The Merkel era is exactly 15 years old. It was in fact November 22, 2005, three decades ago, when Angela Dorothea Merkel, born Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg in 1954, was elected Federal Chancellor of Germany for the first time. She has been her, and it is still seen that she has been re-elected three times (she is still in her fourth government), the first woman to hold this position in the Teutonic country. By now entered the collective imagination, German but not only, as the most influential political leader in Europe, Merkel boasts a long militancy in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), of which she was President for almost twenty years, from 2000 to 2018. In 2007, still in her first mandate, she was also president of the European Council and president of the G8 (second woman ever to do so, after Margaret Thatcher). She was considered by Forbes Magazine “the most powerful woman in the world”.
But let's go back to November 22, 2005. In the elections of 18 September Merkel challenged the outgoing Chancellor, the socialist Schröder: the result was a substantial draw, so much so that it took long negotiations to reach a compromise. Thus, more than two months after the elections and almost without even winning them, Frau Angela found herself at the helm of Germany, forming a white-red government (half of the ministries went to the SPD, in exchange for the position of Chancellor which ended up instead CDU) who was sworn in at 16 o'clock on November 22nd. That first Merkel government included politicians who later became known, such as the "hawk" Wolfgang Schäuble and the current president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, who was appointed Minister of the Family, the Elderly, Women and Youth. The same day, Angela Merkel left for her first institutional trip abroad: she went to Paris, for a meeting with the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac.
Merkel was then re-elected for a second term in 2009, this time in coalition with the Liberals. The third term began in 2013 and was that of the Grand Coalition, with the return of the SPD to government. In 2018, however, the fourth Merkel government came to life, which will certainly be the last given that the same Chancellor, after the drop in consensus recorded in the last elections, has left the leadership of the CDU and announced that she will not run again in the next round.
