THROWBACKTHISDAY; Angela Merkel becomes the first female Chancellor of Germany.

                      

 

 

On 22 November 2005, Merkel assumed the office of Chancellor of Germany following a stalemate election that resulted in a grand coalition with the SPD. Her party was re-elected in 2009 with an increased number of seats, and could form a governing coalition with theFDP. In the election of September 2013 the CDU/CSU parties emerged as winners, but formed another grand coalition with the SPD due to the FDP's failure to obtain the minimum of 5% of votes required to enter parliament.

Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German politician and former research scientist who has been theChancellor of Germany since 2005 and the Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000. She is the first woman to hold either office.^[7]

Having earned a doctorate as a physical chemist, Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, briefly serving as a deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected East German Government in 1990. Following German reunification in 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag for Stralsund-Nordvorpommern-Rügen in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a seat she has held ever since. She was later appointed as the Minister for Women and Youth in 1991 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, later becoming the Minister for the Environment in 1994. After Kohl was defeated in 1998, she was elected Secretary-General of the CDU before becoming the party's first female leader two years later in the aftermath of a donations scandal that toppled Wolfgang Schäuble.

Following the 2005 federal election, she was appointed Germany's first female Chancellor at the head of a grand coalition consisting of the CDU, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the2009 federal election, the CDU obtained the largest share of the vote and Merkel was able to form a coalition government with the support of the Free Democratic Party (FDP).^[8] At the 2013 federal election, Merkel won a landslide victory with 41.5% of the vote, falling just short of an overall majority, and formed a second grand coalition with the SPD, after the FDP lost all of its representation in the Bundestag.^[9]

In 2007, Merkel was President of the European Council and chaired the G8, the second woman to do so. She played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Berlin Declaration. One of her priorities was also to strengthen transatlantic economic relations by signing the agreement for the Transatlantic Economic Council on 30 April 2007. Merkel was seen as having played a crucial role in managing the financial crisis at the European and international level, and has been referred to as "the decider."^[10] In domestic policy, health care reform and problems concerning future energy development have been major issues during her Chancellorship.

THROWBACKTHISDAY; makes it 10 years and TBT Blog remembers.