Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany for sixteen years, from 2005 to 2021, and the dominant political figure in Europe for most of them. Born in Hamburg in 1954, she moved as an infant to East Germany, where her father, a Lutheran pastor, had taken a parish. She trained as a physical chemist, took a doctorate, and worked at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin until the wall fell in 1989. She entered politics at thirty-five through a new democratic movement, joined the CDU, and was made minister for women and youth by Helmut Kohl, who called her das Mädchen. In 1999, when Kohl was engulfed by an illegal donations scandal, she published a newspaper article calling for the party to move on without him — the act that made her leader. She became chancellor in 2005 and governed mostly in grand coalitions, with a style of deliberate caution that produced a verb, merkeln, meaning to avoid deciding. She made three large decisions against that habit. After Fukushima in 2011 she announced the shutdown of German nuclear power, having previously extended it. In the euro crisis she insisted on austerity as the condition of bailouts, which held the currency together and imposed severe hardship on Greece. And in September 2015 she opened the border to refugees moving through Hungary, saying wir schaffen das; about a million people arrived, and the resulting backlash fuelled the rise of the AfD. Her record on Russia has been reassessed since 2022: she deepened German dependence on Russian gas through Nord Stream and resisted Ukrainian NATO membership in 2008. She declined to seek a fifth term.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: German
- Roles: Chancellor of Germany (2005-2021)
