Merkel, Angela Dorothea (1954– )

German right-of-centre politician, chancellor from 2005. She held posts in Helmut Kohl's 1991–98 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) administration and was CDU secretary-general 1998–2000 and leader (chair) from 2000. She became Germany's first female chancellor in 2005, heading a ‘grand coalition’ with the former governing party, the Social Democrats (SPD), following a general election in September which produced a ‘hung parliament’. Although she has been dubbed ‘Germany's Margaret Thatcher’, she favours a more consensual approach and has made reducing unemployment the central aim of her government.

After the Kohl government lost power at the 1998 general election, she became secretary-general and then, from 2000, party chair. With the CDU having been engulfed by a financing scandal that had damaged the reputations of Kohl and other senior figures, she advocated a fresh start, but was not selected as the chancellor-candidate of the CDU and its Bavaria sister party, the Christian Social Union's (CSU), for the 2002 general election. She was outmanoeuvred by CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, but he was unsuccessful, leaving Merkel to lead the conservative opposition in the Bundestag. As opposition leader, she advocated deregulatory reform of the German labour market and controversially supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Born in Hamburg, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Merkel was brought up in communist East Germany, after her father took up a pastorship north of Berlin. She studied physics at the university of Leipzig, gaining a doctorate, before working as a chemist at a scientific academy in East Berlin. In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she became involved in the democracy movement and joined the right-of-centre CDU. After German re-unification she was elected in 1990 to the lower house of the German parliament (Bundestag) and became minister for women and youth under the CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl and an environment minister in 1994.