German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a bad driver

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News
on 11/15/2006

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she's a bad driver who paid her instructor to speed up the process of getting a license. Merkel told Bild am Sonntag newspaper that as a 26-year-old student driver in East Germany she needed two to three times as many lessons as the average person before her instructor would let her take the driving test. In the end she paid her tutor to speed up the process.

"In other words, I'm the incarnation of all those cliches," the chancellor was quoted as saying in the newspaper in comments confirmed by a government spokesman.

She said she acted on advice from a friend who said she should offer her instructor cash "tips" to speed up the process.

"I got my license after that right away," Merkel said.

Unofficial gifts of cash or other goods were a standard way of expediting the often slow-moving services in many communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. East Germany was reunified with West Germany in 1990.

Source: Reuters