Word: merkel
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Diminutive in the imposing vastness of her office, Angela Merkel appears surprisingly frail for someone who's spent the past 20 years upending political norms. Now 55, Merkel, Germany's first Chancellor raised in the communist East, is the head of a democratic form of government and the guardian of individual freedoms that she was denied until her 30s. She outsmarted phalanxes of gray-haired, gray-suited machine politicians to set two other precedents, becoming the first woman to occupy the Chancellery as well as its youngest incumbent. Then in September, after four tricky years helming a coalition that yoked...
...Merkel has spent decades being underestimated. There are still plenty of observers of the German political scene who regard her myriad achievements as flukes. "Merkel has never given a speech that stayed in the memory," wrote her most recent biographer. She can indeed seem reserved and self-effacing at times, but there should be little doubt that she has confidence and ambition aplenty. "You could certainly say that I've never underestimated myself," she says with a smile that in another context could only be described as kittenish. "There's nothing wrong with being ambitious." (See the Top 10 news...
...daughter of a Protestant pastor who settled in the East German state of Brandenburg, Merkel excelled at math and science and originally pursued a career as a physicist. But growing up where she did, she discovered early on that there were limits to what she would be permitted to do. "In East Germany," she says, "we always ran into boundaries before we were able to discover our own personal boundaries...
Paradoxically, Merkel's life under communism may have helped when it came to starting a political career as the Iron Curtain began to crumble. She knew how to navigate around blockages and when to keep a low profile. Her rise to prominence went all but unnoticed, except by the rivals she deftly derailed along the way. Elected to the first parliament of the reunited Germany, she was appointed a Cabinet minister by Chancellor Helmut Kohl just one year later. He called her das Mädchen, "the girl." She was used to sexism. "There was no real equality...
...opinions provide a fitting close to what has been the most tumultuous year of the prime minister's political career. There were the public gaffes: calling President Obama "well-tanned"; getting scolded by the Queen after raising his voice at a London photo op; making German Chancellor Angela Merkel wait on the red carpet while he spoke on his cell phone. Then there was his private life: his wife of 20 years filing for divorce; her accusations that he "frequents underage females"; a Bari prostitute revealing details of several encounters at his Rome residence.(Read "Hoq Silvio Berlusconi Uses Women...