Credit: John Macdougal/AFP/Getty images
German Chancellor Angela Merkel—theoretical chemist, head of state during Germany's upcoming EU presidency, and current leader of the G8—recently took a shot at the climate politicking of the United States. "To prevent global warming, the nations with the largest emissions of gases that are causing climate change will have to take part," she stated. "That's why we will make this an important issue again on the agenda during our G8 presidency."
It was a bold move, considering the US delegation's notorious avoidance of climate commitments during Tony Blair's G8 leadership two years ago. But Merkel, whose direct diplomatic style has been dubbed "the Merkel method," is capable of exploiting the potential of complex situations. Her political success has come as a result of both her analytical mind and her remarkable tenacity. Merkel is, in many ways, still a scientist, and Germany—the fifth-largest economy in the world—is her lab.
Merkel was born in 1954 in Hamburg, but she didn't see much of it: Her father, Horst Kasner, decided that year to take his family to Soviet-held East Germany, where he became a pastor about 50 miles north of Berlin. Merkel attended church, despite the risks; in the communist society, churchgoing could make it almost impossible to gain admission to state-controlled university, get good jobs, or even rent an apartment.
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Typical for a household on the outskirts of a discriminatory society, Kasner drilled into his children the importance of being that much better than the best of their peers. By all accounts, the young Angela Merkel was an overachiever almost unto caricature. Classmates have described her as the one who studied at the bus stop, as the girl who never got kissed. Her father engaged her in political conversations, and she joined the Pioneers, the communist version of the Scouts, becoming secretary of the local Free German Youth outfit. Merkel was a dedicated scholar and an intelligent political player even at a young age, which helped her to get into the University of Leipzig and then the Berlin Academy of Sciences, where she earned her PhD in physical chemistry. Throughout the 1980s Merkel worked on quantum chemistry, specifically on velocity constant calculations and decay in hydrocarbon molecules, writing papers for the East German science journal Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie.
In the late 1980s, seeing a chance to further exercise her lifelong political acumen, she joined a proto-conservative party in dissolving East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), won her first parliamentary seat in 1990, and joined then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet as Minister of Women and Youth. In 1994 Kohl appointed her Minister of Environment and Reactor Safety, further raising her profile. By 2000, she was CDU party leader, and after a political rival lost the election to Gerhard Schröder and the SPD party in 2002, she won CDU's nomination to challenge him directly in 2005. Neither won a majority; both Merkel's party and Schröder's party negotiated a Grand Coalition to run the nation, with Merkel as Germany's first woman—and first scientist—chancellor.
Throughout her political career, Merkel's patience and focus have been evident; it's not clear if these traits led her into science, or if the scientific training imparted them. "She's bright, open-minded, conscious of the importance of things, and not easily distracted," says Hubert Markl, who met her several times while heading the Max Planck Society. "She is clearly of the type that wants to know exactly what is going on, how actions will influence our economy and society and future. She wants to know how it will play out in the end."