO?

“Schroeder is certainly not a pacifist,” says his biographer Juergen Hogrefe. “But at the same time he’s not at all a military man. He has an aversion to the military. It’s a world that’s foreign to him. He has a totally non-military character.”

Although Schroeder has often been castigated by domestic rivals as a pragmatist with no principles who bends with every prevailing popular wind, he has in fact followed a consistent anti-war line throughout his 40-year career in politics.

Last week in meetings with French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Schroeder went out of his way to spell out in simple terms why Germany, France and Russia are openly challenging US and British efforts to win over the UN Security Council for permission to attack Iraq.

“Perhaps what distinguishes the good ‘old Europe’ from others is the fact that the people of Europe have deeply ingrained in their consciousness what war really means,” Schroeder said, standing alongside Chirac in Berlin, in remarks clearly aimed at Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“Perhaps that background makes it easier to understand what unites the French and the Germans in the battle to disarm Iraq peacefully,” he added. Nearly 1.7 million French soldiers were killed in three wars against Germany between 1870 and 1945. More than five million German soldiers were killed in the same conflicts.

In Moscow two days later, Schroeder had on his mind those five million fallen German soldiers, including his father, as well as the 15 million Soviet soldiers killed in two world wars when he delivered another lecture to critics of his course.

“Germany and Russia know from our bitter experiences just what war means,” Schroeder said after meeting Putin. “I still hope and expect that with the goodwill of all sides involved a peaceful solution can be found.”

OPPOSED TO WAR: Schroeder has a long record opposing war. As head of the SPD’s leftist youth wing, he took part in mass West German protests against America’s Pershing missiles in the early 1980s.