Angela Merkel was born on July 17, 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany. She is a German politician who was elected the first female Chancellor of unified Germany in 2005.
Angela was born Angela Dorothea Kasner to Horst and Herlind Kasner and brought up in East Germany. She was proficient in Russian and mathematics in school and later studied physics at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. She was awarded a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1986 and has published several papers in the field.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Merkel joined a new party called ‘Democratic Awakening’. In the German Federal Election of 1990, Merkel won a seat to the German federal parliament called ‘Bundestag’. She was appointed Minister for Women and Youth in the federal cabinet. In 1994, she was promoted to Minister for Environment and Nuclear Safety.
She was later appointed Secretary – General of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and became the first female leader of a German party in April 2000.
In 2005 she became the first female Chancellor of Germany and has continued for four terms till date. She is widely regarded as the most powerful woman in the world and is the de facto leader of the European Union.
She has transformed German politics and steered its economy through financial crisis and recession. She has been instrumental in Germany’s energy reform transition from conventional methods to alternative energy sources in efforts to reduce global warming. Due to Merkel’s inclusive policy during Europe’s refugee crisis, Germany granted asylum to nearly 1.7 million people between 2015 and 2019, demonstrating that a crisis could be met with compassion.
She has remained at the number 1 spot on the Forbes list of most powerful women in the world for the past 10 consecutive years.
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