Angela Dorothea Merkel (née Kasner; born 17 July 1954) is a German stateswoman and retired politician who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. She is the only woman to have held the office and the only former East German. She was Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2005 and Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 2000 to 2018.
Merkel was born in Hamburg in West Germany. Her family moved to East Germany when she was an infant. A member of the communist East German Free German Youth (FDJ), Merkel obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986 and worked as a research scientist until 1989. She then entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, briefly serving as deputy spokeswoman for the first democratically elected government of East Germany, led by Lothar de Maizière. Following German reunification in 1990, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. As the protégée of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel was appointed as Minister for Women and Youth in 1991, later becoming Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in 1994. After the CDU lost the 1998 federal election, Merkel was elected general secretary of the party. She then became the party's first female leader, and the first female leader of the Opposition, two years later.
Following the 2005 federal election, Merkel was elected chancellor, leading a grand coalition consisting of the CDU, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). She was the first woman to be elected chancellor, and the first chancellor of reunified Germany to have been raised in the former East Germany. In the 2009 federal election, the CDU obtained the largest share of the vote, and Merkel subsequently formed a coalition government with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), an alliance more favourable to the CDU than the grand coalition. In the 2013 federal election, the CDU won a landslide victory and formed a second grand coalition with the SPD, after the FDP lost all of its representation in the Bundestag. In the 2017 federal election, Merkel led the CDU to become the largest party for the fourth time, resulting in the formation of a third grand coalition with the SPD.
In foreign policy, Merkel emphasised international cooperation, both in the context of the EU and NATO, and initiating the Russian reset and strengthening of Eurasian and transatlantic economic relations. In the first half of 2007, Merkel served as president of the European Council and played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Berlin Declaration. Merkel's governments managed the 2008 financial crisis and the Euro area crisis. She negotiated the 2008 European Union stimulus plan, which focused on infrastructure spending and public investment to counteract the Great Recession. Also in 2008, she actively blocked the access of Ukraine and Georgia in the enlargement of NATO during the 2008 Bucharest summit.
In domestic policy, Merkel's Energiewende programme supported the development of renewable energy sources and eventually phased out the use of nuclear power in Germany. Despite the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, which prompted sanctions around the world, she initiated the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipelines to Russia and protected their construction from United States sanctions imposed in 2019. Reforms to the Bundeswehr, health care reform, the 2010s European migrant crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic were major issues during her chancellorship. Merkel stepped down as leader of the CDU in 2018 and did not seek a fifth term as chancellor in the 2021 federal election. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, her legacy came under increased scrutiny both in Germany and abroad for her relatively good relations with Russia and increasing the German economy's dependence on Russia, as well as the downsizing of the Bundeswehr that occurred during her tenure.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954, in the Eimsbüttel quarter of Hamburg, the daughter of Horst Kasner (1926–2011; né Kaźmierczak), a Lutheran pastor and a native of Berlin, and his wife Herlind (1928–2019; née Jentzsch), born in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), a teacher of English and Latin. She has two younger siblings, Marcus Kasner, a physicist, and Irene Kasner, an occupational therapist. In her childhood and youth, Merkel was known among her peers by the nickname "Kasi", derived from her last name Kasner.
Merkel is of German and Polish descent. Her paternal grandfather, Ludwik Kasner, was a German policeman of Polish ethnicity. After being captured in France during World War I, he joined the Blue Army and likely fought against Germany. He married Merkel's grandmother Margarethe, a German from Berlin, and relocated to her hometown where he again worked in the police. In 1930, they Germanised the Polish name Kaźmierczak to Kasner. Merkel's maternal grandparents were the Danzig politician Willi Jentzsch and Gertrud Alma (née Drange), a daughter of the city clerk of Elbing (now Elbląg, Poland) Emil Drange. Since the mid-1990s, Merkel has publicly mentioned her Polish heritage on several occasions and described herself as a quarter Polish, but her Polish roots became better known as a result of a 2013 biography.
Religion played a key role in the Kasner family's migration from West Germany to East Germany. Merkel's paternal grandfather was originally Catholic but the entire family converted to Lutheranism during the childhood of her father, who later studied Lutheran theology in Heidelberg and Hamburg. In 1954, when Angela was just three months old, her father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (a district of Perleberg in Brandenburg), which was then in East Germany. The family moved to Templin and Merkel grew up in the countryside 90 km (56 mi) north of East Berlin.
In 1968, Merkel joined the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official communist youth movement sponsored by the ruling Marxist–Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it difficult to gain admission to higher education. She did not participate in the secular coming-of-age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed. During this time, she participated in several compulsory courses on Marxism–Leninism, with her grades only being regarded as "sufficient". Merkel later said that "Life in the GDR was sometimes almost comfortable in a certain way, because there were some things one simply couldn't influence." Merkel learned to speak Russian fluently at school, and she was awarded prizes for her proficiency in Russian and mathematics, being at the top of her class in these subjects. She completed her school education with the best possible average Abitur grade of 1.0.
Merkel continued her education at Karl Marx University, Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978. While a student, she participated in the reconstruction of the ruin of the Moritzbastei, a project students initiated to create their own club and recreation facility on campus. Such an initiative was unprecedented in the GDR of that period, and initially resisted by the university. With the backing of the local leadership of the SED party, the project was allowed to proceed.
Near the end of her studies, Merkel sought an assistant professorship at an engineering school. As a condition for getting the job, Merkel was told she would need to agree to report on her colleagues to officers of the Stasi. Merkel declined, using the excuse that she could not keep secrets well enough to be an effective spy.
Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. At first, she and her husband squatted in Mitte. At the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of its FDJ secretariat. According to her former colleagues, she openly propagated Marxism as the secretary for "Agitation and Propaganda". However, Merkel has denied this claim and stated that she was secretary for culture, which involved activities like obtaining theatre tickets and organising talks by visiting Soviet authors. She stated: "I can only rely on my memory, if something turns out to be different, I can live with that."