Angela Dorothea Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, and grew up in Templin, East Germany (GDR – German Democratic Republic). As was expected of all the children growing up in the GDR, Merkel was a member of the communist Free German Youth movement. After graduating high school with the highest score possible in the German scoring system, she studied physics at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, where she met her first husband, Ulrich Merkel. Though the couple divorced after five years of marriage, she kept his last name.
In 1978, at the age of 24, Merkel joined as faculty of the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. Several years later, she got her Ph.D. for her thesis on quantum chemistry.
In late 1989, after the Berlin Wall fall, Merkel became involved with the newly formed Democratic Awakening party, and within a few months, she became its press spokesperson. In April 1990, the party merged with the East German Christian Democratic Union, and then it merged with its western counterpart, which then became the CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany). In the German federal election of December 1990, the first to be held after the German reunification, Merkel won a seat in the Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament) as the Stralsund-Rügen-Grimmen representative and she was appointed the minister for women and youth.
Merkel began to gain popularity and recognition for her work both as a party member and as a parliament member. In 1991, she got elected as deputy chairman of the CDU. Three years later, at the age of 40, she was named Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, becoming the youngest minister in the cabinet, and in 1998 she was appointed Secretary-General of the CDU. On April 10th, 2000, when she was 46 years old, Merkel was elected as the leader of the CDU, becoming the first woman and first non-Catholic to serve in this position. In 2002, she was appointed Leader of the Opposition in the Bundestag. In this position, she advocated for labor laws reforms, a pro-market economic approach, and a close German-American partnership.
In the national election of 2005, the CDU had reached a settlement with the other major parties to form a grand coalition government with Merkel at its head, and on November 22nd, 2005, at the age of 51, Merkel assumed the office of Chancellor of Germany, becoming the first woman, first Eastern German, and youngest person to hold the office. Her mandate got renewed three more times, serving in office for 16 years. During her tenure, Merkel has faced many national and international challenges, including the euro-zone debt crisis, the refugee crisis in which she kept Germany’s borders open, allowing more than a million Syrian refugees into the country, and the covid-19 pandemic. Over the years, she became the de facto leader of the European Union, facing confrontations such as the Russian annex of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea and the Brexit.
In 2018, Merkel stepped down as leader of the CDU and announced she wouldn’t run in the next federal elections. In 2021, she left parliament after 16 years as German Chancellor and one of the most important people in Global politics.
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