Until recently she was best known for her international best-seller Wetlands, a frank debut novel about the sex life of an 18-year-old that has been described as everything from literary eroticism to undiluted pornography.

Now Charlotte Roche, a 32-year-old, British-born German TV presenter, has found further fame after sending an invitation to the German president.

"I'm offering to go to bed with him if he refuses to sign into law the extension of the country's nuclear power stations," she told Der Spiegel.

Whether or not she is now embarrassed by her own daring – perhaps unlikely given her well-documented record of thriving on provocation – Roche refused a request to talk further on the topic, saying she had said all that needed to be said.

In a statement, however, she explained that her overture to Christian Wulff was a matter of life and death, driven by fear for her own future and that of her children. "My husband is in agreement. Now it's just up to the first lady to agree to it," she said, offering an added incentive: "I am tattooed."

At stake is the future of nuclear energy in Germany, which has become the source of furious debate following the recent announcement by the government of Angela Merkel that it was planning to extend the lifespan of the country's 17 nuclear power stations by a further 12 years. Merkel was accused of kowtowing to the powerful energy sector, which is set to make billions from the deal, and of threatening the future of the renewable energy industry.

The new policy amounts to an effective U-turn on pervious, ground-breaking legislation passed by Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrat and Green government, which would have seen nuclear power phased out in just over a decade's time. Now it is unlikely to happen before 2035.

Wulff can either decide to sign the law, thus riding roughshod over the opposition, or take the more constitutional route and let it go through the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, which is unlikely to pass it. Hence what has been coined Roche's "sex for a veto" offer.

Earlier this month Roche, who admits she had never previously been on a protest march, joined anti-nuclear activists at major demonstrations against the rail and road transport of radioactive waste to a storage facility in northern Germany.

Donning red wellington boots, Roche boarded one of hundreds of tractors to take part in the protest, which attracted 50,000 demonstrators, some of whom chained themselves to railway tracks and tree branches. Herds of sheep were used in an attempt to halt the transport of spent fuel rods between a nuclear reprocessing plant in Le Hague, France, and a deep-earth storage facility in Gorleben, Germany.

"This year the government has radicalised me," she told German radio. "Sometimes I could almost cry in anger ... I'm totally against the fact that we're producing terrible, fatal, poisonous rubbish, without knowing where to put it."

Roche has latched on to the renaissance of a movement that dates back to the 1970s, when protesters at grassroots level first campaigned against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Wyhl in south-west Germany. Nuclear accidents, such as Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 galvanised support.

Ironically, the decision of the Schröder government to phase out nuclear power took much of the wind out of the sails of the campaign.

Merkel's reversal has now had the opposite effect and prompted thousands of new protesters from across the political and social spectrum to sign up to the reignited cause.

"The best way to explain the recent protests is that many people have the feeling that fewer and fewer things are being decided democratically," said Gesine Agena, 23, a member of the Green party's youth wing who has been described as one of the new faces of the protest movement. "Political elites are pushing through decisions they've already made regardless of what the citizen on the street thinks of them."

The banking crisis has only magnified a feeling of exclusion. According to Dieter Rucht of the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin: "This is driving people to the barricades who don't normally go out on to the streets."