BERLIN: A Protestant pastor’s daughter who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, Angela Merkel has made an unprecedented journey to become chancellor of Germany and the world’s most powerful woman.

She has been derided as the eurozone’s “austerity priestess”, praised by desperate refugees as “Mama Merkel” and labelled by the Economist magazine as “the indispensable European”.

The stunning ascent of Merkel, 61 — a twice-married, childless woman from communist East Germany — defies political convention, yet has seen her outlast a generation of world leaders.

Seemingly indifferent to the trappings of power and lacking vanity, Merkel lives in a Berlin flat with her rarely seen scientist husband Joachim Sauer.

She shops in a neighbourhood supermarket and spends holidays hiking in the Alps.

Her oratory is often monotonous and she is awkward in front of the cameras — not knowing what to do with her hands, she took to making a diamond shape with her thumbs and index fingers, which her party turned into her campaign trademark.

It is this air of ordinariness that has made Merkel a hit with German voters, who value the no-nonsense pragmatism and competence of “Mutti”, or Mummy, and prefer her blandness to the charisma of some of her male predecessors.

Yet at key moments she has acted boldly — notably by deciding to scrap nuclear power after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and again in the ongoing refugee crisis, when she threw open Germany’s doors to those fleeing war and oppression.

‘THE GIRL’ BECOMES ‘MUTTI’: Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in the northern city of Hamburg but within weeks her father, a Lutheran pastor, moved the family to a small town in the communist East, at a time when most people headed the other way.

Biographers say life in a police state taught Merkel to hide her true thoughts and intentions behind a poker face.

A star student, she excelled in Russian, which she has put to use in defusing the Ukraine conflict with President Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB officer in East Germany when the Wall fell in 1989.

At the time, Merkel, with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, was working in a Berlin laboratory, but quickly joined the nascent group Democratic Awakening. It merged with the Christian Democrats, then led by chancellor Helmut Kohl, who fondly and patronisingly dubbed her “the girl”.

Merkel’s mentor was not the last politician to underestimate her and pay the price.

When he became embroiled in a campaign finance scandal in 1999, Merkel stuck in the knife, urging her party to drop the self-declared “old warhorse”.

The bold move kicked off her own meteoric rise to becoming Germany’s youngest-ever chancellor, and the first woman to take the job, in November 2005.

WELCOME TO REFUGEES: During the eurozone crisis, when a battered continent looked to Berlin, Merkel preached fiscal discipline and kept a tight grip on the nation’s purse strings, soothing the angst of a thrifty populace fearful about its pensions.

Merkel has defended her tough-love policies as “without alternative” — a term much mocked as a rhetorical bludgeon and voted the most offensive phrase of the year in 2010.

At home, in a fast-ageing but still wealthy country, Merkel was long seen as an assuring rock of stability.

Voters have rewarded her with three election victories, and polls for years have showed her to be Germany’s most popular politician.

But the usually cautious and methodical leader gained a different name, “Mama Merkel,” after she threw open Germany’s doors this summer to asylum seekers.

In the biggest gamble of her 10 years in power she has taken ownership of an issue set to define her legacy.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2015