born in 1954, German
is a German politician and former research scientist who has been the Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and the Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany, the daughter of Horst Kasner (1926–2011),[19][20] a native of Berlin, and his wife Herlind, born in 1928 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) as Herlind Jentzsch, a teacher of English and Latin. Her mother was the daughter of the Danzig politician Willi Jentzsch and maternal granddaughter of the city clerk of Elbing (now Elbląg, Poland) Emil Drange. Herlind Jentzsch was once a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and briefly served as a member of the municipal council in Templin following the German reunification.[21] Merkel has Polish ancestry through her paternal grandfather, Ludwig Kasner, a German national[22] of Polish origin from Posen (now Poznań).[23] The family's original name Kaźmierczak was Germanized to Kasner in 1930.[24][25]