Merkel, Angela Dorothea

German right-of-centre politician, chancellor from 2005. She held posts in Helmut Kohl's 1991–98 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) administration and was CDU secretary-general 1998–2000 and leader (chair) from 2000. She became Germany's first female chancellor in 2005, heading a ‘grand coalition’ with the former governing party, the Social Democrats (SPD), following a general election in September which produced a ‘hung parliament’. Although she has been dubbed ‘Germany's Margaret Thatcher’, she favours a more consensual approach and has made reducing unemployment the central aim of her government.

After the Kohl government lost power at the 1998 general election, she became secretary-general and then, from 2000, party chair. With the CDU having been engulfed by a financing scandal that had damaged the reputations of Kohl and other senior figures, she advocated a fresh start, but was not selected as the chancellor-candidate of the CDU and its Bavaria sister party, the Christian Social Union's (CSU), for the 2002 general election. She was outmanoeuvred by CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, but he was unsuccessful, leaving Merkel to lead the conservative opposition in the Bundestag. As opposition leader, she advocated deregulatory reform of the German labour market and controversially supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.