Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German politician and Chancellor of Germany since 2005. She has also been the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 10 April 2000.A former research scientist with a doctorate in physical chemistry, who moved from West Germany to East Germany when she was an infant with her family, Merkel entered East German politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, and briefly served as a deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected East German Government headed by Lothar de Maizière in 1990. Following German reunification in 1990, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and has been reelected ever since. Merkel was appointed as the Minister for Women and Youth in the federal government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1991, and became the Minister for the Environment in 1994. After her party lost the federal election in 1998, Merkel was elected Secretary-General of the CDU before becoming the party's first female leader two years later in the aftermath of a donations scandal that toppled Wolfgang Schäuble.
