Merkel

For years, Angela Merkel, the first woman Chancellor of Germany, was Western Europe’s most powerful leader. Nonetheless, she remains something of an enigma. Clear-eyed, cool-headed, diligent, and methodical, she put her politics first, setting ideology aside. A pastor’s daughter who grew up behind the iron curtain in the former DDR (East Germany), Merkel re-invented herself after the fall of the Berlin Wall to become “the world's most powerful woman” (Forbes, 2020).