Angela Merkel

Chancellor of Germany
Incumbent
Assumed office 22 November 2005
President Horst Köhler

Deputy Franz Müntefering
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Guido Westerwelle

Preceded by Gerhard Schröde

Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety
In office 17 November 1994 – 26 October 1998
Chancellor Helmut Kohl

Preceded by Klaus Töpfer

Succeeded by Jürgen Trittin

Minister for Women and Youth
In office 18 January 1991 – 17 November 1994
Chancellor Helmut Kohl

Preceded by Ursula Lehr

Succeeded by Claudia Nolte

Born 17 July 1954 (age 55) Hamburg, West Germany

Political party Christian Democratic Union (1990–present)

Other political Democratic Awakening (1989–1990)

Spouse(s) Ulrich Merkel (1977–1982) Joachim Sauer (1998–present)

Alma mater University of Leipzig

Profession Physical chemist

Religion Lutheranism

Angela Dorothea Merkel (German pronunciation: [ˈaŋɡela] or nee Kasner, born 17 July 1954) is the current Chancellor of Germany. Merkel, elected to the German Parliament from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, has been the chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 10 April 2000, and Chairwoman of the CDU-CSU parliamentary party group from 2002 to 2005.
From 2005 to 2009 she led a Grand coalition with the Christian Social Union (CSU), its Bavarian sister party, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), formed after the 2005 federal election on 22 November 2005. In the elections of 27 September 2009, her party, the CDU, obtained the largest share of the votes, and she formed a coalition government with the CSU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Her government was sworn in on 28 October 2009.[1]
In 2007, Merkel was also President of the European Council and chaired the G8. She played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Berlin Declaration. In domestic policy, health care reform and problems concerning future energy development have thus far been major issues of her tenure.
Merkel is the first female Chancellor of Germany. From 2006 to 2009, Forbes Magazine has named her the most powerful woman in the world.[2] In 2007 she became the second woman to chair the G8, after Margaret Thatcher.
Chancellor Merkel is a member of the Council of Women World Leaders, an International network of current and former women presidents and prime ministers whose mission is to mobilize the highest-level women leaders globally for collective action on issues of critical importance to women and equitable development.[citation needed]
In 2008 Merkel received the Charlemagne Prize “for her work to reform the European Union”. The prize was presented by Nicolas Sarkozy.

Early life

Angela Merkel was born as Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg on 17 July 1954, as the daughter of Horst Kasner (b. 6 August 1926 in Berlin-Pankow), a Lutheran pastor and his wife, Herlind (b. 8 July 1928 in Danzig, as Herlind Jentzsch), a teacher of English and Latin. Her mother is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Her grandparents on her mother’s side lived in Elbing in East Prussia; one of them being Masurian.[3] She has a brother, Marcus (born 7 July 1957), and a sister, Irene (b. 19 August 1964).[citation needed]
Merkel’s father studied Theology in Heidelberg (then West Germany) and, afterwards, in Hamburg. In 1954 her father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (near Perleberg in Brandenburg) which then was in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), or Communist East Germany, and the family moved to Templin. Thus Merkel grew up in the countryside 80 km (50 miles) north of Berlin. Gerd Langguth, a former senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, states in his book[4] that the family’s ability to travel freely from East to West Germany during the following years, as well as their possession of two automobiles, leads to the conclusion that Merkel’s father had a “sympathetic” relationship with the communist regime, since such freedom and perquisites for a Christian pastor and his family would have been otherwise impossible in East Germany.
Like most pupils, Merkel was a member of the official, Socialist-led youth movement Free German Youth (FDJ). Later she became a member of the district board and secretary for “Agitprop” (Agitation and Propaganda) at the Academy of Sciences in that organisation.[5] However, she did not take part in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, which was common in East Germany, and was confirmed instead. Merkel herself described her FDJ youth movement years as “cultural work”.[citation needed]
Merkel was educated in Templin and at the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978. While a student, she participated in the reconstruction of the ruin of the Moritz Bastei, a project students initiated to create their own club and recreation facility on campus. Such an initiative was unprecedented in the GDR of that period, and initially resisted by the University of Leipzig. However, with backing of the local leadership of the SED party, the project was allowed to proceed.[6] Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. She learned to speak Russian fluently, and earned a statewide prize for her proficiency.[citation needed] After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry[7] she worked as a researcher.
In 1989, Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party Democratic Awakening. Following the first (and only) democratic election of the East German state, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new pre-unification caretaker government under Lothar de Maizière.[8]

Member of Bundestag and cabinet minister

At the first post-reunification general election in December 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag from a constituency which includes the districts of Nordvorpommern and Rügen, as well as the city of Stralsund. This has remained her electoral district until today. Her party merged with the west German CDU[9] and she became Minister for Women and Youth in Helmut Kohl’s 3rd cabinet. In 1994, she was made Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, which gave her greater political visibility and a platform on which to build her political career. As one of Kohl’s protégées and his youngest cabinet minister, she was referred to by Kohl as “das Mädchen”

Leader of the Opposition

When the Kohl government was defeated in the 1998 general election, Merkel was named Secretary-General of the CDU. In this position, Merkel oversaw a string of Christian Democrat election victories in six out of seven state elections in 1999 alone, breaking the SPD-Green coalition’s hold on the Bundesrat, the legislative body representing the states. Following a party financing scandal, which compromised many leading figures of the CDU (most notably Kohl himself, who refused to reveal the donor of DM 2,000,000 claiming he had given his word of honour and the then party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl’s hand-picked successor, who wasn’t cooperative either), Merkel criticized her former mentor, Kohl, and advocated a fresh start for the party without him. She was elected to replace Schäuble, becoming the first female chair of her party, on 10 April 2000. Her election surprised many observers, as her personality offered a contrast to the party she had been chosen to lead; Merkel is a Protestant, originating from predominantly Protestant northern Germany, while the CDU is a male-dominated, socially conservative party with strongholds in western and southern Germany, and the Bavarian sister party, the CSU, has deep Catholic roots.[citation needed]
Following Merkel’s election as CDU leader, she enjoyed considerable popularity among the German population and was favoured by many Germans to become Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s challenger in the 2002 election. However, she did not receive enough support in her own party and particularly its sister party (the Bavarian Christian Social Union, or CSU), and was subsequently out-manoeuvred politically by CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, to whom she eventually ceded the privilege of challenging Schröder; however, he squandered a large lead in the opinion polls to lose the election by a razor-thin margin. After Stoiber’s defeat in 2002, in addition to her role as CDU chairwoman, Merkel became leader of the conservative opposition in the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag. Her rival, Friedrich Merz, who had held the post of parliamentary leader prior to the 2002 election, was eased out to make way for Merkel.[citation needed]
Merkel supported a substantial reform agenda concerning Germany’s economic and social system and was considered to be more pro-market than her own party (the CDU); she advocated changes to German labour law, specifically removing barriers to laying off employees and increasing the allowed number of work hours in a week, arguing that existing laws made the country less competitive because companies cannot easily control labour costs at times when business is slow.[10]
Merkel argued for Germany’s nuclear power to be phased out less quickly than the Schröder administration had planned.[11]
Merkel advocated a strong transatlantic partnership and German-American friendship. In the spring of 2003, defying strong public opposition, Merkel came out in favour of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, describing it as “unavoidable” and accusing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of anti-Americanism. This led some critics[who?] to characterize her as an American lackey. She criticised the government’s support for the accession of Turkey to the European Union and favoured a “privileged partnership” instead. In doing so, she was seen as being in unison with many Germans in rejecting Turkish membership of the European Union.[citation needed]

Comparisons

As a female politician from a centre right party, and a scientist, Merkel has been compared by many in the English language press to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Some have referred to her as “Iron Lady”, “Iron Girl”, and even “The Iron Frau” (all alluding to Thatcher, whose nickname was “The Iron Lady” — Thatcher also has a science degree: an Oxford University degree in chemistry). Political commentators have debated the precise extent to which their agenda are similar.[12]