Angela Merkel is sometimes portrayed as something of a political outsider: a rare woman in the male world of German corporatism, her exotic curriculum vitae formed under the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic.

Her spruce office in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, conveys a different message. Peering down from the wall above her desk is a modern, impressionistic portrait of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first postwar chancellor and co-founder of her Christian Democrat Union (CDU). party. And her theme in an hour-long interview with the Financial Times places her firmly in the mainstream of that her party’s founding tradition of free-market economics and a modern welfare state.