BERLIN — With Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder soon to face disgruntled voters, would a different Berlin government improve the tattered U.S.-German relationship?

Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) opposition, would find it a stretch to restore the relationship to its Cold War heyday — but she's been far less critical of President Bush and the Iraq war.

A Protestant minister's daughter who grew up under communist rule in East Germany, Merkel is almost certain to be the conservative CDU's candidate in early elections called for by Schroeder after his party badly lost a local weekend election.

Her party is leading in polls ahead of the election, likely to take place Sept. 18, and she could become Germany's first female chancellor.

Experts say she might improve the tone of a relationship that was frayed after Schroeder narrowly won re-election by campaigning against the looming Iraq war in 2002, describing it as "playing around" and "an adventure." Schroeder and Bush patched things up at a February summit, although more out of duty than love.

Her background — growing up under communism, followed by membership in the center-right CDU under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a strong supporter of ties to the United States — makes Merkel more likely to value closer links with Washington.

"Merkel is much more trans-Atlantically oriented than Schroeder ever was," said Jan-Friedrich Kallmorgen, head of the program on trans-Atlantic relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

He summarized her outlook as: "We need to be a strong committed partner to the U.S.; otherwise we don't have any influence in Washington, and Germany and Europe only will have influence in world politics if they cooperate closely with the U.S."

People in Germany remember in particular Merkel's visit to the United States on Feb. 24-25, 2003, as the war neared. She met with Vice President Dick Cheney, said the danger from Iraq was real and that pressure must be kept on Saddam Hussein. She disputed Schroeder's refusal to support a war under any circumstances, even with the approval of the United Nations.

"Anyone who rejects military action as a last resort weakens the pressure that needs to be maintained on dictators and consequently makes a war not less but more likely" she wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece ahead of her visit.

For a 2004 biography, she was asked by journalist Hugo-Mueller Vogg if she was disappointed in Bush over the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after the war. "No" was her answer.

"For me it was about implementing the authority of the U.N.," she said. "One must ask one's self: Who compels whom here — does the dictator compel the international community, or the international community the dictator?"

Kallmorgen and others cautioned that Merkel differs sharply with Bush on one pressing issue: She opposes European Union (EU) membership for Turkey, which Bush has supported. Merkel supports an undefined "privileged partnership" short of full membership. The European Union already has decided, however, to open a years-long negotiations process with Turkey.

Merkel is also more in line with Washington over Russia, being more willing to press Moscow on human rights and democracy than is Schroeder, who has cultivated a cozy personal relationship with President Vladimir Putin. Likewise with China, where Schroeder wants to lift an EU weapons embargo imposed on human-rights grounds after the suppression of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Merkel is regarded as more likely to push the Chinese on human rights.

Thomas Risse, a professor of international politics at Berlin's Free University, said Merkel could bring more of a change in style than in substance.

Merkel, 50, would bring "maybe a different tone," he said. "I would assume that on a personal level she would get along much better with the president."

"As far as the substance of the trans-Atlantic relationship goes, I don't see much difference," he said.