In power so long she has been dubbed Germany’s “eternal chancellor,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel today marks 15 years at the helm of Europe’s top economic power, with her popularity and public trust scaling new heights as her remaining time in office ticks down.
Merkel, 66, has said she would step down as chancellor when her current mandate runs out next year, and leave politics altogether.
Assuming she finishes out her fourth term, she will tie former German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s longevity record for a post-World War II leader, with an entire generation of young Germans never knowing another person at the top.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The brainy, pragmatic and unflappable Merkel has served for many in the past few years as a welcome counterbalance to the big, brash men of global politics, from US President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as liberals have looked to her as the “leader of the free world.”
A Pew Research Center poll last month showed large majorities in most Western countries having “confidence in Merkel to do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
A trained quantum chemist raised behind the Iron Curtain, Merkel has long been in sync with her electorate as a guarantor of stability and prosperity.
Her major policy shifts have reflected the wishes of a changing society — among them phasing out nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster — and shifted her Christian Democratic Union firmly to the political center.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, her boldest move — keeping open German borders in 2015 to more than 1 million asylum seekers — seemed set to determine her legacy.
The woman once known as the “climate chancellor” for pushing renewables, also faces a mass movement of young voters pressing her to make Germany meet its commitments.
She became Europe’s go-to leader during the eurozone crisis when Berlin championed swingeing spending cuts in return for international bailout loans for debt-mired countries.
Merkel, the EU’s and G7’s most senior leader, started as a contemporary of then-US president George W. Bush, then-British prime minister Tony Blair and then-French president Jacques Chirac when she became Germany’s youngest and first female chancellor in 2005.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner on July 17, 1954, in the port city of Hamburg, the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman and a school teacher.
Her father moved the family to a small-town parish in the communist East Germany at a time when most people were headed the other way.
A top student, she excelled in mathematics and Russian, which has helped her maintain the dialogue with the other veteran on the world stage, Putin, who was a KGB officer in Dresden when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Merkel kept the name of her first husband, whom she married in 1977 and divorced five years later.
“My heritage shaped me, for example the longing for freedom during my life in the GDR [East Germany],” she said on the 30th anniversary of reunification.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS