ANGELA MERKEL is the first female German chancellor, but she is not the first female head of government. Louise Schroeder preceded her when she became the first female lord mayor of Greater Berlin from 1947 to 1948. It took another forty-five years for the first female prime minister, Heide Simonis, to come into office in Schleswig-Holstein in 1993 when her male predecessor resigned in the aftermath of a scandal. Since then there have been five more female heads of government at the state level in Germany. Almost all of them took office as a successor to a male politician during an election period or, as in the case of Christine Lieberknecht in Thuringia in 2009, when the top male candidate und then premier was not accepted in the post-electoral coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD). The only exception was the Social Democrat and then opposition leader Hannelore Kraft in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), who gained office as prime minister in 2010 in the course of the general election.

In contemporary democracies people tend to perceive political leaders mainly through the media. Thus for women claiming power, media coverage is crucial. In the present chapter I seek to outline changes in media representations of female political leaders over the last two decades and the impact these representations have on women's claim to political power. I will draw on the findings of my earlier study about the media coverage of female top candidates running for the prime ministry in election campaigns at the state level. I will focus on the first female prime minister in Germany, Heide Simonis (1993–2005 in Schleswig-Holstein), as well as Andrea Ypsilanti, who failed to form a red and green minority coalition, that is, a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, in Hesse in 2008, and Hannelore Kraft, prime minister in NRW from 2010 to 2017. All of them were Social Democrats. This is due to the fact, that the SPD, within the time frame of the study, was the only party with more than one female candidate for prime ministry at the state level. Further reflections about media representations of Angela Merkel (CDU), as well as Gesine Schwan (SPD), who ran for the federal presidency in 2004 and 2009, and the Secretary of Defense, Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), are included.