Angela Merkel

She was born Angela Dorothea Kasner on 17 July 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany, to Horst Kasner and his wife Herlind. Her father was a Protestant theologian and her mother was a teacher who was once a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. From a young age Angela was interested in both religion and politics.

She proved to be a good student in school and excelled in Russian and mathematics. After completing her schooling she entered the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978.

In 1978, she joined the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof. She eventually earned a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry in 1986 and remained associated with the academy as a researcher until 1990.

Meanwhile she had also ventured into politics in the late 1980s and joined the new party Democratic Awakening created in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989. The Democratic Awakening merged with the East German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990.

In October 1990, the former East German states were reunified with the rest of Germany. Two months later, Merkel stood for election at the first post-reunification parliamentary elections and was elected to the Bundestag for the constituency of Stralsund – Nordvorpommern – Rügen.

Soon after her election, she was appointed as the Minister for Women and Youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl who became her mentor. Kohl gave her a more significant role in the cabinet in 1994 when she was promoted to Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety. She received greater political visibility in her new role which helped in accelerating her career.

In 1998, her mentor Kohl was defeated in the elections and stepped down accordingly. Weeks later, Merkel was appointed Secretary-General of the CDU and became the first woman to attain that post in party history.

She achieved even greater success in 2000 when she was elected to replace CDU Leader, Wolfgang Schäuble, becoming the first female leader of a German party. Her election came as a surprise to many as CDU was normally viewed as a male-dominated, socially conservative party.

As the CDU leader she enjoyed considerable popularity and advocated the implementation of significant reforms in Germany’s economic and social system. She supported German labor law changes as she felt that existing laws limited the nation’s competitiveness.

As the Chancellor, one of her priorities was the strengthening of transatlantic economic relations which culminated in her signing the agreement for the Transatlantic Economic Council in 2007 which aims at removing barriers to trade in a further integrated transatlantic free-trade area.

Merkel played an important role in strengthening the foreign relations between Germany and India when she made a “Joint Declaration” in 2006 with the then Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, to focus on future co-operation between the two countries in the fields of energy, science and technology, and defense