Angela Merkel grew up idolising Marie Curie, the Nobel laureate in quantum chemistry.
Fiercely private, lacking in charisma, and plain-spoken, she is an enigmatic person. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Merkel, a 35-year-old divorcee and research chemist, began her transition into politics. She won a seat in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in 1990 as a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
She served as minister for women and youth and then the environment before becoming leader of the party in 2000. Merkel’s pragmatism, some call it opportunism, and a scientific approach stood her in good stead.
She spent the first 35 years of her life in communist East Germany benefitting from its experience. Born in 1954, Merkel grew up in a picturesque village called Templin, 50 miles north of East Berlin. Her family had emigrated from West Germany after her father, a Lutheran pastor, was assigned to a congregation behind the Iron Curtain.
Growing up in a surveillance state during the height of the Cold War no doubt contributed to the chancellor’s ‘sacred sense of privacy’.
Angela is both a natural scientist who thinks rationally and systematically, and a Lutheran pastor’s daughter with strong moral underpinnings. In an act of true Bismarckian realpolitik, Merkel engineered her own big break in 1999, when she publicly condemned her boss and mentor, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, over a party-funding scandal.
While the alpha males in her party jostled for position, the unassuming Merkel emerged as the ideal compromise candidate to the lead the then-opposition CDU.
Germany’s first woman chancellor since 2005, Merkel’s leadership has been experimental in a context dictated by a polity that is understandably wary of aggressive, charismatic leaders. Her swift move to abandon her own failed policies and embrace those of the opposition bedevils her rivals. It is perhaps no surprise then that 71% of Germans approve of the chancellor’s leadership.