Angela Merkel led Germany – and Europe – for sixteen years. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or East Germany), the daughter of a hard-line communist pastor. That was where she graduated in physics and then trained to be a researcher. Her focus was redirected towards politics by the collapse of socialism, the demise of the Soviet empire, and with it the GDR. After a brief detour, she found her place within the ranks of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), in which there were very few young women from the former East Germany – they were far outnumbered by political activists gravitating towards the opposition movement of the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the Socialists (SPD).

The CDU’s leader was Chancellor Kohl, an authoritative and capable figure who reunified the nation. He took the young, ambitious – and above all power-hungry – Merkel under his wing and smoothed her path. That was until she attacked him from behind and brought him down.

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war she betrayed the then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder by taking a stand in the US media against the Franco–German position opposing war, thus siding with an act of aggression by Bush that was based on arbitrary, mendacious arguments.