If she wins on Sunday, it will put German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the path to becoming the longest-serving female head of government in Europe. But the prospect of another four years with Merkel doesn't appeal to many Europeans outside Germany.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been steering Europe through the debt crisis for the last four years, and she's lost many friends doing so. But who else could have done it?
Not for a moment did I suspect that the slightly mousy woman who introduced herself to me as "Angela" would one day become the most powerful woman in Germany – and indeed the world.
Germany’s centre-right chancellor Angela Merkel will go into Sunday’s elections with strong support from French voters, outstripping the lowly ratings of socialist President François Hollande, an opinion poll has shown.
In the summer of 1961, seven-year-old Angela Kasner—today better known as Germany’s first female chancellor, Angela Merkel—squeezed into a Volkswagen Beetle with her mother, father, siblings, and grandmother to travel west for a vacation in Bavaria. After a month in the land of beer and lederhosen, the family returned to Templin, an ancient market town in East Germany that still bore the scars of an Allied bombing raid in 1944. Just three weeks after the Kasners returned home, the East Berlin government built the Berlin Wall, sealing off the border with West Berlin that was the last escape route for easterners seeking the greater economic freedom offered in the West.
Two days ahead of general elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel rallied supporters Friday in Germany's conservative heartland Bavaria on the eve of its world-famous Oktoberfest beer festival.
Fascist countries tend to stick to one fuhrer. I think Norway clung to Gerhardsen for around 40 years.
No wonder labor here feel entitled, enough to maybe have run a bloody false-flag against own people.
Greeks Bearing Brunt of Merkel-Led Austerity Blame Own Leaders
"She didn't start at a local level. She went straight to the Cabinet table," said Jacqueline Boysen, her biographer. "Everyone thought this was because she was young, she was a woman, she was from the east and she wasn't involved with the regime there."
"But things weren't that simple because she proved that it was a place she was suited for. She found that she was talented and enjoyed politics," Boysen said.
Merkel is now widely regarded as Europe's most powerful leader. Comparisons have been drawn with Catherine the Great, the German-born czarina who ruled Russia in the late 18th century and whose portrait graces the chancellor's otherwise spartan office.
The folks in southern Europe like Greece portray Merkel in a Nazi uniform as they protest the austerity measures that came with German bailout money.
She had to hustle the German electorate to get them to give the bailout money in the first place.
Merkel believes in the EU and a united Europe and her bailout policy is part of a belief system she inherited from Helmut Kohl.
When it comes to the EU, like all libertarian and nationalistic patriots I say “PU”.
The third way didn't catch on in the US but did in Britain and Germany.
