Merkel becomes chancellor
2005-11-22 12:36
Berlin - Angela Merkel on Tuesday became Germany's first woman leader after two months of political wrangling in which the survival skills she learned growing up in the former communist East stood her in good stead.
Merkel was voted in by the Bundestag after inking a hard-won coalition government accord between her Christian Democrat alliance and the Social Democrats of outgoing chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
She is the first leader of the reunited Germany to have grown up behind the Iron Curtain.
Angela Kasner, as she was known then, moved from the western city of Hamburg a few weeks after her birth when her father, a Protestant preacher, decided to work in the communist east and the family eventually settled in the town of Templin.
Twice divorced
Locals remember her as a bookish, brilliant student who learned compromise and discretion early on in order to cope as the daughter of a Christian family in a totalitarian state.
"She was a disaster at sports but good at everything else," said Hans-Ulrich Beeskow, who was her coach for the Mathematics Olympics held throughout the Soviet bloc.
"I never had another girl like her in math class. She was a real rarity - logical, analytical, very focused."
Merkel went on to earn a physics doctorate and stayed out of politics until 15 years ago when the regime collapsed.
She joined the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990 and won a parliamentary seat in the last government before reunification.
Merkel had to endure the fond but patronising nickname "The Girl" bestowed by her mentor, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who made her minister for women's issues.
But five years ago, the frumpy, earnest newcomer rose to the head of the CDU when she alone had the courage to tell Kohl to quit in a slush fund scandal.
It earned her powerful enemies in the CDU, a party dominated by Roman Catholic, West German family men where she has always been something of a misfit as a twice-divorced childless woman who grew up in the east.
She has refused to play the gender card but in Germany's excitement at having its first female leader, she has inevitably been compared to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Merkel showed considerable grit though in the aftermath of the September elections when she refused to blink in a three-week power struggle for the chancellery with Schroeder.
She has refused to openly relish her victory and has said she would feel she had achieved her goal if Germans could say in four years' time that they are "better off than they were in 2005".