How Angela Merkel Became the Most Powerful Woman in the World

The most powerful woman in the world is in a hurry. With brisk, determined strides on a spring morning in Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel sweeps into the glass-and-steel auditorium of the Chancellery—Germany’s modern White House—barely acknowledging the dozen or so cameras pointed straight at her. She leads a much younger man, Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, to the podium, one arm grazing his back, in absolute command of this dance. “Lebanon,” she begins under the attentive gaze of Hariri, for whom every minute in the company of Europe’s most important leader is political gold, “hosts more than one million Syrian refugees.” She addresses the assembled, mostly Middle Eastern media, as cameras whir, “And shows great humanitarian spirit.”

Minutes before, I had observed the reporters posing for selfies in front of the black eagle insignia of the Federal Republic of Germany. Now they are mesmerized by the short, matronly woman in a teal-blue raw-silk jacket, wearing her signature black trousers and sensible walking shoes. No hairdresser or makeup artist made Angela Merkel’s morning schedule; there was simply no time. With the country heading into elections, her political future is on the line.

Between Donald Trump’s nationalism and Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian populism, many regard Angela Merkel as the last real democratic leader standing. She is, of course, strengthened by the recent election of French president Emmanuel Macron, a pro-immigrant, pro-Europe centrist. Tellingly, minutes after his May 7 victory, Macron’s first call was with Merkel. His first foreign trip—to Berlin—had the symbolism of a ritual blessing from Europe’s all-but-official leader. But to be head of state for twelve years in the digital age is a very long time, and now she is asking for four more. She has outlasted term limit–bound presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande. Only her nemesis, Putin, is still in power.

The press ritual with Hariri smoothly dispensed with, the chancellor power-walks the prime minister past the official portraits of her predecessors: Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, and the others—all men. Merkel will be the first woman to join their ranks on the wall. But, she hopes, not for a while.

Minutes later, I see her, bulging briefcase in hand, duck into a waiting black sedan. Three dark-suited aides follow her, and the car quickly pulls away from the curb. No sirens blare; no lights flash. Angela Merkel does not enjoy the fanfare of high office. It is Refugee Integration Week, and she is expected in Cologne within the hour. All her focus is on the September 24 election—which will count in many ways as a referendum on her remarkably open, and often controversial, policy toward refugees.

In the late summer of 2015, the chancellor abruptly transformed both her image and her legacy. Known for Olympian caution (the word merkeln was coined to mean “delay”), Merkel did not merkeln when she allowed hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees to cross into Germany and sanctuary. “Wir schaffen das!” she announced. We can manage this. Merkel called Germans to a service beyond atonement for their dark past: to open their communities to strangers, from cultures with traditions, languages, and faiths dramatically different from their own.

Almost overnight, weary men, women, and children poured from trains and buses they had boarded in the less welcoming Balkans and Eastern Europe—the last leg of nightmare journeys begun in towns and cities in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere—a grand total of a million new arrivals. It wasn’t only Merkel who astonished the world. With little advance warning or preparation, thousands of Germans flocked to greet the new arrivals. Many wondered: How had Germany and its chancellor become the world’s moral center?

A fourteen-year-old refugee played a surprising part in her evolution.

On July 16, 2015, during a television broadcast featuring the chancellor and a group of students, a Palestinian teenager raised her hand and said to Merkel, in perfect German, “It is very painful to watch other people enjoy life.” The young girl, named Reem, added, “And I can’t enjoy it with them. . . . I don’t know if I can stay here, or what my future will be.” Unprepared for such raw emotion, Merkel switched to political jargon. “Politics is sometimes hard . . .” she began. The camera panned to Reem, weeping. “Oh, God,” the chancellor was heard mumbling into the microphone. Crossing the stage to the distressed Reem, she bent down to stroke the girl’s shoulder. The world’s most powerful woman did not look powerful at all. She looked as stricken as the weeping refugee.

Later that summer, Merkel was further shattered by images she had not expected to see in twenty-first-century Europe: men, women, and children confined behind razor wire by the gun-brandishing border guards of Hungary, a member of the European Union. “I grew up staring at a wall in my face,” Merkel admonished Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist prime minister, referring to the Berlin Wall. “I am determined not to see any more barriers erected in Europe during the remainder of my lifetime.” And so she announced her policy.

For the chancellor, a former scientist trained in accuracy and precision, it was an astonishingly risky move. Some in the international community applauded her initiative. David Miliband, former British foreign secretary and current head of the International Rescue Committee, calls her achievement in integrating an unprecedented number of refugees “a real feat. Merkel has done one of the toughest things in politics,” he says. “When a difficult issue came along, she refused to turn the other way.” Others disagreed. Opposition politicians called her arrogant; one group of protesters near Dresden heckled her with abuse. The protests did not spread, but even many of her supporters claimed that she had allowed her emotions to blind her.

Her old friend German-born former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger accused her of recklessness. “To shelter one refugee,” Kissinger chided her at a New York dinner party in the fall of 2015, “is a humanitarian act. To take a million is to endanger civilization.” When pressed by Kissinger on her decision, Merkel had only one explanation: “I had no choice.”

The subsequent rampage on New Year’s Eve, 2015, when hundreds of predominantly Middle Eastern men gathered in the center of Cologne and groped and robbed dozens of women, and, more tragically, the attack by a Tunisian truck driver at Berlin’s Christmas Market a year later, killing twelve, fueled her opponents’ ire. Across the Atlantic, presidential candidate Donald Trump declared Merkel’s refugee policy “a catastrophic mistake.”

In November 2009, United States senators and representatives greeted her with sustained applause when Merkel was introduced to a special joint meeting of Congress. “Human dignity shall be inviolable,” she told them. “This was the answer to the murder of six million Jews, to the hate, destruction, and annihilation that Germany brought upon Europe and the world.” Thunderous applause rained on the smiling chancellor. Rarely has a head of state so publicly and unequivocally assumed guilt for its past. A year and a half later, she was invited back to Washington to accept America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for “rising to become the first East German to lead a united Germany,” in President Obama’s words, “the first woman chancellor in history and an eloquent voice for human rights. . . .” Merkel had no way of knowing that that trip would be the high-water mark of her relationship with the ally that had been the midwife of post–Third Reich German democracy.

When she returned to Washington in March 2017, Merkel was not asked to address Congress, nor to dinner at the White House, nor to play golf at Mar-a-Lago. A perfunctory exchange on trade, NATO financing, and ISIS was her initial introduction to President Donald Trump. Knowing his dim view of her refugee policy, the chancellor had explained to him that the Geneva Conventions (forged across nearly a century to ensure basic rights for wartime prisoners) oblige countries to protect refugees of war on humanitarian grounds. The irony of a German leader explaining human rights to an American president was not lost on many observers. An image went viral from Merkel’s White House visit: of Trump appearing to ignore her suggestion that they shake hands for the cameras. Speaking to a packed beer tent in Munich, following a NATO meeting with President Trump in May, the chancellor broke her diplomatic silence. “The times in which we could rely fully on others are over,” she said, and everyone understood who those others were.

Their divergent views on trade (Trump declared the Germans “bad, very bad” on his recent European trip) and immigration give them little to shake on. Merkel, a leader for climate action since 1994, was shocked by Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris climate accord. “I say to everybody who believes that the future of this planet is important,” she defiantly proclaimed, “let us continue along this path together so that we can be successful for our Mother Earth.”

I first met the chancellor two days before September 11, 2001, when she was head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. I was in Berlin with my late husband, Richard Holbrooke, for the inauguration of the city’s Jewish Museum. Since Richard had negotiated an end to the bloody Bosnian War in the mid-nineties, Merkel had asked to meet him. We had lunch at the home of the film director Volker Schlöndorff, along with other guests, including Susan Sontag. It was the relentlessly voluble Sontag, not the quiet German politician, who left an indelible memory.

In the years since, I have often wondered how this uncharismatic woman became Europe’s—and one of the world’s—most significant leaders. Merkel rarely gives interviews, and her tight-knit circle of friends and advisers mostly refuses to speak on the record. But I set out to follow her during her campaign season. I wanted to talk to her friends and colleagues in Berlin, as well as figures from her childhood and student years in the former East Germany, to find out more.

“Please don’t expect her to save the world!” Merkel’s longtime friend former Israeli ambassador Shimon Stein cautions. “That is too much for any single person.” But the odd thing is that the woman who was patronizingly called das Mädchen, “the girl,” early in her astonishing political ascent, and then later Mutti (“Mommy”—what else to call a woman of power and ambition, however veiled?) has raised immense hopes beyond her borders.

“I can stare straight ahead,” she told Herlinde Koelbl, her longtime photographer in the 1990s, “and not reveal what I’m thinking.” Koelbl, a vivid, red-haired septuagenarian, has been taking pictures of Merkel since 1991. In those early days, the future chancellor was still remarkably open. “She was very shy at the beginning,” Koelbl recalls as we sip espressos in a bar near bustling Alexanderplatz. “But even then you could feel her strength. Partly it was due to her lack of vanity. Vanity weakens you. The men I photographed are all very vain. She is not.”

Merkel once told Koelbl, “In the presence of overbearing men, I feel a physical revulsion and want to take a seat farther away.” Meeting Putin at his Black Sea residence in 2007, she demonstrated her steel. The former KGB officer, aware of Merkel’s well-known fear of dogs (she had once been bitten), unleashed his large black Labrador, Koni. Manspreading, a satisfied smile on his lips, Putin observed Merkel, who moved not a muscle, her face and body set as if in stone. Her aides were furious with the Russian, but she was not. “I understand why he has to do this,” she said, “to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness.” What Putin and other alpha-male politicians often miss is that Angela Merkel may be afraid of dogs, but she is not afraid of men.

Still, there is the central mystery of how an unprepossessing former scientist became the first female chancellor of a country that had never even had a queen. Merkel had neither role models nor a network when, at age 35, she crossed from East to West Germany in 1989. What she had was drive, intelligence, and ambition—the last kept well under wraps. “Once, long ago,” Schlöndorff tells me, “I introduced her as our future first female chancellor. She was not happy with me for outing her before she was ready.”

At the pinnacle of power, Merkel has not changed her lifestyle. She lives modestly in an apartment across the street from Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. Only her husband’s name, PROF. DR. SAUER, is above the buzzer. (Joachim Sauer, a respected chemist, is even more private than his wife, simply claiming, “I am of no interest to the public.”) Their partnership is sacrosanct to Merkel. As she explained to Koelbl, “I’d rather cancel three appointments than endanger my relationship,” which, she added, “gives me security. With him, I don’t have to say anything. We can be quiet together.”

Berliners are accustomed to seeing the couple dining at one of a handful of restaurants in town, and to spotting the chancellor shopping for groceries or quietly slipping into the opera. A close friend tells me that at her tiny country house near her hometown of Templin, Merkel not only cooks simple German fare, she clears the table, too. Only the tabloid press is frustrated at the absence of financial or personal scandal to report. Merkel lived for many years with Sauer before they quietly married in 1998. “A child,” she told Koelbl, “would require giving up politics,” something she was unwilling to do.

Her friends—Schlöndorff among them—assure me that the impassive Merkel the public sees has a sly wit, and does pitch-perfect imitations of various world leaders: Al Gore, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, and, of course, Putin. Is she working on her Trump impersonation? No one will say. One thing is clear: If you set out to construct the polar opposite of Donald Trump in every way, you would end up with someone like Angela Merkel. Impatient with flattery, she chides her staff for excessive laughter at her jokes. (“You’ve heard me tell that story before!” she scolds.) During Steffen Seibert’s job interview to be her spokesperson, Merkel told him, “Understand that you will have to work very hard.” “Yes,” he answered, “I know.” “No.” She shook her head. “You don’t. Later on, you will look back and be proud of this work. But you will have no private life.”

The chancellor’s is a small, fiercely loyal team, including several impressive women. Her defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven, has a TV anchor’s sleek, blonde looks. Beate Baumann runs the chancellor’s office and is empowered to speak bluntly to her boss. (Once, reportedly, when Merkel was on the verge of tears, Baumann told her, in front of others, to pull herself together.) Mostly, of course, Merkel keeps her emotions tightly controlled. “She has an unbelievably robust constitution,” says former ambassador Stein. But, Koelbl tells me, “she is incredibly strong during stressful times and gets sick later, when it is over. She sees this as one of the fundamental requirements in politics: When it gets serious, you just have to hold out and be strong.”

To find the source for this complex persona, I board a train at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof bound for Templin, in the northern pine forests and lakes of Brandenburg. It winds through the stations of Germany’s terrible last century: Oranienburg, one of the first Nazi concentration camps; Sachsenhausen, first a Nazi, then a Soviet camp; Seelow, where Hitler’s and Stalin’s troops bloodied each other to the bitter end of World War II. A surreal stillness hangs over this corner of the former East Germany. Sparsely populated, its fields of haystacks and wild poppy are untouched by time. Templin, where the former Angela Kasner spent her childhood and to which she still retreats, is a cobblestoned, picture-postcard town. But, like so much else in Germany, it is shadowed by history. Cyrillic road signs and soil poisoned by weapons testing are reminders of its proximity to a former Soviet military base. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor in a country where religion was frowned upon, Angela here learned caution before she could ride a two-wheeler.

Her childhood’s greatest trauma occurred on August 13, 1961. Overnight, East German authorities erected a wall that encircled the city of Berlin—the last opening in the Iron Curtain. East Germans, including seven-year-old Angela, her parents, and two siblings, henceforth were prisoners of the state. “I saw my parents completely helpless,” she told Koelbl. “My mother cried all day. I wanted to cheer them up, but I couldn’t.”

Watchful, serious, navigating between the all-seeing state, with its 189,000 Stasi informers, and her parents, Angela shone in class. But even as a child, she would weigh and analyze before taking a plunge—quite literally. Merkel tells the story of spending most of an hour of diving class pacing back and forth on the high board, calculating risk versus benefit. When the final bell rang, she dove.

Her Russian-language teacher, Erika Benn, a bustling woman in her mid-70s, makes me coffee in her sun-drenched Templin kitchen and recalls her brilliant student, now the chancellor. Sitting on her couch, we look at class photographs showing Merkel with a solemn expression in the back row, the winner of every Russian-language prize. “I pleaded with her,” she recalls, “to smile a little.” These days, Benn is proud when Putin praises her former pupil’s Russian-language skills.

A former Communist Party member, Benn could not know how Angela chafed at the lack of freedom. “I came home every night full of anger,” Merkel said to Koelbl, “and first had to talk about it all and get it out of my system.” One escape route from the long reach of the Stasi state was science, a fairly privileged field in the Soviet Empire.

I make a stop at Leipzig University—Nietzsche, Wagner, and Goethe’s alma mater—where Angela studied physics. Even here, in the baroque city of Johann Sebastian Bach, Angela stood out among East Germany’s brightest scholars. Her doctoral supervisor, Reinhold Haberlandt, Ph.D., a tall, grave man, invites me to his modest, book-lined apartment and tells me of the hard years when Angela was his star student. “The aim of the government was to break the will of the people,” he says. “All of us scientists, including Angela, had to attend lectures on Leninism and learn Russian. We didn’t like it, but we had no choice.” Is he disappointed that Merkel ultimately chose politics over science? “There are many very good scientists, “he answers, “but there are very few good politicians.”

When, on November 9, 1989, the Wall fell and ecstatic crowds surged west, Angela, by now living in East Berlin, kept to her routine. History may have zoomed forward, but it was Thursday, her weekly sauna-and-beer night. So she joined the jubilant citizens only later, post sauna and beer. In the months following, during a fluid, anything-goes atmosphere as the divided country fused into the Federal Republic, she saw her chance and grabbed it. With her technical skill, she offered to install a computer system at a fledgling new Berlin-based political party, Democratic Awakening. She stayed on as its spokesperson. Released from the confinement of the prison state and divorced from her first husband—Ulrich Merkel, a physicist whom she had married in 1977, at age 23, and left four years later—she began to soar. The newly unified German government, under the titanic figure of the late Helmut Kohl, lacked a woman from the East. Merkel rose rapidly to become Kohl’s Mädchen, minister for women and youth and, eventually, minister for the environment, nature conservation, and nuclear safety. Shy and earnest, Angela Merkel was easy to underestimate.

Her ascent was not always smooth. More than once, she was reduced to tears of frustration at being excluded and belittled—on one occasion even in a cabinet meeting. Suspicious by nature and by Eastern Bloc breeding, she had reason for paranoia in the nineties. “After hours,” former German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger tells me, “and under the influence of a few drinks, I used to hear her fellow CDU politicians taunt each other: ‘So who is going to finish her off?’” Of course there was only one “her.”

By the next decade, she no longer felt like a quota Frau. “You have to be willing to do battle,” she told Koelbl. “I try the friendly way . . . but once important issues are at stake, I can be tough as nails. Just like the men.” When Chancellor Kohl was swept up in a political scandal, Angela Merkel delivered her mentor’s coup de grace. On December 22, 1999, in a front-page article in the country’s respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Merkel declared her own and her party’s independence from its former leader. “The Party must learn to stand on its own feet,” she wrote. “It must have the confidence to face the future without Kohl.” A bold and risky move, it ended Kohl’s political life and assured Angela Merkel’s.

Back at the Chancellery a few days after my journey east, I watch Merkel, backlit by the silvery Berlin sky, with a slice of the Spree River visible. She is surrounded by several hundred volunteer refugee workers from all over Germany. Housewives in prim suits and lanky youths in distressed jeans pepper her with questions. The real work of integrating new arrivals into what was previously a fairly homogeneous, conservative society (cosmopolitan Berlin being the exception) falls on ordinary citizens, such as those gathered here today. Merkel’s job, as she sees it, is to listen to every question with genuine interest and to give honest answers.

“How can you send refugees back to Afghanistan,” a curly-haired woman forcefully demands, “when Afghanistan is unsafe?” For Merkel has lately begun to return those deemed migrants, rather than refugees, back to their countries, if those countries are no longer considered dangerous. The move is almost as controversial as her initial generous acceptance of virtually all comers, and the number of refugees arriving in Germany has dropped dramatically since the spring of 2016. Not only are the authorities sending Afghans and others home, but Merkel also struck a controversial deal with Turkey. In exchange for visa-free travel for some Turks and billions in refugee aid, a number of migrants and refugees have been relocated to Turkey. Merkel has thus defused a potentially explosive election issue. Support for the far-right party, Alternative for Germany, has now dipped to an unthreatening 9 percent—among the lowest support for the right in any European country. And for now she seems to have overcome a potentially greater threat, from Martin Schulz, a Social Democrat who is even more pro–European Union and just as pro-refugee as she is.

“Let’s never forget,” the chancellor says in closing her meeting with the volunteers, “no one ever leaves home unless they are forced to.” That has been her touchstone phrase in walking the tightrope between her humanitarian impulses and political pressure both from within her country and from the European Union.

The session with the volunteers has buoyed Merkel’s spirits. As those attending line up to pose for pictures with her, Seibert reintroduces us, and we at last have an opportunity to speak. “Ah, yes,” she says. “Thank you for your book.” (I had sent her my own account of growing up behind the Iron Curtain, in Hungary.) “I remember our lunch with Richard,” she continues. I am touched by her powers of recall. In this brief conversation, I wonder what I can ask that will offer a glimpse into the enigma that is Angela Merkel. “Madam Chancellor,” I say. “Can you share the secret of your success in the male world of German politics?” The chancellor’s features soften momentarily as she considers this unexpected question. As her aides close in, she finally answers, “Endurance!”

Suddenly Merkel’s astonishing trajectory—from the ash heap of the failed Soviet Empire to becoming the West’s best hope—makes perfect sense: Endure, observe, listen, keep your own counsel, and work twice as hard as the men. Even now.

Win or lose in September, Merkel’s place in history is as assured as that of the woman whose portrait hangs on her office wall, Catherine the Great. The eighteenth-century German princess became empress of Russia and transformed it into one of Europe’s great powers. Like Catherine, Angela Merkel has also transformed her country—not by force of arms and armies but by moral authority and quiet persuasion. We can manage this. So far, the chancellor and her team have done just that. But then, at a time when the unthinkable frequently becomes reality, it is best to avoid predicting the future. Angela Merkel, product of an empire that crashed, takes nothing for granted.