In the last ten years, Forbes magazine has named her the most powerful woman in the world nine times. Angela Merkel, who has outlasted an entire generation of world leaders, will attempt to secure her fourth chancellorship on Sunday.
Unlike her former partners, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, and Silvio Berlusconi, Merkel remains in power and will try to stay there for another four years.
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During her tenure, she has taken a leading role in the European debt and migrant crisis, opposed Russia in the Ukrainian crisis, and recently, after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, many see her as the torchbearer of Western liberal democracy.
With a doctorate in quantum chemistry, Merkel (62) is much better known for her methodical and pragmatic approach to problem-solving than for rhetorical flourishes and far-reaching political visions.
Great prospects for ‘mutti’
Vaccinated against vanity and skilled at avoiding the traps of long-term power, she lives in an apartment in Berlin with her shy husband Joachim Sauer, also a scientist, shops at the local store, and spends holidays hiking in the Alps. Germans seem to love it, so ‘mutti’, as they call her, has great prospects of being elected to lead the country for a fourth time.
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Merkel was born as Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in the port city of Hamburg, but just a few weeks later her family moved to a small town in communist East Germany, at a time when most families were going in the opposite direction.
From the very beginning of her schooling, “Kasi”, as her peers called her, was an excellent student with a special interest in the Russian language and Soviet culture.
After earning her doctorate in East Berlin, Merkel worked as a quantum chemist at the East German Academy of Sciences. Former colleagues describe her as a quiet, diligent, and persistent scientist.
In her biography published in 2013, Stefan Kornelius wrote that Merkel chose to dedicate herself to science because “she did not have the courage to openly rebel against the communist regime”.
She was 35 years old when the Wall fell. That evening, on November 9, 1989, she was with a friend in a sauna. On her way home, she joined the crowd that crossed to the western side.
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Suddenly freed from communist oversight and without fear of the Stasi secret police, Merkel joined a new East German party called Democratic Awakening, whose sister party in the West was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Helmut Kohl’s favorite
Although the CDU boasts some values that Angela Merkel is inclined towards, her biographers speculate that her choice of party was more a reflection of her instinct for power than of ideology.
She quickly became the favorite of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who became her mentor and called her “his girl”. Shortly thereafter, he appointed her Minister for Women and Youth in the first German government after reunification.
– Even when she was self-effacing and quiet… you could feel her strength, said photographer Herlinde Koelbl, who has been photographing the chancellor for official portraits once a year for decades.
Many underestimated the strength of this shy politician and paid the price for it, one of whom was Kohl. When the former chancellor became embroiled in a campaign financing scandal in 1999, Merkel openly called for the party to get rid of him.
In an editorial she wrote for FAZ, in a text now known as the “divorce request”, Merkel stated that the party must distance itself from Kohl just as teenagers must distance themselves from their parents when they grow up.
Although she was already the head of the CDU at that time, Merkel wisely left the candidacy for chancellor in the 2002 elections to the leader of the sister Bavarian Christian Social Union, Edmund Stoiber. This move proved to be excellent, as Stoiber lost the election to the Social Democrats’ Gerhard Schroeder, whose government, in turn, lost power three years later.
In 2005, Merkel became the federal chancellor. She was the first woman to hold that position and the youngest of all heads of government in history.
In a party dominated by men from the south, mostly Catholics, a woman from the communist east with two marriages behind her and no children, she was and remains an outsider. As party leader, she shifted the CDU towards the center by implementing social policies, abolishing compulsory military service, and abandoning nuclear energy.
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During the debt crisis, Merkel preached fiscal discipline and strict austerity measures. In Southern Europe, she was openly hated for this and sometimes caricatured in a Nazi uniform.
This image changed with the outbreak of the migrant crisis, when Der Spiegel called her ‘Mother Angela’ and dressed her in a nun’s habit, although this was undoubtedly the greatest political crisis of her three terms.
With Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the rise of right-wing populism across Europe, Merkel, if she remains in power, faces new challenges. In a world that has yet to come to terms with the results of the U.S. presidential election, many see the German political veteran as a beacon of hope.
And while her chancellor opponent Martin Schulz will admit that Merkel is “exceptionally intelligent and surgically precise”, but also “coldly calculating”, many others in the past year, since Trump’s election, see her as the true “leader of the free world”.
