Angela Merkel

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.

Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 17 July 1954) is a retired German politician and chemist who served as chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021.

Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954, in Hamburg, West Germany, 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 1954, when Angela was just three months old, her father received a pastorate at the church in (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 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.

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.

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.

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.

A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2005 and as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 2000 to 2018.

Merkel was the first female chancellor of Germany.

During her chancellorship, Merkel was frequently referred to as the de facto leader of the European Union (EU) and the most powerful woman in the world.

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.

Merkel's governments managed the global 2007–2008 financial crisis and the European debt crisis.

In 2008, 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.

She negotiated the 2008 European Union stimulus plan, which focused on infrastructure spending and public investment to counteract the Great Recession.

In domestic policy, Merkel's Energiewende program supported the development of renewable energy sources and eventually phased out the use of nuclear power in 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.

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 and did not seek a fifth term as chancellor in the 2021 federal election.

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.

Beginning in 2016, she was often described as the leader of the free world.

Merkel was born in Hamburg in West Germany.

Her family moved to East Germany when she was an infant.

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 the strengthening of transatlantic economic relations.