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Angela Dorothea Merkel was born in Hamburg, Germany on July 17, 1954 and she is the current Chancellor of Germany.

As a youth she was a member of the communist led youth movement, Free German Youth.  She studied physics at the University of Leipzig, in Templin for which she eventually received a Doctorate, and then went on to work in quantum chemistry.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 she became involved in the Democracy movement.  By 1994 she was named the Minister for the Environment and Reactor Safety which gave her great visibility and from there she was able to build her political career. After the Kohl Governments defeat in the 1998 election she was named as the Secretary-General of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

She quickly became popular amongst the German population but the same couldn’t be said within her own party. She was subsequently out manouvered and then became the leader of the opposition.

In May of 2005 she was voted as the challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the National elections, but she was only elected Chancellor in November. After being in office for only 100 days she had the highest approval rating for a Chancellor since 1949.

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