Who is Angela Merkel?
Conservative leader Angela Merkel has become Germany’s first female chancellor. Confusion littered the 2005 German elections and finally a coalition led by Merkel and made up of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany was formed. She is the first German leader hailing from the former East Germany, although some might argue that her policies are more similar to those of Washington then to those of her former country. Born in 1954, the daughter of a pastor and teacher, Merkel was raised in the countryside, just eighty kilometers north of Berlin. An enthusiastic student, she learned Russian at school and later worked as a chemist at a scientific academy in East Berlin. She became politically active at age thirty-five when she joined the Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening Party). She became involved in the growing political upheaval that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. A year later, s
