If someone had said in 1988 that a woman who grew up under communism would lead a reunited Germany before long, few would have believed it. Now it’s hard to imagine Germany and Europe without Angela Merkel.
But the country and the Continent will have to get used to the idea. With Merkel now about to step down as leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, here are some key moments from her life and career, in words, pictures and video.
Angela Dorothea Kasner was born on July 17, 1954 in Hamburg. Just a few weeks later, her father Horst, a Lutheran pastor, moved the family to Quitzow in Brandenburg and three years after that to Templin, a small town north of Berlin in then-communist East Germany.
In 1973, Merkel began studying physics at Leipzig University. In 1986, she earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in Berlin. In between, she married fellow student Ulrich Merkel, from whom she separated in 1981. When she applied for a position at an engineering school, she was offered a job by the Stasi secret police, which she turned down.
1989: Nothing beats a good sauna
When the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, many East Germans rushed to the border to celebrate. But Merkel, as she did every Thursday evening, went to the sauna with a friend and joined the celebrations only afterward.
“It was Thursday, and Thursday was my sauna day so that’s where I went — in the same communist high-rise where we always went,” Merkel told the Guardian.
The fall of the Wall did not break her sauna routine, but the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of her political career. Merkel, 35, joined the center-right activist movement Demokratischer Aufbruch (“Democratic Awakening.“) Her first job was to unpack boxes of new computers and set them up in the office.
1990: Baggy skirts and Jesus sandals
In 1990, the Democratic Awakening merged with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in East Germany (which would later merge with its West German counterpart) and Merkel moved on to become the deputy spokesperson of the German Democratic Republic government under Lothar de Maizière.
The first and last elected GDR prime minister said Merkel’s appearance was completely unremarkable. “She didn’t seem to care about her outward appearance at all,” said de Maizière. “She looked like a typical GDR scientist, wearing a baggy skirt and Jesus sandals and a cropped haircut.”
De Maizière even asked his office manager to take her out to buy clothes.
That same year, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag in reunified Germany’s first general election.
1991: Cabinet minister
Helmut Kohl, who would later reportedly accuse Merkel of “destroying his Europe,” was now her political mentor. The reunification chancellor referred to her as “mein Mädchen” (“my girl”). Merkel made her debut in his government as federal minister for women and youth.
1994: Environment minister
In 1994, Merkel was appointed federal environment minister. According to her late biographer Gerd Langguth, she broke down in tears during negotiations at a United Nations global-warming conference in Berlin. Her long-time close aide Beate Baumann told her to pull herself together. Merkel went back and negotiated an agreement.
Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat who would become chancellor from 1998 to 2005, called her “pitiful” as environment minister. But Merkel had plans for Schröder. “I will put him in the corner, just like he did with me,” she told German photographer Herlinde Koelbl. “I still need time, but one day, the time will come for this. And I am already looking forward.”
1998: Secretary-general of the CDU
In 1998, Kohl’s years as chancellor came to an end. But Merkel was still climbing up the ranks. In November 1998, she was elected CDU secretary-general. Later that year, she married chemist Joachim Sauer, her long-time partner.
1999: Auf wiedersehen, Helmut!
A scandal over anonymous political donations to the CDU, known as the Schwarzgeldaffäre, prompted Merkel to make a decisive move. Both Kohl and Wolfgang Schäuble, who had become CDU leader, were implicated. In defiance of her mentor, and without informing Schäuble, Merkel wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung urging the CDU to move on and leave the tainted Kohl era behind.
Kohl saw it as a betrayal. Within a few short months, Merkel would replace Schäuble as party leader.
2000: CDU leader
After Schäuble’s resignation, Merkel had a clear path to becoming party leader. In April she was elected with 895 out of 937 votes, becoming the first woman to hold the post.
2002: Breakfast in Wolfratshausen
Merkel’s first years as party leader were not easy. She found herself in a power struggle with the Edmund Stoiber, chairman of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). At a now-famous breakfast with Stoiber in his hometown Wolfratshausen, Merkel decided to withdraw her bid to be the parties’ joint candidate for chancellor in his favor. What seemed to be a defeat worked out well for Merkel in the long term: Stoiber lost the general election, leaving him and his party weakened in their alliance with the CDU.
2005: Germany’s first female chancellor
The 2005 parliamentary election did not produce a clear winner: The CDU/CSU won just 1 percentage point more of the vote than the SPD. But after Social Democrat leader and outgoing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder resigned, Merkel took the helm of a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD. She took office in November as the country’s first ever female chancellor.
In the 2009 parliamentary election, Merkel’s conservative bloc won its lowest vote share (33.8 percent) in 60 years but emerged as the largest group in the Bundestag by some distance. The CDU/CSU teamed up to form a coalition government with the liberal FDP. Merkel was back for another term in office.
Merkel made a major policy pledge after the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan, to phase out nuclear energy by 2020. This so-called Energiewende (“energy turning point”), by the world’s fourth biggest economy, made Germany a pioneer among industrial nations in renewable energy with targets going beyond EU guidelines.
2011: Άνγκελα Μέρκελ
All eyes were on Merkel in the Greek economic crisis. German banks held the largest amount of Greek debt, which put the fate of 11 million Greeks in the chancellor’s hands.
Merkel wanted Greece to remain in the eurozone — but demanded major economic reforms in return. Under pressure from other EU leaders, she agreed measures to save Greece from bankruptcy, concluding that “If the euro falls, then Europe falls.”
2013: Merkel III
Merkel’s victory in the 2013 parliamentary election meant she went on to become the third postwar chancellor to reach a decade in office, after Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. The CDU/CSU achieved its best election result since 1990 with almost 42 percent of the vote, and ended up just five seats short of an overall majority in parliament. As the FDP failed to win enough votes to enter parliament, Merkel turned back to the SPD as her coalition partner.
2013: Live from Maryland: Merkel’s not-so-private calls
Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, claimed the U.S. had tapped the phones of Merkel and her colleagues for years. “Spying among friends is never acceptable,” Merkel said. The case increased tensions between the two countries, but didn’t lead to criminal charges — Germany’s federal prosecutor dropped the case in 2015.
2015: ‘Wir schaffen das’
Just as the worst of the economic crisis seemed over, Europe was confronted with the worst migration crisis on the Continent since World War II. Merkel adopted a temporary open-door policy for Syrians fleeing war in their country. As a result, Germany received the highest number of new asylum applications in the EU.
Cracks began to appear in Germany’s welcoming attitude after many economic migrants started to make the journey to Western Europe, and fears arose about the security threat posed by some new arrivals. Merkel, by now widely known as Mutti and seen as a kind of mother of the nation, defended her policy from critics in her own party and beyond. They accused her of failing to understand the gravity of the situation by declaring “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll manage this”) — the phrase that became synonymous with her handling of the crisis.
However, her attitude also led to praise and international recognition. Time magazine named her “Person of the Year” and said “she has stepped up in a way that was uncharacteristic, even for her,” and “she asked more of her country than most politicians would dare.”
2017: New leader of the free world?
Merkel met Donald Trump for the first time in Washington, two months after the U.S. president took office. Establishing a relationship as close as with his predecessor Barack Obama has not been easy.
With Trump pursuing right-wing populist policies, some commentators argue that Merkel is now the de facto leader of the free world, its foremost champion of liberal values. Merkel has shied away from that label. But in May she suggested Germany and Europe could no longer rely on the U.S. in the way they had done in the past. Europe should pay more attention to its own interests and really “take our fate into our own hands,” Merkel declared.
2017: Gay marriage vote
In an unexpected move, the German parliament legalized same-sex marriage in its last session before the fall election. For more than a decade, the CDU had blocked such legislation, with Merkel herself strongly opposed. But when she was asked about the topic during an onstage interview, she suggested it should be a matter for MPs’ individual consciences, rather than a party political issue. Her opponents swiftly pushed for a vote in parliament and the legislation passed. In some ways, that was a setback for Merkel, who voted against the change. But it also took the issue off the campaign agenda.
2017: A Pyrrhic victory
Merkel secured a fourth term as chancellor in the September 2017 general election. But her center-right bloc recorded its worst result since 1949, winning 33 percent of the vote, down from over 41 percent in 2013.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) swept into parliament with 12.6 percent and promised to “hunt down” Merkel. If Merkel stays on as chancellor until 2021, she will match the record of her predecessor Helmut Kohl, who governed for 16 years.
2018: Back to the GroKo
Merkel became bogged down in months-long efforts to form a government.
The chancellor first tried to put together so-called Jamaica coalition with the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens. But FDP leader Christian Lindner pulled the plug on a deal, citing substantial differences, especially with the Greens.
To avoid a fresh general election or a minority government, Merkel turned back to her old partners, the Social Democrats — who had previously ruled out forming another “grand coalition” or GroKo with the chancellor. The SPD finally changed their minds after months of soul-searching and a new government took office in mid-March — six months after the general election.
2018: Seehofer’s master plan
The new government didn’t get much of a honeymoon. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, from Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, battled with Merkel over migration. In a move that brought the government to the brink of collapse, he threatened to implement his plan to toughen Germany’s asylum policies even without the chancellor’s approval.
Merkel clinched a last-minute compromise with Seehofer but the détente between the two veteran politicians would not last long.
2018: Spy saga
A new clash between Merkel and Seehofer blew up when intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maaßen came under fire for allegedly sharing confidential material with the AfD as well as for questioning Merkel’s characterization of right-wing violence against foreigners in the eastern city of Chemnitz as a Hetzjagd — an organized hunt.
Seehofer stood by Maaßen while Merkel and the SPD wanted him sacked. The compromise? A promotion for Maaßen, which was met with widespread scorn and ridicule. The coalition had to backtrack and Maaßen ended up being sent into early retirement.
2018: Mutiny in the Bundestag
Merkel’s hold on the reins of power weakened further in late September, when the center-right parliamentary group rejected her choice of leader. Volker Kauder, a close Merkel ally who ran the group for 13 years, lost in a secret ballot to a virtually unknown MP Ralph Brinkhaus. “This is the hour of democracy, in which there is also defeat,” Merkel said. “There is nothing to sugarcoat.”
Thomas Oppermann, a senior Social Democrat, described the vote as a “revolt against Merkel.”
2018: Bavarian earthquake
In October’s Bavarian regional election, Merkel’s conservative CSU allies suffered a historic setback — their worst result since 1950. The CSU finished with 37.2 percent of the vote and lost its absolute majority in the regional parliament amid strong showings from the AfD and the Greens. What followed the ballot box disaster was a blame game, with some in the CSU blaming Merkel’s refugee policy for their poor showing while others criticized Federal Interior Minister Seehofer for feuding with the chancellor.
2018: Hesse hammer blow
After the Bavarian vote, the CDU faced a decisive test: The regional election in Hesse. And it fell short. Merkel’s party came first but won just 27 percent of the vote, down from 38.3 percent in the last election in 2013, while the AfD finished with a strong 13.1 percent.
The Bavarian and Hessian results and the persistent infighting within the government put Merkel under severe pressure. Preempting any move against her, she announced a phased retirement. The day after the election in Hesse, she said she would not seek reelection as leader of the CDU at this year’s party congress, nor run again for the chancellorship in 2021.
“I once said that I wasn’t born as chancellor and I’ve never forgotten that,” Merkel said.
Angie, where will it lead us from here?