Angela Merkel Facts & Biography | Famous Leaders Born: July 17, 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany Nationality: German Famous For: First female Chancellor of Germany Awards: Dame Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic 2006, Vision for Europe Award 2006 Angela Dorothea Merkel is a popular German politician. She is a trained physicist who decided to venture into politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Angela has been the chairwoman of Christian Democratic Union Party since 2000 and she is actually the first woman to ever hold this office. She is also the first female chancellor in Germany and is regarded as one of the European Union’s leading figures. Additionally, Angela Merkel is the first woman to become a leader in Germany since 1871 and the youngest chancellor since the Second World War. Early Life Angela Merkel, a chancellor and German stateswoman, was born in Hamburg, Germany, on July 17, 1954. She is the daughter of an English teacher and Lutheran pastor and she has one brother and a sister.

She spent her childhood in a rural setting in Templin, north of Berlin, East Germany. Angela participated in the compulsory communist youth program and attended the University of Leipzig to study physics. She earned her doctorate degree in 1978 after which she took a job at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry working in the capacity of a chemist. Merkel’s Career in Leadership When the Berlin Wall fell, Angela saw her entrance into politics. She started by joining the Democratic Awakening Party. She then became a spokeswoman for the first caretaker government, democratically elected in East Germany. Post-reunification, she was elected into the Bundestag. While being a member of the Christian Democratic Union political party, commonly known as the CDU, Angela was appointed to the position of Minister for Women and Youth in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s cabinet. She also served as the Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety under Helmut. When Kohl was defeated in 1998, Merkel became the party’s Secretary General and soon rose to the position of chairperson, becoming the first lady to ever hold that position.

In the 2005 national elections, she challenged the then-chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, and won narrowly by only three seats. As such, she was declared the chancellor of Germany. She was re-elected for that position in 2009. In 2008, Angela became the first German chancellor to speak before Knesset, when she spoke during Israel’s 60th birthday. Current Controversies Angela Merkel has made headlines recently when she came out to accuse United States National Security Agency of spying on her by tapping her cell phone. Angela chided the US for this breech of personal privacy saying that spying on friends is never acceptable. Reports later revealed that the United States National Security Agency may have been spying on Angela since 2002. The Future Angela’s popularity has suffered a few setbacks through her second term as Europe continues to face financial crisis. However, the EU has looked to Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, to lead them through the trouble.

Merkel is known for pulling her government from the brink as well as helping Germany to recover from a recession, achievements that earned her the nickname, “Teflon Angie.” Merkel has held fast to pro-American and pro-Israeli stances and she continues to warn about Iran’s nuclear program.

Famous Leaders Angela Merkel | The Plaid Avenger The Plaid Avenger Years Left in Office: To 2017; re-election possible Political Classification: Center-right Education: MS, PhD Quantum Physics Age: 62 (born July 17, 1954) Angela Merkel Facts and Information Important Points Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany, and the first woman to ever hold the position Merkel is center-right, fiscally and socially conservative, although has liberal leanings on environmental and energy policy Merkel's Germany is economically and financially sound: the biggest and strongest economy in Europe, 4th largest in the world Merkel is really stuck and losing support due to her policies on bailing out Greece and the Eurozone from economic collapse but she draws the line on expecting Greece to pay back Merkel is great at putting countries back in their rightful places as she has worked on negotiations between Russia and Ukraine Merkel is routinely voted as one of the most powerful women in the world The Rundown She’s the Teutonic titan of Europe! Leading Europe’s largest economy and top tier world political power player, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is a significant force well beyond the borders of Bavaria!

Her decisions affect the future of the Euro, of the EU, the world economy, and even of nuclear energy use….and she is routinely ranked one of the most powerful women in the world! She’s downright Merkel-licious! However, this first female chancellor of Germany had perhaps the least likely background preparation for her position. Raised in a small town in the quaint countryside north of Berlin (in communist-era East Germany) by a Lutheran pastor and English-teacher mother, Merkel went on to earn a BS in physics and her PhD in quantum chemistry and then worked as a researcher…this lady is a full-fledged scientist! But Germany, and the USSR, were a-changin’ and communism was a-collapsin’ so a new path was opened to Angie’s energies… As the USSR started to implode in 1989, Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party Democratic Awakening. Following the first (and only) democratic election in the East German state, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new pre-unification caretaker government…from scientist to democracy spokesperson: how’s that for a rapid introduction into politics?

After East and West Germany unified into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, in the very first post-unification election, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag (that’s the German equivalent to the US Congress) as a member of a party that later merged with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CDU is a center-right, Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany, of which Merkel is not just a member, she has been leader of the party since 2000…thus, if in America, she would be a Republican. But just barely. Her fiscal and social policy is largely conservative, but she does have a ‘green’ streak in her: she is a big advocate of green energies and also of halting global warming. In fact, Merkel is the only leader of a large industrial nation that has proposed serious global policy on halting greenhouse gas emissions…not that any of them have been embraced yet, but Merkel does try…. But I am getting ahead of the story…back to Angie’s ascent in the 1990’s: Merkel then became Minister for Women and Youth in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s cabinet.

In 1994, she was made Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, which gave her greater political visibility and a platform on which to build her political career. Angie was on the move, upward. After Kohl lost power, she was leader of the conservative opposition in the lower house of the German parliament, and eventually became the leader of a coalition between the CDU and the CSU (the Bavarian Christian Social Union: a sister party to the CDU)...a position that then put her in the top slot leadership of the German government itself, thus launching her into the Chancellorship in 2005! When Merkel came to power she said her government would be judged by how many jobs it created and by how much it had cut the deficit, and in her first 4 years she did a bang-up job! The German economy has been strong, has the lowest unemployment in Europe, and remains a powerhouse of the continent! Her pro-market, anti-labor policies have not garnered her any favor with the liberal left, but such is politics.

However, she also spent a lot of her time dealing with cultural/immigration issues and bailing out the crippled Eurozone…much to the chagrin of an increasing number of German voters. And her stance on these issues? Well, let’s put it this way: Merkel has outright stated that she believes multiculturalism is a failed experiment for German, has pushed for decreased movement of peoples within the EU zone, and openly opposed Turkey’s entry into the EU—just so you know, the major immigrant group in Germany are Turks, so there is some personal friction going on there, as many Germans feel that a lot of the Turks have simply refused any attempts at assimilation. This feeling by locals that they are ‘losing their culture’ to foreigners is a common theme that is gaining support both within Germany and the EU as a whole. Fiscally, Merkel has kept the German haus in order, but unfortunately Europe as a whole has not fared so well, and our favored Frau is catching sheisse for that too! Say what? Merkel has recently drawn fire for her response to the Greek economic crisis/collapse…which is now turning into a possible collapse of the Eurozone and the Euro itself!

How can Merkel be getting negative press for a bunch of Greek shenanigans? Well, her first controversial decision came in her attempt to bail-out the Greek economy in a similar manner to the U.S. government’s bail-out of its financial and auto industries…with German taxpayer money of course. This was an extremely unpopular decision in Germany and that caused some political backlash from the public. More recently, she as taken a much harder-line stance on any aid given to Greece, even demanding the IMF become a player in the game backing some of these loans. Despite that, as Merkel’s Germany remains THE most critical contributor to debt relief in the Eurozone, members of Angela’s own political party are starting to defect from supporting her on the basis that Germany has already given too much and should pull back from being Europe’s monetary life raft…. But Angie is stuck is really stuck on this one! She (and the solid German economy and fiscally responsible German taxpayers) simply have to contribute the most to salvaging the whole EU and Eurozone experiment: if they allow Greece to crash and burn, many other European countries will likely follow, and then the whole shebang is going down the toilet, which will of course negatively affect all of Europe, even Germany.

But the Germans are getting rightly sick of having to pick up the bill for the southern Europeans states’ complete fiscal idiocy. Can’t say I blame them. So Merkel is doing the right thing for Europe (and for Germany in the long run) but may have to pay the short term political price by losing all sorts of public and political party support. But she is a strong leader with a stoically solid backbone, so never fear. In this respect, comparisons have been made to the fiscally conservative Margaret Thatcher (famous former Prime Minister of UK back in the 80’s): both women are conservative bulwarks of their societies, and have shown the ability to be cool-headed yet hard-core firm in their policy decisions in attempts to guide their countries through difficult economic times. It is from these decisions that they both earned the moniker ‘The Iron Lady’...although in Angie’s case, it has been modified to “Iron Frau”! Other things to know about Merkel: she is the only major world power leader that is moving towards green energies in a dedicated way, as referenced earlier.

She started her administration pretty pro-US, but that Uncle Sam love have been flagging as of late, with German support of the Afghan campaign at an all time low…and Germany actually refused to support the Euro/US/NATO invasion of Libya. Relations and trade with both Russia and China are at all time highs, and Merkel’s Germany has increasing clout as a respected world power that plays well with others…all others, not just its Team West buddies. Germany is pretty much always invited to the UN Permanent Security Council meeting, is a major player in the G-7 and G-20, and an industrial giant…and so you should always know the leader at the helm of this country And for a while longer, its the Merkel! I go berserk-el for the Merkel! 2011 UPDATE: Wowsers!!! Huge big nuke deal just went down in Germany, and I ain’t talkin’ meltdown here! In the wake of the Japanese tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster, Merkel announced that her state has totally renounced nuclear energy use, and will have all reactors off-line by 2022…which is a stunning 180 degree turn from her administration’s position just 9 months prior!

This move by the 4th largest economy and a world superpower in its own right is sending shockwaves thru the nuclear industry and the world. This could very well be a “JFK:we-will-put-a-man-on-the-moon” moment in history that shapes the future of the planet as Germany may spur a true movement towards alternative energies that other countries embrace. The downside? Well, Germany is a major industrial power with major fuel needs, and no one in their right mind thinks that the road to ‘green’ will be easy, or even possible. They will be even more heavily reliant on fossil fuels in the decades to come…hey man, they got to keep those BMW’s hauling ass on the Autobahn! In addition, the Greek/Eurozone bail-outs combined with an increasing deficit due to tax cuts and unpopular anti-labor (anti-union) policies have led to Merkel slowly losing her grip on the Chancellorship. The most recent set back she has suffered has been a defeat of her party at the polls, with the Christian Democratic Union having lost its party majority in the legislature. Things don’t look rosy for Angie, but don’t count the Iron Frau out just as yet! Ich bin eine Berliner!

Although that means nothing in this context, I always like saying it. 2015 Update Well, well, well… the titan keeps on reigning! Three terms going on four it seems! Some wonder if Merkel is wanting a vacation from this weighty power and an early end to the current term, but it sure looks like she wants to keep us on our toes instead! Seriously, what Prime Minister would want to step down from a country leading both economically and with another World Cup title? There’s no reason to leave the party! Anyway, don’t let this jolly atmosphere make you miss the nitty-gritty stuff the lady is sifting through. Since your last insight into her life, Merkel has gotten a third term. Oh, I’m repeating myself…but it’s important to know because Merkel has this new term particularly because of her valiant efforts to keep the economy on a smooth course while hell breaks loose in the rest of Europe. Oh, yeah, and hell has broken loose in Europe in more ways than one. Merkel has been oppressed with the peacemaking role. Boy, I hope she likes it because it seems to be a key part of her job… First of all, there still are problems across the EU economically and financially.

Well, now it seems to be mostly a Greece problem. Yeah, it’s not as simple as scrubbing your average pan. This Greece is really greasy when it comes to making messes that they can’t clean up. With a new president, Greece is looking to skip out of half its debt, but here the titan draws the line and stops playing the nice guy (or woman in this case – must give credit where credit is due). Sure, she wants to help but enough is enough, and Greece is putting itself into a corner just as this is written. Besides still bailing out a handful of countries in the EU and observing if they follow the conditions set to bounce back the countries, Merkel has needed to play babysitter to Ukraine. Why? Well, to put a complicated story into a sentence, let’s just say that Ukraine is kind of split into pro-Western Europe and pro-Russia. Like a little child, it doesn’t know what it wants. Unfortunately, Ukraine is not innocent in the least and has had mayhem, revolts, and just blood pouring because of bad leadership and confusion.

However, thanks to our trusty little lady (aka Merkel) and her ability to travel to five plus places in less than a week, things seem to be heading in a reasonable direction. In February 2015, Merkel and her sidekick President Francois Hollande got Russia (well, basically Putin) and Ukraine to call a ceasefire. Thank goodness it seems to be being upheld for the most part! While this may not be the end of the violence, at least Merkel has been taught correctly to put bad kids in time out to cool their heads. I’m serious, this woman sometimes has the patience of a saint… When Merkel has not played babysitter, she has been strengthening a great strategic partnership with India the past few years (they’re still partying on together to this very day). They’re currently set to have future meetings in the upcoming year to keep everything handy dandy. Oh that woman knows how to play her cards both strong and sweet for her audience! Merkel also isn’t the picky type and goes right for the best competition – which is probably why she has the best working relations with Russia of all the players in the world at this point. That cunning Putin just can’t get around this lady no matter how much he tries.

Currently, he wants to try and persuade Ukraine to come back to Russia, and this isn’t too hard since it’s basically half pro-Russian anyway. He has been showing all signs of bloodlust as he marches his troops up and down the border. At this point, he is just waiting for the perfect time to flip the war switch on and swarm Ukraine. However, Merkel is hitting Putin upside the head for being too hotheaded, and this seems to be working. Is this too extreme? Apparently, it’s the only way to get through to this self-centered man for now. The poor lady is reaching the end of her rope on this one though. If Putin loses his last dose of humanity, Merkel might lose her control strength – her last special ability against the man. I don’t blame Merkel for going this far – the lady wants to look out on Ukraine and the rest of her neighbors without seeing destruction all around. It would totally ruin her garden view if the background was just full of mayhem! How do you keep a garden looking pretty? It’s just by plucking the weeds one by one – just like Merkel’s plucking Putin’s schemes right from under his feet.

Without a doubt, this woman isn’t calling it quits anytime soon – she’s the “girl on fire” after all! Let’s keep up the good work, Merkel, and pass me the sauerkraut would you? Photos The Guardian view on Germany’s regional elections: yellow card for Merkel | Editorial | World news | The Guardian The Guardian view on Germany’s regional elections: yellow card for Merkel Editorial After Sunday’s voting, German politics now has a significant anti-migration party. That’s disturbing, but it makes Germany a more typical European country than it was before ‘Mrs Merkel and her migration policy have had a rebuff. But the chancellor is an adaptable leader.’ Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters Monday 14 March 2016 15.45 EDT Last modified on Thursday 17 March 2016 08.26 EDT Share on Messenger Close Angela Merkel has been the leader of her centre-right CDU party for 16 years and chancellor of Germany for more than 10. For most of the last decade she has been beyond question the commanding figure in European politics. But for how long can she go on?

In particular, is she the inevitable leader of her party into the next German general election in autumn 2017, when she would be seeking a fourth term as chancellor? These questions have been lurking in the corridors of power in German politics for many months. But after three regional elections at the weekend, they have taken on new immediacy. The CDU lost vote share in all three regions that voted on Sunday, failing to win two regions where the party had hopes of victory and slipping badly in the third, while remaining in first place. Some of those losses contributed to the rise of the anti-refugee AfD party , which has opposed Mrs Merkel’s liberal approach to refugees . It was, as she said on Monday, a difficult day. With autumn 2017 now not far away, CDU nerves are still jangling. Yet it would be a premature mistake to assume that Sunday’s results mark the beginning of the end either for Mrs Merkel or even for her policy. For one thing, contrary to some of the more simplistic early readings, these results gave a mixed message to the ruling party.

The CDU’s vote declined by 3% in two of the regions, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt, and by 12% in Baden-Württemberg. These were obviously not good results, but they could surely have been a lot worse, given both the stage in the political cycle and the passions aroused by migration. Since the local CDU in both Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg had distanced itself from Mrs Merkel’s policy, and since these elections were won by the centre-left SPD and by the Greens respectively ( both of which supported a more liberal approach to refugees) it is hard to pin the CDU’s relatively poor showing on the chancellor or her approach to migration. Mrs Merkel therefore lives to fight another day. The CDU also remains the strongest party in German politics. This is partly because, in spite of the truly spectacular showing by the incumbent Greens under Winfried Kretschmann in what was once the CDU stronghold of Baden-Württemberg, none of the established parties seems yet to be a serious rival to the CDU in the general election when it comes.

The SPD and the liberal FDP both marked time or declined at the weekend. The rise of the anti-refugee AfD – which sits in the same group as the British Conservatives in the European parliament – was clearly the immediate story of these elections. The party went from nowhere to a double-figure share in all three contests, rising to 24% in Saxony-Anhalt, which is part of the poorer and less liberal former east Germany. It mobilised people who had voted in recent elections and it took votes from all the other parties, not just the CDU (indeed one in six AfD votes in Saxony-Anhalt came from the former communist Left party). It was a spectacular result. But it needs to be interpreted with care and proportion . This is not the rebirth of Nazism. Nor does it mark the end of German openness to migration. The truth is that, with these elections, Germany may now have become a more normal European country than it was before, having resisted that change longer than most of the others. Its big parties are in decline. The old party system is splintering.

Germany is now sporting its own anti-immigrant party alongside the others, much as Ukip and the Front National have muscled their way on to the stage in Britain and France. Mrs Merkel and her migration policy have had a rebuff. But the chancellor is an adaptable leader. When her party first lost to the Greens in Baden-Württemberg five years ago, she did an about-turn on nuclear power and was re-elected stronger than before as chancellor in 2012. In the wake of the Cologne attacks, she was already taking a tougher line on refugees than she did in the summer. These results will confirm her in that caution. They will make her more determined than ever to drive through the provisional deal with Turkey at the EU summit later this week. Large uncertainties nevertheless remain. Mrs Merkel is weaker than before. She has problems with her party and with EU partners. She still leads the most important country in the EU, but the other players can sense her weakness. Mrs Merkel has been written off before . But the decision she faces about whether to run again in 2017 just got more difficult, not more straightforward.

Angela Merkel: uncharismatic leader who dominates German politics | World news | The Guardian New Europe: Germany Angela Merkel: uncharismatic leader who dominates German politics Despite the CDU struggling in the polls, Merkel remains popular and could win a third term as federal leader German chancellor Angela Merkel has a firmer hold on power than her party. Photograph: Herbert Knosowski/AP Thursday 17 March 2011 04.00 EDT First published on Thursday 17 March 2011 04.00 EDT Close This article is 5 years old In a newspaper article last year the philosopher Jürgen Habermas complained that modern Germany had a yearning for "charismatic figures who stand above the political infighting". But Germany may have to yearn for a while yet. The leader it must live with, for now, is the pragmatic but uncharismatic Angela Merkel . And she shows no sign of going any time soon. Not that Merkel is having it all her way. Over the winter three subjects dominated German public life.

The first was a book, Germany Abolishes Itself, in which the author, Thilo Sarrazin, denounced the effects of immigration and multiculturalism on his nation. The second was a railway station project, Stuttgart 21 – a focus for environmental protest. And the third was the young defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenbergand who seemed set to become the country's most admired public figure, perhaps even its next leader. Three months on, the politician has gone; Guttenberg's career crashed in a plagiarism scandal. The Sarrazin book remains; a million copies sold, the biggest political bestseller in modern German history. The station is at the centre of the next state elections. And Merkel still bestrides German politics. She dominates her centre-right Christian Democratic party. She has no effective rivals in government. Her party is 10 points ahead of others in national polls and she is by far the most popular politician in Germany, a clear favourite to win a third term as chancellor in two years' time. "Merkel is very strong in her party," says Manfred Güllner, head of Forsa pollsters. "But her party is different. [It] is not so popular.

It struggles to mobilise its voters." In fact, the CDU is looking down the barrel of an electoral gun in seven state elections this year. In February the CDU was pitched out of power in Hamburg. Now it faces an uphill struggle in Bremen and Berlin. The biggest test comes on 27 March, when it fights to retain power in the prosperous conservative state of Baden-Württemberg, south-west Germany, (whose capital is Stuttgart) which Merkel's party has ruled without interruption, either alone or in coalition, since the 1950s. How can both these things – Merkel's easy personal popularity and her party's increasingly difficult struggles to cling on to power – be true at the same time? The answer lies in the nature of German political institutions, and in the polarisation of political attitudes, reflected in the response to Sarrazin's book on the one hand and the Stuttgart railway project on the other. But also it lies in the enigmatic political project being carved out by a chancellor who always keeps a picture of another formidably powerful German woman, Catherine the Great, on her desk in her Berlin office.

Merkel is today the most powerful politician in the most powerful country, with the most powerful economy, in Europe . On the European stage, as she is proving in the bid to stabilise the euro, she is the decisive figure. But you wouldn't know it by looking at her in Berlin. Most of the time she does her politics with a remarkably low profile, making relatively few public appearances. She delivers few speeches. She is rarely held to public account in ways that the British system thrives on. She works from behind a sort of invisible Berlin wall. Overall, this is an important strength. Merkel commands a political system far less hyperactive than the British one. Much of the time German politics is stately; it's a stable political system in which challenges to the powerful are rare. Take the example of the Libyan crisis. In Britain, the government's reactions have been minutely tracked and challenged in the media and parliament. In Berlin last week there was not the slightest echo of such arguments. Neither Merkel nor her coalition foreign minister, the liberal Free Democrat party leader, Guido Westerwelle, has faced significant scrutiny over Libya. The idea of a German crisis over Libya would strike officials as bizarre.

Outwardly, Merkel appears an unpretentious, pragmatic, leader with her feet on the ground. But the serene image masks a politician who has spent much time as chancellor consolidating her place in the CDU, removing rivals and forcing others out. The impression that she is good at relationships is belied by a quite large number of facts. In Europe, she has little time for Nicolas Sarkozy or Silvio Berlusconi, an opening the eurosceptic Cameron has been able to exploit. Some see Merkel's inner toughness as the product of her remarkable rise from modest origins as a pastor's daughter in communist East Germany to become the leader of a party that stood originally for the commercial interests of the rich middle-class of the old West Germany. "She does not like the established CDU politicians, mainly businessmen, with their sense of entitlement," observes Constanze Stelzenmüller, of the Berlin-based German Marshall Fund. Merkel's impatience with the CDU hierarchy's sense of entitlement evokes comparisons with Margaret Thatcher's contempt for the Tory high command in the 1980s. In any event, Merkel's control of her party can now be compared with the tight grip of Helmut Kohl a generation ago.

The most recent and most important of these cases is the fall of Guttenberg, a 39-year-old with an aristocratic bloodline straight out of the Almanach de Gotha and married to a von Bismarck to boot. But Guttenberg is now one of a number of notable CDU figures who have fallen by the wayside as Merkel has tightened her grip on the party. The turnover in state leaderships has been striking. Horst Köhler, the federal president, stepped down. Axel Weber, head of the Bundesbank, was forced from office in February after displeasing her. So what drives Merkel? As a woman in a party of men, a divorced protestant in a party based on the Catholic church, an easterner in a party controlled largely by westerners, and as a scientist in a party of financiers and business leaders, she is not an obvious fit with the CDU. Yet it is hard to define "Merkelism". Here the analogy with Thatcher runs into the sand. Like most in her party, Merkel believes in the CDU as the ineluctable party of German government. She believes in being in power, in making things work, and is very good at it.

But it is hard to pin down her views. "She doesn't light many people's fires," one official says. Never forget, though, that at state level, in the eyes of local voters in the seven states which will hold elections this year, the CDU is not Merkel's party. It is the party led by the state premier. In the crucial case of Baden-Württemberg, it is Stefan Mappus's party. So it is state premier Mappus, not the federal chancellor Merkel, who will triumph or carry the can when the votes are counted in Baden-Württemberg in March. Yet this explanation does not go deep enough. Germany, after all, is uniquely prosperous, indeed the richest country, among the nations of the EU. Its export-driven economy, though not out of the recessionary woods, looks set to grow at a healthy 3% this year. Unemployment, high in recent years, has just declined to its lowest level in 20 years. In Baden-Württemberg the situation is even better, with close to full employment.

All over Europe, governing incumbents have been punished for not doing a good enough job, or for simply being in power when the financial system collapsed in 2008. By rights, the voters in the regions ought to arrive at the polling stations and thank the CDU for navigating them through turbulent years virtually unscathed. Yet the polls paint a different picture. German voters seem almost as unhappy as other Europeans and successful incumbents look vulnerable. A recent poll in Baden-Württemberg showed the CDU on 40% of the vote and its liberal FDP partners on 5%, with the centre-left SPD on 26% and their potential coalition partners, the Greens, on 20%. These figures are worrying for the CDU, which often tends to do a bit better in opinion polls than at the ballot box. Merkel is helped by her rivals. A more effective opposition than the SPD might knock her out of her comfort zone. But the SPD is split and has weak leaders; Merkel easily defeats them in poll match-ups as best chancellor. A stronger liberal FDP might cause jitters, taking votes from Merkel. Yet both languish in the polls.

The latest Forsa poll for Stern magazine has the CDU on 36%, SPD 26%, Greens 16%, Left 10%, FDP 5%, and others at 7%. Deeply tenacious, Merkel is clearly set on a third term, in 2013. "These state elections are not as important for Merkel's future as the press says," says Güllner. "Losing in Baden Württemberg would be a shock. But as long as the SPD don't have an effective alternative at federal level, Merkel will stay.

She may still be chancellor in 2017." Angela Merkel's party loses control of region's state legislature after ruling it for almost 58 years Published: 27 Mar 2011 Germany: the career of Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Germany: the career of Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel Part 1: East Germany—youth and political beginnings By Lena Sokoll 8 July 2005 This is the first of a two-part article on the political career of Angela Merkel, leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and chancellor candidate of the "Union"--the conservative bloc of the CDU and Christian Social Union--in the federal elections expected to take place this September. The concluding part was posted July 9. The CDU recently named Angela Merkel as its candidate for chancellor in the federal elections expected this autumn. Merkel is often described as a “phenomenon” in German politics.

Such a portrayal is partly based on her personal characteristics—she is a divorcee who has remarried, is childless, is a Protestant and is from East Germany—which are generally regarded as untypical and an obstacle to a career in this conservative party. On the other hand, she likes to present a public image of herself—ably enhanced by her political mentors—as someone who was a “nobody” before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989—a blank page without political connections who has risen sensationally into the top ranks of German politics. Merkel has undoubtedly enjoyed an unparalleled career since she became a CDU member 15 years ago, a rise to prominence that has also made her numerous enemies inside the party. Unlike almost all other leading CDU representatives, Merkel’s rise did not follow the usual path of decades of party work in the west German party organisation—the youth movement, local party groups and regional associations, slowly building up connections and getting noticed, being proposed for a CDU slate and winning a position. Instead, Merkel was fast-tracked into the party leadership, overtaking her time-served west German party colleagues, until finally she was named as the CDU candidate for chancellor.

Merkel, who was a physicist by profession, only joined a political party following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. However, her time in “Democratic Awakening” (DA) was brief. After four months, she became a spokeswoman for the East German CDU government under Lothar de Maizière. Following German reunification in 1990, Chancellor Helmut Kohl brought the 36-year-old Merkel, who had only been a CDU member for six months, into his cabinet. The 1998 defeat of the CDU in federal elections meant that Merkel lost her ministerial office, but the same year, she was appointed as CDU general secretary. A year later, following revelations of a scandal concerning party donations, she actively sought the removal of the party’s honorary chairman and her former mentor, Helmut Kohl. In April 2000, she then assumed the party presidency. In the 2002 federal elections, she ceded the chancellor candidacy to Edmund Stoiber, leader of the CDU’s smaller sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

However, since then, she has consolidated her position inside the “Union” (CDU/CSU) and overshadowed her political competitors, leading to her unchallenged selection as chancellor candidate. How is the rapid political rise of Angela Merkel to be explained? What where the qualities that enabled her to become a minister after only six month s’ party membership? The attempts of biographers and magazine columnists to explain her career as a matter of good luck, or due to personal characteristics such as assertiveness and an instinct for power are unconvincing because they ignore political and social interests and the conditions under which her ascent took place. Merkel certainly did not enter politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a political novice. Through her father, she had access to influential circles inside the church, which in turn maintained close links with leading government figures in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since the 1950s, the church had played a particularly important role in the GDR by ensuring that political opposition to the Stalinist regime was kept under control.

In the period leading up to the collapse of the GDR, the church was central to keeping the mass protest wave that swept over the country in safe hands that eventually brought about the restoration of capitalism in East Germany and its Anschluss (annexation) by West Germany. Her upbringing in GDR church circles Born in Hamburg as Angela Dorothea Kasner, Merkel grew up as a pastor’s daughter in Templin, in East Germany. Following his theological studies in the West in 1954, her father Horst Kasner returned to East Germany, where he led the “Waldhof,” an evangelical education centre for ministers and priests, which also hosted a nursing home. This was well suited to establishing links with GDR church circles. At Waldhof, Merkel would have come to know Rainer Eppelmann, the later founder of Democratic Awakening, the organisation in which she launched her political career after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Merkel’s father ranked among those church representatives who argued for a policy that combined loyalty to the regime and the church, known as “the church in socialism.” In the early 1950s, the Stalinist leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) had conducted a “struggle” against the influence of the church. However, following the anti-Stalinist uprising by East German workers in 1953, the Ulbricht government adopted a more conciliatory course, which sought to integrate church institutions into the state and utilise them as a means of stabilising SED rule. In particular, the “Weissenseer working group,” in which Horst Kasner participated, was the mechanism by which the Evangelical Church soon moved closer to the regime, and from 1971, officially defined itself as “the church in socialism,” thereby attaining a level of influence that was unparalleled throughout the Eastern Bloc. The growing convergence of state and church, and the increasing economic and domestic political crisis inside the GDR, meant that the church not only played a key role in helping to stabilise the situation at home, but it was also involved in discrete diplomatic relations between the two German states.

Since the early 1960s, the church had provided the mechanism for organising prisoner exchanges with the West, as well as facilitating substantial financial transfers. Later, this very important East-West political contact certainly helped GDR church circles secure a role in all-German politics. Inside the GDR, the church and state maintained their own representatives to conduct negotiations and mediate conflicts between the two. In this, a prominent role was played by the high-ranking Evangelical Church functionary Manfred Stolpe, one of the political architects of “the church in socialism,” and by the Undersecretary of State for Church Affairs Klaus Gysi, father of Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) leader Gregor Gysi. Under Klaus Gysi, the relationship between state and church was substantially consolidated, and the church was granted numerous privileges including church broadcasts in the media, state financial support and the building of new churches. Other important intermediaries were legal attorneys, who represented the Christian groups in their dealings with the state. At the same time, many were also informers for the Stasi (Secret Police), including Lothar de Maizière and Wolfgang Schnur, who were not only active Christians and informants, but later Merkel’s first political mentors.

Growing up in such circles, Angela Kasner already enjoyed connections that she could later use to her advantage. In his authorised biography, Wolfgang Stock reports the fact that Merkel’s high school class had wanted to annoy their unpopular teacher by not preparing a contribution for the school’s mandatory cultural programme, instead giving an improvised presentation. The pupils were to be punished, but an intervention by the Kasners gave the whole thing a new twist: “A petition was written that Angela personally presented to Manfred Stolpe, the highest church attorney in the GDR.... Thanks to church involvement, ‘Berlin’ intervenes: Angela’s teacher is disciplined, ...the pupils are ‘only’ given a reprimand at ‘school assembly.’” After graduating from high school, Angela Kasner studied physics, married and was accepted at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, where she attained a doctorate in 1986.

While a student, she was secretary for agitation and propaganda in the FDJ, the East German youth organisation loyal to the SED regime, a position that she now tries to portray as merely that of a “cultural representative.” A Stasi informer at the Institute who was primarily there to spy on the son of dissident Ulrich Havemann also provided information about his office colleague Merkel. In the reports of this Stasi source, there is no trace of the “internal resistance” to SED rule, which Merkel touts in her authorised biography and in interviews about her history. Stern magazine investigated the archives and found that an “unofficial” informant had “nothing politically explosive to report [about Merkel], quite the opposite, another time emphasising Angela’s ‘positive political views.’ Otherwise, he reports mainly about private and personal matters. Concerning her limited, cosseted life.” Initially, Merkel seemed disinterested in the growing protest and resistance movement in the GDR in 1989. “Oh, just look at what is happening outside,” is how she is reported answering a colleague at the Institute who could not understand how someone could not be interested in attending a political meeting or demonstration at that time.

Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the SED’s loss of power was inevitable did she begin to seek a new political orientation and go looking for a party. Faced with mass protests against SED rule, the Evangelical Church and its representatives played a key role in preventing an open rebellion, channelling opposition along safe lines to ensure an orderly transfer of power from the thoroughly discredited regime. Under church moderation, the so-called “Round Table” was established to make the regime change possible without the working class being able to call to account the Stalinist thugs and establish its own independent organisations. The church called for non-violence and above all ensured the keeping of the social peace. Thus it not only provided a last service to the SED, in the context of the long-established church-state collaboration, but also acted in the interests of the West German bourgeoisie and their political parties. The latter used their good contacts with representatives of the East German church to swiftly settle the fate of the GDR in favour of West German capitalism.

Despite all the differences between the political leaders in East and West Germany, there was a fundamental view they both shared with the church: a profound antipathy to any independent popular movement based on their fears of an uncontrollable revolutionary development of the working class. Church representatives or those with close links to the church were largely responsible for founding the new parties that emerged in the GDR in 1989. At the same time, those with church connections also came to the fore in the former state parties of the GDR as they sought to renew their leading personnel. The beginnings of a political career In December 1989, Angela Merkel joined Democratic Awakening, which had been founded by the clerics Rainer Eppelmann and Friedrich Schorlemmer, as well as Wolfgang Schnur, the trusted attorney of the Evangelical Church in the GDR. Two months later, she was promoted to press spokesperson for DA, which supported the rapid introduction of capitalism into East Germany and was politically aligned to the West German CDU.

In the GDR parliamentary elections of spring 1990, the DA participated on a joint slate with the East German CDU initiated by Helmut Kohl under the motto “Alliance for Germany.” The East German CDU had been largely discredited as one of the so-called “bloc parties” that had supported the Stalinist regime in East Berlin, and so the support of the DA was important to provide the appearance of a break with this old tradition. The unmasking of Schnur as a long-time Stasi agent just prior to the election meant the DA only attained 0.9 percent of the vote. However, against expectations, its ally the East German CDU became the strongest party. Lothar de Maizière, the party leader, became prime minister of the last East German government, which regarded its most important task as facilitating the dissolution of the GDR state and unification with West Germany. De Maizière was a long-standing member of the East German CDU, who had only taken on the party leadership shortly before the election. In the last SED-led government under Hans Modrow, the attorney de Maizière was minister for church affairs; he also enjoyed excellent contacts with the political elite in West Germany.

His uncle Ulrich de Maizière was largely responsible for overseeing West German rearmament after the Second World War, also holding the highest military office as General Inspector of the Federal Armed Forces. So it was probably more than a lucky coincidence that on the day of the East German elections, Merkel swiftly left the DA in order to participate in the celebration of the CDU. There she approached Thomas de Maizière, cousin to Lothar and son of Ulrich, and asked to be assigned a position in the new government. “You should count your luck that you have such fine people as us from ‘Democratic Awakening’ in the ‘Alliance for Germany,’ “ she told the representative of a family with influence in both east and west Germany. “I hope this will be taken into consideration when forming the government,” she said to Thomas, who himself later became a minister for the CDU in the Saxony state legislature. Lothar de Maizière, who also knew Merkel’s father, fulfilled her wish for high office and made her his government spokeswoman. Democratic Awakening was dissolved in August 1990 into the East German CDU, which itself was dissolved into the West German party following German reunification in October of that year.

Merkel’s job disappeared along with the GDR, but those few months were enough for her to develop and strengthen her contacts. She belonged to the close circle around Lothar de Maizière, along with Günther Krause, who as a parliamentary state secretary had negotiated the currency and economic union with West Germany. Recommendations from Krause and de Maizière brought an invitation to visit Kohl in his Bonn chancellery. As CDU regional chairman in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, Krause provided Merkel with a safe seat in the first all-German elections to the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) in December 1990. To be continued

Question: Angela Merkel is the leader of which political party in Germany?
Answer: CDU