ANGELA MERKEL

Angela Merkel (born 1954) became the first woman ever to lead Germany as chancellor.
Merkel and the party she chairs, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), formed a
coalition with two other parties in 2005, and the agreement installed the former physicist as
head of government. Perhaps more notable than her gender is Merkel's background: she is
the first person to lead a reunified Germany who comes from the formerly Communist
eastern states, a division that endured for more than four decades following the end of
Germany's defeat in World War II. My life changed completely in 1989, Merkel said
once at a rally, according to Judy Dempsey in the International Herald Tribune. I have had
many opportunities in the last 15 years. I would like to give my country back what I myself
have gained in terms of the opportunities from reunification.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner on July 17, 1954, in Hamburg, Germany. This was
one of the largest cities of West Germany, but her parents moved east just a few months later to
the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, as Communist East Germany was called. The
decision was made by Merkel's father, Horst, a Lutheran pastor, who was offered a job at a
seminary in the state of Brandenburg, about an hour north of Berlin. Berlin was surrounded by
the GDR, but had a Western sector that remained technically part of West Germany. Soviet and
U.S. troops monitored the different Berlin zones, but in 1961 the East Germans, with Soviet aid,
began constructing a massive wall that divided the city into East and West, like Germany itself.
East German border guards patrolled the no-man's land adjacent to the Wall, with orders to shoot
on sight any trespassers. Nearly all of those who died were East Germans seeking freedom in the
West instead of the strictly regulated state socialism of the East.

A Prize-Winning Student
Merkel was raised as the eldest of three children in the Brandenburg city of Templin. After she
became chancellor, a biography was published in Germany which revealed that her father had
been instrumental in the creation of a separate Protestant church in the GDRallowing GDR
officials to keep a closer watch on its membersand his tacit support of the German Communist
Party likely gave the family the few perks they were able to enjoy. These included two cars
when one automobile was an almost unheard-of luxury in much of Communist Eastern Europe
and travel visas that permitted them to visit relatives back in West Germany and even vacation in
Italy.
As a youth, Merkel was nicknamed Kasi from her surname, Kasner, and was a studious high
schooler who excelled in languages, as had her mother, who had been a teacher of English back
in Hamburg. Merkel became so fluent in Russian that she even won a prize trip to Moscow. Like
nearly all other college-bound East German teens, she was a member of the Freie Deutsche
Jugend (Free German Youth, or FDJ), the official socialist youth organization in the GDR, but
most reports of her young adult years portray her as a dutiful East German who avoided political

rhetoric of any stripe. I would have loved to have become a teacher, she once reflected,
according to a profile written by Ruth Elkins in London's Independent. But not under that
political system. Instead she chose to study the sciences, remarking that physics was harmless
and uncontroversial, according to Elkins.
Merkel entered the University of Leipzig in 1973. According to a German-language biography
by Gerd Langguth published in Germany as Angela Merkel: Aufstieg zur Macht (Angela Merkel:
Rise to Power), her father's proregime attitude helped Angela's career, noted Luke Harding,
correspondent for London's Observer. Horst's status with GDR authorities permitted his daughter
to study at an elite comprehensive school and go on to university, at a time when the children of
clergy were routinely refused places. During her student years, Merkel worked as a barmaid in a
discotheque, and a year before earning her degree married a fellow student, Ulrich Merkel. They
moved to an apartment with neither toilet nor hot water in the Prenzlauer Berg district of East
Berlin, and began renovating it while Merkel also went to work on her doctorate in quantum
chemistry at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. The
marriage ended in 1982.

Joined Nascent Democracy Movement

Merkel earned her doctorate in 1986 and remained affiliated with the Central Institute for
Physical Chemistry as a researcher. In 1989 she became involved in prodemocracy groups that
were suddenly being allowed to operate in East Berlin and other GDR cities. One of them was
Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening), which had its roots in several pacifist
Protestant church groups in the GDR. The pro-democracy movement escalated, leading to the
opening of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989, when the wall was demolished and thousands
of East Berliners jubilantly streamed through, signalling the beginning of the end for the GDR.
Merkel's first mentor in politics was Lothar de Maizire (born 1940), who headed the East
German branch of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The East Germany Communist Party
allowed the CDU to operate as a token nod to a multiparty electoral system, but parties like the
CDU had little power until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soon de Maizire was named head of a
caretaker government in the lead-up to reunification, and in March of 1990 Merkel became the
deputy spokesperson for his government.
The former East German Lnder, or states, were reunified with the rest of Germany in October
of 1990. Two months later the first post-reunification parliamentary elections were held, and
Merkel won a seat in the Bundestag (Germany's lower house) from the state of MecklenburgVorpommern. The East German branch of the CDU merged with its West German counterpart
that same year, and Merkel became a rising star in the party when its powerful leader, German
chancellor Helmut Kohl (born 1930), made her his protg. Kohl had served as chancellor of
West Germany since 1982, and was heralded as the architect of reunification, which just three
years earlier had been considered an entirely unfeasible hope by most Germans. Kohl famously
dubbed Merkel das Mdchen,, or the Girl, and made her a member of his cabinet in 1991 as
minister for women and young people. In December of 1991, thanks to Kohl's support, she was
elected deputy party leader.

Elected Head of CDU

Merkel became the first politician from the former East to become a government minister in a
newly reunited Germany. In 1994 Kohl gave her a more significant cabinet assignment, this time
as minister for the environment and reactor safety, but Kohl was ousted in 1998 elections and
stepped down accordingly. Weeks later, she was elected a secretary-general of the CDU, the first
woman to attain that post in party history, and over the next two years she distanced herself from
Kohl and older members of the CDU when a series of financial misdeeds came to light. In 2000
she bested the latest CDU chair, Wolfgang Schuble (born 1942), in a leadership contest, and
became the first woman ever to lead the party.
At the time, the CDU was relegated to one of its rare periods out of power. Its main rival, the
center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), had won in 1998 and Gerhard Schrder
(born 1944) succeeded Kohl as chancellor. Schrder and the SPD held onto power in the 2002
elections, but by 2005 the German public appeared ready to shift their political allegiances once
again. In parliamentary elections that year, voters gave the CDU a small margin of victory.
Schrder refused to concede power, however, and finally a so-called Grand Coalition was
negotiated, with Merkel becoming chancellor on November 22, 2005. She agreed to form a
government comprised of cabinet members from her own party as well as its counterpart in the
southern German state of Bavaria, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), and members of
Schrder's SPD.
Political pundits often compare Merkel to Margaret Thatcher (born 1925), who served as British
prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Like Merkel, Thatcher had enjoyed an impressive career in
the sciences before becoming the first woman to head her country's leading center-right party, the
Conservative (Tory) Party. The reforms enacted during Merkel's years in office also had echoes
of the Thatcher era: Merkel instituted some sweeping tax cuts for German businesses and began
to move Germany to a more active role as a leader in foreign policy. Her accomplishments in this
realm included a reworking of the compact between France and Germany that gave both powers
a shared leadership role in the powerful European Union (EU), but for the first time since the end
of World War II the new arrangement meant that more decisions were made in Berlin, not Paris.

Friendly with Texan President

In other foreign-policy initiatives, Merkel has established more cordial relations than her
predecessor with the United States, meeting several times with U.S. president George W. Bush
(born 1946). Unlike her predecessor Schrder, she has been a vocal critic of Russian president
Vladimir Putin (born 1952), despite the fact that she is modern Europe's first leader to speak
fluent Russian. Political analysts have wryly noted that while Merkel was busy with the prodemocracy movement in East Germany in 1989, Putin was serving as a station agent for the
KGB, the Soviet state-security apparatus, in Dresden East Germany.
In 2007 Merkel took over two temporary posts in addition to her duties as chancellor of
Germany: the rotating presidencies of both the EU and the G8 (Group of Eight, an international

forum comprised of the world's most powerful nations). As chair of the latter, she proposed a
transatlantic free trade zone that might become known by the acronym TAFTA. I consider it my
job to express to America what's in the interest of Europe, New York Times correspondent Mark
Landler quoted her as saying about TAFTA. And for me, the trans-Atlantic partnership, in
general, is in the European interest. Europeans know that we cannot accomplish things without
America, but she added, America must also know that Europe is needed in many areas.
Merkel earns consistently high marks in public opinion polls, receiving the highest approval
ratings among all postWorld War II German chancellors. In 2007 Forbes magazine ranked her at
the top of its list of the world's most powerful women for the second year in a row. In 1993 she
married her former doctoral advisor, Joachim Sauer, a chemistry professor. Like many German
women of her generation, she is childless; the country has regularly posted some of the world's
lowest birth rates since the 1980s. On the domestic front, this demographic shortfall may keep
her in poweras the median voter age in Germany remains close to her own actual agebut
may also portend disaster for the country's future. If birthrates continue to decline, the country
will one day have a workforce too small to support the social and medical programs that its
elderly will need, explained Andrew Purvis in Time International. Previous governments have
sounded the alarm about this scenarioand then done little or nothing about it . If Merkel uses
her leadership to find ways in which women can be better integrated into the economy, she will
go down in history for a lot more than her gender.