Angela Merkel is a German 🏷️#politician who served as Chancellor of Germany from November 2005 to December 2021 and led the centre-right Christian Democratic Union from 2000 to 2018. During her sixteen-year tenure she was widely described as the de facto leader of the European Union and one of the world's most powerful women.

Merkel's chancellorship spanned the 2008 financial crisis, the Eurozone debt crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, cementing a reputation for cautious, consensus-driven crisis management. She left office in December 2021 after declining to seek a fifth term, handing power to Olaf Scholz in Germany's first three-party coalition government since the 1950s.